Not All GMOs Are Bad

     Somehow people all around the planet have decided that they should oppose all Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), even though the only reason to oppose them was because of the GMOs created by Monsanto called their Roundup Ready crops. Roundup Ready meant that the plants could withstand up to five times as much of the herbicide Roundup being sprayed on them as non genetically modified plants, and the Roundup would become concentrated in the oils of the bean, seed, or grain. It's why some people have tried to purchase both non-GMO and organic foods over the last 25 years, including dairy and meat due to bioaccumulation where certain chemicals will not leave an organism except through the reproductive tissues like in milk from a cow, so standard milk should have detectable levels of bioaccumulated Roundup, while organic milk should have no detectable Roundup.

     Another aspect of Roundup Ready crops was that they had genetically modified, "Terminator Genes," meaning that the plants would produce crops, but unlike the last thousands of years of agriculture, you could not save some of the soy, corn, or alfalfa to grow next year, you had to buy new grain from Monsanto each year. As crops failed for various reasons farmers around the world committed suicide by drinking the remaining Roundup that they had in jugs, because they had no seeds to grow next year and they owed money to a bank. Their crops usually failed because with Monsanto it was a single crop variety that may not have been perfect for that year's weather, but before Monsanto they would have planted multiple local varieties of a crop to see which one worked out best. The Terminator Genes were put in with the Roundup Ready genes so that when you got Roundup Ready crops you got both, and this is another legitimate reason to oppose GMOs created by Monsanto.

     In the last few years Monsanto had to go out of business and sell themselves to Bayer the aspirin people, and since the glyphosate-based Roundup had stopped working against two different kinds of ditch weeds in the Midwest anyway, Monsanto had developed a new herbicide to replace it before they went out of business. The Roundup ready grains were soy, corn, canola, sugar beets, cotton, and alfalfa and were launched one after another starting in 1996, so by purchasing from companies that labeled their own products as free of GMOs or organic, people avoided residual Roundup in their food.

     Monsanto used their vast lobbying power to block any statewide efforts for state labeling of GMOs in food, and it is left only to companies that voluntarily label their products, and there are no GMO free or organic foods that are considered inexpensive. Monsanto had to sell themselves to Bayer because of a mountain of lawsuits filed against them having to do with farm workers that had sprayed Roundup and ended up with Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and we have seen commercials now for years from lawyers looking to collect part of the settlement. This was the entire reason that people have been eating organic food for the last two decades, to avoid residual, concentrated, and bioaccumulated Roundup in their foods.

     Beyond Monsanto and their Roundup Ready grains, there's been very little genetic modification in plants anywhere on the planet with the notable exceptions of, "Golden Rice," and, "Golden Bananas." Golden Rice was created by Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer to benefit mankind as there are people on the planet that lack vitamin A in their diets and because this deficiency go blind in childhood, so golden rice was genetically modified to contain the same beta-carotene that is in carrots, and since the human liver converts beta-carotene into vitamin A, eating Golden Rice prevents vitamin A deficiency and blindness. If golden rice is grown in areas that are vitamin A deficient it can prevent blindness in, according to Ingo Potrykus, "a million children a year." Yet there is resistance to it simply because it is genetically modified, because people do not understand that genetic modification in and of itself is not a problem, the only problem with genetic modification is if it came from a place like Monsanto where they genetically modified the plants to be resistant to high levels of herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides. Despite being developed in the late 1990s, in 2021 Bangladesh became the first country on the planet to start growing Golden Rice, because over 20% of the children in their country were vitamin A deficient and at risk for blindness. 

     Another genetic modification in plants was done to try and save the banana. Decades ago the favorite banana on the planet was called the Gros Michel until a Panama fungus wiped it out around the planet in the 1950s, the same fungus now threatens to wipe out our current banana the Cavendish, and we will literally see the end of bananas on store shelves in the next few years unless something is done. Biotechnologist James Dale and his colleagues at Queensland University of Technology in Australia cloned a resistance gene named RGA2 from a type of wild banana that's, "impervious," to the Panama fungus and inserted it into the Cavendish and has had clone strains ready to go since 2013, then in 2017 they added the same gene from Golden Rice to make Golden Bananas to combat vitamin A deficiency, but according to Dale, due to, "politics," against GMOs, few people are willing to grow any of their GMO bananas. Which is stupid.

       I think the continuous lobbying efforts by Monsanto to block GMO labeling in states in the United States led to a general confusion about GMOs around the planet. All people know is that they want to avoid GMOs, but they haven't a clue as to why they want to avoid them. The opposition to all GMOs comes mostly from white people in the United States and Europe, and so a million poor children of color a year have to go blind around the planet, all because of first world stupidity. We can have Golden Rice that prevents blindness, and we can have genetically modified bananas that got their resistance to fungus from a wild banana, and we can even have Golden Bananas, these are all good GMOs, the only bad GMOs were created by Monsanto from 1996 on and are referred to as Roundup Ready. That is the only reason to avoid GMOs, and it is absolutely stupid for people to oppose GMO bananas when bananas are an important economic crop in many countries around the planet, or even worse, to oppose Golden Rice or Golden Bananas that can save 1 million children a year from blindness.