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  • From: Leigh <lh AT pressroom.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Genetically Engineered Corn
  • Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2002 23:02:10 -0500

Title: Genetically Engineered Corn
OK,  let's think about this for a second. Spraying bt on your corn, or on your cabbage is a different thing completely than corn or cabbage that has bt as part of its genetic makeup.  Sure, Bt sprayed on a crop is reasonable benign.  When I have cabbage loopers I spray bt, it inhibits growth, kills the caterpillar. It saves my cabbage crop.  The bt breaks down, is gone.  Someone eats the cabbage, there's no bt.

However, this isn't the case with genetically manipulated corn. The bt is always there, Its there when the plant's growing, its there in the corn, Its there in the stalk that's turned back into the ground (assuming the bt is a sweet corn).

This brings up a whole set of potential problems that bt used as a topical insecticide doesn't have.

But beside the allergies, if they exist, my real problem with bt corn is the small minded, short term profit seeking of the company that is making it.  Bt is a very useful solution to caterpillar damage.  However, by inserting Bt genes into corn the scientist that did it, and they company that markets it knows (its in their literature) that this will create bt resistant caterpillars.  They know (and its in their literature), that within several decades (if not sooner) there will be bt resistant insects.  That by creating and marketing bt corn the company is making a short term profit at the expense of the long term effectiveness of bt.

And finally, I find farmers that are growing this crop as either woefully uninformed (meaning, they actually believe seed salesman when they tell them a line) or they are knowledgeable and therefore irresponsible by ruining this effective insecticide for farmers of the future.

That is the real issue here.



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