Genetic Modification and Frankenstein Foods the Ecological Risks of Genetic Engineering in Agriculture

For 10,000 years agriculture has been based on the strategy of conserving and enhancing genetic diversity. Humans have always this time domesticated and modified wild plants and animals, the gifts of nature’s biodiversity. According to Erna Bennett (former genetic resources expert to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN), ‘The patchwork of cultivation sown by man unleashed an explosion of literally inestimable numbers of new races of cultivated plants and their relatives’ (Hawkes, Conservation and Agriculture, 1978). Prior to planting crops, humans harvested wild plants. For example, corn, rice and wheat, were originally collected from the wild. For gathering societies, less than a month of harvesting from the wild could ensure enough for the year’s needs. For reasons unknown to us, human societies moved from harvesting wild grain to domesticating and sowing the seeds of those grains. This is a process that still continues. A farmer participating in the Indian Seed-Saving Movement, Navdanya, which is dedicated to conserving native biodiversity, domesticated a wild rice in 1998. Domestication changed the nature of plants. As Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney have described in their book, Shattering, “The simple act of harvesting seeds of non-domesticated plants and then sowing them produced remarkable changes of great GENETIC MODIFICATION AND FRANKENSTEIN FOODS