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And yet, no one would say the same of breeding for higher yield or disease resistance, but suddenly when you use technology, it is wrong.

Not "wrong". Untested, unproven, with insufficient research on safety. Also, GM crops have thus far failed to deliver on the higher yield claims: http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/genetic-engineering/failure-to-yield.html

And the farmers, and the people, and the environment.

Well, let's see. Your first link leads to a German academic paper that would cost me 40 bucks in PDF to debunk. But the summary provides a few bar graphs which immediately give the lie to the text -- at best, pesticide use is only *slightly* reduced on Bt cotton.

The third link is an advertisement, full of lies, damned lies, statistics, and weasel language. Its authors, Graham Brookes and Peter Barfoot of
PG Economics Ltd., Dorchester, UK, trace back to here -- http://www.pgeconomics.co.uk/who-we-are.php -- where it says things like: "PG Economics Limited is a specialist provider of advisory and consultancy services to agriculture and other natural resource-based industries. Our specific areas of specialisation are plant biotechnology, agricultural production systems, agricultural markets and policy." and "...on-going management consultancy and advice in the following core areas: Commercialisation of new technology/biotechnology". Translation, in case you didn't catch it: they're selling something.

The advertisement's premise is that chemical use is reduced because of herbicide-tolerant GM crops. Sounds great. Except, well... it's bullshit. A quick Google search kicks out 14 million results for "pesticide use up", this one from Reuters at the top: Pesticide use ramping up as GMO crop technology backfires: study The chemical companies are selling more herbicide than ever, because farmers didn't used to spray herbicide on crops because it would fucking kill them! Topping that off, the weeds are developing herbicide resistance... so... now what?

Things look pretty grim when you ignore a lot of facts.

Try harder next time; I've got plenty more ammo.

You are basically saying that if the problems of the world were to go away we wouldn't need solutions. That's a pretty vacuous statement.

GMO is a non-solution to a problem that we could much more easily prevent.

And yet, no one would say the same of breeding for higher yield or disease resistance, but suddenly when you use technology, it is wrong.

The only winner in GMO is the patent holder who collects the royalties.

And the farmers, and the people, and the environment. Things look pretty grim when you ignore a lot of facts.

I think many people would have much less of a problem with GMO foods in general if Monsanto's business practices weren't so oppressively evil

While I am not a fan of finding myself defending some big multinational, here's the problem with that thought: it didn't start with Monsanto. The fear mongering surrounding GE crops started with the Flavr Savr tomato, developed by a small company called Calgene. Then Monsanto come along and people say 'GMO foods are bad because of Monsanto.' Well, that is clearly ignorant of the history of the matter, and furthermore, a lot of the 'evil' things Monsanto does, like suing farmers for being cross pollinated, are mostly myths spread by, you guessed it, the anti-GMO groups.

Fact is, if there were no Monsanto, it would be necessary for the anti-GMO moment to invent it. When your argument largely revolves around everyone disagreeing with you being paid shills, and most scientists disagree with you, you need a conspiracy. Doesn't matter if we're talking evolution, climate change, vaccines, or GMOs. Same thing. In this case, it is Monsanto who ties together the GMO conspiracy. Clearly, I am a paid shill, because the facts have a pro-Monsanto bias.

and the notion of routinely spraying Roundup on all our cereal grains (both for humans and livestock) weren't quite so heinous.

What gets me about that is it isn't! I'd much rather glyphosate be sprayed than one of the nastier herbicides out there. And what are your other options? Tillage and hand weeding mostly, and the first destroys the soil while the second is economically preposterous. The problem is that people are so damned disconnected from agriculture that what should be seen as a good thing is instead demonized. I'm not saying that it is an ideal situation, but realistically, you have to deal with weeds somehow. weed control is not optional, if it were farmers wouldn't bother spraying in the first place, but for not, herbicide tolerant systems are the best we've got.

The existence of GMOs have NOT boosted production in the slightest.

Tell that to the papaya farmers in Hawaii. Virus resistant GMO papaya saved the industry. Without GMOs, there would be no papayas on the Big Island. How's that for a yield gain?

Second, you completely ignore the also prevalent Bt crops, which while they have not had much of a yield impact in developed countries (which is no surprise since insecticides are readily available there) but have had noticeable impacts in developing countries like India.

Third, why do you pretend this is all about yield? It's not. You criticize herbicide tolerant crops, yet I don't see you proposing a better idea for weed control. Would you like to go back to harsher herbicides? Or maybe tilling the hell out of the soil? Besides economic benefits, there is also the benefits of no-till and replacing harsher herbicides. It is a perfect system? Nope, but I don't hear the anti-GMO crowd volunteering to weed a few million acres by hand.

This herbicide immunity, by the way, is an immunity being acquired by other "pest" plants which were the original target of the herbicide.

The first example of an herbicide resistant weed was in the 70's, so your argument has more to do with over-reliance on a single mode of action herbicide than genetic engineering. Surprise, evolution in the weed population works the same regardless of whether or not a transgene is present. It is telling that one of the best arguments against genetic engineering is 'we might lose some of the benefits it has provided.'

GMOs do not represent a world-saving technology.

No one is saying they are, but to point that out is like saying that vaccines won't cure everything, therefore they are bad. That's an asinine argument. As the case of papaya in Hawai'i and Bt crops in Asia & South America, while they are no panacea they can indeed help.

What they represent is a danger to the world's food supply not only because it comes under control of a small collection of companies,

The consolidation of seed companies has been going on for a very long time. Just because you didn't start paying attention until GMOs showed up doesn't mean GMOs did it. Correlation, not causation.

but because it reduces the varieties of plants available. In the event a disease develops to wipe out these GMOs, there may be extreme starvation and human suffering due to the continual growth of GMO use.

Please explain how the presence of a transgene is reducing the varieties of crops out there. you are confusing the selection of genes, aka conventional breeding, with the insertion of a small number of genes. They are very different. Genetic monoculture is caused by having a lot of similar genetics, not from having a single gene inserted. Now, to be fair, over relying on a single inserted transgene can and has resulting in pests overcoming the resistance, but the same thing has happened in with conventional systems, from hessian fly overcoming the conventionally bred resistance in wheat to late blight overcoming tomato resistance, to the fall of the Gros Michael banana. You are taking a basic agricultural issue completely out of context.

Please shill for Monsanto elsewhere.

Ah, the big shill gambit. Not just for anti-vaxxers anymore!

Terminator genes convey an evolutionary advantage?

No, but if the genes transfer, they'll reduce future seed yields for any nearby farmers. By a lot if they're dominant, by a little if they're recessive (although by more for generations if recessive because the trait will only crop up rarely; pun intended).

By at most a little regardless of whether they are dominant or recessive. The vast majority of the seed (99%) will have been fertilized by other plants in the same field. This might cause issues with organic certification, but not with seed germination yield. http://www.agbioforum.org/v4n2/v4n2a02-jemison.htm

My bad, did some research after posting and found this: http://www.agbioforum.org/v12n34/v12n34a10-duke.htm Apparently there are a lot of products that have been on the market for some time and are commonly grown in NA.

First, genetic engineering is a way of improving a plant. A monoculture is growing all the same thing. these are entirely different concepts. Trying to link the two only makes it look like you don't know the definition of either.

Second, how are Monsanto's seeds wrong? sure, the make Monsanto a profit, but there's nothing wrong with that. The insect resistant ones have feared pretty well, reducing pesticides and even benefiting farms that don't grow them. The herbicide tolerant ones have, for all their ill will, been environmentally positive, having reduced the need for tillage to control weeds (tillage degrades the soil quality and promotes fertilizer runoff into water systems), reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and replaced harsher herbicides.

Monsanto? Is that why anti-GE groups are protesting the publicly funded Rothamsted GE wheat trial in the UK? Is that why they complain about the Rainbow papaya, Arctic apples, Golden Rice, and BioCassava, or why groups destroyed the GE grapes in French, GE wheat in Australia, GE potatoes in the Netherlands, and GE wheat in the UK? It might be true for you, but that is minority thought. You can not play that card while the vast majority of the protest against GE crops is also applied to those that have nothing to do with Monsanto.

GM Roundup-resistant oilseed rape (canola) has already been found in the wild, hybridised with local weed Brassica populations. We have already created a super-weed, resistant to major weedkiller, by releasing GM crops which have cross-pollinated purely by chance with indigenous populations. http://agbioforum.org/v12n34/v12n34a10-duke.htm We already know it happens easily in the wild. Adding genes coding for drugs (toxins) to a plant could well confer a selective advantage by making it less likely that the plant will be eaten by herbivores, allowing the mutation to sweep through a wild population. We need to forget the idea of putting extra genes coding for toxic things in the genomes of things related to things we eat.