Why I am against GMOs and lost all respect for Neil deGrasse Tyson

I watched the trailer for 'Food Evolution' last night and was quite impressed by the amount of manipulative dishonesty they were able to fit in 2 minutes.

The main argument, narrated by Mr science himself, Tyson, is that "science is true, even if you don't believe in it". Everyone loves a good sound byte that they can repeat to their friends but this comment in the context of GMOs is disingenuous, condescending and outright manipulative.

Even if science, was no corruptible by greedy corporate interests. Even if there's scientific consensus and the science does indeed proves that ALL GMOs (even those not yet created!) are safe, all of the studies are short term and we have no way of knowing the long term effects since there's no tracking of GMOs due to the industry's fierce opposition to labelling.

So by making it all about the 'science' the documentary completely misrepresents the anti-GMO argument.

It ignores the fact that people may have issue with patenting life. Have you ever thought about it? Life which took millions of years to evolve may be privatized after changing a single gene. This would be akin to me patenting my computer because I scratched the corner. Life is many orders of magnitude more complex than any man-made machine. Yet, somehow without any democratic discussion, it's legal for corporations to own genetics after minimally changing them.

It ignores the fact that people may have an issue with centralization and monopoly of seed production by a few multinational corporations known for their greedy and selfish character and not altruism. Resilience is in biodiversity not a handful of lab bred species.

It ignores the fact that people may be concerned with the unsustainable conventional mono-cropping, the farming of enormous land areas, which requires huge fossil fuel fertilizer inputs, kills biodiversity, depletes soil fertility, creates ocean dead zones and eventually causes desertification.

It ignores the fact that people may want technology that empowers them rather than technology that makes them dependent on profit driven organizations. Farmers are not allowed to save the GMO seed like they do with regular seed. And if GMOs are found in their land they may be sued out of business.

Biotech ignores other potential, albeit perhaps non-profitable, solutions to the problems it claims to be trying to solve. One of the solutions being, Permaculture. The idea of learning from and working with nature's systems to create, close-looped human edible landscapes and ecosystems.

Instead biotech (not dissimilar to the pharmaceutical industry) reduces very complex problems, which mostly derive from the break down of an intricate web of inter-relations and interactions of an ecosystem, to the gene level so that it can be patented and owned.

And finally, after witnessing the manipulative self-serving dishonesty of the biotech 'science' argument, while belittling and condescendingly ignoring those that have genuine questions about a technology that was forced on them without any democratic consultation, intelligent people may have lost ALL trust in the industry and its propaganda.

I leave you with a vision of not what I am against but what I am for. I made this video a while back, no GMOs were used.

And here's another example of a man who regenerated depleted land back into an abundant tropical food forest and how his work is inspiring a movement of agro-ecology.