| Northern corn - 4/19/2015 18:11
Drought tolerance is not a trait that was engineered
Most drought-resistant corn has indeed been nonGM, but Monsanto has been selling DroughtGard corn since 2013. Not sure if it's terribly efficient at that, but regardless, you can expect more drought and heat resistance traits to be increasingly GMOs, as it's much easier to add a new gene than to cross-pollinate and recess the undesired genes. The hard part is to identify such genes that are relevant to crops. My point is that because biotech companies have focused on what was most commercially valuable to them does not mean that the technology of genetic engineering itself is flawed or not able to help us battle the challenges we face. It does not mean either that GE is the only solution to these challenges, a wheat manually selected to be resistant to stem rust would be just as great as a genetically engineered one, it's just that it may take less generations to have a commercial variety available for the countries badly suffering from stem rust, like some parts of Africa or Australia. Unfortunately, with seed companies also being pesticide companies, there is not much incentive for them to produce pest-resistant plants. Same with drought-resistance, the biotech companies don't produce them to "save the world", only because farmers stand to lose a lot economically in drought years.
 (Drought.jpg)
Attachments
----------------
 Drought.jpg (51KB - 173 downloads)
|
What benefits for the consumer does production ag's GMO are there
