Are GMOs good or bad?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Are GMOs good or bad?
Position1 of 3›: GMOs are bad
Argument‹4 of 4: GMOs are harmful to the environment

GMOs led to an increase in the use of herbicides, which have toxic chemicals that get into the water supply. GMOs also decrease biodiversity by homogenizing the seeds.

The argument

There are several ways that GMOs are harmful to the environment, and this argument traces them to a single design choice: engineering crops to survive chemicals that kill everything around them. The first consequence is chemical volume. Herbicide-resistant crops resulted in a massive increase in the use of herbicides like glyphosate, a probable carcinogen, because farmers can spray to kill the weeds without worrying about damaging the crop. The modification does not reduce the need for spraying; it removes the constraint that previously limited it, so the rational thing for a grower to do is spray more. The second consequence follows from the first. The increase of herbicide-resistant crops is creating a rapid increase in superweeds that are themselves resistant to herbicide — the predictable result of applying the same chemical repeatedly across large areas, since the survivors are the ones that reproduce. Farmers then have to do more tillage, which erodes the soil, and to use even stronger herbicides. The technology therefore does not settle at its initial level of chemical use but ratchets upward, and each round of escalation leaves the next one harder. Those herbicides hurt animals and then get into the water, carrying the damage beyond the field where they were applied. The third problem is different in kind. The widespread use of GMOs is destroying crop biodiversity, because a small number of engineered varieties displace the many local ones they outperform commercially. The US has lost 6,000 out of 7,000 of its apple varieties — a narrowing of the genetic base that agriculture draws on when a new disease or climate pressure arrives. Chemical escalation, resistant weeds, contaminated water and a shrinking gene pool are each detrimental to agriculture and the ecosystem, which is why this argument holds GMOs are bad.

Premises

[P1]Herbicide-resistant GMO crops have driven a massive increase in the use of harmful herbicides like glyphosate, which poison wildlife and contaminate water. [P2] The spread of these crops generates herbicide-resistant superweeds, forcing more soil-eroding tillage and even stronger chemicals. [P3] Widespread GMO adoption is collapsing crop biodiversity, as shown by the U.S. losing roughly 6,000 of 7,000 apple varieties. [C] Therefore, GMOs are bad because they cause serious environmental harm.

Counter-arguments

GMOs result in less tillage (which removes nutrients from the soil and causes erosion) to address weeds since the crops are herbicide-resistant. GMOs are also good for the environment because they use fewer pesticides and waste less water. Modifying crops to be pest-resistant means that there is less need to use pesticides. These pesticides are harmful to the environment and to animals such as honeybees and monarch butterflies. Crops can also be modified to be drought resistant which would help to waste less water.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] GMOs result in less tillage since the crops are herbicide-resistant.