The Social and Economic Impact of GM Crops: The Case of the Herbicide Tolerance Trait

Abstract

To have any relevance to development of a country’s agriculture and to the needs of small farmers, it is necessary for managers of Genetically Engineered (GE) crops to provide real life solutions to the problems inherent in these methods of producing food and fodder. Currently available GM crops are those that were developed for industrialized agriculture in developed countries, complete with their positive and negative traits. At least one of them, the Herbicide Tolerance (HT) trait, is not just irrelevant to our country’s needs, it is downright harmful to the agricultural and food systems that strengthen local food security. Using HT crops will reduce the demand for labor in a labor surplus country where agricultural operations such as weeding provide wages, especially for women; it will reduce food and nutrition availability for the poor by eliminating natural leafy greens, it will strike at human and veterinary health by destroying locally available medicinal plants, and it will increase risks of crop failure by making it impossible to engage in mixed cropping, which distributes risk and provides more food and nutrition.