The inherent unpredictability and unsafety of GE foods is by itself a sufficient reason for disallowing their use. However there are strong reasons to stop them even if they were safe. These reasons have so far not been considered in the debate:
1. Global warming
It has now been generally accepted by climate experts that Global Warming will bring about considerable climatic instability and extreme weather conditions, including heavy rains, storms as well as severe droughts.
Experience indicates that GE crops may be more delicate than conventional crops. The reason is that the artificial insertion of foreign genetic material including viral and bacterial DNA required to make the inserted gene work work, represents a significant genetic disturbance similar to a disease. This is reflected in several reports of GE crops failures and disturbances in productivity.
This increases the risk for GE crop failures due to the extreme weather conditions caused by Global Warming.
2. Imminent oil shortage predicted to bring about hunger crisis
The international energy agency (IEA) and other expert bodies have predicted that there is a risk for severe hunger catastrophes when oil shortage occurs. This is because conventional large scale, chemistry-based agricultural food production is heavily dependent on oil. With oil shortage it will collapse.
In addition, transportation will become expensive and in the worst case very limited. Industrial scale agriculture is closely tied to long distance transport of foods.
In the case of genetically engineered crops, the seeds are produced only in a few places and therefore require long distance, if not overseas transportation. This will make it very expensive to use such crops, and with severe oil shortage, it might become physically impossible.
Recently an increasing number of experts have been warning that oil and gas shortage may occur much earlier than believed so far, perhaps even within a few years (see for example "Get ready for oil supplies to dwindle, experts warn" (Vancoucer Sun, 27 Sept 2006).
The experts predict that it will take at best 10 years, but more probably 15-20 years to replace the oil-dependent technology with something else. At the same time, there is an increasing consensus among independent experts that oil shortage will come in less than ten years, and in the worst case within a few years.
Even if Food Biotechnology had been safe in every way, for this reason alone it is a very dangerous way to go. This is especially so as the Biotech Corporation now are rapidly expanding the use of industrial heavily oil dependent GE-food production in the world. When oil shortage comes, it will expose millions, if not hundreds of millions to hunger and death from starvation.
Already the expansion of food biotechnology in the third world is eliminating tens of thousands of small scale farming units with a low oil dependence, replacing them with highly oil dependent industrial farming. In stead, great care should be taken to foster a development in the opposite direction, which would decrease the impact of an oil crisis on food production.
GE foods significantly increase the risk for mass starvation in the future. This is brought about by a combination of:
Therefore, even if GE foods would have been safe, they have to be stopped.
Unfortunately, this technology is inherently unsafe and has already spread genes with unpredicatable effects over wide areas. There is every reason to stop the release of GE genes into the environment including production of GE foods immediately.