What the companies are making now!

The first and most important GE crop is soybeans. "I don't eat those. Yuk!" you probably think. But you'd be surprised because you find them - or stuff made from them - in most foods from bread to hamburgers. Maize or corn is the second most important crop. And there are many more, mostly not important yet. But what's different about these GE crops if they don't taste different or look different? For the moment, there are two main differences: many of these GMOs are made to be resistant to the weedkiller chemicals. That means farmers can spray their GE crops with weedkillers (herbicides) which will kill every single plant except the crop. The other GMO crops have been engineered to make a poison which kills insect pests. These two things seem good ideas, you might think.

Problems with weedkiller-safe crops
Farmers like tidy fields and weeds compete with crop plants meaning that the farmer gets less crop and less money.

So making sure no weeds grow by spraying herbicide seems to make sense … but not for the other creatures and plants that live on the planet. By killing everything but his crop, the farmer is making the landscape into a desert for other life. No birds will be there because there are no weed seeds or insects to eat. There will be no flowers. Just miles of identical GE plants. The whole web of life is destroyed. Oh, and many farmers are finding that they aren't making the great profits they had hoped to make by growing GE crops.

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