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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 , 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 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
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
they had hoped to make by growing GE crops.
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