GM Crops: To What Purpose?

GM: Genetically Modified. Applying genetic engineering techniques to add/modify the DNA of economically valuable plants or animals. Sometimes referred to as making Frankenfood.

There is a pretty vociferous debate going on these days about the pros and cons of GM foods. There are the proponents, who claim a moral imperative to feed the starving masses, and the antis, who claim that these hi-tech foods, or Frankenfoods, can be dangerous to your health. I disagree with both of these claims. Perhaps this is not the best stand to take, but please bear with me.
To begin, the likelihood that GM foods will prove dangerous to the consumer is, let's face it, fairly remote. The creators of these altered plants are pretty knowledgeable people, and their purpose is not to poison their customers, but to make money from them. It's hard to sell food to dead people. And the testing needed to show dietary safety of food that is really not so different from stuff that's been around for a long time isn't terribly difficult.
However, the promoters of such stuff are being disingenuous. They're trying hard to distract your attention from the man behind the curtain. There are other issues besides food safety. Issues that go far beyond food safety. Especially given that there is no shortage of food in the world today. There is, as always, an economic problem: poor people can't afford to buy food. When people of means take note, they send food off to the poor starving . When their attention wavers, the poor return to being poor, and continue to starve. Sorry - different subject.
About frankenfood; there are definitely other concerns than just safe nutrition.
How about the environmental problems? For the most part, GM plants are being designed with three goals in mind. Disease resistance, pest resistance, and herbicide resistance. Crops with such characteristics can be grown more successfully, where success is defined as the greatest yield of a single crop measured in Tonnes/Hectare. A field where nothing except the desired plants can survive, the ultimate in monoculture, is the most 'efficient' of farms. The result of this kind of farming is, however, not unlike the current situation where increased use of chemical fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, have caused a tremendous increase in the level of contaminants in food, as well as degradation of watersheds and the environment that is dependent on uncontaminated water. Pursuers of this kind of efficiency are not unlike the landowner who dams the river flowing through his property, unconcerned with the damage to his downstream neighbors.
In the ultimate farm envisioned by these pioneers of GM cropping, the plants will unaided create a circle of death around themselves, destroying all other plants, destroying insects harmful, benign, and beneficial as well. Result: the farmland so used becomes infertile to any other crop except for this or another similarly engineered plant.
What does this mean in terms of economics? The farmer who has planted such a crop is now a client of the patentholder of the crop. The corporation now dictates the means and method of growing - and the price - of the seed, the fertilizer, the chemicals to be applied; the entire system from planting to harvesting. The farmer has just become a tenant, or sharecropper, on his own land! Of course, his crop yield will increase (probably). Ask any farmer or fisherman, or anyone at the bottom of the commodity production process. An increase in output goes hand in hand with a decrease in price. Grow more; sell for less. The profits are made by the people higher up the food chain. Of course, this is a description of the small family farm. Something that hardly exsists in North America. Agribusiness is the rule rather than the exception. Fields with but a single crop, as far as the eye can see. These businesses can deal quite well with GM crops. They grow them, take their price support money from the government, and invest it in the company that sells them the GM seed! Not a bad way to do business.
Not exactly related to the vision of Feeding The Starving Masses though, is it?
All the above is not at all an indictment of GM technology, nor of all applications of that technology. There is a lot of promise in genetic modification for creation of wonderful compounds for medical purposes. It seems to me that there's a very real possibility that genetic engineering can be used to help in environmental restoration as well. Perhaps to help corals and planktonic life adapt to the increased temperature of the oceans (yes, there is global warming, and no, I'm not blaming you in particular for it).
Using genetic engineering to search for new compounds, new biological entities, and new knowledge is a great idea. Even if it weren't, it's pointless to try to tell people to not know something they know. Sort of like telling them to forget how to make nuclear bombs, please!
Personally, I'd really rather not see plants, or animals, with odd assortments of genes from odd assortments of other life forms, set loose on a large-scale basis, with the near certainty of negative unforseen consequences. Those unforseen consequences that always seem to go along with any human endeavor.