Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
sensory features, meet the same sanitary standards as their conventional
food counterparts, and are often less costly. Thus, the utilitarian calcu-
lus involves weighing benefits that are tangible and proven versus risks
that are presumably prevented by regulators and that have thus far been
speculative about harm arising from the genetic engineering involved in
making the product.
Other safety issues raised by GM agriculture, such as threats to
wildlife, ecosystems, and conventional crops, do not enter or are given
much less weight in the consumer calculus. Given that most consumers
do not know where their food comes from, have not been confronted
with any accounts of serious or irreparable environmental harms caused
by the planting of GM crops, and have become somewhat accustomed
and immune to a decade of warnings of impending disasters by envi-
ronmentalists, such concerns remain as remote, theoretical issues that
do not influence daily decision making in the supermarket by most
consumers.
Thus, American culture has presented few obstacles to corporate
introduction of new products such as GM seed, crops, and foods, a sit-
uation that has led to an extraordinary increase in the acreage devoted
to growing GM versions of commodity crops in the United States since
1996. Data from the federal Department of Agriculture indicates that
the GM share of soy acreage rose from less than 10 percent in 1996 to
more than 90 percent in 2007; for GM cotton acreage, from zero to near
70 percent; and for GM corn, from near zero to more than 50 percent.
2
According to another report in 2006, since Monsanto created the first
GM crops in the early 1990s, the percentage of all agricultural land in the
United States devoted to GM crop growing has risen steadily to almost
a third, and that a major increase is anticipated now that GM varieties of
2
United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, Adoption of
Genetically Engineered Crops in the U.S., U.S. Dept. Agriculture, www.ers.usda.gov/
data/BiotechCrops/ExtentofAdoptionTable1.htm.
