Furthermore, it's demanding proof of a negative. We can't prove that carrots won't attract swarms of malicious homosexual space aliens with a taste for human brains to Earth, and therefore should ban carrots because they can't be proven to be safe. Politicians in support of carrots should be shamed as being pro-gayzombpocalypse. Spread the fear!
The very reason we're creating GMOs for food is to reduce the resources (land, energy, fertilizers, water, etc.) needed for food production. The motivation of course is that lower resource usage means lower production costs.
Requiring unreasonable burdens of proof mean greater waste in our food production, but that side of things isn't a scary and therefore gets less consideration than the limitless possibilities of unknown harms that could come from GMOs.
There's some drop in the price of a hamburger below which I'm not willing to risk a Leprechaun extinction. However, I'm willing to risk extinction of Leprechauns, Yetis, and Loch Ness "monsters" in exchange for less land needed to grow my food, and fewer children being under-nourished. These are real problems that GMOs can help with.
In fact, if more "proof" for safety of food would be appropriate, it wouldn't be on GMO food but on organic, which is in fact responsible of the last big-scale food poisoning in EU, which killed over 50 people in Germany.
Imagine the hysteria if a GMO food item would have been involved in the chain of events!
The very reason we're creating GMOs for food is to reduce the resources (land, energy, fertilizers, water, etc.) needed for food production. The motivation of course is that lower resource usage means lower production costs.
Requiring unreasonable burdens of proof mean greater waste in our food production, but that side of things isn't a scary and therefore gets less consideration than the limitless possibilities of unknown harms that could come from GMOs.
There's some drop in the price of a hamburger below which I'm not willing to risk a Leprechaun extinction. However, I'm willing to risk extinction of Leprechauns, Yetis, and Loch Ness "monsters" in exchange for less land needed to grow my food, and fewer children being under-nourished. These are real problems that GMOs can help with.