Separate Politics from Science and GMO's Will Be Seen as Critical to the Human Race

I've talked about GMO's before.  I'm getting some support from important people:

Scott Hamilton Kennedy, the director of the new documentary “Food Evolution,” which takes the — gasp! — position that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the agriculture industry might well be the best thing to happen to the planet since solar panels. And he’s not alone — he enlisted two of the nation’s most beloved scientists, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who narrates, and Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” who appears in the film. Incredibly, both affable, smart guys have come to the same conclusion as Kennedy that the science demonstrates that genetically engineered food isn’t as damaging as popularly believed, and, in fact, can lead to downright sustainable farming practices.

In figuring out the core communications of the film we came to a few must-have tenets: 1) GMO, or more correctly, GE (genetic engineering) is a process, not a product. It is a breeding method, similar to the ways farmers have been manipulating and improving plants for the last ten thousand years, but now it is done in a lab. 2) GMO is not ‘owned’ by any one company or industry. So the strongest argument for using GMO technology is that it works. Then the question becomes: Is it the correct fix for the given situation, and that is another of our core tenets: 3) take all future GMOs on a case-by-case basis, just like any other technology. Is it safe, is it helping, is there a better way to solve the problem? And in many situations, like the papaya in Hawaii and the bananas in Uganda, no other method could stop the devastation of that crop except for GE.

As Neil deGrasse Tyson has said, ‘We’ve been doing this for 10 thousand years but now that we’re doing it in a lab, now you have a problem with it?’ And while that might be oversimplifying the difference between genetic engineering and previous seed breeding techniques, it really does capture the spirit of and motivation behind what scientists are trying to do with this technology.

I'll admit that the opponents of GMO's have a legitimate beef.  Huge corporations are using it to increase their wealth.  But that doesn't mean GMO's are bad.

We have global warming to worry about, a very serious worry.  But just as serious is the fact that the population of the planet is projected to be 9.7 billion by 2050.  Current agricultural practices are simply unable to support that kind of population.  GMO's are going to be critical in solving that problem.