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Harvest of Fear

 

            
            
            
             I was surprised at my seething anger and indignation that arose during the 11/12/03 viewing of the video Harvest of Fear by Nova and later processed the information as a means of understanding and identifying my emotions. The following is a response to the video and an explanation of my emotions.
             The video began with the disaster that occurred on Hawaii where by the ring spot virus decimated plantations causing the farming industry a loss of forty-five million dollars. Surely this appears to be a problem for the farmers as well as for papaya eaters. If the fruit does not grow healthily then there is nothing to harvest and take to market. A brilliant scientist asked the question, "Could genetic engineering help"? Of course the solution was to splice genes in order to vaccinate healthy fruit by a method comprised of shooting engineered genes through the leaves with "The Gene Gun". These new or transgenic cells in turn will grow new healthy plants that are able to resist the ring spot virus. The use of virus resistance makes plants less susceptible to diseases caused by viruses thus, higher crop yield. This seems like a reasonable solution until I looked further into the ramifications and my emotions. .
             Putting medicine or engineering plants to create their own medicine would assuredly become a tempting aspect to commercialization because it attracts large corporations that produce herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides along with farmers who want to capitalize on bigger and better (more nutritious) crops. The results would mean products would have a lower price, greater durability and nutritional value. Of course there are drawbacks and if history were any indication of mans folly it would seem that we are destined to repeat ourselves until we get right. The critics claim that Genetically Modified foods are reseeding the earth and that this undermines the traditional ecological and cultural food values.


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