The wisdom of collective farming has been slowly getting into the hands of shrewd agribusiness multinationals. It seems that the latter have been tweaking on God’s original handiwork and taking advantage of farmers’ collective wisdom, knowledge, and skills for their corporate aggrandizement and coffers.

Today, genetically-modified crops are said to have increasingly lessened the role of farmers in agriculture, while capitalizing on farmers’ knowledge. The current genetics of agriculture have produced genetically-modified crops that are ‘rigorously licensed forms of intellectual property.’

‘Introduced more than a decade ago, genetically modified crops are now planted on millions of acres throughout the world. But the fundamental questions about them remain — both about their safety and their long-term impact on global food security and the environment.’

The increasing cost of farming inputs, no thanks to the same agribusiness multinationals that constantly hike the prices of fertilizers and pesticides, has brought about the high cost of grains.

Traditional farmers have been left with no choice but to abandon some of their planting activity, thereby resulting in lessened availability of traditionally produced grains. By some sheer business acumen, this market condition now ‘seems to favor genetically modified crops’ since ‘the cost of conventionally-grown grain goes up and up because there is less and less of it. This leaves the world open to the nearly unchecked proliferation of genetically modified varieties.’

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Via environment360