37 - YES. Science says GMO food is okay. So I'll eat it. But if we find out otherwise tomorrow, I'd like to know what I'm eating.
Actually, science does not say that "GMO food is okay". Science simply *does not know* because funding for independent studies of GMO food safety is very limited and intellectual property rights limit publication of existing results. Add to this regulatory capture and lack of democratic debate about this issue, and imo it's absolutely not obvious that GMOs are ok. Additionally, there are newer results that seem to show that GMOs are not as safe as they seem to be - and these are just shorter term results, as there have been basically no long term studies at all.
Nevertheless, the main problem with GMOs is not food safety (which is still a large problem), but centralised control over the food production process. It is mostly used not to increase yields or decrease losses or create more resistant strains (all of these attempts have backfired btw), but to secure top-down, centralised control over the production process through increasing productivity (ie. decreasing the amount of human labour needed in agricultural production) and thus increasing possible farm size and decreasing the amount of people who can live off the land and concentrating profits at the technological level. Doesn't work that well thankfully, but still, that's the idea. Food labeling does not solve this problem but it may increase awareness so it's a good first step.
Frankly, I don't think that GMOs are a good idea overall. Not because of the problems with the technology or some inherent lack of safety, but simply because it's just way too dangerous and we are, in handling technology, just like a bunch of not very smart but very aggressive eight year olds. Simply not mature enough, by far.
It makes the consumer think there is a good reason to avoid it if it had to be labeled. I think it's important to spread adoption of these new types of good as they're just more efficient.
There are several good reasons to avoid buying GMOs actually, so making the consumer think that is awesome.
I think I pointed out earlier on this thread that it affects the nutrition as much as using illegal immigrants to pick/process the food. But the only reason to label if it uses GMOs or if the company was raided by the INS is if you have an ideological agenda to push on consumers.
No. That there is good science that shows that GMOs are safe is simply a myth, so even from this point of view labelling is pretty important. And still, why not let the market decide, based on, you know, full information? Isn't that how free markets are supposed to work anyway? If they're completely safe, this will eventually be reflected on the market also, so you'll eliminate a much, much bigger information asymmetry (which shouldn't have been there anyway) which may cause larger problems later. There may be temporary issues, but that's how things are supposed to work, so it's all good in the long run. If you hide information from the market, it'll be inefficient, at least that's what theory holds, no? Not that I believe in it, but the argument still stands.
Also. There are a few non-rational arguments about GMOs that are imo completely unacceptable, and no one should fall back on. One argument is that there is no science that proves that there's a health risk with GMOs (this is wrong for multiple reasons, first, because of the ones I mentioned in the first paragraph, but also because it's safety, not danger, that needs to be proven, based on the precautionary principle). Another is that anti-GMO people are anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-technology reactionaries (I'm not going to detail why this argument is degrading for people who make it). Third, that GMOs are needed to "feed the world" (this is a much broader and much more controversial issue so I'm not going to go into it here).
