Have you read the 'Why GM Food Won't Feed The World piece in the U-Know Features section? It deals with a lot of the points you're raising.
' we have been geneticaly altering things for thousands of years now'
Humans have indeed been genetically altering plants through selcetive breeding. I've no problem with that. What we haven't done is mix a tomato with a scorpion in one generation. These are entirely new organisms, not just a new variant. This introduces material that has never been part of the human diet before.
For example, when a GM potato was made with a lectin gene, lab tests on rats showed non-GM potatoes with lectin added had no effect. The GM potatoes with the lectin gene caused dramatic and severe organ shrinkage, leading to death in a matter of days.
Whether such effects translate to humans is anyone's guess, but it clearly establishes that gene-splicing is a different thing than just adding the two parts together. It simply doesn't compare with selective breeding.
'science isnt all bad' - absolutely not. But being against GM is no more 'anti-science' than being against nuclear weapons or any other scientific development aimed to fuck people over for profit.
'i hope that one day it may help feed the world' - we already have the methods to do that, and indeed the food is grown.
'we should understand that for a starving man food is food'- We have actually made the point and counterpoint on this one several times now. I'll say it once more.
If it were a choice between GM and starvation you'd have a really strong point here. But it is not. We have plenty of non-GM food to feed the starving. Nations that refuse GM are given non-GM, of which there is a global surplus.
If a nation accepts GM and it starts to grow, it threatens all of its arable land. It risks future ability to feed themselves and not be stuck in a cycle of starvation and aid.
Are we clear on that now?
The Zambian (and several other) cases have been deliberately used by the GM corporations via the US government for propaganda purposes.
They know that their 'massive yields for no effort in crap soil' stuff has been proven to be a lie, so they desperately need something to make GM look benevolent.
GM promotes the use of farming methods that will lead to more starvation, not less.
The idea that GM is only opposed by the well-fed is nonsense. The largest and most hardcore anti-GM campaigns have been by Indian peasant farmers.
If it really did offer to the feed the world thing surely it would be being embraced by those farmers, governments, Oxfam, Christian Aid, World Development Movement, etc.
It is opposed by the farmers of those nations, by their governments and by NGOs working to alleviate starvation, all of whom clearly explain that the present push for GJM crops is nothing to do with help[ing the starving anfd the poor, it is about making the very rich even richer at the expense of the poor and the environment.
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