Over the past three years there has been an explosion in the production and distribution of genetically engineered food. The industry has claimed that what it is doing is similar to what nature does with cross-breeding. But natural cross-breeding only occurs between like species, whereas the biotech industry intentionally crosses boundaries put in place by nature. The DNA of an insect is implanted in a potato and that of a flounder in a tomato. And where natural evolution of plants, insects and animals can take millions of years, the biotech industry's products appear almost instantaneously by comparison.
Nature works in a holistic and unhurried way on the basis of complete knowledge.
The biotech industry acts in a partial and precipitate way, divorced from the context of nature's full functioning and without nature's prodigious capability to provide checks and balances that assure safety and viability. Notwithstanding its claims to expertise, the biotech industry operates with very limited knowledge and with technologies that are imprecise. Extraction of a gene from DNA material can be carried out with reasonable precision, but its insertion into the DNA of another species is a sloppy and clumsy procedure. The headlong rush of the biotech industry to produce genetically engineered products is driven by a perception that there are big profits to be made in this area. It is seen as a new frontier of science, where those who are first in the field of commercial development can entrench their positions through patent protection and licensing agreements with growers who are contracted to produce the new products.