> Isn't GMO to create foods that require less pesticides? So wouldn't that be a good thing if there are less chemicals used on our foods, seeping into our soil and water supply?
As mentioned by wonderwonder, Roundup-ready soybeans are the poster child for GMO varieties being create to allow more chemical herbicides. And in this case glyphosate (RoundUp) is being seen more and more widely as a really nasty chemical to allow into the water supply and into nature. It has been linked to honey bee colony collapse, and the general insect collapse, not to mention lymphomas and lukemias.. (As an old Iowa farm boy, I am shocked at the number of relatives and their neighbors that are getting strange lymphomas and lukemias.)
> I never really understood why people are so scared of GMO....
But I do agree that eating a GMO grain is not scary by itself. It is the side effects of the different style of agriculture it allows that concerns me. (see glyphosate, above, and more below).
> I think there should be a GMO open source initiative...
Just Monsanto's poor luck that you can not create an unstable soy bean hybrid. They all breed true. The is the great advantage of selling seed corn, if you just avoid doing the last, stabilizing, cross, you can sell seed corn that will create a healthy plant who's seeds will not produce productive plants. Mother Nature gives you free IP protection. (Monsanto is a nasty company in so many ways.... I don't even want to get into it.)
Another chemical-related factor with GMO varieties is the unintended consequences of evolutionary selective pressure. A common GMO application in maize is to modify the plant to produce a toxin that is poisonous to the root-worm moth and/or the corn-borer moth. So, in this case, less pesticide chemicals. Which is great, but used indescrimanently, in a few generations we will have largely resistant moth populations. The state of Iowa has been very forward-thinking on this front, and requires that some percentage of every field planted to the GMO variety (like 15% or so, I forget the exact number) must be planted to "refuge rows". That is, if you plant a GMO moth-resisant variety, a percentage of the same field must be planted to traditional varieties to create a refuge for the moths so that the population does not develop resistance. Now, since maize does best in large blocks, the fence rows never yield as well anyway. And you always have turn-round rows where machines trample some unlucky plants as well. So plant the already poor-yielding rows to the refuge variety, and the GMO variety more than makes up for the loss. So it still pencils out advantageously.
What concerns me about this scenario is more environmentally naive and myopic regions might allow 100% GMO-toxin varieties, for the moth or other similar scenarios where evolutionary selective pressure can be a fast-acting force. Rolling out a GMO variety of anything requires examining the second- and third-order consequences.
So while I have little fear of eating GMO Doritos, I don't want GMO Doritos to bring on The Invasion of the Super Locusts in 3D with Dolby sound.