Except that we’re talking about commercial farming here, millions of hectares of mono-culture, even at the extreme outlier of 60m (I’ve checked and the effective range is quoted as between 5m and 20m). One of the main principles is that you don’t get many plants around the mono-culture, let alone any could cross pollinate with the crop you’re growing. Any areas where wild crop plants grow is already taken up by farming, any areas that aren’t used for farm land are going to be unsuitable for anything close to the crop plant so cross fertilization does not occur. You’re not going to wipe out your next door neighbours crop because farms aren’t that close and their crops are too dense to allow fertilization to occur at any meaningful rate. Not only do you require that the 60m area contain plants that are capable of being “fertilized” by the crop plant but you also require that enough of the 400-600 kernals per plant are fertilized by the “infertile” pollen that produces the inactive seeds. Even then you’re looking at reduced seed count and given most crop plants are selfing, that impact is going to be tiny based on density alone.

You won’t find any argument from me here and it’s sickening. You shouldn’t be allowed to aggressively protect food like that.





You don’t get GMO farming and non-GMO (although naturally occurring is totally misleading, it’s like calling a Dalmatian naturally occurring) crops in the same areas because anywhere with decent legislation doesn’t allow it (something the US needs to work on, their laws on the use of miticides in varroa mite control are a continual annoyance to me). There isn’t any area of non-GMO crops for the GMO’s to “crowd out”, it’s all going to be taken up with the GMO in the first place because farmers like to maximise their yield with monoculture. On the issue of patenting, again, you won’t find any objection from me but it’s the same with medicine, it’s a cultural issue, not an agricultural one.
If you are in areas with heavy moth pest action (and with mono-culture you always are), then yes BT Maize will survive longer than the non-GMO maize, this is the whole point of the BT toxin, it kills the pests. It will eventually (and this would be an incredibly slow process) take over the plot where the non-GMO was, but only because the pest had wiped out the non-GMO. What wouldn’t happen was you leave it for 10 years and find your garden and everyone elses totally dominated by BT-maize, you still need to do all that farming stuff.
Oh and as I said earlier (might have been to someone else), the BT monarch butterfly paper was nonsense and debunked by several scientific organisations rather quickly (I know one of the people who did the debunking).




Going to address your last paragraph in a few sections:
Firstly the Soy issue with reduced fertility. I’m not sure whether the hamster paper was ever published (which is usually a bad sign) but this was done in rats a year or so ago and the reduced fertility (which occurred in both non-GM, GM but not the control) was due to weight loss as soy is a pretty rubbish diet to feed rodents. I can’t find the hamster paper on google scholar (I’m not in work so I don’t have access to anything else) but if you know where it is then feel free to link it.
The herbicide article is interesting but only in that it is pure conjecture, it makes lots of assumptions based on individual studies (and often speculation based on unpublished data). I don’t have access to any of the papers he listed (and several are unpublished) as they only show up as references to a 1993 paper not listed online. The speculation about the pat and bar genes is about as unscientific as you’ll find, not only is it unsound and draws conclusions from papers that only vaguely allude to what they’re talking about (the bee gut yeast enzyme paper I’ve read before and citing it to back up what he said wouldn’t get past the first reading of paper submission at a decent journal). You can’t take any of their claims seriously when you consider uptake rates and the actual mechanics of metabolism. It’s a great area to sell conspiracy theories but any valid concerns are published in decent journals (and very are, regularly), once you model the nonsense you see it’s just that, nonsense.
Your paper on the herbicide is a problem with over-spraying of herbicides, something GMO’s would hopefully help to alleviate (although with bad farming that can be the opposite). It isn’t an issue with GMO’s. I’m not sure what you mean by the “could be masked by GMO’s resistance” though; you’ll have to elaborate further.
The I-SIS thing, I’m not even going there. I’m not going to try and defend anything written by them (or indeed anything from now on that isn’t from a peer-reviewed journal) because if they could provide decent sources they would.

For the scientific paper you have listed, as the abstract so nicely puts it; the actual findings weren’t “everythings going to turn herbicide-resistant and toxic” more this;
We find that in many cases, careful attention needs to be paid to the spatial arrangement of GM crops in relation to non-GM crops in order to ensure that GM contamination is not ubiquitous. The relative ease of system-wide cross-pollination of farmland by GM crops indicates that significant external costs could be imposed on a typical farmer because of the inability to certify produce for sale in potentially lucrative GM-free markets. The analysis suggests that the potential for market failure in this industry may justify a need for government action, and that innovative and flexible regulatory structures will be needed to handle the wide range of co-mingling risks posed by differing crops.
i.e, if you’re planning to try and grow non-GM and GM crops together, then be careful how you space them because they can transfer and it will ruin your profit margin if you can’t meet industry standards for GM-free markets. The “market failure” is that you won’t be able to declare your products 100% GM-free, not that everything is toxic and unkillable without buckets of herbicide. This is a sentiment I whole heartedly agree with, if you’re trying to grow GM and non-GM in the same area be careful or you’ll have to sell it all as the cheap GM stuff because you’ll get minor contamination for that batch of crop and next year you’ll have to do it right.