NOT for human food??? You're joking right???
With the exception of ethanol, everything else you mentioned, we humans eat. With bio-accumulation, the pesticides and
GMO proteins which the cows, pigs and chickens ingest from Round Up ready GMO corn get served up on every grocery store shelve across America.
And
HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) is in more human food than you can shake a stick at. Just start reading the labels on the food in you kitchen and you'll quickly see what I mean. One researcher I know of compared it to Cocaine. He said that during a recent trip to Peru, he had Coca leaf tea and chewed the leaves of the plant as people have done for centuries with no ill effects. It is the way nature intended it to be consumed. But after it is refined and intensified to the point at which you have cocaine, it is extremely damaging to the human body. The same, he said, can be said for corn and HFCS.
My wife and I don't eat any of it if we can help it, but it's not easy to do as it is everywhere now. My gut & stomach will tell me in about a half an hour to an hour when I've eaten any GMO food.
I understand full well what the ULTIMATE use is... that's not what I said. I said that MOST "field corn" is NOT used DIRECTLY for human food, and it isn't. It's used for livestock feed and ethanol and HFCS feedstock. Of course most of the byproducts of those processes are used as livestock feed to (at least in ethanol production, not sure about HFCS production) as "dry distillers grains" or "wet distillers grains". Some yellow dent does end up ground as cornmeal, corn starch, and for things like corn chips, tortillas, polenta, etc. What isn't yellow dent corn is mostly white corn, which is produced much the same way by the same companies.
Basically EVERY major crop has some GMO variants nowdays, and thus the products made from them. Soybeans and soybean meal or protein or lecithin from GMO soybeans is used in practically everything, much like HFCS. So is wheat and a lot of other grains, most vegetables, etc. Last year I was hauling "Plenish" soybeans my BIL was growing-- had to deliver them directly to his son-in-laws family elevator, which was the designated "delivery point" for them, since they have to be delivered to an approved 'delivery point' rather than just any old elevator, since they have to be kept out of the regular soybean supply chain. Plenish soybeans are genetically engineered to produce a high oleic soybean oil that does not need hydrogenation, unlike regular soybean oils and most other seed oils. Increasingly most of the oil your food is fried in is from GMO's... including cottonseed oil, which has been GMO for decades now...
As was mentioned in another post, genetic contamination from GMO's to surrounding crops, including "organic" crops, is a HUGE problem and there is very little that can be done about it, other than strategies such as delayed planting or buffer zones and such. Heck the environmentalists have found GMO genes even in southern Mexico, in the "cradle of corn" where the natural predecessors to our modern field corn, teosinte grass and the ancient native flint corns selectively bred by Native Americans for centuries, still exist (and which is a genetic resource pool of inestimable value for things like pest resistance and new NATURAL traits not found in the highly inbred seed lines commonly produced in the US... most people don't remember the huge outbreak of corn blight in the 60's or 70's, caused by genetic susceptibility in the genetics caused by overreliance on highly inbred lines caused by years of hybridization and back-crossing to the same parent lines-- it was only solved by finding naturally resistant varieties and cross-breeding them into these inbred parent lines, passing on the resistance genes). With GMO contaminating even the very "root stock" of natural corn parent lines, this genetic resource is being damaged in unimaginable ways... what natural genetic variations leading to disease resistance or other traits is being lost forever due to genetic contamination from GMO's?? Nobody knows because most of it hasn't been identified yet.
The GMO companies are in a world-wide "gold rush" to patent EVERYTHING that they can lay their hands on... they're snapping up native crops worldwide, especially in poorer and third world countries, and "patenting" them as their own private genetic resources, into which they breed their "improved" GMO traits and then sell as a "licensed product".
Personally, I grew GMO cotton one year... Bt cotton which is modified with a gene from the bacteria Bacillus thuriengensis, which produces a crystalline protein that, when ingested by caterpillars (lepidopterous pests) feeding on the plants, fruit, and fruiting structures of the cotton crop, ends up plugging and perforating their digestive systems, causing them to stop feeding and die in a matter of days (most corn nowdays is "Bt" as well, and much of it is "stacked traits" such as Roundup Ready, genetically engineered to resist the action of glyphosate herbicide, or "Liberty Link" corn, designed to resist the action of Liberty herbicide, as well as Bt... there's stacks of multiple GMO traits such as Roundup Ready (RR) and Liberty Link (LL) as well as various Bt traits, which now come in various "iterations" (Bt1, Bt2, etc). Cotton is Roundup Ready (at least two iterations last time I checked) as well as LL and some others, and new ones are coming out. The same is true for most crops. Personally, I didn't see much yield increase (worth the added expense) and I didn't like the "grower agreements" that you must sign to "gain access" to their technology... essentially a farmer signs all their rights away and gives the GMO companies "carte blanche" to do pretty much anything they want to on your land. Heck, they can do pretty much anything they want to anyway, as the Percy Schmeiser case proved... I didn't like essentially being reduced to serfdom on my own land, so I went back to regular cotton production and quit GMO's. Of course nowdays that's a difficult proposition, since the GMO companies have bought out virtually ALL the seed production in the United States during a frenzy of consolidation in the seed business during the late 90's and early 2000's, when most of the regional seed producers were bought out by the big boys and their lines merged with the "parent companies", leaving only a few big players, all of which are owned by either Monsanto or Dow Agriscience, the biggest GMO players. The only "conventional" lines left are largely inferior varieties, and they increased the prices on conventional seed to "incentivize" buying GMO seed.
It's a mess, but it's a mess our "beloved leaders" and our "trusted regulators" supposedly charged with looking out for our own best interests have not only allowed to happen, but openly embraced and made a fortune off of in the process...
later! OL JR