The problem isn't GMO plants in Europe, it's the IP system surrounding them that's the problem. The massive upwelling of opposition to GMO's on the part of national governments isn't opposition to GMO, but instead it's opposition to Monsanto and the legal risks surrounding Monsanto's plants.
Monsanto is predatory to the point of absurdity, and that is where opposition to GMO comes from. They throw lawyers at you until you comply with their demands, and then you pay a tithe to them. It's a modern form of feudalism that centers around abusing the legislative and justice systems.
What system of IP protections would be suitable to allow private industry to subsidize the expense of developing genetically-modified foods that are able to be planted over and over again after the first purchase? I suspect it will at least resemble patent protection, which at least does eventually end.
It's a very old problem, with parallels with Unix (as I understand it you could duplicate the install media after purchase for free; it wasn't until later AT&T would realize the value of what they were sitting on and try to control distribution of SysV to extract capital from it).
While open-source programmers like myself don't mind volunteering time and code, there is not a comparable contingent of "open-source geneticists" that I'm aware of. That means someone has to pay the piper if they want the GM seeds. If you concentrate the cost in the first batch of seeds you make them prohibitively expensive, which would lead to a gray market of fellow farmers selling their excess seeds at much cheaper cost.
So I don't see buying seeds yearly as a tithe, as much as a requirement of the overall business model given the reality of the large capital investment required. Am I missing a superior alternative?
If genetics and biotech knowledge is a public good, then one alternative to IP would be to let the public i.e. governments fund the development of this knowledge.
I agree that buying seeds yearly seems pretty practical to me too, but alternatives are imaginable.
I do agree that both would and should be public goods, but on the other hand I am all too familiar with the inefficiency of government in actually overseeing projects like this, and that's not counting the very large pool of people who oppose government involvement in this kind of thing anyways.
But I wonder why that wouldn't work in Europe... it seems Germany, France, even Hungary and other EU nations could combine to beat Monsanto at their own game... of course, U.S. farmers would then just use those seeds if they ended up being really good and so the EU would have subsidized the U.S.'s development on that. As long as that's acceptable to the EU that could certainly work though.
Actually, the problem IS with GMO plants in Europe.
> ...among those [Europeans] who know what GMOs are, 59 percent of surveyed citizens believe they are unhealthy, with only 22 percent believing they are not.
> In its history, the European Union has only approved two genetically modified organisms for cultivation: Monsanto’s MON810 maize, in 1998 (which was renewed in 2009), and BASF’s Amflora potatoes, in 2010.
> > ...among those [Europeans] who know what GMOs are, 59 percent of surveyed citizens believe they are unhealthy, with only 22 percent believing they are not.
It would be nice to correlate this with the percentage of people who are considering dihydrogen monoxide to be unhealthy.
1. GMO is famous for making crop that produce herbicide or other sort of toxin, terminator seeds, or stuff that resist to things that you would not like to be sprayed on your food. Bad PR. "Technically cool" food is not a selling point in Europe.
2. Recently the industry has proven that they will fraud on actual existing regulation with the meat crisis in Europe and nobody has forgotten the other various food crisis from the 2 last decades. There is a massive distrust of the food industry, and the GMO has as much potential for good than for bad.
A lot of people see opposition to GMOs as irrational, but I don't think it is. It's perfectly rational, especially if you don't really understand genetics (which most people don't... it's an esoteric subject).
The reason it's rational is this: were GMOs to be found to be unhealthy, it would be a continuation of a well-established pattern. Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy.
- Trans-fats (hydrogenated oils) are basically artery plaque in the form of fake butter or shortening.
- Nearly all additives such as MSG and artificial sweeteners are either unhealthy or suspect.
- Bleaching and other treatments to improve shelf life denude food of its nutrients. Re-enrichment only replaces macronutrients, leaving micronutrients and minerals unaccounted for.
- Preservatives enhance shelf life and reduce the likelihood of food-borne illness, but many are themselves suspect and many have been taken off the market.
- Nitrites are possible carcinogen.
- Google: brominated oil, arsenic poultry.
... and so on. The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients, namely iodine and vitamins C and D. But we're talking two successes out of dozens of failed experiments.
In every case, the "experts" told people it was safe or even good for you before the experts proceeded to change their minds. Margarine in particular is illustrative. It was recommended as a health food.
As a result, people have become rightly ultra-conservative about food, viewing any modification to food as guilty until proven innocent. "GMO is safe" means "we haven't figured out how GMO kills you, yet."
- Preservatives -- it's hard to know what you're referring to without you being more specific. Something being "suspect" is basically a comment about human paranoia, not actual health effects.
- Nitrites -- again, weak evidence that they may be carcinogens in some circumstances. Nothing epidemiological as far as I can tell. The alternative (botulism or other contamination) is far worse.
Herein lies the problem. Science is a method, not a dogma or a series of religious pronouncements. Trans-fat and even cigarettes were once considered healthy according to the science of the day.
As far as suspicion of new food items goes, there's a scientific argument to be made there too. Human beings are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution that has optimized us to metabolize certain nutrients in certain ratios. In a healthy individual, this diet is likely to be optimal since evolution has been optimizing for it in a feedback loop for thousands of generations. Any deviation from this diet is likely to be neutral to suboptimal, and anything not present in this diet likewise.
Don't get me wrong... far worse than anything I mentioned in my original post above is the way we eat: tons of simple carbs and sugars. Drinking soda and eating empty calories is likely a lot worse for you than GMOs would ever be likely to be.
I do know a bit about genetics too, and I personally think that GMOs are probably safe in most cases. The only legitimate health issue I'm aware of is the possibility of allergies. I was talking more about the social context of opposition to them, and pointing out that it's based on reasonable extrapolations of a trend.
So far nobody's responded to my core point, which is about human social behavior and inductive inference in the absence of deep subject matter understanding.
People have also cherry picked this or that. I'll concede MSG. That's not the point. So far nobody's cherry picked margarine because there is now very strong evidence for the unhealthiness of trans fats.
What inductive inference are people supposed to draw from this pattern? Or are they just supposed to mindlessly trust in people with credentials next to their names?
It's a problem that goes way beyond medical science, too. Every time the president of the United States stands up and lies the country into war, every time a well-respected economist claims housing prices will always go up or a market pundit calls out that "this bubble is different," every time it is said that "no modern reactor can have an accident like Chernobyl" (this was the refrain prior to Fukushima), people lose a bit of their respect for the social mechanisms our society uses to identify and credential expertise.
This is the cause for the increasing mistrust of expertise. The quacks and fanatics and pseudoscientists are simply exploiting it. They didn't cause it. The claimants of expertise in our culture destroy their own credibility quite well, and when that happens people inductively extend that loss of credibility to entire categories of expertise and even to the concept of expertise itself.
It's difficult to respond to your core point when you just list off a bunch of kookiness and try to use that as a basis for saying that nearly every recent change in food has been bad.
You first need to demonstrate that food changes have been overall bad before we can even accept your core point, let alone respond to it.
You aren't even comprehending it. Even if every single claim I listed is completely wrong, the social phenomenon I am describing exists and must be understood if culture is to become more rational.
I've tried to point out the perception-of-expertise problem before in threads like this, and skeptics always get angry and defensive and dismissive.
MSG is fine. GMOs are fine. There is no housing bubble. That's what the experts say.
How many people do you know whose financial well-being was destroyed by the housing bubble?
Bernanke graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, among other accolades. You don't get more credentialed expertise than that. What conclusion are people supposed to draw here?
I'm simply pointing out the obvious one, and the one that many people do in fact draw: expertise is bullshit. I don't personally believe that -- I think the reality is far more nuanced -- but I can see how someone could draw that conclusion and I am not convinced that doing so makes them an idiot.
Absolutely. Cigarettes were good for health too. Pretty much anything that makes an industry is good for you, until it's not. I highly doubt that GMO is different.
GMO might be different, but people are going to err on the side of caution.
All the hype about how GMO will end hunger and nutritional deficiencies and such is part of the problem. I'd say at this point breathless hype is seen as a contrarian indicator.
Hey, just jumping in, I have a BS in Biology and api's post here is full of non-scientific and pseudoscientific garbage.
I believe he suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect and his completely unsourced post should create a huge red flag in any readers mind.
I'm not going to go point by point as the average HNer should be able to research for themselves, but I will respond to this gem that generated the largest facepalm:
> Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy ... The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients,
This is such a shockingly misguided statement that it hurts to read it. This is why I believe he suffers from illusory superiority, because I think his utter inexperience with agrology is leading him to think that he actually understands this field and can speak with expertise on it.
For a counter-point that "all innovation has been bad", one should only have to look at Norman Borlaug, known colloquially as "the man who saved a billion lives" and "the father of the green revolution". Norman Borlaug was Nobel laureate and agrologist whose research changed agriculture around the world and is credited with preventing billions from starvation.
The innovations of the past century directly allowed nations to increase wheat and rice yields by 2-10X, saving more than one nation from mass famine. I certainly would not label that "unbeneficial" or "unhealthy".
And this is just the elephant in the room in terms of examples, believe me when I say you could write books on the subject of the benefits of agricultural development of the past century. Entire schools are devoted to this study.
I should also have been more precise. By food "innovations" I meant synthetic alterations in the composition of food itself such as the introduction of chemically altered oils, flavoring additives, preservatives, and similar. Borlaug changed the way food is grown, not its composition.
I personally am not particularly afraid of GMO foods. I was pointing out the sociological and political reasons for opposition to them. Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food.
Every time you say something is good then reverse yourself, you lose credibility. At some point people actually start taking your pronouncements as a contrarian indicator. "Oh, the experts say GMO foods are great... they must be on Monsanto's payroll and they're probably worse for you than cigarettes."
>Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food.
Bad cherry picking used only to promote your own point. What about the enormous amount of good advice that has changed our lifestyles over the past century? Do you even know how people lived 100 years ago, how they ate?
What you should say is "some health experts have a habit of not always promoting scientifically sound advice, and many times promoting ideas that fly contrary to evidence. Fortunately as more evidence is gathered, those 'experts' are discredited and a better understanding of nutrition is the result".
When you don't cherry pick, you can find sources like:
Can you take issue with these health experts providing advice? Anything they recommend that you think is grossly wrong? Because this is scientifically validated nutrition advice from health experts, the very thing you're trying to discredit by screaming "trans fats and cigarettes" as if those complex cases invalidate an entire scientific field of study.
Honestly, you're trying to smear the name of "experts" in general, without separating "health experts" (medical doctors, nutritionists, idiot laypeople who label themselves naturopaths, etc) from scientists. I feel like you're trying to find a way to ignore the entire science of nutrition because you got burned listening to a fad or because big tobacco ran roughshod over science six decades ago.
"Honestly, you're trying to smear the name of "experts" in general, without separating "health experts" (medical doctors, nutritionists, idiot laypeople who label themselves naturopaths, etc) from scientists. I feel like you're trying to find a way to ignore the entire science of nutrition because you got burned listening to a fad or because big tobacco ran roughshod over science six decades ago."
Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm doing. High-profile failures affect the perception of expertise, even across disciplines. The Harvard that credentialed the economists who said there was no housing bubble is the same Harvard that credentials the scientists who say GMO food is safe. The medical science that big tobacco ran roughshod over six decades ago hasn't changed substantially either-- the institutions and how those institutions are financed and run is largely the same.
People are simply not going to nod their heads to experts anymore. It's over, not just because of high-profile failures but because of the Internet. On the net anyone can appear as an expert. Anyone can look like they know what they're talking about.
How is science going to adapt to that? What I'd like to see is a solution to both problems: a more transparent, open, and engaging scientific process that both reduces the likelihood of major errors and frauds and more deeply engages the public.
Yeah, to each their own. You still sound extremely anti-science to me, so it's very clear we're going to have diametrically opposed opinions. Thanks for sharing!
I'm not anti-science. I'm not even anti-GMO, though I doubt they're some kind of panacea either.
You know... I have an apology I'd like to make. I'd like to apologize to all those marketing and sales people I slandered over my years as an engineer.
They were so irrational, said such ridiculous and inane things, made absurd and hyperbolic claims and chastised me for pointing out how unreasonable they were, insisted on framing things through awkward metaphors that bore little resemblance to underlying realities...
What they were trying to do was bang me over the head and get me to understand how actual human beings make decisions. They were trying to get me to pull my head out of technical realities (cough my ass cough) for a second and look instead at how things are perceived by people who are not experts.
Cause that's what I'm doing here. I am intentionally being hyperbolic and playing devils' advocate just a little because I want people to grasp why science and industry are mistrusted by so many in the general public. Most importantly, I want people to grasp that the people reaching these conclusions are not idiots. They're relying on methods of inductive reasoning that function on average very well in limited-knowledge scenarios. Evolution invented these methods of reasoning to keep us alive in situations where we have incomplete knowledge and are required to make important decisions.
I might draw different conclusions, but that's because I have a BS in biology and have created transgenic organisms in the lab before. That puts me in a tiny minority, probably less than a tiny fraction of 1% of the population.
I can either look at the rest 99.99% of humanity and the fact that the majority of them are suspicious of GMO food and say -- as most scientifically-minded skeptics do -- "man, those people are idiots." Now I've insulted them, which makes them even less likely to listen to me. Or I can say "hmm... why would so many otherwise intelligent people be afraid of something that is not likely to really be harmful to them?"
For me I just want choice (at the super-market). Choice to not choose GMO, until there is more than enough evidence and discussion around the topic. Maybe you feel there is enough evidence, but I want more. I do not want said firm to 'force' me into eating their product just yet. This is my due diligence on the one life I live.
Why not go full scale and demand choice of not using the fruits of scary science at all? Demand every store to carry the products made of wild plants and hunted down wild animals only, with no products of selection (aka "genetically modified") at all? Why would mega-corporations force you to eat modern wheat, whose yields and chemical composition was completely modified by the corporate puppetmasters and whose production requires to use herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizers and a variety of modern chemicals and technologies that very well might be accepted? Why not do the due diligence and eat the healthy diet that allowed our cavemen ancestors to live long and healthy lives? And if you can not feed 7 billion people with caveman technologies - too bad for them, you only have one life and you can't spend it worrying about such things.
The subject is conservatism. A conservative is not someone who rejects all of a thing, but someone who is skeptical and suspicious of new things.
As a result of many past issues with novel food products, people have become increasingly conservative about food. That doesn't mean that they reject all industrial or scientific agriculture, but they're likely to be suspicious of things that haven't been around for more than one or two generations. They're quick to reject novel changes in the food supply and very slow to accept them.
Along with having been burned in the past, I can think of another reason why this might be rational. The cost function is weighted heavily on the conservative side. It feels like something that could be modeled well with game theory.
The cost of food conservatism is likely a small increase in the amount of money paid for food. This is a very small cost for most first-worlders, where food is so available that obesity is a health crisis. The benefit is that the risks, if any, are well-known and are known to be tiny.
The cost of food liberalism, by contrast, is an unknown chance of getting cancer, heart disease, diabetes, allergic reactions and inflammatory disorders, etc. The unknown chance is probably very small, but many of those health effects have astronomically high costs that possibly include death or permanent disability. But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food.
The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies on unlikely events such as floods or tornadoes. Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance -- otherwise how would it be that the insurance company could make money? But you'd rather trade the risk of losing everything you own and having no recourse for a small amount of money that you're not going to miss.
>>> The unknown chance is probably very small, but many of those health effects have astronomically high costs that possibly include death or permanent disability.
This is a very basic math error. If you multiply two unknown quantities, you can not assume anything about the result, even if one of them is very big. So basically what you're saying is "we have no idea if it's dangerous or not, and there's absolutely no evidence on any danger present, but if it were, you could DIE!!! so PANIC!!!" This would be an extremely irrational and stupid behavior.
>>> But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food.
The problem is that it is very fragile. If the anti-science idiots ever prevail, the whole food abundance we have now could very well collapse pretty quickly - without science, malthusian scenarios are very real, and the people who predicted massive hunger by 2000s could very well be right if science did not intervene. If the idiots ever succeed in their war on science, first world would be in no way insulated from the disastrous effects of their victory. The whole abundance is the direct effect of what you call "food liberalism" and it is the only thing maintaining it.
>>> The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies
Not at all. Insurance companies have very accurate actuarial and statistical data, which they use in very accurate and specific ways to issue insurance. They never base their decisions on "multiply two unknown numbers, make assumptions on the result, panic". Your decision on buying the insurance may very well be irrational, but the insurance market itself is very rational.
>>> Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance
It is not true, since you can not be better "statistically" - the fact that it didn't happen to 100000 people would not improve your situation if it happens to you. The whole function of insurance is to make statistics work for you, without it statistics would be just a useless trivia - just as the fact that if Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average income of the bar visitors jumps - is useless for anybody in the bar, because they get no money from it. Insurance is the way to get you some money from statistics.
Do you have an idea where the seeds the farmer used came from? There the water came from? What is the chemical composition of the soil and which exactly chemicals in which quantities were put in it? Probably not. And it is never required to publish it. However, you require to publish data about using specific technology. Thus you single out this technology and stigmatize it, implying product using this technology is abnormal and substandard, and must be avoided. If the full knowledge was indeed important to you, you would solicit all the information above, but you do not. You want only information about specific technologies used, arbitrarily defined, for irrational reasons. It is fine, but the additional expense and regulatory hurdles you would impose on the producers because of this irrationality is not.
To be honest this whole "debate" reminds me more of the popular antivax movement than anything else.
I suppose I can understand Europe's arch-conservatism regarding food products after the thalidomide disaster, but I would certainly prefer to see actual evidence of harm from genetically-modified food, or even a plausible explanation of why a given GM food could cause injury and not just FUD FUD FUD.
You're correct that a lot of the anti-GMO side are spouting alarmist nonsense.
But that doesn't matter. The reason we're careful about GMO technology is that there is a reasonable mechanism whereby harm may be the result.
We thus require careful testing and good quality science before allowing these technologies.
Unfortunately, politicians are often in the chain of "people granting permission", and many of them are stupid and ignorant and not interested in science.
You ask for a plausible mechanism for harm, but you also mention thalidomide. Thalidomide is a great example of unknown unknowns - we didn't know that chirality was important, and it was only after many birth defects that we found out.
So maybe there's something we don't know with GMOs, and we don't know that we don't know it so we can't reassure ourselves about it. We can do as much as we can to rule out those unknowns, and to reassure ourselves about the knowns.
1) The IP system and the companies who exploit it to essentially disrupt agriculture (licences to grow seeds, cannot replant, must buy seeds annually, aggressive lobbying, regulatory capture). This is upsetting to the agricultural status quo (political and economical) in Europe (their farm subsidies would essentially be funnelled to foreign corporations). There is also the use of courts to abuse the IP system, where farmers who unknowingly grow patented seeds (pollen drift or seed stock contamination) get sued, instead of the other way around (farmers should be able to sue--and win against--GMO companies for contaminating their farm with unwanted plants).
2) The issue of eating the produce of GMO plants. On the health side, many (industry-funded) studies show no effect (surprise, surprise), watchdog groups say the industry covers up any bad results, while some independent long-term studies are starting to uncover problems (though results and methods are controversial). Then there is labeling and the fundamental right of people to know what they buy and ingest.
3) Huge but not mentioned yet: the environmental impact of the large (and growing) herbicide applications required by GMO crops (the glycophosphate-resistant varieties, but ther are other herbicides and pesticides involved). Again, this is a multifaceted impact: water runoff and groundwater contamination, impact on the polinators and other sub-ecosystems, evolution of resistent "super-weeds," escalation to other herbicides such as derivatives of Agent Orange. The fact that Monsanto sells the herbicides as well further muddies the problem (it is biased towards not seeing any environmental impacts). The problem is that environmental impacts take years to build up, become significant, and be pinpointed through studies--and by then it's too late.
I really think there'd be less opposition to GMOs were it not for the fact that this one company -- a firm with a history of somewhat scummy and antagonistic behavior -- didn't control the entire industry.
That antagonistic behavior being what? I ask because there's a commonly-held belief about Monsanto that they, in effect, wait for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields and then sue the farmers who manage those fields for royalties.
The reality is that Monsanto sues farmers when they take Roundup-Ready crops, plant them, and then use Roundup on those crops. You can't do that innocently; if you spray Roundup on non-Monsanto crops, you kill the crop.
If there's a case where Monsanto sued a farmer simply for having Roundup-Ready seeds or plants on their farms, I haven't seen it, and I've (a) looked and (b) asked around a lot.
If you just mean that patent enforcement is inherently scummy and antagonistic, well, I have no snappy response for that. Although again note that the problem with software patents is that you can implement some obvious piece of functionality and get sued by someone with a ridiculous patent. Like I said, nobody accidentally uses the whole Roundup system on a farm.
I thought there was pretty much a whole movie (Food Inc) documenting that very thing (i.e. cross contamination). Please don't try and say that the hatred going towards Monsanto isn't deserved because it most assuredly is.
There are a lot of things I like about Food Inc. I can geek out a bit on seasonal and local food. I have a local butcher I work with for most of the protein we cook and he sources his product from a small set of farms within driving distance of here. I have ethical problems with battery farming, both because of animal cruelty issues but more importantly for pragmatic reasons like environmental externalities and antibiotic abuse. I cook, a lot. I'm very sympathetic to Food Inc's viewpoint.
But the Monsanto stuff is a highly technical issue, and neither Michael Pollan nor Eric Schlosser appear to have much expertise in them. There is a lot of GMO FUD. I would not assume that none of it leaked into the movie.
Now now, Food Inc is most definitely not a reliable source of information on much of anything. The whole thing was pure biased crap, the authors having a pre-decided conclusion and just using all sorts of unscientific scare tactics to persuade their audience to their way of thinking.
Link to it. There are lots of movies saying lots of things. I'll make you a documentary implying how ASU eats babies if you want me to. That doesn't make it correct.
(ASU because it's across the street from my house)
>If you just mean that patent enforcement is inherently scummy and antagonistic, well, I have no snappy response for that.
Well then finally we can all agree that Monsanto is detrimental to the development of GMOs. No one is claiming that Monsanto is "waiting for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields", so that might explain why you can't find any evidence of it.
What people do have a problem with, is a patent troll and a litigious one at that. That's what Monsanto is and there are plenty of cases to prove it:
What people are concerned about is basically "embrace, extend, extinguish" business practices applied to agriculture, with the result being a consolidation of ownership of the means of seed production into the hands of a small oligopoly of companies with interlocking patent agreements.
(Others have pointed out that no, Monsanto does not control the whole industry. But they are by far the dominant player.)
That sounds bad. Is it what's happening in practice? I'd like to learn more about this. I certainly don't want to be knee-jerk in the opposite direction (that Monsanto is totally O.K.).
However, sueing a farmer, because he grows plants shows how Monsanto sickens our society.
Overuse of Antibiotics, Pesticides, Herbicides and Fungicides are the stuff that create our allergies and poison bees too. Birds eat those poisoned bees, I really don't know how far this goes down the rabbit hole, but I'm worried.
While this is obvious hyperbole, I agree with your general sentiment. In fact, GMOs, perhaps more-so than any other modern technology, have an unprecedented potential to save billions of lives. Golden Rice alone could save the lives of one million children every year.
As a biochem major, GMOs are something I'm passionate about, and it really aggravates me when I see armchair scientists (read: people who watched a youtube video) decrying them as dangerous and calling for their banning. I would say these people are partially to blame for the regulatory nightmare that Golden Rice advocates are facing, meanwhile one million children go blind and die terrible deaths each year from vitamin A deficiency.
>unprecedented potential to save billions of lives
Potential, yes; but not with massive financial interests behind it. In a world where shiploads of wheat are held back in order to game the wheat market, things need to change before GMOs can cure 3rd world hunger.
I've read that GMOs have to be bought anew for every season because the harvested crops can't be used as seeds. Is that actually true?
Buying new seeds every season began with hybrid crops in the 1920s.
"Today, hybrid seed production is predominant in agriculture and home gardening, and is one of the main contributing factors to the dramatic rise in agricultural output during the last half of the 20th century. In the US, the commercial market was launched in the 1920s, with the first hybrid maize. All of the hybrid seeds planted by the farmer will be the same hybrid while the seeds from the hybrids planted will not consistently have the desired characteristics. This is why hybrid seed is constantly repurchased by growers for each planting season."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed
> Potential, yes; but not with massive financial interests behind it.
This is not necessarily true in every case. pvnick mentioned Golden Rice. The Co-inventor of the genetically engineered, vitamin-A-rich strain of rice Potrykus has spearheaded an effort to have golden rice distributed for free to poor farmers. This required several companies which had intellectual property rights to the results of Beyer's research to license it for free. In fact, Monsanto was one of the first companies to grant free licenses. If the substinence farmer doesn't make more than $10,000 per year, he is freed from paying any royalities. The farmers are even permitted to keep and replant the seeds.
This is in the specific case of Golden Rice. Maybe somebody can jump in and tell a horrific Monsanto story.
This article commits journalistic fraud - it attributes the fact that crops failed due to pests (which can happen to any crop, GM or not) solely to the fact that the crops were GM, and making a false impression that suicides were caused not by crop failures but by the fact that the crops were GM. They imply that "after" means "because", and that's the fraud.
Of course, even GM crops can not protect from all causes of crop failure. But blaming them on every cause of failure is wrong.
I seem to recall seeing claims that GM cotton was more susceptible to certain pests, especially if you didn't spray it with the pesticide produced by the manufacturer of the seeds.
The way I read the article, it's mainly pricing of the GM product that led indirectly to their despair. They could've handled the crop failure with the cheaper non-GM seeds.
It's analogous to US students getting into a pickle by accepting large student loans and then finding no jobs in their field. But if they don't take the risk they may lose to those who took the risk. They'd almost all be better off if the student loans weren't available.
Yes [1]. But for good reason. It is similar to pharmaceutical companies. They invest millions into inventing products. They should be entitled to a monopoly on the product for some period of time in order to re-coup their investment.
That shiploads are held back is actually a _great_ thing, maybe one of the best things capitalism does.
Yes it means you get to pay more (in some cases a lot more) for your bread. It also means that farmers make more money and enable them to sell their wheat _now_ when they need the money and not after they have been foreclosed and it puts a price floor on the market for wheat, insuring that the crops we need to prevent starvation will not rot on the fields.
I agree that it's good for the sellers (farmers). But how is artificial scarcity and rising prices good against hunger? The argument about rotting crops is a bit weak, AFAIK crops can be stored quite well if kept dry.
I think the danger here is that Monsanto is a private company and is doing shady stuff.
I'm from France and we have to take a course on that at one point in university.
IIRC Monsanto launched several products without testing them and was later forced to stop selling them since they were tested dangerous for health. Seeing that they weren't really testing their products and using biased studies sometimes, Europe just decided to make a lot of laws about testing before using GMOs.
IMO a technology as important as GMOs should never be in the hands of a private company motivated by money and share holders. It should be in the hands of an international association (like the UN).
I think most people who are anti-GMO really just want to know what they are eating. They just want to see a label on it if it has GMOs in it.
The fact is that we don't know what GMOs can do to you. They might be safe, they might not be. It has to be different in every single case, since in every single case, you're talking about different combinations of DNA. Can that possibly be dangerous in a particular case? It sure can. Both directly and indirectly.
Such a label does indicate danger to the uninformed masses, even if it's unfounded. I would say it falls under free speech. Let the market forces dictate the risks vs benefits.
Once completely organic chicken breast becomes as unattainably expensive as beluga cavier I think you'll find nobody gives a shit how the cheap stuff is produced.
GMO labeling is as stupid as California prop 65 labeling, only more harmful. Every commercial food we eat is "genetically modified", it's how we manage to survive and feed 7 billion people - since the dawn of civilization, men found organisms useful to them and "genetically modified" them to be more useful. Trying to scare people off some methods of doing this would only lead to less productive agriculture and raising food costs - which would do little for the golden billion but have them spend a little more on food and little less on iphone apps, but would be very harmful for those that still live on the edge.
Plant hybridization (or whatever the ancient method is called) is significantly different than modifying the genome of a plant to embed a pesticide. The former is much more in tune with natural evolution.
It's not in tune with the evolution at all - the evolution does not make plants useful to humans, it makes the plants survive. Evolution would not produce fruits, vegetables or berries we love to enjoy - they would be wasteful and useless in natural conditions. The plants we use are genetically modified, and btw many plants produce pesticides naturally - such as Chrysanthemum or Nicotiana plants. It's just easier and faster to genetically modify plants on genomic level than by selection, where it could take generations to produce needed genomic change.
You want the change to take a long time so that humans can evolve with it. Yes plant hybridization (e.g. to make fruit sweeter) is not as fast or easy which is why it's more in tune with evolution. Some things that genetic modification can do are impossible with the ancient methods.
Even if GM produced a plant that was truly superior and healthier in every way, there's no good way to trust it. There are too many instances of "oops, what we thought was good for you is actually bad for you" or "oops, we thought we could improve nature but we made it worse" to trust GMO, at least for the next fifty years or so. The plant that seems truly superior and healthier might end up killing enough insects or otherwise affecting them such to be worse all things considered.
Evolution takes much longer time than selection. And human evolution does not function like it did since humans have medicine and society, which means if you can't eat grains, for example, you don't die and take your genes out of gene pool - you just take some medicine and eat something else and live happily and procreate. So evolution has nothing to contribute with regard to organisms modified by human selection - it's both too fast and evolution doesn't have a chance to do its cruel business.
Im modern mind "evolution" has became synonymous to "natural" in the quality of "it has no nasty science in it so it has to be good". In fact, neither "natural" nor "evolution" has nothing good in it - nature is impersonal, immoral and unimaginably cruel, viewed from our point of view. And if the science can do something to correct it - it is great.
For example, sweeter apples we enjoy now appeared in the last couple of centuries, and the US varieties in the last century alone, before that apples were mainly used to make cider or applejack. A couple of hundreds of years is nothing for the evolution.
Yes from our point of view, where human death is always bad and future consequences are largely ignored. From a macro point of view nature achieves what is perhaps the best possible outcome. Man has a spotty track record of improving or correcting it. We made some improvements that still seem better over the last century, like vaccines. And we've made many big mistakes, like DDT. What you support is a matter of what seems trustworthy.
Search for: "Pests are adapting to genetically modified crops in unexpected ways, researchers have discovered. The findings underscore the importance of closely monitoring and countering pest resistance to biotech crops." That sounds like another "oops, we did it again" in the making to me.
Science is not perfect. It's the best we have. Yes, pests are adapting and we don't have silver bullet. The solution is, however, not to say "well, science didn't work out, let's try to go back to the caves" - the solution is to keep working.
>>> What you support is a matter of what seems trustworthy.
This is exactly the problem - the support becomes political and relies not on what is actually better but on whose lobbyists are better and whose PR campaign is more successful. This venerable tradition started a long time ago, with Edison's shenanigans[1] to give him edge over the competitors. The story of DDT is another example - while the scientific basis for the book that destroyed the DDT - Silent Spring - remain shaky[2] and the ban ended up costing millions of lives of malaria victims, it is still considered an example of how science is going to doom us all. Another example is the continuing PR battle between sugar lobby and corn lobby. Initially, corn lobby was winning - that's why HFCS is called "high fructose" - because once fructose was good and glucose was bad, so the marketing term emphasized the good part, even though some varieties of HFCS have less fructose than table sugar, and commonly used one has only very slightly more [3]. Due to this and as the effect of the insanely high sugar tariffs, US industry switched from sugar to HFCS. Now the tide has turned and HFCS is becoming the bane of our age. And now the corn lobby wants to go back to "corn sugar", but so far they weren't allowed to. Corn guys though did another number in "biofuels", so even if they lose the HFCS thing, they have other victories in their belt.
This is all to say "what seems trustworthy" is a very poor guide, since most information you'd see in popular press is probably worthless. And decisions made by politicians are probably based on random factors having nothing to do with actual merits of proposed solutions.
Monsanto rightfully believes that if GMO products are labeled, and there is one single instance of a GMO product killing a person (even from some kind of rare allergy), then the market will fall since GMOs will be able to be avoided by consumers.
GMOs can have a staggering amount of benefits to this world. But to say that they are safe across the board is extremely dishonest. We simply can't see all the long-term consequences of the new forms of life that we ingest. With enough knowledge, we can theoretically do whatever we want with DNA, including make cells in apples produce prions that eventually cause Alzheimer's. And we can do so accidentally.
What would have happened had GMO food been introduced with labels in the beginning that indicated that it was GMO, how it was modified, and the benefits?
I wouldn't be surprised if there'd be much less opposition to it. If you're opposed to labeling now, it looks like you're trying to cover something up or sneak something past the public.
I just realized... maybe the problem isn't that the Monsanto PR machine is deceiving everyone about GMO food. Maybe the problem is that Monsanto sucks at PR, bad. They certainly suck at modern PR. The kind of PR-firm tactics that they use to try to explain themselves to the public come off as smarmy and disingenuous to anyone under 40.
Rule #1 of modern PR: if you assume that your audience are idiots, they will realize this instantly and assume that you are a lying sack of you-know-what. I know I can smell a talking-down-to-me PR flack writeup a mile away, and stuff like that makes me feel like I'm eight years old and my gym teacher is telling me this is what people do when they love each other.
The problem is not with the product per se, but with the uneducated populace they force it unto. I never saw a Monsanto infomercial, but I'm pretty sure I eat their product every day. No wonder people are unwilling to give them their confidence.
That's why I think this story is great news for the general population. It will hopefully push Monsanto to change its lobbying practices. It should, in my opinion, take some years to really educate (not propagandize) the people instead of spending the millions on a couple of political lobbies. It would have a longer lasting effect. And if they're not willing to educate the people because their product really is a health hazard, so be it!
People don't need to become experts on any particular food innovation to have a very good chance of serving their best interests in opposing it. The people have been continuously misled about health risks.
If GMO saves a million children it will next need to save ten million children, and then a hundred million and so on, until it fails and then there will be greater suffering. Culture and religion are the root cause of the problem; it's better addressed from that angle.
I think genwin's point is that we humans behave very stupidly whenever we find an innovation that allows for exponentially more of anything. We behave as if that massive growth will continue forever, and it never does, and usually leads to a crash worse than the solution. So if a new invention allows us to feed all 7 billion of us comfortably, instead of just feeding 7 billion of us comfortably we'll instead create 10 billion, 20 billion, 100 billion of us, up to whatever point the innovation no longer feeds us all comfortably, and then it crashes, and then instead of a billion people dying off we now have 90 billion people dying off. Where I think genwin is wrong is in blaming culture or religion. Instead I think we're just stupid that way.
I do not see factual basis for this claim - how Green revolution led to a crash that is worse than the solution? How modern medicine led to a crash? So far all malthusian prophecies had been reliably wrong. You can claim that sometime in the future it may happen that they still will be true - I can not really disprove that. But you can not say "it never does" - because so far it actually always did.
See how long you can keep borrowing money. Pay off each credit card with a new credit card. You don't need to witness the crash to know that the future is bleak.
There is plenty of factual basis to the claim that we're borrowing against our future to feed the current population.
To "know" the future is bleak you have to be a prophet, since knowledge of the future is not available to mere humans, only assumptions about what might happen in the future. However, the fact that you claim something always happens and yet it never happened makes the claim a bit doubtful.
Yes, we can't know that something bad will happen when we jump off a cliff. If during the fall someone claims that something bad always happens at the bottom and yet it hasn't happened, the claim is doubtful.
We assume this always happens it because we observed many things falling off many cliffs. Though if you had a parachute concealed on you, our assumption about what would happen if you jump off a cliff would be proven wrong.
We never observed the thing that were predicted above, despite the claim that it always happens. We didn't even observe the "fall" you claim to be happening right now. No evidence for it exists except for repeated claims of impending doom, usually accompanied by sermons to repent and sacrifice to whatever favorite pseudo-deity the would be prophet happens to believe in. I have nothing against faith, but this particular faith wouldn't be my choice.
Actually there is plenty of evidence of societies suffering greatly when they exceeded their resources, including modern ones like during the Rwandan genocide. We can also observe the current global fall, in terms of fast declining ocean fish stocks, fast depleting aquifers, and tons of other measurements. The book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is a layman's introduction, with references to extensive scientific evidence in its appendix. The relevance of the evidence is always debatable but to say there is none or that such failure hasn't been observed, or even that a fall cannot now be seen in progress, is false.
I am not saying society failure never happened. I am saying society failure because of improved conditions of life so far never happened - Green revolution did not actually led to something worse than widespread starvation. Like Rwandan genocide, most of current failures are designed, not just happening due to overpopulation - they are consequence of man-made evil designs, not development of society.
But that's not what studying population shows us: when people have economic opportunities, education, and choices, they choose to have fewer children. So much so that we end up with the "problem" of the birth rate dropping below what's needed for replacement. It doesn't appear that population growth will ever reach the point that we'll have a problem producing enough food to feed everyone.
It's not the choice here. Monsanto can not reform Indian or Chinese society into something else. The choice here is either we have better crops and people do not starve, or we do not have them and people starve. You say "people do not starve" is a bad choice. To me it looks like advocating starving off people as the means for population control.
In this scenario "less people" is achieved by starving them off, so you're basically saying "we will starve people off and then there would be less people to starve, so it's actually a good thing". Seems to be like an extremely cynical piece of mental gymnastics.
Nobody needs to starve when the root cause is focused on. You're basically saying "we will starve people off in the future, but save less people today, so it's actually a good thing". Of the two of us, I'm the one advocating that less people starve.
"When the root cause is focused on" is an extremely vague and non-practical phrase. You can always say "since we have people starving, root cause is not fixed, so we should leave them starving and not help them until it is". What is your method for making "less people"? We have population of 7 billion and growing, Green revolution technology can enable us to feed them. If you deny it, then what you propose to do with those people, where they are supposed to go?
The data suggests that it is hyperbole to say that Monsanto owns the market, but judging by the CR4 and HHI - standard economics measures for concentration of market power - it's fair to say that the GMO market is very concentrated, and that Monsanto leads the pack by a significant margin.
Good. If EU wants to have inferior crops, let them have it. Actually, I wonder why won't they go the full scale and sow original, unmodified plants - like wild emmer - and also eschew use of pesticides and herbicides. Of course, there's no chance they could feed the Europe population then, but I'm sure US would be able to sell them all the crops they need, while they enjoy that nice fuzzy feeling of not being contaminated by the nasty modern science.
It would be nice but useless as 99.999% of people protesting against GMO couldn't care less about science. They don't know the first thing about what GMO are and where they come from, all the know it's some scary stuff that "contains genes" and since it comes from the large corporation it would kill us all unless we march on the streets with slogans. More science helps when there's no information, when there's no interest in information more science would not do a thing.
This does accurately describes the status quo, but I think it is Monsanto's (and others') duty to change it. The tremendous advances that have been made in science in the past century haven't percolated down to the populace yet. It takes time and sustained effort, but the level of scientific literacy could increase.
Actually, I think we're at the stage where people know a lot of new terms, but don't really understand the concepts behind them. Like genes.
Greater population density, greater decentralization of agricultural production, greater variety and cultural attachment to regional culinary preferences, greater (dare I say it) social concern.
Purely on the basis of these base environmental factors, GM monocultures in Europe were never a winning proposition.
Imagine if a nation who had a significantly worse obesity epidemic going on that was way worse than in the US. And they were pushing to sell seeds to us.
It's kind of like a hobo who is next to death trying to sell you some health pills while insisting that his poor health is not caused by the health pills he has been taking all the time.
My grandmother gave me some advice years ago: "Never trust a skinny chef". If you're buying food to keep people from starving to death, wouldn't you trust the fat salesman to have good product?
Monsanto is predatory to the point of absurdity, and that is where opposition to GMO comes from. They throw lawyers at you until you comply with their demands, and then you pay a tithe to them. It's a modern form of feudalism that centers around abusing the legislative and justice systems.