I'm rather proud of the fact that the last time I was published in a magazine it was Mother Earth News, wherein they published my letter asking them if they could, for the sake of simplicity, link to somewhere that actually talked about the harms of GMO, rather than just assuming it was bad, bad bad. Their response was "everyone knows the risks from GMO." I wish the issue were that simple, however. What it really comes down to is there is very, very little oversight of GMO design and implementation and those who would like there to be more of it don't have the basis in understanding to know what to ask for. So they push for bans and labeling instead. If GMO crops were subject to the same scrutiny as pharmaceutical drugs, there'd be a lot less of them, they'd be a lot more expensive and bad things would still get through. However, it'd be a lot less like lawn darts, wherein you have to put a few through people's heads before you decide that terminator genes are a bad idea.
My issue with the push for GMO food is the inability to choose not to be part of the GMO experiment. And as an aside I have yet to see a convincing argument for not labeling GMO foods.
I agree. Not giving people a choice is the definition of fascism. If GMOs are as great and wonderful as the bio-tech industry claims they are, they should be proud to label their products and not force them down people's throats.
To be fair, the problem a lot of people have is not with not labeling GMO foods, but making it a government mandate to when there has already been plenty of progress on the organic labeling front, which includes GMOs, pesticides, and a plethora of other environmentalist issues.
I can understand that objection but I also have been watching the USDA organic label slowly regressing.
When I have more time I can provide more examples but here's just one from a cursory google search: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jul/03/business/fi-organic3
Putting aside the issue of whether or not GMOs should to be used out of necessity for farmers or benefit, part of my annoyance in GMO discussions comes from the fact that the debate centers around any strain of a plant that includes foreign genes. Not just genes outside the plant's species, mind you, but genes specially transfected by a human into the cells or genes mutated at a rate faster than normal in nature. At the local farmer's market, I can buy a pluot (Plum + Apricot), peacotum, seedless watermelons. Almost every strain of corn grow in the US is a hybrid. And for good reason; it grows taller and is more compatible with American growing techniques, making for better yields come market time[1]. Hell, if you buy weed from your a drug dealer, it's most likely some hybrid of the major cannabis species, too. But the moment a genome is corrupted by a nasty scientist in a lab, every natural blog under the sun locks arms against it. It's not that there are no downsides to industrial agriculture. It's not that Bayer's Bt potato is immune to any chance of insect resistance or Monsanto's Roundup Ready corn doesn't contribute to the already massive problem of the overuse of pesticides. But food is complex, and Bt, Roundup, and golden crops are all separate issues that should be examined in their own contexts. The entire field of genetic engineering should not be discounted in one sweeping motion. In the case of golden rice, there is real potential to relieve human suffering in far parts of the world. Now, for someone who doesn't care to learn the ins and outs of the American agricultural behemoth, but still wants to do their part to fight Big Ag, going with the rule of thumb against GMOs makes plenty of sense. But if we're being proper basement dwellers debating arguments on internet forums, let's not let things become black and white and drive the wind out of all debate on the topic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis#Corn_.28maize.29
This would be fair IF the science of GMOs is proved to be solid and GMOs end up being safe. Let's for a second assume that it is. The safety of GMOs isn't the only reason why people are against them. The centralization of seed production as well as the ability to patent life are two aspects with huge environment-socio-economic repercussions, which were never openly debated. On this basis alone I feel it's fair to have a stance against the whole of the bio-technology industry. Regarding golden rice, why don't we give seeds of vegetables which naturally contain the vitamin that a certain population's is deficient on, instead of selling them an expensive, patented GM seed which they'll have to buy every year (since saving GM seed is illegal)? It seems to me that bio-tech companies are trying to hide their greed behind altruistic marketing.The entire field of genetic engineering should not be discounted in one sweeping motion.
Sure, but again, this is a stance against industrialized agriculture in general. You don't need to splice genes or irradiate seeds to get something that is useless after one generation, you just need to sell F1 hybrids (Fun fact, "killer genes" aka GURT aren't actually used in practice. The majority of farmers are dependent on hybrid plants nowadays, whether or not they decide to plant a GMO or another strain. I don't want to quell the debate against industrialized agriculture, just pointing out that the singling out of GMO technology is, for the most part, silly. But the use of GMOs and organic (Slash "post-organic) farming are not incompatible, even if most organic farmers have a bad taste in their mouth after Bt and Roundup Ready crops. Because a crop is only the cost of its seeds. Not the weather, the soil, the seasons. Growing all crops are the same and require no plant-specific expertise that may or may not be present in different cultures. Sarcasm aside, a more varied diet is usually more preferable, but when you compare the task of completely altering the foods of all the orange and red countries on this map and giving out cheap seeds, the short term solution is going to be the former. The long term solution is to bring the countries out of poverty, but "they're already working on that".The safety of GMOs isn't the only reason why people are against them. The centralization of seed production as well as the ability to patent life are two aspects with huge environment-socio-economic repercussions, which were never openly debated. On this basis alone I feel it's fair to have a stance against the whole of the bio-technology industry.
Regarding golden rice, why don't we give seeds of vegetables which naturally contain the vitamin that a certain population's is deficient on,
instead of selling them an expensive, patented GM seed which they'll have to buy every year (since saving GM seed is illegal)? It seems to me that bio-tech companies are trying to hide their greed behind altruistic marketing.
Actually the GMOs on the market so far aren't sterile. They can reproduce and cross breed with native varieties contaminating indefinite future generations. But I agree that sterile seed, in whatever shape or form, isn't sustainable. I don't think that most GMO activists are aware of the issues with industrial agriculture. It's not something that's widely covered. The business practices of bio-tech giants including their lobbying against labelling is what has created the anti-GMOs momentum. Thanks for bringing to my attention that "no royalties need to be paid" for Golden rice seed by the farmers who do "not make more than $10,000 per year". And that "in addition, farmers are permitted to keep and replant seed." Now watch what you call "bullshit" here.You don't need to splice genes or irradiate seeds to get something that is useless after one generation, you just need to sell F1 hybrids (Fun fact, "killer genes" aka GURT aren't actually used in practice. The majority of farmers are dependent on hybrid plants nowadays, whether or not they decide to plant a GMO or another strain.
I don't want to quell the debate against industrialized agriculture, just pointing out that the singling out of GMO technology is, for the most part, silly.
Gonna call bullshit on this one.
For what it's worth, Nature Biotechnology published a similar article to my point this week: Also discussed are the Hawaii papaya and the Floridian orange, neither of which I had known of before the reading.Even Monsanto and the biotech industry unwittingly have enhanced the false GM/non-GM dichotomy by parroting the agronomic benefits of any products under the GM umbrella. This has led to a debate framed by oversimplified pro-GM or anti-GM stances. Instead, the discussion should be about pros and cons of individual products: Bt corn or EPSPS soybeans and so on.
It's amusing to me that anyone would use this as a justification to prove that GMOs are safe when there's no way of tracking (due to lack of the infamous labelling) of whether any illnesses are actually related to GMOs. It's laughable really. What an interesting admission. Then of course, any study that shows GMOs dangers is "flawed", has "flimsy evidence", with "downright mistruths". While every "well researched" study is pro-GMOs. Pardon me?! Says who? Anyway, we'll have to agree to disagree. Bio-technology as an industry is in its infancy. If we don't put the breaks on it now, I see a future in 20-30 years where most of our food crops are patented GM. Not because they are particularly magical crops, but because corporations managed to monopolise the food industry. By then it'll be too late to care about bio-diversity, and it'll be impossible to grow even your non-GM food as GM genes will have cross-bred with most native varieties. Even animals will be GM created in the image of the arrogant human that refuses to work with nature under the naive egotistical impression of its own superiority. Nature, as created by evolution will be a thing of the past. And humans will be at the mercy of greed. All I have to say is this. If you do so much believe that GMOs are here to bring us all of what their creators promise. If you think they will save us and that we need them to feed us, then go ahead, fight that fight. I go even further and suggest that you put your mouth where your morals lie and eat all the GMOs you can. Show true support for them. Prove to others how safe and wonderful they are. And if you believe in freedom of choice and democracy then let those who don't want to, have a choice. As for me, I'll keep my trust on nature for as long as I have a choice. As an aside here are a few blasts from the past of things that were deemed safe at the time and which took decades of fighting against industry to prove otherwise. DDT is good for me. More doctors smoke Camels. Hopefully GMOs won't be joining this list. Good luck.It does not matter that no adverse health effects have been recorded from eating them [GMOs].
And changing them will require a concerted and long-term effort to develop GM foods that clearly provide convincing benefits to consumers—something that seed companies have conspicuously failed to do over the past decade.
But in terms of risk, how a food crop is created is totally irrelevant...
Well, let's take a page out of that same journal from the previous week. The process of ensuring food safety is far from perfect in the US. Rather than having a de jure process of screening foods before they come to the market, the FDA relies on the fact that companies submit safety profiles in order to avoid costly lawsuits down the road. But, since I'm sure you'll point that out as a serious shortcoming (I agree), you should also note that all the same foods have been approved in the EU and the US and the regulatory agencies of each follow similar guidelines. What does that entail? It means comparing to the status quo, and where differences in metabolic profiles appear, examining any that have a reasonable chance of toxicity. This process applies to all new foods, GM or not. What has that found? Then, when it comes to the new protein in particular: As the old saying goes, "the dose makes the poison." You can find trace amounts of uranium if just about everything if you look hard enough, but as it's below a few parts per million, toxicologists aren't going to raise their eyebrows. The same goes for CryIAb, which has had had its dosage measured up to 4000 mg/kg body weight without an measured toxicity effects[1]. But hey, that's not all, in the case of new / elevated levels of proteins, the lab scientists then also look at a number of factors including pH stability (Can it survive breakdown in the stomach), sequence identity to known allergens, and 90-day feeding studies. Now tell me that's still laughable. The question of post-market retrospective studies is not unwarranted, but the trouble there is that the entire agriculture pipeline makes no distinction between GM and non-GM grains. All corn is equal in the eyes of the elevator, and from there on out, it goes through hundreds of different pipes before coming out as a processed product for all the "foods" sold in stores today. You want to label food containing GMOs? You'd need completely separate pipes for each one of those processes. Still want that label? I lied, it does exist, it's included in the umbrella label, "USDA-certified organic". Most everything else is a "may contain GMOs but we're not sure because the industrial monster is beyond human comprehension and changing every day." To be fair, it's already on seed companies to convince the farmers, and most consumers don't give a rats' ass about how the reliability of yields from year to year or the cost of seed vs. biomass produced vs. water usage. Not that these don't matter. And not that GMOs are always the right answer to that those questions (I personally don't believe they are), but safety vs. ag policy are very different questions, the latter of which is much more nuanced and difficult to answer. You're welcome to pick apart any Monsanto study all you want, but the fact of the matter is when the majority of published evidence (Coming not just from Monsanto, but plenty of independent research agencies) points in one direction, extraordinary evidence is expected to sway opinions. When the studies can't get their methodology right[2][3][4], excuse everyone else for being skeptical of the results. Unless you're a fan of homeopathy, the general consensus is that it's things that you put in your body that poison it. There's plenty of steel, plastic, and copper sitting in the room around me, but until I eat them or breath their vaporized versions, I'm fairly confident they present me no harm. Now, farms still do plenty to poison the environments in which they are grown, and the process by which fertilizer is produced isn't exactly pleasant, but those are separate from GMOs as a whole. The rest of your comment is just a tirade against industrial farming which I have no interest in defending. The fight against "Big Ag" (And "Big Org") isn't unfounded, especially from an environmentalist point of view. But you seem to be relying on the argument that "nature always good, scientists always bad", when I am asking you to break down the field into its individual components. Don't fight "GMOs", fight Roundup, fight processed foods, fight runoff, fight subsidies, fight factory farms, fight biofuels. Fight Nestle, fight every damn company that pushes junk food on kids every day[5]. Fight monoculture, fight the fact that almost all of the damn food that ends up on the average person's plate is made up of corn. Fight the policies that push more and more farmers out of a job each year. But stop fighting a broad-ass term that still has plenty of potential to help those who need it. [1] http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-PEST/1996/August/Day-02/pr-8... [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22382376 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22074695 (Yes that's a Monsanto shill, but it's relatively well written and I'm too lazy to pull up more than two of the many studies critical of Aris et al.)It's amusing to me that anyone would use this as a justification to prove that GMOs are safe when there's no way of tracking (due to lack of the infamous labelling) of whether any illnesses are actually related to GMOs. It's laughable really.
Compositional analyses of 129 transgenic crops submitted to the FDA for marketing authority from 1995 to 2012 have all failed to detect any significant differences—or any believed to have biological relevance—between the engineered plant and its nonengineered counterpart or reference species according to an analysis of the literature conducted jointly by FDA and Dow AgroScience scientists10.
For all transgenic events commercialized so far, the concentration of the newly introduced protein in the context of a whole plant (and the consumable parts derived from it) has been so low that it has been considered not to pose a risk.
What an interesting admission.
Then of course, any study that shows GMOs dangers is "flawed", has "flimsy evidence", with "downright mistruths". While every "well researched" study is pro-GMOs.
Pardon me?! Says who?
Never said they were. But, as a crop, the F2 generation is effectively worthless. Now, out-crossing is definitely a concern, but you have to look at what genes confer selective pressure outside of a farming environment. A gene to break down glyphosate? Not very useful where glyphosate is not present. Now, Roundup-resistant weeds have been found on corn fields, but, to the best of my knowledge, no cases have been documented of it spreading far from the farmer's field. A gene to produce Bt pesticides and protect oneself against insects? Very much a concern and one of many legitimate arguments against Bt crops. A gene to produce yet another metabolite, a gene already present in plenty of other crops, that has not been found to function as an antibiotic, pesticide, herbicide, etc? Gonna air on the side of: "it's probably okay" on this one. I pitty the person who calls themselves an activist before getting to know the field they're fighting for. Michael Pollen's The Omnivore Dilemma discusses that and many other aspects of modern farming that anyone interested in agriculture should familiarize themselves with (Roundup Ready corn is also discussed, but from a grower's perspective which is neat to see). The anti-GMO movement was the reason California's Prop 37[1] was brought to the table in the first place... Unsure if this is a stab at me, but $10k is a damn lot in countries where the poverty line is 3-4 orders of magnitude less. You won't see me defending Monsanto's marketing practices, but the exact same practice you see done there with GMO seeds could just as easily have been pulled with some other F1 hybrid. Pardon me for driving golden rice so far home, but it's the only example of a GMO that doesn't trigger the Monsanto hate train. [1] http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition...Actually the GMOs on the market so far aren't sterile
I don't think that most GMO activists are aware of the issues with industrial agriculture.
The business practices of bio-tech giants including their lobbying against labelling is what has created the anti-GMOs momentum.
Thanks for bringing to my attention that "no royalties need to be paid" for Golden rice seed by the farmers who do "not make more than $10,000 per year".
Now watch what you call "bullshit" here.