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The Rights of GM Humans
An anonymous submitter writes "Some of the powers that be -- not just talking heads -- go on record about our genetically enhanced future in this Village Voice article. The anti-doping watchdogs of the Olympics say they'll ban GM athletes, and even athletes who have a grandparent with an enhanced germ-line. Would Ivy League schools slap a quota on these people to fend off the enraged parents of the "normal majority?" Imagine how a politician would fare if it became known she'd been tweaked in utero. Human history is rife with aristocide and mob attacks on perceived elites. Today lawmakers and regulators are eager to ban the technologies that would be needed to create a new breed of intellectually and physically superior people. But who's willing to stand up for the rights of this future generation? Environmentalists already deride GM crops as "frankenfood," so how far behind could the demonization of GM people be?"
The claim I debunked wasn't that GM can reduce starvation, but that it had already saved more than a billion lives. That is simply nonsense. As for GM's possibility to save life, I'll address that as well:
Sure, GM can provide higher yields. However, typically yields are compared with highly technologically intensive production methods that require large capital investment. Second, most GM research is currently being done by corporations that have no interest in helping starving farmers - Monsanto, for instance is infamous for it's licensing and it's work on ensuring that farmers are prevented from replanting grains from their crops, which is a vital part of most third world agriculture.
So while GM could possibly reduce starvation, it won't do so without massive capital investments. People who have the capital to do large scale farming and buying all their seeds aren't starving in the first place.
I'd also like to point out that the problem isn't that it's somehow a big problem to move all this food around - that's being done all the time. The food transport required would be on the orders of a few percent of the food export taking place on a regular basis. Nor is it an issue of money - Europe and the US spends huge amounts stockpiling surplus food and destroying it after having poured billions into subsidies every year.
The issue is that it would affect prices and demand worldwide, and the west isn't willing to risk that effect on their economy. That effect would be just as real if the third world suddenly managed to increase their food production dramatically, and would likely be met with protectionist trade restrictions, as it always have in the past when jobs in the industrialized countries might be at stake. Again, the argument collapses on itself. That food would've saved thousands of lives but, on account of greed and politics, was denied. Even if it was later accepted, people died in its delay. And that is not acceptable in my book.
So you would rather that millions die next year because Zimbabwe loses the majority of it's income from exports and are unable to cover the costs of other vital things like medicine, healthcare and foods that aren't suitable for production there?
Accepting the unmilled grain would have have destroyed their only major livelihood for years to come, and that applies to the other countries who also protested.
Greed had nothing to do with it. Survival has. Destroying their own economy would cause far more long term deaths than a few days of stalling.
In either case, the original claim was that the food was rejected due to claims that GM food was "poison", which is blatantly wrong. Regardless of whether you agree with the economical argument or not, the fact is that the protests from Zimbabwe and other countries against receiving unmilled grain was ONLY made on the basis of the threat to their agricultural exports once their crops recover.
I'm fairly neutral about all this stuff, but I would still question a couple of your assumptions: just exactly where does a resistance to glyphosate (a widely used herbicide made by a certain famously litigous megacorp) occur in nature? For 'tis this gene that was inserted into Bt Corn making it impervious to this weedkiller. That's something a whole level above regular cross breeding as it works by the insertion of more-or-less artificial genetic code. Also, most of these crops never make it anywhere near the "third world" as the patents on them normally preclude such non-profit uses.
It's too late for me to die young
Perhaps you should sign up for a brain "enhancement". The guy who gets the most electoral college (not popular) votes gets to be the president.
In an episode of the original series of Star Trek, the Enterprise encountered a ship, adrift, called the "Botany Bay", upon which humans from past history had put genetically modified superpeople that had gotten out of hand and been exiled. Their leader, name Kahn, was played by the actor Ricardo Montalban, who was also in some popular ads from Chrysler at the time, featuring cars with "fine Corinthian leather" seats and appointments. Much hilarity and cross-referencing ensued.
Virg