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Dodging the Negative Reaction To GE Crops
BINC writes "Wired has an article up today entitled 'Selective Breeding Gets Modern.'" From the article: "Genetically modified food has gotten a chilly reception from consumers, especially in Europe and Asia. Just last week, Japan suspended imports of American long-grain rice after authorities discovered that a genetically modified variety had accidentally mixed with conventional rice. To skirt such problems altogether, biotech companies are creating superior plants using genetics technology that is advanced but which falls short of grafting genes from one organism into another."
Europeans and Asians get their knickers in a knot over the nebulous dangers of GE foods, but they smoke like fiends. I don't get people who ignore the real hazards in life to focus on the unproven ones.
...what the problem is with technology that can produce vast amounts of nutritious food that can feed people who may otherwise not have access to such a resoruce?
Nothing's wrong with that.
What people fear are unforeseen long-term consequences of messing with genetics and releasing the results of that into the wild. Once it's out, it's extremely difficult to undo any damage.
Why do we keep hearing the myth that we need GE for more food?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
No, GM modification is taking random DNA (which might be animal based) and placing it into plants for our consumption.
The scales of the Deep sea herring appears to repel greenfly, so they extract what appears to be the active fragment of DNA and implant it into a donor plant.
Mrs perkins down the road is allergic to fish and very wisely avoids eating anything fishy.
All of a sudden the bread she is eating makes her have a reaction, for such a staple product like wheat or rice this is NOT a good situation, she doesn't know what she can avoid anymore or worse she might not be around to know.
Thats only one of the possible scenarios, what happens if this crop is worldwide before we realise that DNA strand acted in a strange way on our offspring?
liqbase
I'm not sure I'm being misanthropic here, but I always wonder just what is the point of making ever-increasing amounts of food. I seem to remember from my high school biology class that any group of organisms will invariably grow until it outstrips its food supply. From that standpoint, increasing the food supply does NOT decrease the number of people that will go hungry. If the ratio of hungry to not-hungry populations stays constant, you're increasing the number of hungry people, aren't you? Whenever a topic like this comes up, I just can't help but feel like we're trying to help, but we're making things worse.
I think part of this is somewhat like the battle between closed source and open source.
With normal fruit/vegetables, you have seeds and can grow them freely and as you wish.
With GE crops, the seeds of the fruit/vegetables either come out sterile and you are dependent on the company to provide you with more or the seeds are okay but you have to license it from them to be allowed to use it, sort of like how you could theoretically put Windows on unlimited PCs with just one CD but the BSA will come knocking.
I think this is part of the backlash and I don't blame farmers/people not wanting any part of it.
GE foods available for purchace are never harmful to humans.
What a bold an unfounded statement.
They are tested extensivly before release.
So are drugs, and yet we have huge scandals every few years because someone made a mistake.
So, while GE foods could pose health risks (both to humans and the enviroment), they usually don't.
They usually don't? How do you know? How long has GE food been around, and to what extent has it been produced? We don't have enough empirical data as of yet to come to the conclusion that they are "never harmful to humans".
Its not the first time tested substances have been found to be bad for us.
Waiting until after the defects start coming in with something as dangerous as GM crops would be horrific, not least how would you REMOVE it from the earth after its cross pollinated?
Fully natural hybrids have been used and tested for millenia and are PROVEN (you and I wouldn't be here without it working) to work, the methods described in the article are just a fine tuning of that.
If we can get ALL the same benefits of GM crops without randomly inserting DNA from who knows what then I am all for it, this article would appear to make GM foods days numbered - its just not worth the risk in my eyes.
liqbase
GE crops are patented and trademarked. You can't independently grow these foods, prices are completely insulated from traditional agricultural pricing mechanisms and the danger of these corporations dumping vast amounts of GE crops at a loss only to make it up by raising prices and exploiting the monopoly they just gained later on is obvious, and very real.
Not to mention the terrible weakness and loss of variety that will result from basing entire food chains only on the single strain that provides the biggest profits for the corporation who holds the patent on the crop.
Basically, it comes down to an issue of trust. And no, i don't trust Monsanto to act ethically, fairly or honestly, and I have no trust in the governments that supposedly provide the checks and balances on these companies either.
GE food would probably be fine under the following conditions:
No patents on genetic sequences.
No forced sterilisation of seeds.
If these GE foods really are that good, why can't they compete on their merits with other foodstuffs instead of having all these additional 'GRM' - genetic rights management mechanisms added.
Thats my big beef with GE foods, its got nothing to do with productivity or efficiency. People have been growing their own food for thousands of years - widespread GE foods would essentially criminalize that activity.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
How about just wanting to lead a healthy 100% natural life
Yes, how about that. Get back to me when you are naked, living in the forest, gathering fruits and berries for food.
The world produces enough food right now to feed everyone on the planet. So why aren't they getting fed? The problem is within capitalism and the distribution system.
GM food will not solve either capitalism or the distribution system's problems.
What GM food will do is to pollute the world's plants by gene migration from GM plants to other plants (already seen and documented) and impact us in many unforseen ways (e.g. the butterflies dying from GM-altered plants).
And, of course, GM food will also shift power to corporate agribusiness in a huge way, which is the real reason the US gov't pushes GM crops.
In our puppet state of Iraq -- one of the areas where agriculture literally originated -- US-imposed laws now forbid Iraqi farmers from harvesting seeds from crops to use to plant next year.
it is a stupid statement, a more correct statement would be "GE foods are not more harmfull than non GE foods."
If non GE foods were never harmful, I would never want anything else either. un-modified food crops have been introduced in lots of places with disasterous results to the native plants, and wildlife. Because their is still alott more attention paid to GE, and those introducing them, they know 1 mistake in these early stages would be disasterous to them.
their are so many people with food alergies regardless of the foods background (not to mention cholestrol, fat, diabiates) their is very little food that could fit the category "never harmful to humans."
as the rest of the crap going on with our food supply. My personal favorite is Cambell's Soup, which has ingredients added to it soley to assit in the formation of Monosodium Glutamate, that way they can truthfully say "No MSG Added", because, hey, they didn't add any. All they did was wait till the other stuff they added created MSG on it's own.
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Massive difference. That "engineering" was based on crossbreeding phenotypes, not genotypes. Modern genetic "engineering", is based on crossbreeding of genotypes, whos phenotypes are not even able to crossbreed. Moreover, the phenotypes created are not even subject to rigorous study before being chucked out to pasture, in a process more akin to introducing rabbits to australia than breeding two types of pig.
May the Maths Be with you!
For detailed explanation, from Oxford, a new issue of the International Journal of Law and Information Technology features scholarly articles putting into perspective the latest cr[o|a]p of patents in the fields of both biotechnology and software.
Capitialism is one of the main reasons there is more than enough food to go around. It is one reason a lot of grains get shipped to third world areas.
You want a government type to blame then blame the dictatorships. The petty dictators of many these countries who accept food shipments, monentary grants, and actual machinery are one of the major reasons many starve. They spend money on their luxurious lifestyles while their people live in squalor. They spend money on their armies while their people die by the use of the same armies to keep them in line. Some nations even go so far and divert money they can now spare to fund terrorism in their neighboring countries. All the best of the foods, medicines, and equipment goes to themselves and relatives of the families running these countries.
Sorry but the push for GM crops is because they can grow where other crops cannot. They can provide nutrients available by no other means. So what if someone profits, the fact the chance at profit existed is why the crop exists. What you say? Oh, all those non-captialist societies were hell bent on solving hunger and engineering crops for the sake of their people - oh, wait a minute they weren't were they.
Got to love the tinfoil hats that like to villianize capitalism. Its easy to find negatives, why not look at the good that comes and put the blame where it belongs.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The problem was that they didn't want their food supply coming under corporate control.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Of course, selective breeding already 'pollutes' the world's plants by gene migration via cross-pollenation (seen, documented, and well-understood by the world's gardeners - or did you think roses came in all those colours by chance? most are hybrids with other flowering plants). The butterfly thing was, if not exactly 'forseen' by the people who made it, pretty bloody obvious. The plants were designed to resist insects by generating their own insectisides, insectisides kill butterflies anyway with traditional farming, it's reasonable to expect that the new technique would still kill butterflies. I expect the company who produced that crop was unsurprised by this result. If you want to make war on insectisides, go ahead - but don't blame it on 'GM food'.
Realistically, most of the current gene-splicing techniques aren't doing anything that couldn't be accomplished with traditional selective cross-breeding, they're just massively cheaper and faster and more reliable (it can take years of careful work to breed a particular trait into a plant, particularly if you have to cross several species to get it; gene splicing can do it in a few weeks or months). Our gene splicing technology is not currently at the level where you can stick cow genes into a tomato plant and expect it to produce milk; the species being spliced must be approximately similar before you start, so we're mostly limited to what could be done with careful breeding. Farmers and gardeners have been cross-breeding plants and animals for centuries, and it hasn't wrecked the world yet. The current practice of careful study of the impact of gene-spliced crops, through controlled field trials, is a sound one, and far more careful than people have been about introducing new lifeforms into the wild in the past (rabbits in
You kind of redefined the meaning of "genetic engineering", didn't you?
Some more educated people, yes. But most just fear that their food is going to be poisonous. It drives me mad -- all the things the body can take (e.g. dozens of units of alcohol), but suddenly a few genes changed in some existing plant/animal, and people think they're going to grow a second ass or turn into a shark by consuming the stuff.
A few genes? Such as the gene in brazil nuts that codes for the protein that causes allergic reactions to people allergic to brazil nuts? Or the one that cause allergies in people allergic to peanuts?
I don't see the public saying medicine should be banned due to the evolution of superbugs that can spread out of the hospital environment
The ban on improper use of antimicrobes such as antibiotics yes. There are now strains of TB, as well as other bacteria, microbes, and viruses that are resistant to antibotics that were previously effective drugs. The misuse of antibotics will only accelerate the spread of these.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It makes perfect sense, you simply lack a basic understanding of economics.
Western subsidies produce huge overproduction, the result is cheap food, at far below cost. Excess cheap food is dumped on the third world, the market price drops, it becomes uneconomic to farm the land in the third world, large numbers of the farmers leave the land. Money floods abroad to buy food on international markets. Then, there is a bad year, the remaining local crop fails but there is now no buffer level of production. Aid floods in to the local market devaluing the local food prices further, more money leaves the local market and exits the country which becomes poorer still.
With a healthy local market, excesses can be sold within the country, the money stays within the country, land remains in production and people stay on the land farming instead of forming militias and massacring people.
You seem to be under the impression that third world countries have plenty of spare money around which they're happy to export in order to purchase food on the international markets. You simply have no conception of the economic reality. The fact is that the farmers who accept large subsidies to overproduce food in the US and EU are causing the deaths of tens of millions of people in the poorest countries in the world.
Deleted
The problem is stopping western farmers dumping their products on third world markets at far below cost. Destroying the local market for locally produced food, thereby driving local farmers out of business and off the land.
I realize the west isn't helping, but the countries affected could prevent the problem the same way we maintain our markets -- by taxing the bejeezus out of imports. The corrupt governments (a redundant adjective, granted) of these countries are just as much to blame for not using the potential source of income through import duties to further develop their countries. They wouldn't need local farmers if their governments invested in creating industry, but if they raised tariffs high enough, it would be profitable for their own farmers to grow food. It's not like it's an all-or-nothing proposition either; they can allow in a minimum amount of produce to meet demand, and adjust the quota year-over-year -- just like the US does. The US is not entirely to blame for providing a product [food] where there is a demand any more than, say, South American countries are to entirely to blame for doing the same with drugs. If there was no demand, there would be no drug smuggling.
The reality is that both sides are culpable -- it takes two to play, and the game stops whenever one side decides to stop playing. Blaming one party is just recockulous.
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