Bayer Petitions For Approval of Biotech Rice

br_sjrpreto_sp writes to clue us to an article on Foodnavigator. Agro giant Bayer Crop Sciences has petitioned the US Department of Agriculture to approve a genetically modified rice variety that has been at the heart of a recent contamination scandal. From the article: "Marketed under the brand name LibertyLink, these [varieties] were engineered to tolerate the toxic herbicide glufosinate ammonium. The company in July notified the US regulatory body that it had discovered trace amounts of an unapproved GM rice in samples of commercial rice seed." After the contamination scare, the market for US rice tanked as European countries imposed import limitations. When rice producers sued Bayer, the company responded with this request to the USDA. The petition is open to public comment until October 10. Comments may be submitted via the Internet at www.regulations.gov — search keyword APHIS-2006-0140."

Comments

Do any of you really know what GM is?

[spoco2]

I mean really, you all talk about glowing green, getting two tounges etc.

I caught my first episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit the other night, and it just so happened to have a piece on GM food.
    Some clips:
    A short clip outline
    The entire segment

It painted a pretty good argument FOR GM food... to feed the millions who are otherwise dying because it's hard to get crops to grow in their parts of the world.

Aren't the 'GM' crops really just an extension of grafting and selective breeding that has been going on for thousands of years?

Please enlighten me if I'm wrong, but in their piece they/those they interviewed stated that two of the things I thought were true about GM foods aren't:

* GM foods contain genes spliced from frogs/fish/other animals: Apparently bullshit
* GM foods don't require any testing/checks before being used: Also apparently bullshit, that they are more heavily regulated than any other food.

Is this true, or have Penn & Teller hoodwinked me?

Re:Do any of you really know what GM is?

[lelitsch]

Both are valid arguments, but they somewhat miss their mark.

Yes, GM seeds might be able to grow in marginal areas. But the vast majority of GM foods is grown in the US where there aren't millions starving. Actually, patented GM foods create a problem for farmers in developing countries since they can't keep back part of their harvest as seed for the next growing season. If they can't afford seed corn, they'll starve or have to wait for th UN air drop. I haven't seen Monsanto or anyone put a huge effort into GM plants for the Sahel or the Tibetan desert yet. And, quite frankly, improved irrigation or similar changes to production are probably much more efficient.

There are reasonably good arguments for using GM foods to help counteract nutritional deficiencies, though. Golden Rice is probably the best example.

GM foods do require stringent testing, but past experience shows that even the most stringent testing can reliably weed out all problems Two examples for failed pharmaceutical testing would be Contagan and Vioxx, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are two examples that even if something is tested to be almost idiot proof, someone will invent a better operator. If you screw up FDA testing for medications, you can just destroy what was produced. With GM foods, you simply can't. Some will escape and multiply.

The no fish/fowl gene argument is a bit spurious. There have been experiments along those lines. But just think what would happen if pesticide resistant rice cross pollinates with weed grasses. Instant huge problem.

Re:Do any of you really know what GM is?

[PCM2]

This is a really good question. It's also a really complex one. The best book on the topic that I know of is called Lords of the Harvest, by Daniel Charles. Its a comprehensive and mostly unbiased look at the history of biotech and what it means for society and the future of food.

Charles really manages to sum up both sides of the argument pretty well. For one thing, he explains pretty much what you say Penn & Teller have said: that this stuff just ain't the demonic conspiracy a lot of people want to believe it is. A lot of genetically modified foods are produced by bombarding cells with radiation, or bathing them in chemicals that cause genes to replicate in random ways. In other words, scientists are just forcing the natural process of random mutation that occurs any time life reproduces. Very few GM organisms are created by piecing together bits of this or that -- it's too hard to do successfully.

There is something to be said for "feeding the starving," too, as you say. In certain parts of the world, certain plant diseases are so rampant that you just can't grow a lot of crops. They will grow poorly and not yield what they could in order to feed people. A lot of GM crops aim to solve this problem.

But there are more troubling aspects as well. Here at home, the reasons for using GM crops seem less cut and dried. To give one fairly benign example, a ton of work has been put into genetically modifying tomatoes -- but not to make them taste better, or to be more nutritious. No, scientists modify tomatoes so that they will have more cellulose in them, which makes them take longer to ripen and go soft. That way they can be transported farther without spoilage. Of course, it also makes them sort of taste like a piece of celery. The modifications are done solely for the business of agriculture, not for the customer's benefit.

More troubling is that many of the stated aims of biotech have not come to fruition. At one time, scientists promised that GM crops would be resilient to pests and diseases. If a boll weevil couldn't eat a certain crop, you'd no longer have to dump pesticides all over it, which would make farming more environmentally friendly! Well, that sort of happened. But the most popular GM crops of all, as it turns out, are these herbicide resistant crops like TFA talks about. These are plants that can't be killed by modern herbicides. The reason you want that is because weeds can be killed by modern herbicides. So instead of hiring people to go and painstakingly remove all the weeds from your fields, you just repeatedly spray your fields with herbicides. In other words, with GM farming you're actually using more chemicals than traditional farming. And why not? Because the same company is selling you both the GM crops and the chemicals.

And then you have the intellectual property issues. Most of these GM crops are patented. If you are a farmer and you want to plant GM corn, you have to buy it under a license from Monsanto (for example). Typically, that license will include a clause that says you can never plant corn that you grow. Got that? You have a whole field full of ears of corn, and you are forbidden to take any of that corn and put it in the soil to grow next year's crop. You must buy all your seed directly from Monsanto, year after year. And Monsanto sends people out to test your crops, too! If you're not licensed to be growing GM corn this year, and they pick an ear off one of your plants and they determine that it's GM corn, they will actually sue you. (And yes, there have been "false positives" -- false, because the farmer did not knowingly do anything wrong, because his crops were cross-pollinated through the air with GM crops.) To many people, this move toward farming as a new kind of industrial complex controlled by gigantic, multinational corporations is very troubling. To what extent is it appropriate for these corporations to control our food supply?

Anyway, that's just a snapshot

I've losing faith in slashdot

[Time_Ngler]

It seems that no one so far has understood the main point of the article. Its not that Bayer's GM rice is infecting non-GM rice, but an unreleased GM rice that Bayer was still working on and was not approved by the FDA, yet, has infected Bayer's already approved GM rice that was sold to farmers.

In other words, Bayer can't keep the unapproved and approved strains separate when they sell their GM products to the general public. **shudder**