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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."
So the USDA approve's Bayer's application, and Bayer's rice starts contaminating fields all over the coutry. Europe and Japan ban US rice exports permanently. Why is this better please?
If this particular genetic modification become prevalant in our nations rice stocks, doesnt that mean that Bayer technically owns the rice because it contains their genetic modification. What would this mean for farmers whos rice has become contaminated with Bayers strain, would their rice stock then become property of Bayer?
This means yes, the crop will succeed better due to natural selection in areas where the pesticide is applied.
However, the associated fitness cost means that it is to the organism's advantage to lose that genitic modification whenever it grows in the absense of pesticide. So that natural selection would often select for the original strain.
"Hey Albert, Good luck exploring the infinite abyss."
But just think what would happen if pesticide resistant rice cross pollinates with weed grasses.
Not "if". When.
It is an absolute certainty that the genes will get loose. That's what they do, and plants hybridize to the extent that there are biologists who have challenged the validity of the "biological species concept" as a general means of categorization, citing cases where up to 40% of the individuals in a particular lump of foliage are unclassifiable hybrids.
The very point of the story here is that GM rice got into non-GM shipments. This kind of thing has already happened in Canada, where a farmer got done for storing seed from "Deadly Poison Ready" wheat that had grown from cross-pollination from a neighbour's field.
As to the GP's argument that this is all good for the developing world...yeah, right. Just like drug companies spend all that money on marketing because they want to help the sick...but somehow neglect to invest anything much in the diseases that have the largest effect on people, because the people they affect, also in the developing world, don't have any money to speak of.
The meaning of "GM" is: genetically altered by direct manipulation of DNA to produce commercially useful varieties that are not capable of being produced by hybridization. Releasing such varieties into the wild is a great big ecological experiment that we are all getting to participate in, like it or not.
I wonder how the folks who are responsible for this stuff will feel when they find out what's growing in their back yards in a few years?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
GM food is entirely evil, not for any of the qualities of the food, but for the legal and political sham taking place around them.
Enter Monsanto. They make GM canola, among other things, as well as having patented over 12,000 varieties of seed, most unmodified and taken directly from the goverments own seed stores.
A little bit of their GM seed blew off of trucks and onto the fields of a farmer in Canada. Monsanto found traces of GM plants on the farmers land (without his knowledge or permission, which in the U.S. we call trespassing), sued the farmer, and cost him his life savings, and he had to destroy all of his seed. He was a real farmer who rotated his fields with a variety of seeds to maintain the soil. He lost literally generations worth of seed, a devestating loss.
Much of the upper echelons of the U.S. government, particularly the FDA, are former executives of Monsanto or it's subsidiaries. The goal is nothing short of utter and total control of the worlds food supply.
Watch the documentary The Future of Food. It'll put a bad taste in your mouth.
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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.
And this has nothing to do with GM food, per se. It's an issue with obsolete laws from the dawn of the industrial revolution being stapled onto the modern world. This has more in common with pharmaceuticals (especially AIDS treatments) than it does with agriculture.
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.
Comparing the testing to pharmaceuticals is absurd. If you can't figure out why you should be ashamed of yourself for making the comparison, do the rest of us a favour and never discuss this topic again.
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.
This is pure technophobia. Three mile island is a non issue. Even the laughable 'cell phones cause teh cancer' nonsense is of more concern than that. Chernobyl was the result of a dying government, rather than the technology itself.
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.
So? The absolute worst case senario is that a highly specialized pesticide will be somewhat less effective against wild varieties of your particular crop. They aren't going to cross breed with any other plant, and if you think they will, you need to turn the god damned scifi channel off.