Slashdot Mirror
Judge Rejects Approval of Engineered Sugar Beets
countertrolling writes "A federal judge has ruled that the government failed to adequately assess the environmental impacts of genetically engineered sugar beets before approving the crop for cultivation in the United States. The decision could lead to a ban on the planting of the beets, which have been widely adopted by farmers. Beets supply about half the nation's sugar, with the rest coming from sugar cane. The Agriculture Department did conduct an environmental assessment before approving the genetically engineered beets in 2005 for widespread planting. But the department concluded there would be no significant impact, so a fuller environmental impact statement was not needed. But Judge White said that the pollen from the genetically engineered crops might spread to non-engineered beets. He said that the 'potential elimination of farmer's choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, or a consumer's choice to eat non-genetically engineered food' constituted a significant effect on the environment that necessitated an environmental impact statement. There's still hope, isn't there? That we can at least get this stuff labeled properly?"
They're always after my frosted Lucky Charms!
What about Round Up ready Corn?! http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsanto_and_the_Roundup_Ready_Controversy
that the title didn't say "Judge delivers beet down on the Gov't"
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
It was just modified by farmers over a longer period of time using human (i.e. unnatural selection) to bring out certain traits.
The only difference is in the people doing the modification and the techniques used.
Just like dogs have been genetically modified to produce everything from chihuahuas to great danes.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
There are lots of organizations that will cater to your backward luddism and sell you food full of warts and disease, as nature intended.
You just have to pay for it, you cheap asshole.
Now I'm not all that fussy about not eating bio-engineered food. But I think that biodiversity is a Good Thing, and that it's probably a good idea to preserve some uncontaminated stock (the old adage of "work on a backup" applies doubly when you're dealing with your food supply).
Add to that the way a lot of the bioengineering agritech firms love to assert copyright over their "intellectual property" (plant genetic material), whether or not the farmer actually wanted it or if it was undesirable cross-pollination, and I say good for Judge White.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
I know the "greens" love to worry about GMOs but what is your particular fear? Are you afraid the proteins or amino acids will make you sick? Left-over anti-pest traces? Or are you falling into the marketing trap of "ooh, scary Frankenfoods!" please be sure to think critically for yourself.
John
I mean, who the hell wants better bigger tastier and healthier crops?
Organic foods - throwing farming back to the 16th century!
The three pillars of organic farming:
diseases, cross contamination and starvation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In reality, all crops are genetically engineered. The difference is the methods involved, where people artificially interfere with breeding and natural selection by means of selecting crops themselves or directly cut and paste genes to that effect. Genetic engineering has the potential to be a second green revolution, but the current regulatory climate and stigma reduce its development to multinationals with weak competition, that doesn't necessarily produce the best results. The real environmental effects are zero versus a conventional crop in any case - any farmed crop is completely unnatural and environmentally disruptive.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How about my hope that anti-GM zealots won't behave like alarmist idiots? Nope, that hope has been dashed.
Look, almost everything you eat has been genetically modified. The fact that some of it was modified by altering DNA is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion; the supposed dangers of GM come from unbalancing the environment by introducing a foreign organism, something that we've done and then dealt with many times throughout human history. (Note, I'm ignoring the supposed health risks in consumption. They have no relevance to an enviromental impact study.)
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
This is on par with banning sea salt because they came up with a more efficient evaporation process. With the exception of turbinado (i.e. raw sugarcane extract) and molasses, white cane/beet sugar is 99%+ pure. Who cares if the DNA of the plant is different from the previously "genetically modified" breed of sugar beet? Sugar Beet is right up there with modern corn, strawberries and wheat in terms of plants that have been bred to produce 1000x what the plant produces naturally in the wild. There is no DNA in white sugar, and any that was in the Turbanado or Molasses was destroyed in the boiling process.
moox. for a new generation.
These companies spent a lot of money developing these beets. How dare the US stand in their way? They deserve all the money from selling these beets. And of Course the seeds can spread to other fields. How else can they sue innocent farmers for patent infringement when their crops get unintentionally contaminated by the GM beets?
As long as they grow them in sealed greenhouses that do not allow for cross pollination with the plants I want to actually eat!
I think companies like Monsanto should not be allowed to sue farmers just because the pollen from their genetically modified food crops spread to other fields, Monsanto released the product in to the open air world so it is only natural that the pollen from their products are going to spread to other plants, proving the farmer not at fault...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
What has science ever done for us?!
If only we could go back to the blissful carefree days of the caveman....
does this judge tell farmers what they may and may not plant on their own land?
This is a matter for tort, not judicial legislation.
I don't think many people would disagree. But the solution isn't to ban genetically engineered crops it's to change the law so a farmer can only be sued if he or she can be proved to have known (or had the information to know if they'd cared to think about it) that their seed was actually carrying the trait, and also benefited from the trait (ie it's not like the farmer benefits at all from having beets resistant to a sepecific herbicide if they don't actually spay that herbicide, which would have killed their beets if they didn't contain the trait.)
I agree, for the most part people are paranoid about genetic engineering of food crops. I'm not convinced this is bad though, It's ok to take our time w/stuff like this IMO.
However, the really disturbing issue to me is the cross pollination issue. Seed contaminated by your neighbors RoundUpReady corn? Random test performed by corporate police? Welcome to lawsuit hell and/or bankruptcy. You have no control over which way the wind blows. This is the part of the judge's argument that everyone here seems to be ignoring.
A fitting analogy would be a DRM virus. File infected? Can't prove you're licensed to run that virus? You must have knowingly stolen it. Nope, it doesn't matter if you wrote the song and recorded it yourself.
You can scratch that "safer foods" part - no evidence to support that. In fact, one might try to argue that roundup-ready foods are full of pesticides which is another level altogether from the food modification itself. The other thing is that they are known to go after people who had their crops unintentionally cross pollinated with their proprietary crops.
Their goal is to make money by taxing food, while possibly having a detrimental effect on food safety.
>There's still hope, isn't there? That we can at least get this stuff labeled properly?
It already is - and your tinfoil is showing.
Wanna bet the beet lobby gets a special law through congress so they can keep planting pending the outcome of the environmental impact study?
Wanna bet the beet lobby will cooperate and the study will be done in such a way that it shows only minor, mitigatable impacts on the environment?*
*A complete whitewash would look too suspicious
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm generally the anti-environmental activism type but when it comes to GMO food, there are some serious concerns. Genetic engineering isn't the same as naturally selecting crop variations. It's a whole new game. In some cases the natural barriers that would keep out certain genetic material are circumvented to inject things like pesticide projection that could never naturally make it through the cell wall. Essentially, things are being injected into the dna of crops that could not get in there naturally and then any cross-pollinated crops will have this foreign DNA. Eventually, it's conceivable that ALL crops would be genetically modified. What happens when 10 or 20 years down the road we find that these modifications have serious health hazards but now we've lost all our non GMO varieties? There is little un-biased research done on this issue.
Also check out this documentary, just don't believe everything they say.
Engineered sugar beets reject approval by YOU !
Yours In Ulyanovsk,
Philboyd S.
I see a lot of "it's just sugar" or "everything's genetically modified" arguments cropping up here; it's really not that simple. Plants are surprisingly "promiscuous" (follow this thread for a number of, no doubt, terribly ribald comments on *that* one). Traits adopted by one set of plants can make their way over to others of the same or different species. Depending on what traits are being modified, this can be a bad thing; consider that Roundup resistance in weeds is not just a result of selective pressure, but of the movement of genes from Monsanto's Roundup resistant seed stocks to neighboring plants.
Yes, this sort of "gene flow" happens in the soi disant natural world as well, but, like CO2 production, modern technology allows us to make bigger, more significant differences over a much shorter period of time. Caution is appropriate here.
I think the Judge showed a great understanding in his conclusion. How many others would have the same insight?
Unless you happened to live in California for a few years in the 1990s you've never tasted a genetically modified tomato (and I understood they sold quite well during that time).
Unless you were at one point a grad student who engineered them yourself (or worked in a lab with someone who did) you've never tasted a GM strawberry.
If I'm wrong please point me toward where I can buy the GM seed for either of those.
For the record the only GM fruit or vegetable anyone will probably encounter right now would be a papaya from Hawaii engineered to resist papaya ring spot virus, as GM papayas were introduced after ring spot virus decimated the conventional papayas.
If you're really afraid of GM crops stealing your soul, you can grow them in sealed hydroponic gardens.
The Monsanto suit involved a farmer who specifically cultivated Roundup-resistant rapeseed from a cross pollinated field. It wasn't just natural genetic drift.
See, most GM crops aren't just selected to be bigger or hardier. Most of it actually has genes copied from various bacteria (e.g., Bacillus Thuringiensis) to produce its own pesticides, or to make it more resistant to higher levels of herbicides and/or pesticides.
Yes, they should be harmless to humans (though in a couple of cases they did also copy the gene for a strong allergen.) That's not what I'm talking about.
But if you're going to put the equals sign between that and human selection, I'm affraid I'll have to ask for evidence of even a single crop which started producing pesticides as a result of just selection by humans. I'm genuinely curious.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And that's not even to mention stuff like the Terminator gene, the GM equivalent of server-based DRM. If a crop containing that cross pollinates another crop that doesn't then you may have killed the livelihood of the farmer next door.
The case you're thinking of involved a farmer who specifically gathered cross pollinated rapeseed and selectively bred them for the Monsanto gene. He wasn't sued for genetic drift.
Oh, and linking to hulu is a real jerk move. They block non-Americans.
Agreed. Looking at the genome of say, rice, you can easily pick out some genes that are most closely related to genes in fungus than in other plants, and presumably arrived via horizontal gene transfer. Not a lot, but that's because most horizontally transfered genes serve no purpose out of context in such a different form of like and would be preserved or spread through the gene pool.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from paying for meat certified not to be from modified stock.
Would you argue that non-Kosher food should have to be labelled as such? If not, why should I have to pay to accommodate your superstitions?
But Judge White said that the pollen from the genetically engineered crops might spread to non-engineered beets.
The United States court system is protecting us from miscegenated sugar beets?
Arguments in favor of genetic purity are no more valid when applied to sugar beets than when applied to people.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Yeah that was my first reaction. Half the sugar? I guess corn syrup doesn't count as sugar because what, it's not sold in granulated form?
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
We need more sugar production, not less. I'd love for us to get back to real sugar in foods rather than this stupid corn sweetener junk we've been putting up with for decades. If genetically engineered beets can help, I'm all for it. So what if they cross pollinate "regular" beets? If some nut job is afraid of genetically engineered food, I'm sorry, but GE food is preferable to artificial and corn sweeteners in my opinion.
*All* crops cross pollinate. Why should GM growers be held to a higher standard? They're just as "contaminated" by the other farms.
If you really want crops without any cross contamination, you can grow them in a sealed hydroponic facility.
You're answering the wrong question.
I did not ask whether it's "evil", whatever meaning that might have for a plant.
I did not ask whether such a mutation could theoretically happen in an imaginary alternate reality, via viruses or otherwise. (Though how many viruses can equally affect a bacterium _and_ a plant, now that's a better question.)
I did not ask whether _other_ mutations have been caused by viruses.
I asked for an example where just human selection by clueless farmers in the last 5000 years actually produced a plant that prouduces pesticides. Since that was basically the kind of handwaving I was answering to.
So unless you're going to answer that, well, nice try but non sequitur. I mean, but no banana ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is human progress. These rulings about genetic engineering are foolish because they defend intellectual property for the expense of feeding people. The problem isn't the genetically engineered crop - its clearly better. The idea that humans should not be allowed to alter genes in the environment is stupid. Genes are altered all the time by everything, whether or not people do it is quite alright because we are not somehow separate from the eco-system.
The problem is financial: it's that Monsanto and others have a habit of showing up on your doorstep with a bill because one of their genetically modified seeds may have blown onto your doorstep. If you modified the laws so that people who GM stuff blown onto their land could just use it, or, if their crops were dimished by the GM, they could sue, then you would not have this problem. It's like that for regular seeds. Why not be that way for anything else?
I'm in strong favor of intellectual property rights, but clearly, intellectual property rights should not trump the rights of land ownership.
This is my sig.
to do so. If he causes provable harm to a neighboring farm there are laws to handle that.
Just a bunch of Luddites who either failed to extort money from one of the involved players before going to court.
...continues apace.
Actually, yes. They are referring to granulated "table" sugar (aka sucrose) when they use the word "sugar". It is a case of colloquial vs scientific speech and definitions.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Now is the time to invest in corn syrup futures my friend.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
--Do we really have the confidence in our understanding of genetic mechanisms to rule out harmful side-effects?--
YES, but that's not the issue in this case.
The problem with common sense is it isn't.
The sugar farmers need to grow something else and our stupid feds need to drop the damn sugar Tariffs.
The rest of the world enjoys CHEAP sugar. All our food in the U.S. uses shitty corn syrup because sugar is too expensive in the U.S. Go to Canada or Mexico and order a soda (not that I'd drink that stuff anymore) and you'll see it tastes MUCH better than the corn syrup soda you get here.
No one has been sued for genetic drift.
The farmer that was sued lost the case because he isolated the plants that were pollinated by his neighbours crop, and specifically selected for the GM trait.
Yeah that was my first reaction. Half the sugar? I guess corn syrup doesn't count as sugar because what, it's not sold in granulated form?
Fructose != sucrose. They are different sugars. Fructose is a monosaccharide and is extracted primarily form corn. Sucrose is a disaccharide (one glucose + one fructose) and is extracted primarily from sugar cane and sugar beets. Other sugars with commercial uses or significance in human biology are lactose, mannose, galactose, and maltose.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
And as a consumer (not a farmer I'm afraid) I can't believe Judge White claims to be championing the right of consumers to choose whether or not to eat genetically modified beet by taking the choice completely of our hands. Once you take genetically modified sugar beets off the market, this is no choice it's either non-genetically modified (and therefore must be grown in ways that increase topsoil erosion and require herbicides that are more toxic to humans) sugar beets ... or other non-genetically modified sugar beets (that also must be grown in ways that increase topsoil erosion and require herbicides that are more toxic to humans).
Pollen drift had some risk of reducing choice slightly. A judicial order will end choice completely.
> Monoculture is deadly. Think of it as inbreeding.
1.... 2.... 3....
<ducks>
So, I'm not really sure why a posting on sugar beets makes it onto /. anyway, but I'll cast in a couple important points for civil discussion.
1) The pollen from sugar beets does travel a very long distance (Darmency, H. et al., 2009. Pollen dispersal in sugar beet production fields. TAG Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 118(6), 1083-1092).
2) This is may be an environmental concern, but it is also a concern for anyone growing sugar beets. That is, there are problems controlling weedy beets when herbicide-resistant beets sprout up.
3) This entire issue is unimportant when beet growers cultivate off the tops of their beets, rendering them sterile. If they receive a higher yield for the herbicide usage, this may be an extra drive across the field may be a good option for preserving the integrity of the resistance trait.
If you actually knew what Monsanto has been doing in the legal arena, you'd know that you don't have to be a botanist to smell a fish.... Read the rest of the posts and do some research about Monsanto's litigation history.
> apparently some layman judge type just wants to make noise.
Perhaps he is instead more familiar than you with Monsanto's legal history?
> I can almost guarantee this case will change nothing and do nothing but waste
> the time of quite a few attorneys.
You might be right about that, except the part where you forgot about Monsanto pouring enormous $$$'s into those lawyers' pockets to try to get this precedent overturned, erased, or forgotten. I'm sure those lawyers don't view it as a "waste of time".
Yeah, they really need to label them organic crops so I can avoid buying them. What a snow job that is.
This is a stupid issue to go organic on. I can sympathize with folks who want to keep pesticides and keep their tomato plants organic, or some veggie/fruit you eat whole, but sugar beets are refined into sucrose. I don't know anyone that actually eats sugar beets as a meal. Sucrose just isn't that complicated a molecule... how hard is it to verify there aren't any contaminants or byproducts in the sugar? Even the legal system should be able to clue into this one...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I'm not concerned about eating genetically engineered beets.
The real problem with "eliminating the choice to eat non-engineered beets" is that it would make all sugar beets effectively proprietary: farmers have been successfully sued for growing genetically engineered crops even when that was due to contamination from adjacent fields.
Of course, a better way of dealing with all this would be to eliminate patents on genetically engineered crops altogether but ease the approval process.
Many people object to genetically engineered foods not because they fear that the end product is unsafe, but because of the impact that growing them has on farmers, the economy, and the environment.
Fructose is a monosaccharide and is derived primarily from glucose extracted from corn. While there are natural sources of fructose, corn isn't one of them.
Strawberries and Tomatoes are both listed under "In development."
Just to be clear I'm not saying there will never be GM tomatoes or strawberries, just that you can't eat them today. So while you or others may feel tomatoes today are less tasty than they used to be, the fault doesn't lie with genetic engineering since the ones everyone is eating haven't been touched by the technology.
Thanks for the link though. It's a great resource.
The problem isn't so much the engineering. That's just applying new technology to the age-old practice of agriculture.
The problem is that Monsanto (and others) want to control the rights to the genetic code they produce. This puts them in the position to benefit from the natural spread (through pollination) of their intellectual property. Yes, they produced the code originally. But that code replicates naturally! It's like the New York Times coming after you for licensing fees because you have copies of their photos in your browser cache.
There's tremendous potential for abuse in allowing a company to own genetic code in this way. How long before someone starts secretly creating viruses and blights in order to wipe out crops that happen to be missing a patented resistance gene?
I'm just a dump web guy, and not particularly evil. If I can cook up that scenario, you can bet that it has crossed the minds of executives at Monsanto.
I totally agree with your post, but I thought it was worth mentioning the following quote from the article:
:)
David Berg, president of American Crystal Sugar Company, the nationâ(TM)s largest sugar beet processor, said food companies had accepted sugar from the biotech beets. âoeTheyâ(TM)ve been a big nonevent in terms of customer acceptance,â he said.
A "nonevent", eh? I bet there would most certainly be an "event" if there were labels on the food.
This is just one more reason to abolish the patent system. Rent-seeking is out of control, particularly with respect to the desire for a captured market. Sure, let's get rid of software patents and gene patents and business method patents. Let's see how long that will last. As long as there is a patent system, incumbents will always seek more protection. Best to blast it out completely, at the roots.
Ok, I know that was more than you asked for, but I just needed to vent.
Proceed as you were.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
The concern here isn't over contamination of the end product, but the environmental impact of growing the crop.
You might have a point if he hadn't known his neighbours were using GM rapeseed, or if he didn't know what it did.
He lost the case because he knowingly derived the GM trait from plants he knew had it. The court found that this was no different from seed saving.
Now, you could argue that we shouldn't allow Monsanto to charge an ongoing license, or that they shouldn't be able to prevent what the farmer did and I'd agree with you, but that has nothing to do with GM crops. You can get a patent on a plant strain developed the slow way, too.
Have you eaten wheat? Corn? Beef? Chicken?
All of these products were genetically modified by people long before we knew what genes were. In its natural state, wheat blows away in the wind, leaving no food to eat. Mutant strains kept the seeds, and we cultivated those. Mutant strains developed by Borlaug in the 1950s saved millions from death and billions from starving.
Cows are domesticated from aurochs, now extinct. Wild corn is an inch long and hard as a rock.
Everything we've eaten for millenia has been genetically modified for maximum yield and higher efficiency.
We just have different tools now. What if they'd used phenotype selection to create a super-sweet beet instead? Would that be a problem? Eventually Mostanto could create a roundup-ready corn using artificial selection, the same way we've been doing it since we dug furrows in Mesopotamia.
Would that be fine? Is it just the tool that's the problem or is it hysteria at anything that's genetically modified and labelled as a Frankenfood by enivronmentalists?
For the record, I am a vegetarian.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
The post you replied to didn't claim that direct gene splicing isn't "natural" (whatever that really means), it claimed it wasn't comparable to cross-breeding and selection.
And you have to admit that the rate of (significant) horizontal gene transfer in nature in food crops, over the period of the recent past, is small compared to the rate of intentional gene transfers of genetic engineering in the same period.
So what? Americans already pay five times as much as the rest of the world for sugar because of 18th-century political corruption. Now they'll just pay twenty times as much.
It's Monsanto's evil plan to drive us beekeepers out of the market for sweeteners.
The problem with your suggestion is that Monsanto has made a habit of lobbying http://consumerist.com/363935/ regulatory agencies to prohibit food items from carrying labels that effectively certify the item as coming from Monsanto-free sources or production methods.
When producers of non-GMO products are prohibited from labeling their product as-such so that I can choose which I want to buy, then *YES* there is something stopping me from paying for the non-GMO product.
What Monsanto has repeatedly done is (analogously) argue that Kosher food must never be labeled as Kosher because it is nutritionally equivalent to non-Kosher food and "Kosher" labels on some products would cause harm to producers who do not choose to certify their products as Kosher.
> Eventually Mostanto could create a roundup-ready corn using artificial selection, the same way
> we've been doing it since we dug furrows in Mesopotamia.
OK, now explain how Monsanto could develop GURT by using selection. That would be kind of hard, considering that the trait they want to enhance is sterility? So, yes, all our food is genetically modified, and no, direct genetic engineering isn't just a stronger form of cross-breeding and selection.
> Would that be fine? Is it just the tool that's the problem or is it hysteria at anything that's
> genetically modified and labelled as a Frankenfood by enivronmentalists?
I agree that the unwashed masses are hysterical, but my feeling is that the judge is right. Monsanto have already sued their victim(s) (and won!) in the past when their unwanted technology was passed to neighboring farms via pollen, through no fault of the neighboring farmer. That, at least, has to stop. It's similar to having RIAA sue you for downloading music which a computer worm transferred to your computer.
From when I was very young (6 or 7) until a few years ago (I am almost 50 now) my parents used to buy milk straight from the farm. Often the milk was put in the bucket we used to transport it right after the cow was milked (by hand) and only sifted. Later the farmer had to tap it from the milk tank, but it was still raw milk. None of us have ever suffered from any bad effects. All members of our family (5) were and are rarely ill. Last time I had (3) sick days was (I think) about 5 years ago and the time before I can't even remember. The milk was not only cheaper, it also tasted a lot better than the supermarket stuff. When I went to live on my own I had to "learn" to drink the 'milk' sold in the supermarkets. Now I have no problems with it anymore, but I still can't drink things like skimmed milk. The only reason my parents and my siblings don't drink real milk anymore is the fact that 'Europe' forbade farmers to tap from their milk tanks a few years ago because it was deemed 'unhygienic'.
(I do realize this is anecdotal, but afaik this goes for all people we know who bought their milk straight from the farm (and did not cook it before consumption).
It is a weird thing that people are so used to everything being pasteurized or sterilized and being so overprotected to everything that they can not imagine that a lot of it is not really necessary. And they wonder why their resistance to illnesses decreases...
This is not to say that 'every advancement made by man is bad', shelf life of most stuff improves vastly when pasteurized/sterilized and I guess there will be two or three cases of food poisoning less per year. And you can settle for getting 'fresh' milk / whatever stuff once in two or three weeks instead of twice per week. That the taste of most processed stuff is horrible if you know how real food is supposed to taste is something that goes past most people, used as they are to (over-)processed food. Not every advancement is in all aspects an improvement.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
He did use Roundup, and his plants weren't just accidentally cross pollinated. He killed everything in his field but the cross pollinated plants with an overdose of Roundup, and gathered seed from the plants that survived.
And yes, linking to hulu is a dick move. If you can't find an alternate source, don't link it at all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Monsanto has gone through a very confusing corporate history.
This is quite simplified;
Monsanto used to be a large chemical company with several agricultural divisions. Products like PCB and DDT were made by the Monsanto chemical company.
At some point in the company history, they decided to spin off the agricultural products. The new spin-off got to keep the "Monsanto" name, while the chemical company renamed itself Solutia. Solutia continues to exist today and is the historical descendant of the original Monsanto chemical business.
This ignores the Pharmacia spin-off, the Pfizer acquisition, and several other twists and turns, but it makes the general point clear - the agricultural company known today as "Monsanto" is not the linear descendant of the old chemical company with the same name.
http://www.rawfoodinfo.com/articles/art_GEyieldstudies.html
and here
http://technology.open.ac.uk/cts/pita/AnnC11-mono-monsanto.pdf
and here
http://www.daff.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/539443/gm-canola-info-package.pdf
Basically, what a conglomeration of studies cited by the first link shows is that yields are actually lower. I've also heard of studies indicating lower yields for GM soybeans due to less drought tolerance (see second and 3rd) and salt.
So we are gambling on contaminating wild strains with weaker GM strains. Esp. when you factor in global warming.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It's no wonder children in the U.S. are FAT. They are sold food during commercials that is largely sugar.
"There's still hope, isn't there? That we can at least get this stuff labeled properly?"
Yes, that small step is good, but there's still little hope. If you pay taxes in the U.S., you pay to kill Iraqis and Afghanis so that weapons makers can make more profit. The corruption is deep and profound, and the Obama administration has only touched the surface. Also, of course, those who profit from oil want to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.
This issue is not about GMOs, whatever their merits or weaknesses may be.
The is about the ongoing battle of the corn industry which wants to promote High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) over sugar beets and sugar cane.
HFCS is almost completely unknown outside the United States. Except in the Americans, corn is grown almost exclusively as a feed stock for animals. The only reason HFCS exists at all is because of MASSIVE (in the order of 50-60%) subsidies on corn production.
Remember C&H cane sugar? Most sugar in the USA used to come from Hawaii (and before that, Cuba) before successful lobbying by agribusiness (NOT SMALL FARMERS!) led to a massive subsidy on corn, which led to the invention of HFCS.
High Fructose Corn Syrup is evil. It makes people sick and fat. It's mildly poisonous. Corn production is environmentally destructive in many areas (sugar cane production in the tropics is MUCH more efficient). etc. These are facts, not opinion. We don't need to "ban" HFCS. We need to end farm subsidies.
The argument against this is screwing the so-called "family farmers".
"Family" farmers don't exist, and haven't existed for over 50 years. It's a myth. *I* am supposedly a family farmer. Yet, I've never worked on the farm. I own land that I lease to agribusiness. And my cousin, who runs his own acreage, barely goes out there. He has an army of Mexicans that work the land (like everyone else). A white nuclear family that hires 150 Mexican workers to do most of the work is not a "family farm".
There are REAL family businesses that employ only family members, like many restaurants and small retail stores. They seem to manage without massive government subsidies.
OK, now explain how Monsanto could develop GURT [wikipedia.org] by using selection. That would be kind of hard, considering that the trait they want to enhance is sterility?
I'm not even close to a genetics expert but I expect you would do it something along the lines of the way you create a mule. There are plenty of ways to create sterile offspring without resorting to modern genetic techniques. The modern techniques just make it a whole lot easier. It might be too costly to bother but I don't see any fundamental impossibility here.
...no, direct genetic engineering isn't just a stronger form of cross-breeding and selection.
Then what is it? I have to say that I think it is nothing more than a stronger form but please... prove me wrong.
How about counter-suing for environmental contamination. I mean, it's kind of like IP and file sharing right? And their not just making the pollen of Monsanto genetic ip 'available', but allowing it to spread unchecked, which is akin to somehow sharing files and infecting other people computers with those files (and then suing them for having them).
What an amazing business model.
Quack, quack.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am surprised that beets are being treated differently than corn. Corn is already genetically engineered with the exact same problems as sited by the judge regarding beets. There is currently no way to guarantee that any corn is not-bioengineered becuase of cross-pollination. In my opinion, the real danger here is diluting the genetic diversity of any crop. If we only plant crops with the same genetic make-up, when some new undiscovered or yet to be evolved disease comes around it will wipe out all off out corn (or beets, or whatever).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I would argue, however, that it would take order of magnitudes longer time for random mutation to stumble upon longer, desirable sequences which happen to exist in frogs.
No argument there. Modern genetic engineering is undeniably powerful and potentially dangerous but we've always been able to harness useful genetic mutations. The new technology just makes it faster, more reliable and more accurate. The best analogy I can think of is that it's a bit like trying to dig a hole and suddenly getting a backhoe when all you used to have was a shovel. You can get to the same end point with other techniques but it is going to be a lot harder and slower.
We've been manipulating genes for the last 10,000+ years. Only difference now is that we're better at it. Of course there are risks but there are huge rewards too. What annoys me is that most people who argue against genetic engineering don't even begin to actually understand the technology. There ARE reasonable critiques to be made but those critiques are made so rarely...
Finally, it is entirely plausible that modern genetics, or more specifically, modern agribusiness, could reduce the genetic diversity of our food supply. I'm going to guess I don't need to inform you of the risks there.
I'd say it's not only plausible but that it has already happened. Economies of scale tend to work against diversity. That's not always a bad thing (starvation is a worse problem than a non-diverse food supply) but monocultures do expose us to new risks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd say it's not only plausible but that it has already happened. Economies of scale tend to work against diversity. That's not always a bad thing (starvation is a worse problem than a non-diverse food supply) but monocultures do expose us to new risks.
*ahem* evolution requires a sort-of "minimum efficiency"* from any species in order to have it survive. This minimum efficiency level is constantly being raised by the competition.
There are multiple phases to any evolutionary process. In the first stage, when the *initial* colonization of a lifeless environment takes place, there is a massive explosion of diversity. But once that initial wave dies out, it only goes down**, as more and more species fail to achieve the minimum efficiency levels. Initially this merely eliminates harmful mutations, but it will start killing entire species and ethnicities within those species soon. Eventually (usually this takes a looooooooooooooooong while though) a "grey goo" type event takes place : some species finds a very efficient process and colonizes the whole planet (since no other species can acquire the energy necessary to stop it).
* minimum efficiency comprises a lot of factors, not just energy collection and use, but anti-getting eaten strategies, anti-parasite strategy, anti-symbiosis strategy ... it is some number that summarizes everything. A sort of inverse "price" on the species' survival, so to speak. Eventually there is no stopping the species with the lowest price.
** in the same way temperature equalizes : there is no single physical law that prohibits that everyone's house just heats itself without energy expenditure. It's just so massively unlikely it's considered absurd. That doesn't mean that all sorts of effects change the required heating level in a house, but on average, the entropy of the solar system can only decrease. Likewise species diversity, once the lifeless environment is colonized, can only decrease.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Although our spineless Europoliticos have been bravely bending over for Monsato and co, the resistance to GM foods is so high here that there is almost zero chance that it will ever get accepted by the majority of Europe's population, and it doesn't sell either since there are Europe wide laws that GM foods or foods containing GM products have to be labelled as such.
Monsato is like some science fiction corporation gone wrong. Given how many scientific breakthroughs have proven to be dangerous or bad in the long run, Monsato could literally bring a good deal of the world to starvation with their product. God, even that benighted backwater, Zimbabwe refused to accept USAID cornmeal because it had GM maize (what you yanks call corn) in it.
I'm not really into liberals and their crap, but I would be willing to go to jail to stop things like Monsato.
We used to engineer crops based on the outcome, the totality of the plant. Now, we're engineering crops based on single genes.
I'm well aware that we now have a scalpel where we used to have a sledgehammer. That doesn't change what we are doing, merely the speed and accuracy of how we do it. We used to make changes pretty much by guess and check without any clear idea what our changes were doing. The ONLY way to fully understand a genome is to make changes to single genes and see what happens.
I'm not saying genetic engineering is bad; I'm saying we should know literally everything we can about genes before we start fiddling with things.
A nice sentiment but not really possible or practical. The only way to really learn about genes is to "fiddle" with them and see what happens. We have a theory and then we test that theory. There is no way you can learn "everything" about genetics prior to doing the experiments and research. This necessarily involves tweaking the expression of individual genes if we really want to understand what is going on.
We can't even get 100% man made inventions to work properly (software) and we arrogantly think we can hack stuff we barely grasp and it will work perfectly??
Its like some hacker wannabe kid with a bunch of downloaded tools (and no skills) just cracked his 2nd video game and promises it runs wonderfully and uploads it for others to use....
Or when IT promises something is going to be fool proof...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It clearly duplicates functionality and will cause consumer confusion.
Super Number One, a podcast about all things geek
I'm just not frothing at the mouth over them.
He didn't lose the case due to cross pollination. He lost the case because he specifically sought out the plants that had been cross pollinated, and used Roundup overdoses to kill any that *hadn't* been cross pollinated.
No one has been successfully sued due to natural cross pollination.
Even if the vast majority of people who argue against genetically modified food are idiots, your argument is stupid.
You're wrong on two very fundamental points.
GM is genetic modification, and can be from anything from mutation to breeding. The results will either breed true or die, and any changes that make it harmful will usually make it die if it can ever germinate. "Junk" DNA is full of linkages between the things that kill the organism and others that consume it if it breeds dominant, but is carried along 'safely' as deactivated recessive genes like bad grades on your permanent record.
GE is selective DNA alteration, genetic engineering, being done by people who can change things so selectively that they can unlink the genes that make it harmful to itself from the ones that make it harmful to others without realizing it, and since nobody tests food in clinical trials just because it's a new 'strain', can kill people sitting at the dinner table.
GE has killed people. Showa Denko engineered some yeast for fermenting the amino acid tryptophan to produce twice as much. They didn't test it for anything other than tryptophan and that was 99%+ pure, and so didn't know it was ranking out the toxin ditryptophan. 37 people died eating it and over 1400 were crippled to various degrees. Showa Denko paid US$4.5BN in damages and rather than announce it the FDA simply warned pharmaceutical makers about "substance X" found in some supplements. To this day US phrama acts as though the it makes perfect sense that top drug testing agency couldn't identify this food stuff adulterant, and will not produce the non-narcotic sedative that the rest of the world still uses with no problems as long as the yeast isn't fucked around with by fumble-fingered and -minded corporations. Obviously FDA is capable of testing down to the molecular level, so any result of "substance X" is false. I'm not sure who detected the ditryptophan, but it certainly wasn't the FDA; they were offered the yeast for testing, and declined.
GE food is not tested rigorously.
GE food has injured and killed.
The agency responsible for the former and for preventing the latter refuses to do either.
And the sheeple call it names and eat it anyway, secure in their self-enforced ignorance, believing that The Government Cares About You And So Do The Corporations It Works For.
Worst that can happen is you die. If it's someone else and the company that makes your corn flakes has to shell out billions, you'll still be around to pay a buck a box more for your breakfast so they can recoup the costs before the next quarterly. And besides, it wasn't you that died. This time.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
At least no more than any other vehicle to mainline sugar. Presumably, it'd all be refined down to crystalline (CH2O)n.
The environmental/economic impacts are another matter.
I've never heard of mannose before. Sounds like a bad movie about a guy with lumpy knees.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
It's a naturally occurring sugar found in legumes and other plants. The name comes from the manna of the Bible, a sweet secretion of sap from some desert plants that contains mannose. It is not metabolized well by humans, so it is used sometimes to provide sweetness without calories. A significant portion of the non-metabolized sugar is excreted in the urine, and mannose has some use in treating urinary tract infections.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Exactly how much genetic similarity is permitted before a genome is considered infringement? AFAIK a little mutation happens with every generation, so if you replant the product of your crop then it isn't the same genome.
Irish potato famine, anyone?