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Anti-GMO Activist Recants
Freddybear writes "Former anti-GMO activist Mark Lynas, who opposed genetically modified food in the 1990s, said recently, at the Oxford Farming Conference: 'I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologize for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment. As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely. So I guess you'll be wondering — what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.' To vilify GMOs is to be as anti-science as climate-change deniers, he says. To feed a growing world population (with an exploding middle class demanding more and better-quality food), we must take advantage of all the technology available to us, including GMOs. To insist on 'natural' agriculture and livestock is to doom people to starvation, and there’s no logical reason to prefer the old ways, either. Moreover, the reason why big companies dominate the industry is that anti-GMO activists and policymakers have made it too difficult for small startups to enter the field."
Kepler figured out he had it all wrong after a career spent trying to prove bad theories (Platonic model of the universe? Really?) ... and arguably launched the age of the scientific enlightenment.
I'm anxious read Mr. Lynas' coming works.
I find this refreshing. If only everyone would take the time to reevaluate their beliefs from time to time we might be so much better off.
Cross contamination & subsequent loss of organic certification isn't an issue then?
How about Monsanto dragging innocent farmers into court?
Sounds like he has already found someone else to vilify.
research has shown some GMO's are harmful.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I have not read the article, but a couple of things in this summary ringed some bells: current GMOs use is not to feed the world population, for instance USA corn monopoly is empowered with Monsanto GMO corn to make farmers and countries even more dependent and them. There is a whole vicious circle involving subsidies, monoculture, corn industrial derivatives, corn feedstock, antibiotics that has nothing with "feeding the world population" but with empowering monopolies". Furthermore "'natural' agriculture", is he talking about traditional agriculture? I couldn't agree more that it's doomed. But the UN has studied Agro-ecology and found out that it could double agriculture production http://is.gd/oxtixy
Burgeoning bourgeoisie: For the first time in history more than half the world is middle-class—thanks to rapid growth in emerging countries. John Parker (interviewed here) reports. http://www.economist.com/node/13063298?story_id=13063298&source=hptextfeature
In all cases, follow the money. While I'm not completely anti-GMO, the companies producing GMOs have not been honest, not been honest, and not been honest. As a long time hater and now a big advocate, I wonder who's payroll he made it on too in order to now back GMO foods. There is a tremendous amount of science showing how bad GMOs are, much worst than the anti-GMO crowd initially thought! So his "because of Science" answer is pure bullshit!
Studies have shown that GMO foods are not only unhealthy for humans, but often harm the environment. As a simple example, Poland found that a GMO corn was killing off whole colonies of bees. Poland outlawed GMO corn.
Studies showed that long term, GMO foods can cause some nasty cancers in lab rats. When mixed with a certain pesticide, the cancer was insanely fast growing and abnormally massive tumors would be found.
A very large GMO company ran smear campaigns trying to keep hiding what was GMO and what was not. Do you really trust eating foods that they don't want to tell you are genetically modified? Not only not tell you, but spend nearly a billion dollars to keep you from knowing?
That same very large GMO has been suing people left and right for having seed gone awry grow on their own farms. They have monopolized and killed off competition in many markets, many of which are overseas and impoverished areas. Interestingly, after the Mississippi river flooding, guess who bought most of the farm land? Of course it's only those Chinese and Russians that can influence the weather though, and hell an upstanding US company would never do such a thing would they?
Needless to say at this point, I don't trust anyone that changes sides based on a lie.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Really? Shouldn't the science have come first?
This is great and all that he saw the light when it comes to science... but with technology and science comes responsibility as well. Two key issues come to mind:
(1) Cross pollination of farmers crops, and then demanding royalties from the seed owners,
(2) and engineering the crops to disable re-planting the same seeds for the purpose of profit.
One actual example would be allowing a patent to monsanto on basmati rice...
link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/jan/31/gm.food
...Lynas jumped into his gold plated Ferrari and drove back to the country club for another round of golf with his new best friends from the Monsanto Board of Directors.
Roundup used in commercial agriculture (food crops) only eliminated weeds for a few decades, now there are superweeds that have evolved its own immunity to Roundup.
what happens in the lab and used in the fields will find its way in to the wild (it is unavoidable)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Seriously, there is plenty of science that shows issues related to GMO crops. If not the crops themselves, the fact that a round up ready corn means several times more round up applied to the ground. This is scienfitically documented.
So I am of the opinion this guy is probably just some bought out loon.
Science, and advocate of real science, would concede there is far too much we just do not know at this point. And MANY fears that were pointed to, have been proved valid. Like infection of wild specieis.
That's SCIENCE...
The two options aren't unquestioning acceptance and total ban. GMO with strict regulations can be useful. Without it, it's a disaster waiting to happen. He is just a professional activist who can't accept that the world isn't black and white.
Don't worry... If we get hungry enough, we'll eat the Monsanto Board of Directors....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Found this gem on wayback machine http://web.archive.org/web/20090422041121/http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto_today/2009/biotech_crop_safety.asp
"Millions of farm animals have consumed nutritious feed rations made with grain from biotech crops and people have consumed hundreds of millions of meals containing foods derived from biotech crops—all without a single substantiated instance of illness or harm due to the GM ingredient."
We all are lab rats
That's an Orwellian sounding retraction. It reads like he had a gun to his head while transcribing it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The living standards have been getting better and still are, even in the western world. If you have some evidence to the contrary, I would like to see it. Oh you mean that the rich are getting richer so that makes you feel worse off in comparison even though you really are better off as well?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Some of us don't like the idea of corporations eventually holding patents on all our food. Sorry but if we can't sustain ourselves without giving up something so basic then we need fewer people on the planet.
Cross contamination & subsequent loss of organic certification isn't an issue then? How about Monsanto dragging innocent farmers into court?
I would personally advocate slicing GMO issues into separate bins. What you're referring to is the Intellectual Property bin which is a problem with (at least the US) most countries and the ownership (whether an instance of or the general use of) genetic material. Put all those lawsuits and patents and copyright crap in one bin.
Then you have another bin where we analyze the human element of consumption of GMO foods. What is the process to determine when something has undergone enough testing and is ready to push it forward? How many years of human trials must be held before it can be released? We do this with drugs but strangely, I haven't heard of much about this with GMO crops -- why is that?
Lastly we have a more open problem like environmental issues both surrounding the plant's effect on its environment and also the adjusted actions of the humans cultivating this crop. For example: with Roundup ready plants from Monsanto, have we really analyzed what the increased usage of chemicals like Roundup has on the immediate vicinity of the fields? Do we know that these genetic constructs that are taken from an insect and inserted into a plant do not adversely affect the pollen and have indirect affects on hay fever or honey bees? Again, how do we test this and how long should it be tested before it's pushed nationwide.
Lynas raises an interesting point I had not considered -- that my above desires for process and bureaucracy will prevent a small company from venturing into this field. On the other hand, we've been using selective breeding to move past a lot of the hurdles Lynas mentioned that GMO crops are supposed to move us even further past. It's unfortunate but this isn't a black and white issue and I'm against the unfettered proliferation of gene constructs that have been taken from other organisms and inserted into plants without sufficient testing.
The process of DNA -> Amino Acid -> Protein is still a very difficult puzzle for us as humans and I feel we should not openly experiment with inserting stuff at Point A when we don't know the full effects that yields in points B and C. I feel like there is still a lot to be achieved with selective breeding and until we have a better understanding of protein folding, we should shy away from smashing DNA into strands of plants unless it's absolutely critical to humanity. Go ahead and do that stuff in a lab to better understand it but leave it in a lab until there's a process that ensures it is safe.
My work here is dung.
Neither extreme is particularly credible, nor is going from one extreme to the other without at any point having a balanced perspective.
The technology to genetically modify food species is not bad, but misuses of the technology are, and the misuses are happening.
Amusing, lumping together global warming (is that even the name of the new scare anymore?) and GMO.
I don't think one can easily find a "Climate Change" denier. Everyone knows climates change over time.
What you will find are those that deny that climate change is more than minutely affected by man made causes.
I think the "former wrong-doer (or in this case, wrong-thinker) does right" think is cool and all, but I don't think anybody sane needed to hear this from him to form an opinion, and the anti-GMO nuts won't be swayed by it.
Prepare for him to be vilified as a 'shill' and accused of all sorts of nonsense by anti-GMO whackos.
Terminator genes have never been in a comercial product. EVER.
Congratulations, that doesn't mean GMO is always good.
It is a bad thing to breed pesticides into our food supply without absolute certainty of they are safe.
It is not a bad thing to have to label GMO foods for what they are.
....population reduction.
This can be in part accouplished with sterilizing GMO's
The real reason he changed his mind
for the science - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFnrvcS6AQ
population reduction is as well in United Nations Agenda 21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21
Exactly. To here these Occupy types blather you'd think the middle class is sleeping under a bridge.
The standard of living for an American poor person is very high for most of the world, and mostly not so far behind socialist paradises in the EU. I'll give you that we need some sort of means-tested max-out-of-pocket universal single payer health care, but other than that it's a bunch of crybabying and class envy.
A few years ago the closest grocery store to where I was living was a Coop. Which was great in the summer because it was stocked with a lot of fresh stuff from local farmers (it was a rural college town).
Well one of my biggest sources of income is the family farms I've inherited along with my Dad that we lease out. We're semi involved helping the farmer with trying new methods on our farms trying to boost yields (Rice & Soybeans are the primary crop, some years corn). This is mainly my father as he's retired and it gives him something to do, but as he's gotten up into his 70's I've started to take a more involved role in things.
One time I was at the Coop and commented about rice and lack of a particular brand that we sold our rice to which led to a conversation with one of the patrons who flipped out when I mentioned we had switched to a new hybrid seed. She went on this total anti-GMO rant at which point there were several people looking on and I said, "I said Hybrid. As in Rice A was bred with Rice B to produce the strain we plant. Farmers have been doing this for centuries now. Pretty much everything in your bag has been Genetically Modified using cross breeding."
Then I left and went on about my business leaving her red in the face not exactly sure how to respond to that.
And that's what I've never understood. To these people using cross breeding and classical Mendelian genetics to modify plants are fine. But go in scientifically and do the same thing in a sophisticated lab and suddenly it's evil.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Who cares what he has to say?
Any blanket assertion of GMOs being bad for you is just as idiotic and pointless as a blanket assertion GMOs are not bad for you.
Every case must be judged on the merits and it must not stop with the question of the qualities of the product. One must also consider the secondary effects playing god has on the environment and fucked up geopolitics of globalization meets Monsanto.
The tawdry subject of coin comes immediately to mind. Was this person somehow encouraged to make these vast, overly general statements?
Oh you mean that the rich are getting richer so that makes you feel worse off in comparison even though you really are better off as well
Except that by the metric of household income the lower income tiers aren't particularly better off. The wealthy saw a significant increase in their incomes (inflation-adjusted) over the last several decades; the working poor saw almost none. See here, and especially this plot.
So you can spend billions developing a product and because it's easy to steal anyone should be able to just use it for free? You should absolutely be able to patent a life form _you create_.
Linking to "Canada's Best Satirical Newspaper". Really sir, an article stating "Cucumbers Cause Genital Baldness" didn't trigger your skepticism?
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
I'm shocked to hear that. Also shocked to read, from the same source, that the US is aquiring the Canadian Maple Leaf symbol: http://www.thelapine.ca/united-states-acquires-maple-leaf-symbol
You don't work for the Chinese media do you? Just wondering.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Hello person on the internet who can't descriminate a real news story from a story on a website that bills itself as "Canada's Best Satirical Newspaper". For other hard hitting facts to base your well though-out world view on, I recommend www.theonion.com
When they stop being the patented and wholly owned product of megacorperations simply trying to control the world's food supply.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
All food that is produced by humans through agriculture and farming has been genetically modified in some way, even though much of it happened in ancient times. Corn would cease to exist without humans. Almonds would all be poisonous. Cattle would not be docile. Wheat would scatter it's seeds before we could collect them. Man has been genetically modifying its food for thousands of years - even if we didn't always understand that's what we were doing. We actually understand the consequences of what we are doing far better than we ever did - because we are doing it consciously with science. This is what he discovered.
Income and standard of living are orthogonal metrics: standard of living can increase while income decreases, and vice-versa.
And in the western world, standard of living has increased more than income has decreased.
Since when are terminator genes good for the environment?
"Terminator genes" are a perfect example of the scaremongering on the anti-GMO side. They were never really deployed, and Monsanto has vowed not to do so.
And even if they were, you've got the idea wrong. They weren't an environmental threat - rather, terminator genes were scary because they'd make poor farmers reliant on big industry for their seeds (Terminator genes prevent the resultant plants from having viable seeds). They COULD actually be good for the environment, as they'd prevent GM plants from spreading uncontrolled (which is another scare story).
There's pluses and minuses to GM plants for food. But the debate is dominated by people with bizarre, uninformed emotional connections to one side or the other. Like yourself. Are you as brave and open minded as the guy in the OP? Having found out you're double-wrong on this, are you going to reconsider the issue and perhaps take a moment to learn about what's at stake?
I doubt it. I think it's much more likely that you'll lash out at me because I'm mean, or something equally productive.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I recall having a discussion with an anti-GMO campaigner in the late 90s in France. I was insisted that what was needed was extensive testing protocols, not unlike new drug approvals, rather than blanket opposition.
Sadly in Europe they got mostly blanket opposition while in USA we got mostly "rollover and hope that crops which produce their own DDT are not bad for you".
A total loss-loss situation.
...too often it's USED for profit at the expense of mankind and the environment and not for the betterment of mankind or the environment. This is a huge problem. Science is science and is great for advancement. Problem is, businessmen don't care about consequences or advancement. They simply think "how can we profit from this knowledge" and too often "environment/health/people be damned". GMO is not the problem. It's how it is USED that will/will not be the problem.
Sugapablo
Thanks only to an extremely broad definition of middle class that would include many that westerners would describe as working poor.
Anyone with merely the potential to escape poverty is considered middle class by this definition. That includes, e.g., the minimum wage fry cook because one day he could in theory become manager.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I agree with your points to a great extent, especially about the patents.
On the other hand, engineering a viable organism is both in our interests to promote, but it is also expensive to do. Someday, it may well be very cheap and accessible, on the order of simple cross-breeding. That is not currently the case. Creating some random lifeform is easy, creating the one we want to get, without the disadvantages, needs to be supported somehow.
Of course, I am not sure I believe in patents as being useful any more. Like anything, I think they were useful in a time before those who would abuse the system became adept at making them barriers to progress. Without patents, people would still invent things, but they'd use secrecy to protect their advances, instead of patents. Since secrecy would not prevent reverse engineering, I'd say that simple reverse engineering is likely to provide all of the information that we might want the patents to provide. After all, patents at this point, are no guarantee that you can make anything out of the presented ideas anyhow. I'd say we should just dispense with them, going forward.
What exploding middle class? The one in China and maybe India?
In some places in Africa, too.
And? Are you saying that those people are somehow not middle class?
Nonsense.
People are earning less and working more. Meanwhile access to basic physical needs like health care are on the decline. We are headed for a next Guilded Age and many people seem to be all for it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.
the easy solution is to label GMO and non-GMO
foods. let the people's dollars do the voting.
GMO is inherently centralized, requiring large companies; "small startups" are never going to be significant in that field. It takes one farmer to make a new breed with traditional methods.
On this, I disagree. Right now, I think the patent regime and perhaps the complexity of the processes does make GM difficult, but I see no reason that the process cannot be simplified and refined to the extent that small high technology firms or even individual farmers could not, some day, do their own GM work.
I do agree, on the other hand, that such a process could have a lot of roadblocks put in the way of progress, but let's be honest, DNA is just data like mp3s. Once the data is found, its there to copy, and with that data someone is going to be able to figure out how to hack GM crops and then rampant copying is going to make them effectively free.
GMO or not, I want to know what I am buying. It should not matter if you are pro GMO or anti GMO, everyone does better with more information. I do not care if labelling it will cost business sales, guess what, if your product has a negative connotation because a bunch of hippies had better propaganda, you and your advert team should be fired and left to rot for doing such a bad job. Of course, I am not opposed to letting anyone that works in advertisement to be left outside to rot anyway. I digress, the point being GMO can be used for good or bad. You can setup a system where you drain the pockets of farmers and set them on a monthly schedule of what amounts to wage slavery... or you can increase the amount of antioxidants in tomatoes, and the drought resistance of staples. I want to insure that w/e it is, is safe by doing at least three generation studies on a mouse model... After that the product should be labelled as GMO and the intent code, Drought resistant - 0, antioxidants - 1, .... and so on.
The creation of new life forms should not be left to Crassus Maximus.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The Gini coefficient of the US is increasing. That's income inequality. It lends weight to phrases like "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer". While it could be that the poor are getting richer while the rich are getting ludicrously richer, that's still seems, you know, kinda unfair. It's certainly class envy, if you want to be a dick about it. But when profits are privatized while losses are socialized, as they were in the 2007 econopocalypse, you get a little angry about the weight of the yoke we bear.
If you have not seen the movie Frankenweenie yet, do so now, for the sake of science!
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Or that it's not (going to be) a huge freaking problem.
Resources of all kinds are going to be stressed.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I'm actually going to challenge your assertion. I'd argue that the vast majority of the world's starvation problems are distribution-related, not yield related.
How much food goes to waste every year? (Quite a bit!) And how many people suffer because of a lack of food production in their immediate area, while other parts of the world produce more than enough to feed them?
"Every increase in crop yields due to the use of GM crops saves the lives of some people that would otherwise die from starvation. It's a direct and obvious relation - there's no need to do a scientific study here."
Personally, I believe we should be very careful with the use of genetically modified crops, especially considering historical evidence of what can go wrong with new discoveries, scientific consensus can change drastically, the impact of greed and backroom politics.
See that's the problem with your types. When you jerk your knees too hard, you miss details that matter.
The Lapine is Canada's version of The Onion. You linked to satire, you dipshit. Might as well post a link to Mad Magazine while you're at it.
I have nothing against GMOs. What I do have a problem with is patents on genetics.
I think that's what a lot of the more educated anti-GMO activists have a problem with as well. Nobody should be able to patent a life form or a DNA sequence.
The crazy thing is, unlike the DNA patent for testing for breast cancer which has finally gotten SCOTUS' attention, there is no indication that a GMO will ever not meet the bar of a utility patent given the amount of purposeful engineering involved. The issue is more about whether the government should allow the entire world's food chain to be completely at the whims of a single, monopolistic patent holder.
There are a variety of plant-variety-protection acts that were originally penned to protect fruit tree breeders from having their competitors just grow seedlings from their painstakingly cultivated strains that often took decades of greenhouse breeding. Such protections have exemptions built in allowing farmers to re-plant seeds, as well as research exceptions and other public-safety provisions (i.e. if the government can step in if licensing terms would cause a famine, for example). The fine line that Monsanto treads is that, to anti GMO activists, they claim that a GMO is really just a souped-up type of selective plant breeding that we have been doing for centuries, so it shouldn't require any special environmental or public health regulations. But when it comes to licensing disputes, they insist that GMOs are so sophisticated and totally unlike a traditional "plant variety" that they deserve a utility patent and not ordinary plant variety protection. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Someone needs to found the AMD of GMOs and take away their cake. And then maybe they'll stop using lawyers to force 20-year-old genetic technology down farmer's throats and actually innovate for a change.
If one understands how the pesticide works, it's not so scary. Per WikiP: "When insects ingest [BT] toxin crystals, the alkaline pH of their digestive tract denatures the insoluble crystals, making them soluble and thus amenable to being cut with proteases found in the insect gut, which liberate the cry toxin from the crystal. The Cry toxin is then inserted into the insect gut cell membrane, forming a pore. The pore results in cell lysis and eventual death of the insect."
Humans, and I believe all vertebrates, have acidic digestive tracts, so BT is not active and cannot hurt you.
Not to say, in some remote universe, you couldn't be allergic to it, but that's true with any new molecule introduced into your person.
So, perhaps there's too many people, about 800 million.
Not sure why we have to feed all of them.
On the other hand, meat is 2 to 4 times more tasty than grains.
Seems acceptable either way.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
When you bring science into it, I have heard that at least in one case, the round-up corn which is GMO and resistant to round-up the weed killer, is easier to keep weed free, but the crop havested has higher concentrations of round-up in it which is not healthy. So GMO may not be all bad but not all GMO crops are good from a health standpoint.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TylvUGJIi_w
well done sir, well done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The problem with GMO's has always been primarily with the idea that you can patent life. We need to fix that problem and FAST. All the old patents should be invalidated and no compensation should be made since it was immoral to do in the first place.
The other problem is with safety. I think many GMO foods have proven to be safe but new ones are made every day. For that very reason I still support labeling GMO and allowing informed people to make their own decisions.
If we waited for absolute certainty , we would still be single celled.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Whilst the balding cucumbers sounds an interesting twist, every bit of hard primary evidence that I can find online points to it being false.
The bigmac tale was the thing that flashed the warning signs. An assertion that McD had stated something, and then no evidence from them that they had. Look at their webpages - all still list the same old pickles.
And are you sure Dr. Nancy Walker said what she's claimed to have said. Her official webpage makes no reference to it or even her expertise in the matter. A search for ``Nancy Walker Director of Public Health Research site:dal.ca'' makes no mention of her holding that position.
This is basically a not-particularly-funny Onion story, IMHO.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
when was the last time corn was tested?
Cause you know what? there is bacteria the gene swap 'animal' and 'plant' dna. In the world with no controls.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What happens if terminator genes spread to non-GM plants, leading to most/all plants having no viable seeds? It's not so easy to get back from that one.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Monsanto uses the delta endotoxin from Bacillus thuringiensis. It's been used as a pesticide since 1901. It's the most widely used "natural" pest control agent in the context of organic farming (where the crystals are dissolved in water and sprayed on the plants).
The crystal structure of Bt endotoxin, when exposed to the alkaline environment of an insect's digestive tract, breaks down and becomes soluble where it is broken by proteases in the insect gut and the product forms pores in the gut -- terribly in convenient for organisms with open circulatory systems; the ensuing cell lysis through self-digestion kills the bug.
Humans have acidic digestive tracts and the toxin is very rapidly lysed into dozens of short polypeptides. The oral LD50 for mouse is 17300 mg/kg body mass (e.g. a mouse needs to eat 17x it's own body mass of the stuff before it has a 50% chance of dying from it) - it may be similar for humans, but there's no record of human illness from it.
When engineered into a plant, the primary concern would be whether or not the protein could be considered a potential antigen that provokes an allergic response. Since we know the primary sequence and structure of the molecule, we know that it contains none of the epitopes that are associated with human allergic responses. We also know that it's very rapidly degraded in the human digestive tract into effectively inert peptides.
In fact, it's safe to say that we know more about the genetics and composition of genetically modified grain plants than we do about naturally crossed plants. From a food safety point of view, GMO plants are let slide because the risk from them (despite widespread consumption) is too low to measure using current methods. In fact, crops such as celery and strawberries (non-GMO) have comparatively very high risk associated with them. The greatest risks are posed by: the soil composition, water used, manually applied chemical agents, and worker handling of the product.
There's an extremely large amount of scientific and agricultural literature on these subjects. It's not right to say that we don't know them to be safe. The scientific and agricultural communities have a very solid handle on the safety of these products, despite public perception to the contrary.
The emotional fallacy you are promulgating is that there is some inherent good of us pauperize ourselves to feed / house / water / medicate the greatest number of people on planet. What happens when the the bottom economic half of the planet has more offspring. Should we cut our 'ration' in half to feed them?
The world is not fair, was never fair, will never be fair. Attempts to make it so on a global level is a fools errand of staggering proportions.
You would have a point if the 0.1% was doing all the innovating and increasing productivity. The fact is that nearly all improvements in wealth have been due to technology and those who are making disproportionate gains are typically those who play with money and screw the economy.
Fuck wall street. It's too bad Bin Laden hit the wrong targets. He would have done us a favor wiping out Goldman Sachs and their ilk. He'd probably be alive if that were the case and we wouldn't be trillion dollars in the hole.
The fact that meat consumption is so high is a much bigger problem than most people are willing to admit. Meat production is helping to starve people.
Actually, the latest research appears to give red meat a somewhat cleaner bill of health than you might expect: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=meat-of-the-matter-modern-methods-preserving-cooking-meat-healthy It turns out that it's just processed meats that are bad for you, not meat itself. I've always wondered how such a "natural" part of the human diet could be so unhealthy, and now we know: it probably isn't, not in and of itself. It's the preservatives and all the other crap added to processed meat that's the real problem.
GMO's are dangerous. The introduction of man made proteins into a biosphere that has the goals of:
1) Destroying all natural varieties through cross pollination.
2) Destroy plants, animals or insects.
3) Destroy the third world who cannot pay for GMO food.
4) Destroy the freedom and economic independence of all nations so that only a few can produce food to exercise poorly veiled eugenics projects.
GMO's destroy, they do not enable, they do not feed people, they kill people, environment, animals, insects and the environment for worse than the oil industry does.
GMO is about destruction AND _control_, and it has nothing to do with producing food.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
and there was much rejoicing.
Are the two largest countries in the world too small for you?
I would also add that the mindless gasbag has presented a fallacy of false choice; use GMO or starve. We are told to believe that despite Monsanto's business plan of enslaving the world's farmers, that they are just doing this out of the kindness of their hearts to feed an overpopulated world. Here's a thought, reduce population growth instead. Statistics show that free access to education and contraception reduces population growth without imposing martial law. But no one gets rich off of giving something necessary away for free. So we are doomed.
Even then, it's not the cost of the materials for the home, it's the "value" placed on the financial worth of the land. If one CEO is earning $1.5 million and can afford a ten acre lot, that sets the price for everyone else earning $500,000 and $50,000.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
To feed a growing world population (with an exploding middle class demanding more and better-quality food), we must take advantage of all the technology available to us, including GMOs. To insist on 'natural' agriculture and livestock is to doom people to starvation, and there’s no logical reason to prefer the old ways, either.
This is a bunch of crap.
Modern industrial agriculture does NOT maximize food output per acre. It certainly does not maximize food output per input (fertilizers, fuel, etc). It maximizes food output per farmer. And it does so by disregarding good soil and water management practices, which means that it damages the systems it relies on over the long term.
Much higher yields can be obtained by intensive cultivation of smaller plots of land, with much more attention paid per acre. These techniques usually (though not always) also serve to preserve soil, nutrient, and water resources.
Plant have evolved to produce a tremendous amount of pesticide and herbicide, fungicide chemicals to compete and survive. They have also evolved to be tolerant of herbicides produced by other plants and viruses. Thus even organic produce has large numbers of completely untested chemicals that are naturally produced by the plants themselves. I think many people somehow form a cognative dissonance if they think about this too much, so they basically do doublethink.
Some of these natural defensive chemicals in plants that we know are quite deadly to us (say glycoalkaloids like solanine in greenish potato skins which are nerve toxins). Although most foods that we eat today have gone through many informal "trials", I doubt anyone can tell you what the process was, nor what the acceptably safe levels is of the various toxins are. We simply have "grandfathered" these foods into or diets. For example, the potato isn't even that old, although cultivated for ~7000 years, it only made worldwide since the 16th century and is now one of the top 5 food crops in the world. A similar food is Cassava root which is outside of south america/africa/asia is only consumed as Tapioca. Cassava is much more poisonous to humans than potatos (via cyanide poisoning), yet widely consumed as a food-security crop in much of Africa and some of Asia.
Certainly testing should be done on all things sold for food (I'm not advocating no testing), but I doubt that any level of testing would be sufficient to avoid all risk, nor even if it could, it would not satisfy many of the folks opposed to GM.
I imagine the real fear that most folks have about GM crops is not about the technology at all, it is simply the unrealized angry feeling of helplessness that as a society that we have evolved to be completely dependent on others for our own survival. We do not grow our own crops, we do not hunt, we do not forge our own tools, we do not build our own homes, basically we are at the mercy of greater society to provide us with the means of survival and we are angry about anything that might upset the current status quo. Simultaneously we discount/ignore all the massive changes and risks we have taken just to get us to our current point in history as a sunk cost.
Certainly there is much to fear, but I think much of our fear is just a reflection of our hidden anger about our evolution into helplessness. Typically fears are conquered by knowledge, experience and (when conditions warrant it) conditioning, but since in many folks these fears don't appear to be quelled by these factors, it's likely not fear at all, but emergent anger. People are just angry about having to be dependent for their sustinance from someone else, but supress that anger until some proposes a change and that event sets them off. Only when people get over their anger, they can tackle the fear and use it constructively to make sure that the proper risk/reward/testing tradeoffs are being made.
Saying that GMO's are bad because you don't like Monsanto's business tactics is like saying computing technology is bad because you don't like Microsoft's (or Google's or Apple's, take your pick) business tactics, or that telecommunication is evil because you don't like AT&T's (etc.) business tactics.
Trying to increase yeilds to meet the demands of what is simply too many people for the world to support is just putting off the inevitable crash of the food supply. Genetically modified crops won't help when tornados rip the crops from the ground and hail damages what's left. Genetically modified crops won't help when there is drought one year and floods the next. We won't know what harm GM crops can do until it happens. It will probably be something no one thought of, but it will kill us anyway. There is far more science we don't know, than what we do.
Nuclear weapons have never been in a commercial product. SO FAR.
Spending money entitles you to legal protection? Really?
I bet you were paid $50 by Greenpeace to post this! Haha all facts that exist are now invalid, SUCK IT
I'm sure they'll keep their guards well fed if it comes to that.
Some people would definitely be interested in not needing to shave there again.
Until genetically engineered foods are proven to be safe I will continue to oppose them in our food supply and our ecosystems. We should be erring on the side of safety with these Frankenfoods and not simply assuming they are safe until proven unsafe. They should be banned until proven safe.
Popper-falsifiability is rarely possible for much of scientific research and Popper has said that it should not be a strict requirement for scientific claims. Just because the nature of the universe is such that not everything fits into the nice little boxes we've made up far doesn't mean that it's not possible to investigate and make determinations about.
The problem with genetic engineering crop is no different than the problem of the cheetah. You take away from a species it ability to environmentally adjust (minimize its genetic diversity) to climate change, disease and pathogens, and other forces of nature, you potentially destroy the species. Fundamentally we are playing at a level we don't understand. Whether we are endangering our health or our planets, it is just too early to tell, and as a result we need to be wary and cautious.
I find this interesting in Mr. Lynas's statement:
"As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing..."
I agree with his mission statement. In fact, it's best argument for the labeling of GMO foods there is. But until GMO foods are labeled as such, people won't know what diet they're choosing. Let GMOs be labeled and give people the real choices they have a right to.
Lol, nice backpedalling; it's clear from your original comment that you thought it was valid or at least were trying to trick people into thinking it was, stating it as a fact like that. I do agree that obviously GMOs could be dangerous and obviously they could be beneficial and as such each should be studied well.
The fact is that atheist conventions are filled with people who used to be (perhaps one might even say mostly are) die-hard Catholics or fiery Evangelicals. Then they had their little epiphany and now they understand "what's really right".
The most rabid faith-based organizations are likewise filled with people that at one time were certain of what they were doing, and then they "found God" and have some sort of monopoly on the Truth....this time, for sure!
Life isn't like that.
Life is never black and white, it's a whole slew of grays.
While I agree it takes some courage to make a 180 on your beliefs based on (what you assert) are 'new things you now understand', it may simply mean that you're one of those addictive 'follower' personalities.
"Believers" of all waters are just annoying.
-Styopa
And in 1940, they didn't have $100/month cell phone bills, $150/month cable and Internet bills, $400/month car leases, 2-3 week long overseas vacations every year, microwave ovens, multiple TVs, etc. We buy a LOT more stuff and spend a LOT more percentage-wise in ongoing "services" than was common back in 1940...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Meat consumption is not the problem, overpopulation is. If we had fewer mouths to feed, we would have fewer starving people. It is unfortunate that the planet is overpopulated and no one has the stomach to tackle this problem. Africa has a food problem (and probably always will). The US has begun consuming water far above the replacement rate. It won't be long until we can't drill wells deep enough since we have taken all of the water out.
What is the problem with a smaller population? The only argument I have ever heard was the lack of freedom to choose to have more children. If anyone can enlighten me why a reduced population is bad, please do.
Excellent and informative post, I do wish there was a reference however.
I'm not actually sure whether you're joking. In any case, gene contamination risk is (rightly, I think) seen as a benefit of terminator genes: if modified gene content does spread somehow, it would be less likely to continue to spread (over generations) further afield from the original contamination. There's a natural stop to the spreading of plants with limited ability to reproduce.
To the extent you're serious, I suppose that, yes, you've identified a potential concern. Also a potential concern is the possibility that consuming GM plants will turn us into zombies. Either of these scenarios would require mechanisms to exist that we have no evidence of, but there's no absolute reason either of those things couldn't happen.
However, there's a lot of risks that are much more likely and that should probably be higher up on the list of concerns. I certainly don't dispute there are legitimate risks to using GM technology, but there's also serious risks to closing off those avenues - and if demands a real, informed debate where pros, cons, risks and rewards are all weighed seriously.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I was raised as one of those old-soul, hippie, organic gardeners. In a perfect world, we'd all grow our own food in our own backyard and we'd probably all be healthier for it. Personally, I'm not a fan of most supermarket produce. If you've never eaten an heirloom tomato grown in your own soil, then you won't understand. Most supermarket produce is bland and devoid of nutrients in comparison to what you pick from your own backyard. However, I realize home gardening isn't terribly plausible for most people. As the human race spreads and populates more of the planet, we have more demand for food and less land to grow it on (it seems a reduction in population would be a better fix, but I'll argue that some other day). I can understand the want to genetically enhance crops. The concern is the motivation. Monsanto isn't fiddling with genetics because they're good folks and want to feed the starving masses; they want to turn a profit. As such, they're GMO is less about hearty, well adjusted plants, and more about terminator seeds and selling more pesticide. They couldn't care less about the health of the people eating their crops, so long as links to health problems aren't tangible enough to make a court case. The truth is, it'll be decades before we know for sure GMOs aren't slowly killing us. I realize most of the research says GMO is safe, and if that GMO was all about doing some good in the world, I'd be lots more likely to take those claims at face value. It might be worth taking a risk if the cause is noble. However, I'd rather not gamble with the health of the entire population for the sake of lining Monsanto's coffers. I, personally, don't want to eat their creations and I don't want to support those evil bastards. That leads to another major point: choice. In a few years, we may not have one. Pollen doesn't stop at fence lines or read signs. When you introduce this type of organism, it spreads. Once it's established, there's no good way to fight it. Once it's in the silo or your cereal box, there's no good way to discern mutant from natural. Just because I don't want to eat their demons seeds, doesn't mean I'll have a choice in the matter.
GMO is just a bad idea. Genes don't stay put. Because of Round-Up resistant GMO crops, we already are seeing Round-Up resistant weeds.
Besides, some of us may not want food that makes its own pesticide.
My problem with GMO crops has got buggerall to do with gene manipulation itself. The current GMO foodcrops are being genetically manipulated not for higher yields, but for greater resistance to frighteningly strong pesticides. Quite predictably this particular regime of blasting weeds with weedkiller that left "most" of the weeds dead have also now bred "superweeds" which need multiple times the originally recommended dose of GMO-crop pesticides to keep them at bay. The worst-case scenario is that this arms-race against nature is probably going to end up with some version of Paolo Bacigalupi's "windup" universe. At best we can look forward to an increasingly toxic food supply.
Reference : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19594335
There is something very fishy about this guy's sudden "enlightenment".
In principle, there's nothing wrong with GMOs. Then there's practice. It's hard to predict the effects of some new gene introduced, and it's hard to measure the impact and l. For one thing (and I'm not a nutritionist), but I understand that some GMOs (but presumably not all) are more allergenic than their unmodified versions. And we're only now starting to really understand (as a culture) the impact of food allergies, short-term and long-term.
I think Monsanto has his family gaged and bound with a death threat deadline.
The 20th-century totalitarian states arguably all existed in part due to huge inequality during this period.
I think it's much more complicated than that: Russia was arguably even worse before the Gilded Age, because the majority of the population were serfs. The country wasn't particularly industrialized by 1917 either, so most of the Gilded Age excess passed it by. (The excesses of existing aristocracy, of course, continued right up until the Bolsheviks took over, and the peasants were still in miserable condition.) Germany was the complete opposite: the country was one of the best-developed in Europe, and Bismarck had introduced what were then incredibly novel and progressive welfare programs when it unified (of course, the primary goal was to discourage communist revolution). Even after WWI, despite hyperinflation and depression, Germany had an enormous middle class and was in much better condition - or at least had much more potential - than the vast majority of the world and even Europe. That Hitler was able to take over had very little to do with lower-class discontent; in fact, the parties which actually advocated (or claimed to) for the working class, the Social Democrats and Communists, were the primary opponents of the Nazis. If they had cooperated (instead of the Communists denouncing the Social Democrats as "social fascists"), or if the German conservatives didn't foolishly ally themselves with Hitler, the result could have been much different.
If anything, I would argue that the countries which experienced some of the most spectacular benefits and disparities of the Gilded Age - the US and UK - managed to stay relatively stable.
And yet you didn't require one for the far less comprehensive and detailed OP?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
people are genetically modified organisms. But somehow human cloning is morally wrong and getting cooked in a backscatter x-ray at the airport for the sake of security theater isn't. What is it about GMO foods that scares us? Is there a difference between good GMO and bad GMO? Is it fair to lump GMO under one good/bad paradigm?
Good people sometimes do bad things but it doesn't necessarily make them bad people. Good people sometimes do bad things that do necessarily turn them into bad people. And sometimes bad people do good things and it can either turn their life around or not. In the same vein, GMO foods might actually harm us but it might actually be worth the trade off. Or it might not.
I don't feel any more enlightened by this revelation that the starter of the anti-GMO movement is remorseful about his stance, when he thought he was right then and he thinks he's right now. He sounds like he didn't know what he was talking about then, but he's drunk the GMO kool-aid now. How stupid is he going to feel if in 25 -50 years we discover that GMO food can harm us? Dumber than he'd feel if he kept on with his anti-GMO movement after he changed his mind about it? Somehow I think if we all just slowed down life enough that we could all just grow our own food this whole argument would be moot. I work as an engineer crunching time for deadlines and I can tell you most of them are arbitrary and pointless, much like this whole debacle. In summary, no one knows shit, so why are we acting like we do.
Not having read TFA, I hope that the summery given is a simplified version of what he meant.
The world is too complex and interdependent for something to be all good (with no drawbacks), or all good (with no benefits), and he seems to be insinuating that GMO foods have no drawbacks, which is just as wrong as saying the have no benefits.
But, other than that, I basically agree with his assessment that we NEED (or will need) it.
The world population is growing too fast for our current food production methods to keep pace with demand forever, and unless we are willing to sit passively by during mass starvation on scales never before seen, wars breaking out over farmland, crops, seeds and food animals, and extinction as local peoples turn to endangered species for food, we will REQUIRE GMO foodstuffs that can mature faster, grow larger, and sustain themselves on less, and/or in different environments.
Otherwise we will outstrip our planet's ability to support us.
We've already stripped the oceans of their most bountiful harvests, and are eating and passing off fish we once called "Junk Fish", as the high-demand fish become scarcer and scarcer.
But we must keep in mind and learn from our experiences with adding new substances and quantities to diets, such as plastics imitating estrogen, and causing population crashes and mutations in animals like frogs, and crocodiles. Also brain diseases like BSD / Scrapie / CJD / Kuru.
BSE (Mad Cow), first appears in 1984 and makes clear that there are dangers to radically changing the long-term diets of animals and humans by introducing substances and quantities of substances that have never before been seen in their diets. In this case, the introduction of massive amounts of proteins from meat (and brains) to replace vegetable sourced proteins in low quality animal feed, deniers point out that cattle have likely eaten meat proteins (via bugs) from time immemorial, though never in the quantities found in modern feed.
Mad Cow (and it's human variant vCJD [not CJD]) came from the well known, and well contained, disease called "Scrapie" (because it caused, among other things, the infected to rub up against things and scrape off their fur) in sheep and goats. The source of the disease was not known, but what WAS known was that it was common in some places, had been known of for at least 250 years, and that the meat AND brains of the Scrapie infected were human edible with no ill effects.
Scrapie remained a rare, species specific, disease that had no effect on predators UNTIL the introduction of industrial farming methods, specifically the use of low quality feed (farming byproducts, rather than valuable crops) that needed it's protean content supplemented by slaughterhouse waste. This introduced the Scrapie Prion into cattle feed, and eventually produced "Mad Cow Disease". But something changed in the transfer of disease from one species to another. It changed from a single species, predator resistant disease, to a food transmissible disease to which predators were not immune. (FSE, the feline version was first discovered in the 1970's, when domestic cats developed it after eating BSE infected cat-food. FSE is also found in captive big cats, thought to have been feed BSE infected meat. As far as we know FSE is unknown in the wild.)
My own theory is that all natural predators have a natural immunity / resistance to "Spongiform Diseases", the prion's of which are found almost exclusively in nerve tissue. This means that catching i
THINK! It's patriotic
How is the parent post flamebait? What has happened to people's ability to comprehend a rephrasing the same question into a "cautionary tale"?
Pointing out the fact that even people have been unjustly demonized by a label is both informative and insightful. It does not equate anyone's view with that of the Nazi's, but (for anyone who knows their history) it is a vivid description of the power a label can have over human behavior. The Irish did it differently, when the English forced them to wear green, they turned it into a symbol of pride.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
GMO has become and was largely about the business of SELLING chemicals. But if Monsanto can OWN contaminated nature they'll be glad to migrate from chemicals to owning nature.
People seem to think plants are simple so lets hack them before we hack human DNA using our limited understanding of the code nature is programmed in. What could possibly go wrong?? Lets not ask Computer Scientists about their experience with man-made programming in completely artificial environments that are 100% verifiable...
FYI: Plants have more genes than humans. I say, let us learn on simple organisms like humans before moving to plants.
Too many people? Use Birth Control. At least humans starve and it is THEIR FAULT but to wreck all of life.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Terminator genes seem like a good idea to me - wouldn't they reduce the chance the GMO would successfully cross pollinate with other strains?
You are confusing production in developing countries with transport form developed countries. While it would be nice for the latter to be improved (while somehow avoiding the problem of cheap or free imported food destroying local farmers' business), improving the former will most certainly help, or do you deny that crop failures in developing countries have ever harmed anyone?
It's true that people take up space and use up resources. But they also create spaces worth being in and produce resources. Also, the more people we have, the more innovation we have. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
Most of the USA's land and about half its water goes to livestock agriculture. The livestock runoff then pollutes most of the other half. See:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/
While a small amount of clean organic naturally-fed unprocessed meat (especially fish before mercury and dioxin polluted them) may be healthy in a diet, the quantities and types of animal product most US Americans are eating are part of why US health is so poor.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
On Earth, we could reduce water consumption by growing vegetables indoors. But in any case, we can always condense fresh water out of the air or distill it from the oceans if we have cheap energy, which we will get soon from cheap solar panels (and maybe cheap hot or cold fusion soon). The more people, the sooner we will get those innovation breakthroughs.
Since the Solar System could support quadrillions of people living in style in space habitats, even if one was to argue the Earth was overpopulated, even limited agricultural land is no reason to limit human population growth any time soon, even if one might suggest an aesthetic limit on the Earth perhaps, like putting an occupancy limit on a restaurant in a city.
The repentant anti-GMO activist is wrong on the need for GMOs, because GMOs (even if safe) are solving the wrong problem. To begin with, people starve or are malnourished for economic reasons that could be solved with a global "basic income". The market does not hear the needs of people without money, so the simplest solution to malnutrition is to give people money so the market will listen to their needs. Yes, this requires some level of social consensus leading to enforced redistribution of resources. Frances Moore Lappe and others explains why less people does not mean less starvation.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-it
http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/WhyCantPeopleFeedThemselves.pdf
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Although a semi-rebuttal to Lappe that ignores distribution issues:
http://www.hoodrivernews.com/news/2002/sep/18/lappe-response-think-locally-starve-globally/
Agricultural robotics (including for the home gardener) and solar panels are going to change the face of agriculture over the next twenty years to produce lots of food for all, if we want that future:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
We do not need GMO crops to feed the planet. What we need is to do things like grind up rocks to make cheap organic fertilizer:
http://remineralize.org/
And then we need a space program. And we need to be better stewards of the oceans (rather than overfish because our economic systems are broken in that sense).
The current focus on plant breeding, whether GMO or conventional, has produced monocultures of crops that are dependent on s
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This planet is overpopulated with people. Until there is a viable way to control population growth we are on a path to eventually destroy the planet we live on. Producing more food through genetic modification is a panacea as is fracking. Both have serious ethical issues attached to them. The Earth cannot sustain a population of 6 billion people and it can't begin to sustain 9 billion. Argue all you want to about whether a person has achieved "scientific enlightenment," but for fucks sake let's sometime take a look at the real issues.
What happens if terminator genes spread to non-GM plants, leading to most/all plants having no viable seeds?
It's only a problem if all of the plants gain the terminator genes at once, which is vanishingly unlikely. Otherwise, what happens is that the plants that get the terminator gene get immediately selected out of the gene pool.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
FYI I have compared a same sized house (similar number of sq meters) in a similar neighborhood. Yes my grandfather was a hard working person however I could not buy a same sized house in the same time frame he did even if I worked overtime. I have crunched the numbers more than once. I am a software engineer with a graduate degree so its not like I am earning minimum wage here. My grandfather was a stone mason in case you were wondering.
You can downmod me all you want. I know what I am talking about. I have the documents of the transaction and I know the regular wages in that era. I talked with my grandmother while she was still alive. I have seen similar studies of people both in the US and elsewhere in Europe claiming the same thing. If you read this article you can clearly see even back in the 1980s houses in the UK were a lot more affordable than they are now.
What did not exist back then was the ease of credit people have now so house prices were not inflated nearly to the same degree. But you can keep drinking the kool aid as much as you want.
Another chart this time house prices vs income in Melbourne Australia 1965-2010.
I have a pre-paid cellphone, the second cheapest DSL rate, bought my car with cash, do not do vacations more than 30 km away. Granted I pay more in water, electricity, and communications than my grandparents did. However things are a lot more skewed than some people think and the reason is not services. Its just that the price of a house is whatever the market is willing to bear and with loans, which weren't easy to come by back then, people can bear a lot more. See the Melbourne house price chart I posted in the other thread.
Bingo. Most of the extra cost has been on land. Easier credit compared to back then also means people accept these highly inflated prices when they wouldn't do it otherwise.
Roundup, the plant growth hormone that messes up the plants growth regulation to the point that they die, and is then quickly destroyed by soil bacteria.
It is hard to find a completely natural substance more benign, unless you happen to be the plant sprayed with it. ( I will refrain from making statements involving the word "vegetable".)
If you are going to complain about chemicals, find something that is worth complaining about.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I'm a little uncomfortable with big companies owning the DNA we rely on for sustenance.
This is one of my worries too. Any glance at history should tell us not to trust a situation like this that concentrates such power to a few. These companies have incredible power.
Also, I really worry that in the end this sort of thing could quell genetic diversity in our food supply rather than increase it. It's one of the reasons why I am buying heirloom seeds and planting my own garden this year. I want to be at least a small part of what keeps our food heritage alive.
Why are so many of these responses being modded 0? I find the careless dismissal of GMO fears to be more ludicrous than the "superstition" that the pro-GMO techies are lampooning. Burden of proof surely belongs on the GMO side, seeing as GMOs are only a recent development and have been adopted on a huge scale without anything approaching real testing.
Mod parent up please. What is going on here? It's like Monsanto has hired an army of Slashdot modders. There was nothing ignorant or trollish about the post.
... are more the result of the introduction of hybrid vs. the native varieties.
The fact that the big agricultural corporations preferred to introduce GMO hybrids, more than non-GMO hybrids, and push them relentlessly through bribery, does not make the increased production a result of GMO 'an sich'.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
... and what exactly does this have to do with GMO?
And how many lives did his technology cost in terms of diseases through the soil exhaustion, hence reduced nutrient content in food?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Mosquitoes carry G Fever (in 1 of 4 strains), &
a great way to reduce their numbers is to GM
some males so they'll mate but no life comes
from the eggs from their unions.
Populations have dropped by 85% after 3 mon's
of introducing the GM'd males.
(This was reported in a very recent TED-talk.)
This example might persuade anti-GMO folks
to reconsider, at least for such obvious cases
of advantage from GM of animal that we -don't-
eat.
I wonder how much was paid for such good PR for companies like Monsanto pushing these untested and unsafe foods onto people. Did this Lynas see the recent long-term Russian study on rats? Now that's actual science, not mere assurances.
Just read TFA, I suspect he's been drawn into the orbit of the "skeptics" movement (deliberate quotation marks) who have blind faith that the government is only there to help people, that no corruption of regulatory agencies takes place, that there is no fraud in science etc...
On a side note perhaps what he really meant to say is that with the growing population we need GMO food to kill everyone off who is unable to access a strictly non-GMO diet. And the more crops that become GMO the harder that becomes. We could be only a few generations away (60 years?) from the unwashed masses disappearing into extinction. Then that seed vault in Svalbard that was created by private financiers for absolutely no reason whatsoever will be put to use.
That's one of the stupidest things I've ever read. Read your own comment again, slowly, go sit and think about it for a while, and when it comes to you, I promise you'll kick yourself.
My other UID is three digits.
Also, don't forget about taxes! The Federal Government actually ran a small surplus in 1957 (the last time that actually happened), and the national debt dropped as well. Taxes, adjusted for inflation and per capita, were about 45% of what they are today ($3100 in 2005 dollars, versus $6600 today in 2005 dollars). And State income taxes, and sales taxes, were considerably lower as well. Taxes are taking a much bigger chunk of our income today, than it did for our parents and grandparents (which really makes one question why our deficits are so sky-high).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You will find that the number of people that will risk spending money without such legal protection is very few. So few that you can imagine an economy without any sort of risk-based investment. I think another word for that is "dark ages" - until the corporation was "invented" there was very little risk investment and very, very little commercial activity. You had the village baker risking pennies on a new pan with hopes of making a couple more loaves of bread, but that was about it.
Employment was pretty limited with most people spending their time in fields farming. A shopkeeper didn't really need much help and that help tended to come from within the family of the shopkeeper.
I suspect we could go back to that, but it would be an interesting change to say the least.
People can grow and eat all the GMO food they want. It just should be posted on products so I/anyone can decide. Also Monsanto needs to protect organic and non GMO farmers from contamination. Very simple. Let me live my life.
And it has nothing to do with the obscene amounts of money Monsanto may or may not have deposited into your bank account?
What does it break down into?
Structurally, Glyphosate is a remarkably simple-looking compound, as far as organic structures go. You have a carboxyl group on one end, a secondary amine in the middle, and a phosphate on the other end. There are no halogen groups, heavy metals, or other exotic hetero-atoms. It can be degraded to common biological substrates, by common microorganisms, in a remarkably short sequence of steps: http://umbbd.ethz.ch/gly/gly_map.html
Obtaining "magic bullet" selectivity with a structure this simple is only possible thanks to engineering the crop itself. You can be sure that pesticides intended for non-engineered targets (like the weed killers people put on their lawns) are more complex-looking beasts.
Surface contaminants are possible to wash off, GMO infused contaminants can not.
I don't so much have a problem with GM of foods. What I do have a problem with is the Patents. I am also a bit leary of corporate short sight of next quarters profits, over long term food security.
Basically making better food, in the natual order of things, means it will be more successful. Which is fine if it is better in everyway including nutrition. However the slipperly part is when your neighbor isn't using a particular GM strain. To which your GM strain basically kills off and takes over. Is the neighbor who is now forced to use your GM strain forced to pay licencing fees for a product that killed off its compatition? Would (inconcievible!) GM strains be purposfully built to this end with this buisness model in mind?
Anyway like a lot of things, if done the right way is a good thing, or if done the wrong way very bad. So long as this is a highly regulated endevor with built in safe guards and some checks and balances it is probably fine.
Look at your own chart. Home values in Australia more than doubled immediately when a huge change was made to the way they are taxed, in 1999. Other than that one jump from the tax change, home prices vs. incomes have been pretty flat. The fact that the best you can do, looking at all the countries in world, is to find one country with a single spike in prices due to huge tax change proves one thing - in any but the most unusual situations, you're simply wrong. Smart people become smart by learning - by opening their eyes to when they are wrong and learning what the correct facts are. Stupid people continue to defend their mistaken ideas no matter how clear it is that those ideas are wrong.
No, that seems like a fairly petty thing to do. How about a more progressive tax system to account for runaway executive compensation instead?
And maybe tighten up those tax loopholes and deductions. Yes, even if that means getting rid of the ones I partake in. And if they funnel all their money off-shores and pay zero taxes or do a little dance with stock options and only pay capital gains, then the IRS needs to go in with guns blazing and send them to JAIL.
LD50 does not account for long term damage caused by persistent exposure.
"For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research