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China Rejects 545,000 Tons of US Genetically Modified Corn
hawkinspeter writes "The BBC is reporting that China has rejected 545,000 tons of U.S. corn that was found to contain an unapproved genetically modified strain. Although China doesn't have a problem per se with GM crops (they've been importing GM soybeans since 1997) — but their product safety agency found MIR162 in 12 batches of corn. 'The safety evaluation process [for MIR162] has not been completed and no imports are allowed at the moment before the safety certificate is issued,' said Nui Din, China's vice agricultural minister. The Chinese are now calling on U.S. authorities to tighten their controls to prevent unapproved strains from being sent to China after the first batch of corn was rejected in November due to MIR162."
The North Koreans will happily take it.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
Apparently the melamine powder content was too low...
MIR162 is a Syngenta product... the company is Swiss...
Assuming that Chinese health authorities have their priorities straight, that must mean that eating US corn is more dangerous than breathing the air in Beijing. This is worrisome!
Not sure how the South China Sea incident relates to this, the US ship continued following the Chinese aircraft carrier.
Where does it say they threw it away? They rejected the first of a series of shipments. It just means the ship will need to unload somewhere else.
In this case, it isn't really so much about "keeping the genie in the bottle," since they're quite alright with the genie in general. This is just about double-checking safety of a product and one country's industries not doing enough to respect another country's approval process by keeping the supply-chain neatly segregated.
Of course, the irony is that this sort of story usually happens the other way with China. e.g. Honey containing traces of pesticides of antibiotics approved for general use in China but not approved in the US.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
We could, but then again do you want to explain to some lowlife why he can't have his cheap electronic toy?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
China has a "Product safety agency"? Really? It must only apply to imports, not exports.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Are you going to build a house out of Corn?
http://inhabitat.com/corn-waste-transformed-into-versatile-building-material/
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Given that the United States just arrested three Chinese nationals over alleged theft of GM corn, it appears that they do not have an issue with GMOs.
In fact, I suspect that this shipment refusal may be retribution for the arrests.
It was tested for two years http://cera-gmc.org/index.php?action=gm_crop_database&mode=ShowProd&data=MIR162. Considering most drugs take decades if they even make it to market.
No good deed goes unpunished.
HOW CAN ANYBODY THROW AWAY HALF A MILLION TONS OF FOOD WHEN SO MANY HUMAN BEINGS ARE STARVING?
Well, it depends. Is that food actually safe to eat? In this case, probably, but that hasn't been vetted and proven by the Chinese government, so they're quite sane in erring on the side of safety. Especially considering all the product recalls involving tainted food from their local producers. Plus, it's not like the US or China are strapped for food at the national level.
The problem with starvation has been one of distribution for much of the past century. If this food IS being thrown away (and that's a big "if"), then it's because there's no good way of getting it to someone who could pay some price for it before it spoils. (And food aid is generally not done for completely free.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
China holds all the cards
Not all the cards. China is - in some ways - like the uncontrolled and empowering Germany of the early XXth. They're the young new world superpower which doesn't have a superpower-history long enough to feel how dangerous it can be to lack diplomacy and look for trouble every other week. That obnoxious behavior is particularly strong and obvious since a couple of years ago - which is worrying. China is powerful thanks to its economic and commercial ties with most of the rest of the world. Unless there is an international comercial/economic consensus to return China to reason, China will keep growing until it is out of reach.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
All food is safety tested. Don't try to single out GMO's here.
Article says they don't have an issue with GMOs.
They have an issue with unapproved GMOs.
Seems pretty reasonable. Even if politics are at play.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Citation needed. I haven't found any specific strains rejected as not being safe.
On the other hand.
This sick propaganda starts with the media. Fuck reading a story's contents, you give me the color/race, ethnicity, religion, sexual-orientation, wealth/affluence, partisanship of the story (domestic and international), I'll tell you exactly what the reactions of my countrymen will be regardless of the facts. This post-colonial imperialism is sickening and runs through the veins of our society from top to bottom. It creates double standards, domestically and internationally.
China and its Ministry of Agriculture rejects unapproved goods just like our FDA would. How dare they expect the same as us? Let the smear campaign begin! China executes Uyghur Muslims, all of a sudden China is the best. Why? Because in our hierarchical caste system, China seems ranks higher than Muslims. This is the reality, a single stamp on your forehead of an identity defines one entirely and groups you with a stereotype irrelevant of the facts. And if you think that people are willingly going to accept second-class treatment, you are tripping, keep investing in the military as this is the only way.
This is exactly why:
These double standards and injustices go on BECAUSE you permit it to happen. I'm the fucking patriot here, you are just a mindless sheep falling in line, fuck you!
"How dare China import lead-tainted goods! Ban!"
"How dare China ban our GMO exports!"
American Exceptionalism is Exceptional Hypocrisy.
The China of today is nothing like the China of old. It's really not much like the China of 10 or 20 years ago.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Not sure if troll or ignorant. Chinese empire is the oldest one on earth by far. No other civilization in our history survived as long as theirs.
The current Chinese "empire" is only about 60 years old. It replaced the one before that in the Communist revolution, which in turn replaced the dynastic empire of ancient China 40 years before that. The current government has about as much connection to that ancient empire as modern day Egypt does to the pyramid builders, so if we're defining civilizations simply by their geography and demographics, the Egyptian civilization is actually older than the Chinese one by a thousand years or so.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
And the China today is simply an extension of the Ming dynasty, right?
Civilization may have existed in China for that long, but it has not been a continuous civilization in the sense you are portraying and not even close to a continuous empire.
Because even conventionally grown foods aren't "safe", such as potatoes that contain solanine and apple seeds that contain cyanide. Conventionally grown foods are subject to random mutation and yet are not checked for safety, yet genetically modified foods that we know precisely how they are modified are tested because genetics = scary.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
The whole point of some of these changes is to make the food no longer attractive (or possibly even toxic) to pests. It seems reasonable that the changes required to do this may have some impact on people as well.
That said, direct genetic modification is a lot less likely to cause problems than the radiation-based mutation where they just blast it and see what they end up with--that ends up changing a lot more DNA than the direct modification would, and has far fewer labelling restrictions.
Both of which have nothing at all to do with GMO plants and whether or not they have been rejected by any country in Europe. The citations are about bacteria and not plants. Good information but wrong topic