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Anti-GMO Activists Win Victory On Hawaiian Island
biobricks writes "New York Times reports on how the county council on the Big Island of Hawaii banned GMOs. 'Urged on by Margaret Wille, the ban’s sponsor, who spoke passionately of the need to “act before it’s too late,” the Council declined to form a task force to look into such questions before its November vote. But Mr. Ilagan, 27, sought answers on his own. In the process, he found himself, like so many public and business leaders worldwide, wrestling with a subject in which popular beliefs often do not reflect scientific evidence. At stake is how to grow healthful food most efficiently, at a time when a warming world and a growing population make that goal all the more urgent.'"
I wouldn't equate pseudoscience-believing hippies with Republicans.
I'm from Hawaii (specifically the Big Island), and that state (and county) is dominated by Democrats who are very, very far from being creationist Republicans. Heck, even our Republicans are more liberal than a lot of mainland Democrats. So yeah - totally pseudoscience hippies. We have a saying (due to our macadamia nut orchards) that we send our nuts (macadamia) to the mainland and they send their nuts (california hippies) to us.
Field tests to study new G.M.O. crops would also be prohibited. Penalties would be $1,000 per day.
What a joke.
That's a rounding error to a multinational corporation.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Do you think it's more likely the GMO foods being sold to Hawaiians is of the "really noble" variety or the "eeevil profit driven corporation" variety?
Here's a protip for you: If there is transparency in the way GMO is used in food, it's likely in the former. If there's an effort to fight the simple labeling of such foods as being GMOs, then it's almost certainly the latter. People with noble goals don't usually try their best to hide what they're doing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I wouldn't call it pseudoscience
From the hippie side of things, yes, it is. These are the same people who think that eating an "alkalizing" diet and drinking "alkalized water" is a necessity for being healthy and ridding the body of "toxins." It's pseudoscience because they have BS "science" that "proves" it. For example, there are papers by people with fake phd's that say eating protein means your pee is more acidic, which means your body is toxic. Anyone who remembers high school biology should know why that's BS (and why the "Westernmost Institution for Gaia Science" is not an accredited institution), but they believe it because they've smoked away their high school memories.
Interestingly, at least on Maui, I can't necessarily speak for the Big Island but I'm going to assume parallels, it wasn't the hippies that got the anti-GMO ball rolling, although they're the ones taking off with it. The initial ball-rollers were the taro farmers, and for entirely different (and IMO legitimate) reasons. There are a lot of small independent family (actually a family, not just a big conglomerate owned by a family) taro farmers. With taro (it's like a big potato), much of the planting is done by cutting of the top of the corm (the potato part) and replanting it. They saw what Monsanto was doing with not allowing corn farmers to save seed, and were concerned that if the taro market went to GMO the same thing would happen with taro, where farmers would be entirely dependent on Monsanto and pretty much unable to resist or remain independent.
That's horseshit. GMO is a very specific term, despite what some people would have you believe. It stands for Genetically Modified Organism. As in the product of taking genes from one organism and placing them directly into another organism. This is different from hybridization where you have to be able to create viable offspring by mating two organisms together selecting the ones that express what you're interested in.
Prior to about the '80s, they didn't exist at all. Conflating hybridization that takes many generations and may or may not yield a specific product with one where you can put completely unrelated and unpredictable genes in is completely wrong.
The problem here is that there's a massive conflict of interest with the scientists don't the research and the people responsible for safe guarding things. They still haven't introduced any way of keeping the genes from jumping species even though they still lack the ability to predict what the consequences of that are long term. I have no particular problem eating GMOs, I have a huge problem with them being permitted to propagate in an unchecked fashion.
A better analogy comes from the artificial "trans fat" fiasco. Here's this new kind of fat created by "scientific processes" that is touted by many authorities to be superior to the natural fats that people had been consuming for centuries. In the 1960s, it was pushed heavily as a way to prevent heart disease. A few decades later, it was discovered to actually increase the incidence of heart disease and we're in the process of slowly removing it from our food supplies.
GMO is even less tested than artificial trans fats were (they were around for nearly half a century before being heavily pushed by government and industry). Maybe some of them will turn out to be just fine, and possibly repleat with benefits, but others may be harmful to both the environment as well as the people and animals who consume them. There just hasn't been enough testing to demonstrate that mixing genes from here with genes from over there, as well as creating new sequences out of whole-cloth, has no unintended consequences.
I don't think it's too much to allow people to have labeling to then be able to make informed choices about whether they want to be a part of this huge un-controlled human trial.
These are the same people who think that eating an "alkalizing" diet and drinking "alkalized water"
That's an overly broad and unfair characterization. Everyone seems to be ignoring that companies are not required to prove with sufficient rigor that GMO crops are adequately safe.
The FDA requires new pharmaceuticals to undergo years of testing. In contrast, GMO crops are assumed to be safe because they 'closely approximate' their originating crop. That's a foolish assumption.
Howdy howdy howdy
However, the next category error is assuming that just because a changed organism doesn't kill people outright that it's actually safe for long-term consumption and safe for other organisms in the environment.
Plus, the PATENTS! It's not about science, it's about freedom of seed! Banning GMOs is an important first step to getting rid of life-patent laws. Seeds should be part of the public trust. If they become public again, I'd have no problem with GMOs that were open to people looking at them and doing real research on them
If you'd read the article, or paid any attention at all to the subject, you'd know that many GMOs are unencumbered by IP laws and/or were always intended to be given away. This includes both golden rice (which was specifically intended for the third world - developed nations don't really have endemic vitamin A deficiency) and virus-resistant papayas, which Hawaii currently grows. Banning them does nothing at all to advance the cause of open science.