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Genetically Modified Rice Makes More Food, Less Greenhouse Gas
Applehu Akbar writes: A team of researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences has engineered a barley gene into rice, producing a variety that yields 50% more grain while producing 90% less of the powerful greenhouse gas methane. The new rice pulls off this trick by putting more of its energy into top growth. In countries which depend on rice as a staple, this would add up to a really large amount of increased rice and foregone methane.
All the seeds that just any jerk can buy are all these heirloom seeds. Which sounds nice until you realize they're basically the most vulnerable seeds possible. The original breeds that mostly didn't make great food plants were able to take care of themselves.
The seeds you get in the packets are nice only they are modified just enough that they suck at protecting themselves... which means you have to be some sort of garden wizard or blanket the field with pesticide doom just to keep your plants alive.
I'd prefer a GMO plant that had the best of both worlds. Ideally something hearty that could deal with a very wide set of climate conditions, high pest resistance, and good production when the conditions permit.
Basically I want a plant that first looks to its own survival. And once that's handled... I want it to output as well as anything. And while we're at it... why not make the produce super nutritious.
That's a thing people don't get with GMO is that it can be made to be better for you than the original. More vitamins etc.
Take wheat for example... We could have a different breed of wheat that has one extra vitamin in it. And do that with every vitamin giving us a dozen or so types of wheat that collectively have all the vitamins and minerals a person needs.
Then when you mill the flour you can blend them together in the ideal ratio to give you a super flour that really does have everything a person needs to survive in it.
The whole anti GMO thing is obnoxious... Its the 21st century, dopes... Get over it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'll believe it's tested when the CEO eats it for a year (as part of their regular diet).
I grew up eating beans and rice (with a bit of meat for flavor when my mother could afford it) and I bet many of the cultures this will be recommended to will consume it daily as well, so you'd do well to not tell me this is an unreasonable request.
That said I also recognize that genetic engineering isn't completely magic, I assume that the scientists who selected this barley gene know how it will change the expression of other genes in the rice plant and won't add gluten production or introduce other unwanted genes from the barley plant.
Being the libertarian that I am, normally I would be on board with that, except for one major problem: There's only so much room on the food labels, and there's so much other important information that could be put there instead, but isn't.
Take me for example: I have IgA nephropathy and am in stage 4 CKD. I have to be extra careful about how much potassium and phosphorus I consume. Yet most labels don't show potassium, and hardly any show phosphorus (at best you get a %DV count, which gives you a very poor idea of its actual contents.) The manufacturers don't have a problem giving you these figures if you ask, but they don't put them on the labels because the package is only so large.
A complete nutrition information chart given to the manufacturers from a food lab is very lengthy, and no food label on just about anything would be able to accomodate it all, so they typically only put on their labels what the FDA says they must.
That said, I'd be pissed as hell if the FDA started requiring immaterial facts such as a GMO label that affects nobody one way or another, but ignored electrolytes that can kill people like me.
Ok let's put things into perspective for a minute:
Every time a plant breeds naturally, there are some millions of DNA nucleotides that are changed as a result of that process, and it happens in ways that are entirely unpredictable and unknown.
Yet in GMO, you're making a very deliberate change to some 200 (or less) nucleotides, and you know EXACTLY what that change does, because you've already observed its results before putting it on the market.
Why is it that I'm supposed to be afraid of the known very few GMO changes and not be afraid of the unknown thousands of changes in the natural process?
Since the ecosystem already contains barley and rice, what possible harm can come from a plant that incorporates DNA from both?
"Prior to the 1980s there were no GMO organisms anywhere in the world"
Wrong.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
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companies use all sorts of tricks to hide stuff like that. Soup companies use yeast to put MSG in Soup without reporting it (it's a by product of the yeast, which serves no other purpose). Cookie and Donut companies have for years claimed "Zero Grams Trans Fat" on products that are literally made of trans-fat by putting a token amount of wheat in there and adjusting portion sizes. You've got to make these 'warnings' really, really blunt or they just work around it.
As for labels, that's all well and good for the top 10%. What about the other 90%? You know how we found out sodium nitrate causes cancer? It wasn't the FDA. It was a farmer feeding old herring to cows and noticing they kept dying of liver cancer. The food industry doesn't exactly have the best track record....
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The whole GMO issue has nothing to do with feeding the poor. GMO grains cost more so the starving proles can't afford to buy the seeds, they just save their current seeds for next year. First world farmers like GMO because they get a higher profit margin, but only if they can sell it at full price. If you mark the GMO foods then people will demand a discount (because many people think it's "bad"), and that wipes out the higher profit margins and that's why they work so hard to prevent labeling.
The whole GMO issue has nothing to do with feeding the poor. GMO grains cost more so the starving proles can't afford to buy the seeds, they just save their current seeds for next year.
Just three corporations control one quarter of the world's seed market (Monsanto, Syngenta and DuPont) and biodiversity is not high on their agenda. National seed lists in many countries make it illegal to buy and sell unusual varieties and it is prohibitively expensive to keep seeds on the list. Agribusinesses require farmers buying seed to sign contracts that prevent them saving and replanting seeds at a later date. As this is difficult to enforce, seeds are now being genetically modified to be sterile after a year in order to protect company's patents, a process known as terminator technology. While this guarantees profits, an estimated 1.4 billion farmers worldwide depend on seeds saved or exchanged with neighbors. The Chilean Rural and Indigenous Network call this copyrighting or patenting of living things 'a crime against humanity'.
Source: A Handbook For Changing Our World by the Trapese Collective.
...except the variety of a particular type of plant matters.
The obvious one here is that it has different nutritional content.
Someone in another forum also brought up the issue of allergies. This really isn't rice anymore. It's a hybrid grain. It's really much more like tritcale and they do label for that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The trouble is, like most anti-GMO people, you have a fundamental lack of understanding of what genes actually do.
They mutate by themselves for one thing. Should we be running around ensuring that no natural mutations occur? No because that would be an insane exercise and would fly in the face of the fact that DNA has been doing shit for a billion years before you came along to worry about it.
Intermingling crops? Are the crops you're talking about native to the area you're in? Are those crops naturally occurring strains of plants or have they been only in human cultivation for a few thousand years?
I'm not gonna say we _can't_ kill the planet by messing with species, but I will say with the utmost confidence that we won't.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
I think we should just go back in time and ban breeding altogether, I mean before we domesticated dogs or so.
Because that's what breeding is, genetic modification, just slow. To be fair, being slow it also gives you a longer heads up if some apples go pear shaped.
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paid shills, GMO fanbois, rose-colored-glasses wearers, ...and people who are none of the above, but just tired of tedious luddites like you. Why don't you go find yourself a cave in the himalayas and go freeze in the dark?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."