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Scotland To Ban GM Crops
An anonymous reader writes: Scotland's rural affairs minister has announced the country will ban the growing of genetically modified crops. He said, "I am concerned that allowing GM crops to be grown in Scotland would damage our clean and green brand, thereby gambling with the future of our £14 billion food and drink sector." Many Scottish farmers disapprove of the ban, pointing out that competing farms in nearby England face no such restriction. "The hope was to have open discussion and allow science to show the pros and cons for all of us to understand either the potential benefits or potential downsides. What we have now is that our competitors will get any benefits and we have to try and compete. It is rather naïve."
Aren't all crops genetically modified?
No, not by humans. By natural selection, yes, but that rarely would produce Antarctic teleost genes in vascular plants or other extreme HGT effects now "readily" possible.
Scotland's rural affairs minister has announced the country will ban the growing of genetically modified crops. He said, "I am concerned that allowing GM crops to be grown in Scotland would damage our clean and green brand, thereby gambling with the future of our £14 billion food and drink sector."
Oh he's gambling with their food and drink sector but not in the way he thinks he is. Simply banning these crops in the absence of actual evidence of their harm will definitely cause an impact but probably not a positive one. I understand taking reasonable steps to evaluate the effects of new(ish) technologies but slapping a blanket ban on something without any actual evidence of harm seems rather short sighted. This is exactly the sort of thing that you need to have a rational and evidence based debate over. Not a fear motivated ban.
forcing terminal
Nobody is 'forcing' anybody to do anything, and there are no 'terminal' crops. Two words, two lies. Seems about right for the anti-GMO bunch.
Get the book called Genetic Roulette to learn all about the harm done to farm animal eating GMO food: behavioural changes, organ tissue damage, and loss of fertility, vastly higher rates of miscarriages, among other things. People like myself who go out of our way to make sure every piece of food that enters our body is not genetically engineered believe this book is more than junk science or misinterpreted data. Also, calling religious people nuts doesn't help your cause. It only causes even more resistance.
Must you keep repeating this bullshit? Read the actual case, not some anti-GMO spin on it.
He was not 'concerned that Monsanto seed contaminated his farm'. He suspected that some GMO seed from his neighbors property got on his field, so he intentionally killed (with glyphosphate) all of the crop that HE planted, kept the seed from the 'contaminated' plants, and replanted them. There was nothing 'accidental' about it.
in case you missed the last twenty years, they're specifically talking about the Monsanto crops which are a: terminal (they do not produce viable seed), b: specifically resistant to insect and disease strains that have already adapted to the resistant strain crops such as triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye), and most importantly c: as synthetic strains, are patented, hence with marker genes can be traced into the wild and used to shut down farmers who refuse to buy Monsanto strains by litigating them to death when those marked strains are found sprouting in their hedgerows.
Aren't a and c mutually exclusive? I am not a farmer, so if I have a gross conceptual error here please correct me, but if the crops are terminal, how are the farmers "illegally" getting seeds to plant without paying royalties? Someone has to buy the seeds from Monsanto if they are not viable on their own, right?
The book is wrong. There have been hundreds of studies that show animals turn out the same. Also the seed/pesticide price for a farmer isn't that big of a difference between the two types of corn. The farmer would not grow it if there was a difference.
I find it really funny how non farmers think farmers are stupid. They spend all day thinking about these things, the same as you think about computers/tech, etc.
> and simply bred a new crop without paying for it:
Paying to grow plant seeds, simply because he "ought to have known" that those seeds have artificial restrictions placed on them by government on behalf of some company? That's luddism right there.
Why would you think that this could happen? There are tons of companies that produce seed. The only reason a farmer would pay a ton of money for their particular seed was if it was a really profitable seed that they couldn't get anywhere else. And farmers have been buying seeds anually forever for lots of crops. Agreements not to replant specialty varietals long predate the modern transgenic era. A lot of the time, they're just buying a particularly useful hybrid that doesn't breed true (or doesn't produce seeds at all), so it makes sense to buy seeds year after year anyway.
This doesn't actually seem to be happening, though. Glyphosate use is way up, but that seems to be primarly because it's replacing other (much nastier) herbicides. And insect resistant crops actually reduce insecticide use.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Your view of property rights is pretty messed up. If monsanto doesn't want their seeds being blown by the wind, carried by birds etc, they need to build fences. If their seed lands on my land I can do whatever I want with it. Period. Only massive legal spending on a scale never before seen, and that could not be matched by Schmeiser enabled them to squeak out a victory. If they don't like the way nature work s- those pesky bees spreading pollen everywhere - they are welcome to leave the seed industry.
In general, there are several concerns about GMO foods (presented in no particular order):
1. GMO foods cause cancer, infertility, etc. (health concerns in general)
2. GMO foods will disrupt the environment, either by spreading too far due to their increased fitness or by spreading their genes and causing unforeseen changes in the surrounding wildlife
3. Issues with the concept of patenting life
4. Concerns about letting one (or several) large company control most of the seed stock
5. Concerns about allowing crops to get too similar, thus potentially raising the chance of crop collapse like the Potato Famine
6. It's "unnatural" and scary
Of these, 1. has no real evidence behind it, and plenty of evidence against it. It's still a potential concern in some cases, but in general these fears are overblown (especially when people are afraid they will pick up those genes - if gene therapy was that easy, hemophilia or muscular dystrophy wouldn't be an issue), as the proteins made from the inserted genes are already generally considered safe. 2. is possible, in that they could disrupt the insect/pest population, but their genes are unlikely to significantly improve the fitness of surrounding plants, and crops aren't good enough to grow outside of fields, for the most part. I understand both sides of the issue on #3. 4 and 5 are (in my opinion) legitimate concerns in general, but that isn't limited to GMO crops. 6 is just stupid.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Strawberries too. 100% of strawberries are from grafted hybrids.
Corporations do some crazy things in the name of profit, but GM food is not particularly crazy or malevolent. It's pretty awesome, actually. Unfortunately, the ill-defined "natural foods" trend -- really just another form of superstition -- is all the rage among a well-meaning but (sometimes willfully) uninformed population of mommies, hipsters, and, by extension, their households.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Well, that and the fact that it's 100% obvious to any judge that Schmeiser intentionally killed off his non Roundup-Ready crops to select for the trait. His fields were 95% Roundup Ready. That's not "Ow! Monsanto is pollinating my crops with its big, bad pollen!" That's, "Yay, I'm going to get this stuff without paying for it!"
And Monsanto had a solution to this a while back. Terminator seeds that produce sterile plants. But everybody had a heart attack over the idea, so they've agreed not to use them. Now they're stuck chasing pollen around and getting blamed for "contamination" by farmers who clearly just want to steal their IP.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
If at some point in a discussion about GMO and the company Monsanto gets brought up as a point pro/con GMO, just remember this. Bringing up a company that is built around a product does not mean that the product in question inherits the attitude that the company that uses has.
Good example, if I'm talking about chicken and McDonald's and their woeful employee wage gets brought up, more than likely you have less a problem with chicken and more a problem with McDonald's.
I get that Monsanto has some serious legal ethics issues and that apparently the CEO goes to bed at night after his late night snack of kittens. However, GMOs didn't make their CEO some monopolistic asshat, he was already that before hand. GMOs are just his weapon of choice. It could have been self-microwaving hotdogs for all we know but we were destined to have this kind of caliber of a person grace the planet and this person choose GMOs.
You have a great point in that the whole problem isn't a scientific one, the problem is a political one. Much like climate change, a lot of people when the topic gets brought up start naming off political parties. Which that typically means whoever it is doing the talking has a lot more beef with the other political party (parties) than they actually do with the science behind the whole issue. It would be great to not hold people accountable if they didn't plant the seed and it came over by the wind instead. However, I will say, that a fair amount (I wouldn't say majority, but a lot more often than would like to be admitted) of farmers are on purpose planting seed knowing all about the agreements and what not. That comes from my experience with living not too far away from where a lot of growing goes on and having a few buddies that work on those farms. Again, though, we have a serious problem because the vast majority of those that aren't seriously trying to game the system are finding it difficult to mount a serious defense. However, again, that's not a problem with GMOs so much as a political problem.
So it is important and yet very difficult, because after all we are humans, for us to understand that there is a separation between the actual thing being debated and those who want to be complete dickheads with or about those things. Scotland banning GMOs is less an attack on the validity and safety of GMOs, and more along the lines of a big middle finger to companies like Monsanto. Knowing the context of why Scotland took the actions it did, helps us to cut through the "how do we make GMOs safe / how do we eradicate GMOs from the Earth" debate and get to the real heart of the matter, "How do we stop kitten eating CEO corporate greed? Or at the very least wean them off of kittens and reduce the full throttle amount of greed that engage in?" Because it is not unheard of for a business owner to actually take interest in their employees' lives and care about their impact on the local and national levels. That era may have passed us or may be only something in the domain of small businesses. However, I believe that this is truly the topic we should on a more broader sense be discussing.
You made that up. Or somebody did. What GMOs need more pesticides? And what pesticides are they, specifically?
Bt crops that produce their own pesticides are amazing. They took a natural bacteria-based pesticide that has no known effect on humans (and is used by the truckload on "organic" crops for this reason) and engineered the gene straight into the plant. The result is a pest resistant plant that massively reduces the amount of Bt pesticide used per acre and increases its effectiveness at pest control.
Of course, the anti-GMO crowd has a million complaints about it. It produces too much Bt to be safe. It also produces too little Bt to be effective. It's OK to spray it but it's super toxic when the plant produces it. 100% bullshit, but it's cheap to make a web site and hard to do real research.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Unfortunately, the ill-defined "natural foods" trend -- really just another form of superstition -- is all the rage among a well-meaning but (sometimes willfully) uninformed population of mommies, hipsters, and, by extension, their households.
You nailed it: GM fear and vaccinations are the 2 top superstitions of the 21st century. Plus, the two are related: "stick a pin in a map in the center of an anti-vax hotspot, and you've found a Whole Foods.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, eliminate IP for all things would be better of course, but eliminating it for lifeforms would be a nice start.
Well, that and the fact that it's 100% obvious to any judge that Schmeiser intentionally killed off his non Roundup-Ready crops to select for the trait. His fields were 95% Roundup Ready. That's not "Ow! Monsanto is pollinating my crops with its big, bad pollen!" That's, "Yay, I'm going to get this stuff without paying for it!"
So farmers cannot select for beneficial traits anymore. What are they to do -- keep databases of traits so they can determine which ones might be "property" of a genetic engineering firms?
And please don't try to tell me this ban on millennia-old behavior will stop at 'Roundup-readiness'.
No spin: Before GMOs farmers could select for interesting traits without restriction.
Now they must assume that new traits they come across are someone else's "property" until proven otherwise. To say this is burdensome would be an understatement.
No, they absolutely can. Just not ones that are specifically genetically engineered and patented. Other than that, knock yourself out. Although farmers aren't really in the "producing new and better varietals" business these days. If they want to get in to R&D, they can jump right in, but most of them are going to keep buying seeds and seedlings from the companies that actually produce the varietals.
Are you seriously implying that that knowing about Roundup Ready crops was just an undue burden that nobody in the industry could ever be expected to keep up with? This case is so completely over the top that it's a wonder anybody is defending him.
Actually, it's not really a wonder, because he's the only example they really have. The other borderline cases that everybody is thought experimenting on never seem to materialize in the real world. Ending up with 95% of a neighbor's traits in your seed "by accident" is just impossible.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
It's not a question of "no one" doing it. It's simply a question of how many. There will always be public research and non-profit funds for doing this type of work. Just not as much. Doing away with patent protection won't halt biotech. It will just slow it down. If that's a price we're willing to pay, then so be it. But in this particular industry, the cost/benefit analysis seems to me to go the other way.
Software development requires investment, but not nearly as much investment as biotech. Add in regulations and what it takes to get those GM lines into production (you'll note that there are lots of interesting new GM plants on the drawing board or in the lab, but very very few actually in the market for regulatory reasons) and you have huge startup costs when compared to most software or music projects. You note this, but I think it's important to really take in the scale. It's also worth noting that musicians generally make more money performing than they do on album sales, and that open source software companies still make money selling support and services. I don't think biotech companies really have much in the way of alternative ways to monetize GM crops beyond selling them.
On the other side of it, there's a difference in what the IP rules cost us in different industries. Software lifecycles are ridiculously fast. A 20 year patent might as well be 100 years. The costs to the industry of a 20 year patent are substantial. On the biotech side, planting cycles are annual and development timelines are generally measured in years, so a 20 year patent isn't all that long when compared to the time it takes for new ideas to become widely adopted products. Second, there's the bullshit factor. In software at least, the bullshit factor is high. I'd guess that most patents these days are given for bullshit rather than real innovation. On the GM crop side, the signal to noise ratio is still high. That could change, but I don't think we're there yet.
I'm really sympathetic to the problems people have with the patent system. In a lot of fields, it seems like it has outlived its usefulness. But in this one, it seems to me like we still have some mileage left.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
First off, the evidence for including them as "probably carcinogenic to humans" (category 2A) is fairly weak. Some glyphosates were only classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" (category 2B), which means there's no good evidence one way or the other - coffee falls in this category, FYI. Second, do you really think farmers are stupid enough to pay extra money for Monsanto seeds if they were getting much less out of them? That's just dumb.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Shouting "shill alert!" doesn't make anything he said less true.