Slashdot Mirror
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."
Do these people want us to go back to the Stone Age? Because that's what's going to happen.
These people are opposed to any progress that might actually solve the problems we face, which only leaves us with the option of going backwards.
I'm more concerned with pesticides/herbacides/whateveracides than GMOs.
We started engineering our food when we started farming 10,000 years ago.
Anyway, not sure how this will play out if Monsanto buy out Syngenta and asset strip it then Scotgov has 400 redundancies at Grangemouth to deal with.
"The hope was to have open discussion and allow science to show the pros and cons for all of us to understand "
Unfortunately, this argument isn't about science. It's about the ability to patent and control crops. GMO crops are safe and effective, the use of them are only bad in the long term effects of politics and big money.
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.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I guess Scotch made from organic wheat will be better for my liver?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I don't think the world is quite ready for genetically modified haggis.
#DeleteChrome
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.
TFA:
"The Scottish Government will shortly submit a request that Scotland is excluded from any European consents for the cultivation of GM crops, including the variety of genetically modified maize already approved and six other GM crops that are awaiting authorisation."
The rest of the world calls that corn. We've been genetically modifying it for all of recorded history.
Really? You mean they're not talking about the stuff that Norman Borlaug made as well. It sure seems like it, and many of the things he invented fall into those categories as well.
Om, nomnomnom...
Selective breeding and hybridization I don't think are counted as "genetically modified".
Can someone with first-hand knowledge explain to me what the problem, or perceived problem, is with GMO's? It's tough to find this information on the net without feeling an agenda is being pushed. Is it religious nuts scared that science is playing god, or are there real concerns? I think I read at one point there was concern about GMOs causing super-bugs to arise, or a lack of genetic variety could cause an entire crop to wiped out. Are these the primary arguments against GMO's?
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Lots of people like to say things like 'there is no evidence that GMOs are dangerous.' But that is mirroring the hippy-dippy types who say that anything 'natural' is healthy.
Just because no one's found a problem with the corn that most of us have been unknowingly eating for decades, that doesn't mean the latest and greatest GMO won't have its own unique risks. The more GMOs that are engineered, the more chances there are to screw something up.
The SNP, naive? Who'd have thought!
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
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.
Of course, you realise that the Terminator Seeds thing is effectively a myth - right:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsvi...
Of course, we're quite happy to eat effectively some of these kinds of plants (seedless grapes and seedless watermelon).
And of course if you were worried about some of the GM gene's getting into the "wild", this would be a good thing. Then again, you'd expect one to be more concerned about our traditionally GM'd crops (i.e., bred) inter breading with their "wild" relatives.
Not to mention burning witches.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Shush, don't go intruding about the anti-science paranoia.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Selective breeding is humans directing natural selection. We have been doing it for millennium. Wheat and maize only exist because humans have influenced them.
Though I would expect that this kind of GM would not be banned, unless the hippies that are running things have really gone off the hook. But even still, this "science = BAD!" generalization is not helping things. What happened to having some government organization look at each proposed GM change and authorize them on a case-by-case basis?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
anytime a company holds a patent on our craps and can one day charge $1000 per seed or hold everyone hostage by not producing the seeds unless political or financial agreements is made is a BAD thing. Never mind the potential for increase pesticides that then drain into our water supplies or stay in the food for us to digest.
love the taste, hate the texture
See also: false dilemma.
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?
They completely miss the real point of GMO.
Monsanto sells herbicides, which also kill pollinating bees, so you can't get seeds for free next season.
Monsanto also sells seeds, so you don't need bees to pollinate your crops, you can just buy them from Monsanto.
Get it?
they're specifically talking about the Monsanto crops which are a: terminal (they do not produce viable seed)
If they are, they're not blocking anything, as Monsanto has never sold terminator seeds.
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)
If they are, they're not blocking everything, because all crops are being constantly bred for disease resistance
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.
There has never been a lawsuit for accidental wind sprouting. The closest case was Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser, in which Schmeiser bred roundup-ready seed, pretending to have had it been part of a wind-blow, but actually having purchased the seed before, and simply bred a new crop without paying for it:
Lots of luddites on slashdot right now. I thought I ought to correct the record.
anytime a company holds a patent on our craps
It's the end of the world when you can eat your food and get sued when it comes out the other end.
Well, now I need the rest of the story. I know seedless oranges were luck of normal, natural genetic chaos, and they propagated the seedless trees through grafting. Are you saying seedless grapes and watermelon (which have been around for more than 20 years) are not the same?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Monsanto goes after farmers who use Round Up Ready on their farm fields, not farmers who grow the Monsanto seed. Farmers are free to use any other pesticide on their crops and Round Up Ready would work against non-Monsanto crops. Only when both Monsanto seed and Round Up Ready are used is there a clear case of willful patent violation.
I believe he wanted something without an agenda being pushed.
Also:
People like myself .... believe this book is more than junk science or misinterpreted data.
You are religious, and that is nuts.
Jeffrey M. Smith (born 1958) is an American consumer activist, self-published author, and former politician.
He attended Maharishi University of Management, and participated in a TM-Sidhi program yogic flying demonstration
Wow
He probably wanted something actually based on science, and not anecdotal claims and innuendo.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You get the science you pay for. And who's paying for it? Why, it's Monsanto! Do you see any non-profits who can buy a comprehensive study disproving Monsanto claims? Is there an elected official who will support an investigation of Monsanto? (Try to find one who doesn't get support from the company.) As usual, when a controversy arises you can usually follow the money to see who is behind the 'facts' we are presented with.
...omphaloskepsis often...
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.
Wait.
How can they be talking about crops that are both a) sterile and c) spreading into the fields of non-Monsanto farmers?
Btw, I'm pretty certain the sterile seeds were never used in production.
I stole this Sig
How the fuck did he 'saved the seed and planted is next season' if your claim that they do not produce viable seed is correct? You need to keep your lies straight.
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.
What, humans aren't natural? Where did we come from then?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
> 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.
Seedless watermelon involves crossing two lines (diploid and tetraploid) annually to generate a sterile fruit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I understand it seedless grapes are typically grafted from plant to plant and are perennial but I expect the "first" generation of them are produced in a similarity. That's how you could get multiple seedless varieties (green, red, black, etc.)
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"
The "accidental contamination gets you sued" argument that they made is also a myth. The most famous case usually cited is that of Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser, where they sued a Canadian canola farmer for growing crops from seeds wind-pollinated from a neighbor using their plants. But Schmeiser always admitted to deliberately trying to get the glyphosphate resistance. He roundup'ed his own crops that were grown next to his neighbor who was using roundup-ready canola, saved only those seeds from the survivors for the next year and planted his whole crop with the resistant seeds, achieving a 95-98% concentration of the gene. He was deliberately attempting to acquire the gene without paying for it - it was in no way, shape or form "accidental contamination". Monsanto confronted him about what he was doing and insisted he pay a license fee since he was using their crop. He refused saying that because he grew it from seeds on his land, it was his own property.
Despite the fact that it was deliberate contamination, not accidental, Monsanto still barely won the patent infringement case, 5-4.
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
Corn with fisheyes is generally considered to be GM. Corn in tune with Mother Nature (when she's not trying to kill us) and grown under the benevolent gaze of a wholistic crystal is not.
Only the ones that float on water
Take a close look at those cases. The lawsuits have only been people who were obviously intentionally selecting for the trait to grow their own roundup ready seeds. People who get cross-pollinated by accident have never been sued. The lawsuits generated a lot of press, so there's a pretty good amount of information in the public record about what actually happened, and it's nothing like what the anti-GMO activists have claimed.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Interesting perspective. Almost entirely wrong, but still interesting.
TL;DR:
1) Monsanto does not produce "sterile" seeds. They do hold a patent on that technology, but have promised not to create seeds using that technology. Yes, they could go back on that promise...but how about we wait until they actually do that before vilifying them?
2) They have never "litigated a farmer to death" over "marked strains are found sprouting in their hedgerows". The one lawsuit that occurred was a result of a farmer who intentionally replanted Monsanto seeds from crops adjoining his neighbors farm (who was using Monsanto seeds), after spraying those same crops with RoundUp, so he knew that was was left was pesticide resistant.
In this case, the amount the farmer (after appeal) had to pay Monsanto was: $0.
>which are a: terminal
No they are not. While Monsanto has teh patent to the terminator gene, they have never used it in a commercial product. Right there I know I can disregard the rest of your post since you have started off with veritably false information.
Read myth #1
http://www.npr.org/sections/th...
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Hi there. I'm a big-time sustainability nerd. In fact, it's literally part of my job description. I have friends throughout the industry-- energy, transportation, water, land use, etc. I have a couple friends in the food sustainability area and they're vehemently divided on the viability of non-GM crops in the modern world. Me? I can't be bothered to care too much. I don't have the time in the day to figure out how to best grow free-range battery chargers for solar chickens. I need to leave that to someone else. I'm happy that someone has volunteered to be the test bed for this experiment.
is worrying about the effect of GM food on public health.
Lots of people like to say things like 'there is no evidence that GMOs are dangerous.' But that is mirroring the hippy-dippy types who say that anything 'natural' is healthy.
That is a bad attempt at conflating two things that have nothing to do with each other. Saying there is no evidence of GMO crops being dangerous is (thus far) an accurate statement of fact. Doesn't mean or even imply there isn't something we don't know yet. But claiming GMO crops are dangerous when you have no evidence to support that claim is not remotely the same sort of statement as asserting that all "natural" things are healthy. One is a correct statement of the absence of evidence of harm and the other is an assertion of faith clearly contradicted by known facts about what is actually harmful. Saying there is no evidence that GMOs are dangerous does not imply that there will never be any such evidence. To use a poker analogy you play the hand you have until the known facts change. Anything else is irrational.
I don't remotely qualify as a "hippy dippy type". I very much have a scientific thought process on this. If there is some evidence of harm or even a credible model of potential harm then by all means let's slow down and figure out the best way to proceed. So far that doesn't appear to exist except in the mind of certain people. Their fears might even come to pass - I'm not dismissing the concern at all. If there is evidence of harm then I assure you I'll be first in line to mitigate that harm but until that day I'm going with the evidence over the fear.
Simple answer:
The plants do produce viable seed. The sterile seed BS is just FUD by the anti-GMO group.
I don't know how governments think they can just legislate a potential problem away when it comes to nature. The world does not have isolated bubbles when it comes to crops. Sure, you can ban the seed but that doesn't stop the change. Look at Mexico, GMO corn has been banned there for years yet they are still infected from the US. You can't control pollination.
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.
How do they both produce non-viable seeds and end up in the fields of a farmer who didn't buy the seeds from the company that produces them?
Also, It's a malfunctioning patent system if you can patent the genes or natural reproduction system. A patent for a gene sequences should be limited the the industrial process used to produce those genes in a target organism. If the farmer hasn't spliced it in themselves using the patented method they should not be violating the patent.
Really? You mean the book by this guy, who has literally no educational background in genetics (or for that matter, any kind of science).
And before you accuse me of ad-hominem (which is not always fallacious), a pretty good trouncing of every "fact" in that book can be found here
I don't want to be poisoned! We can't stop the corporations in this country! Monsanto sites the shit out of every farmer who tries growing natural corn with some bullshit about their growing Monsanto corn without paying for it. Pollination intermixing... Farmers have been sued since the late 1980s.
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.
This could benefit Scotland in that "grown in Scotland" could mean more value to the a consumer. Putting the science issues aside for the moment, a certain percentage of consumers don't like GM food. Sometimes zigging when everyone else is zagging gives you an edge.
Table-ized A.I.
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
That's because it's already happened. If you notice a bunch of crops growing on your land with special properties, and you dare replant those next year, you could inadvertently be running afoul of a license agreement you never saw, never agreed to and be sued for patent infringement.
So it doesn't matter that you can buy seed from a competitor - if some of the "viral" seed ends up on your land, your only option is to burn it. Or be sued.
Terminator seeds don't work, period. And unless the legal system changes to the point where if your patented seeds end up on someone else's farmland, then it's SOL for you - it's your responsibility to prevent that, then it's a serious problem.
Hell, the problem's compounded if your neighbour starts using the seeds and you want to go for organic certification.
All Scotland really needs to do is change the laws a little bit and say legal agreements are not conveyed by living things. So you can impose license agreements on farmers that agree to buy your product, but if they spill your product elsewhere, then not only is all legal protection void on the spilled product, any other IP protection carried on that product cannot be enforced. So your neighbour's seed ending up on your crop is yours free and clear.
Looking at changes to an entire nations food source is most certainly gambling, and based on the legal antics of the GMO players running the game today, what you label as a fear motivated ban others simply call common sense.
"Common sense" is based on evidence and good judgement. This is not common sense as it doesn't involve evidence, sound scientific advice or even a reasonable model of harm. If they want to treat GMO techniques with the sort of rigor they do drugs (plenty of testing of safety) then I don't have a principled objection to that provided the rules are vaguely sane and uniformly applied. But that isn't what they are doing. Just a blanket ban while dismissing the fact that all the evidence that so far shows no harm isn't common sense - it's idiotic.
It's IP law, not property law. If you photograph the book that I've written from your house, that doesn't give you the right to publish it and sell it.
And you could make a great argument against IP laws -- there are many to be made -- but this has nothing to do with property rights.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Short answer: Nibiru
Monsanto does not produce "sterile" seeds. They do hold a patent on that technology, but have promised not to create seeds using that technology. Yes, they could go back on that promise...but how about we wait until they actually do that before vilifying them?
We should have demanded that all Monsanto seeds use that technology, because it would have prevented lawsuits over contaminated fields because some seed blew into a neighbor's.
I know the argument against is poor farmers need to save seed, but nobody in that position would buy from Monsanto anyway. It's not like it's cheaper to make GM seed, not once you factor in R&D. They can dump, but that's illegal.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And yet, with all of the farmers out there, there are no examples whatsoever of inadvertent use resulting in a lawsuit. The only ones who have gotten sued are the ones who obviously intentionally selected the Roundup Ready seed and planted that. Monsanto's position on this is pretty clear, and they've acted on it exactly how they said they would. In fact, Monsanto used to have (and probably still does) a policy that they'll pay to have hybrids removed from your fields if you contact them.
Terminator seeds would completely solve this problem, but there was so much outcry and shit flinging when they were proposed that Monsanto has pledged not to produce them. This is 100% not Monsanto's fault. They'd love to sell terminator seeds and have 0% cross pollination and never have to worry about enforcing their contracts.
That's a tougher nut to crack. USDA rules allow some cross pollination without losing certification. I haven't seen a lot of data that indicates hybrids are taking over, and depending on the crop, there are techniques to mitigate the problem (adjusting planting times, etc.). But cross pollination happens and people need to learn to live with it. If I grew strawberries and claimed that my deity was angered by corn pollen touching them, how much of a right would I have to dictate what my neighbors planted? At some point, the public's demand for religious accommodation on this issue is going to start trampling on other practical goods and we're going to need to draw a line.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
And you could make a great argument against IP laws -- there are many to be made -- but this has nothing to do with property rights.
I disagree. I think it has to do with both, and how they intersect, or don't. And in the case where your IP has been distributed through natural means, I say you should lose control of it. Plant patents were surely beneficial at one time, but today they hold back progress, just like other patents.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So, basically eliminate IP protection for plants entirely, then? Because within a couple of seasons, somebody like Percy Schmeiser can "accidentally" Roundup his crops and produce a field of 100% Roundup Ready seeds and start selling them himself and before long, your research is down the toilet.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The things we eat are things that we have discovered -- pretty much through fatal trial and error -- do not kill us, not things that are inherently good for us. There line between healthy vs. unhealthy is not the same line as naturally occurring vs. genetically modified or bred. A lot of people may wish that it were, because that's simple and easy, but wishing doesn't make it so.
Here is a not-at-all exhaustive list of naturally growing things that you should not eat:
Mature Asparagus - The berries of the mature plant are poisonous, containing furostanol and spirostanol saponins. Rapid ingestion of more than five to seven ripe berries can induce abdominal pain and vomiting.
Amanita Phalloides - Commonly known as the death cap, the fungus is highly toxic, and the toxicity is not reduced by cooking, freezing, or drying.
Jequirity - The attractive seeds (usually about the size of a ladybug, glossy red with one black dot) contain abrin, a ribosome-inactivating protein related to ricin, and very potent. Symptoms of poisoning include nausea, vomiting, convulsions, liver failure, and death, usually after several days.
White Baneberry - All parts are poisonous, especially the berries, the consumption of which has a sedative effect on cardiac muscle tissue and can cause cardiac arrest.
Sabi Star - The toxic sap of its roots and stems is used as arrow poison for hunting large game.
Honestly, just getting nutrition without getting acutely poisoned is a huge accomplishment in itself. Achieving optimal nutrition is a nice-to-have, but there's a point of diminishing returns once you've achieved sufficient nutrition, which, fortunately, we've done in first-world countries.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Terminator seeds don't work, period.
How would we know? They're not actually selling them, period. There was massive global outcry over the very idea, and now essentially 100% of the world's corn is contaminated with Monsanto's IP — because they didn't use the Terminator gene.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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"
I find it really funny how non farmers think farmers are stupid.
Well, most of them are at best insane; they are fighting a losing battle, they know that's what it is, but they keep at it. Especially when "everyone" knows that the money is in processed products, not in the raw vegetables. If all the farms around you have gone under, and your farm is going under, and the only farms which aren't going under have something special like processed products or free-range organics, and your primary attempt to do something about it is crying to congress which demonstrably doesn't give a fuck, you probably are stupid.
You can talk about nobility all day, but most of the nobility was syphilitic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
When I did a search, Schmeiser did not come up, but this did: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/monsanto-wins-lawsuit_n_3417081.html and to quote in part, "Monsanto filed 144 patent-infringement lawsuits against farmers between 1997 and April 2010, and won judgments against farmers it said made use of its seed without paying required royalties."
The assertion on slashdot is that everyone they won against stole the Monsanto seed, but cross-contamination is well documented which places the burden of proof on Monsanto's many and loud defenders. Monsanto does not claim cross-contamination doesn't occur, though they claim to not sue for it (that PR statement being the subject of a lawsuit that was the subject of the linked article). Yes, in the linked article it appears that being a public statement it is binding -- but Monsanto has refused to sign anything that would clearly be legally binding -- despite: "In its ruling Monday, the court noted that records indicate a large majority of conventional seed samples have become contaminated by Monsanto's Roundup resistance trait."
And, again, *Monsanto* admits to cross-contamination so any claim that they have not wrongfully sued needs to be examined on a case by case basis. Just offering one case (there are 144 mentioned in the article) does nothing to support Monsanto's claims to not wrongfully sue.
I know, Monsanto's astroturfing wants the discussion to be about "GMO is so good farmers steal it and then lie about it" but that isn't what is happening. That isn't why the lawsuit in the linked article happened. Free market proponents want the market to settle things and... the free market has said there is a market from selling non-GMO products. And companies that wish to cater to this are being harmed by cross-contamination as their product is no longer non-GMO.
Burn the witch!
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I realize the Monsanto narrative is about dishonest farmers who steal Monsanto's imaginary property, but Monsanto's GMO is a *liability* for farmers. They don't *want* it no matter what Monsanto lies are spread around. Why don't they want it? Because it costs them money. Not from paying Monsanto, but from not being able to see their product. http://www.rt.com/usa/monsanto-lawsuits-gmo-wheat-603/
I'm inclined to agree with you in a lot of industries, but plants? What progress is being held back? It seems to me that the people doing the real heavy lifting in producing transgenics and novel hybrids are companies that benefit from patent protection. I mean, Bt and Roundup Ready crops are amazing and there's even more interesting work being done, but if all of your investment is gone within two planting seasons, it seems unlikely that they'll do much more expensive biotech research.
It's also worth remembering that this isn't purely analogous to other types of patents. If I get rid of a patent on a machine, you at least still need to design a copy of my machine and build it. Seeds are more like software. You can copy them at will without much effort. So getting rid of that patent protection is a lot more like doing away with software copyright. There may be philosophical reasons for doing it, but I don't think Adobe is going to be putting out a new release of Photoshop if it's 100% free to copy.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Terminator. Seeds.
modifying haggis only makes it angry...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Do you have any quotes or actual figures regarding Scottish farmers disapproval of the ban? Of course TTIP will make it impossible for sovereign governments to implement such legislation.
It's not a matter of "he ought to have known". He did know. He'd previously licensed the seeds. And he used Round-up to kill off non-Round-up-Ready seeds.
I'd have had some sympathy if he'd not used Round-up with the seeds, which ordinarily would kill the crop and is therefore something you would never normally do. But as it is, he wanted the seeds, he knew they existed, he wanted to exploit their advantages, he deliberately went out of his way to obtain them by means other than getting them from Monsanto, and he made use of their defining property.
This wasn't accidental patent infringement.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It's not a case of "ought to have known." He did know. He specifically killed off any plants that didn't have the trait. This man is not the victim here. If he didn't want Roundup Ready seeds, he could have just kept doing what he was doing and he never would have been bothered. If he did want them, he could have bought them.
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.
The lawsuits you're talking about do not exist. Monsanto isn't running around suing people who accidentally grow contaminated seeds, unaware that they have some. The only lawsuit thus far is against somehow who knowingly obtained them, and used Round-up on them to kill off unmodified seeds.
(Remember - it's pitifully easy to determine whether a farmer is knowingly abusing the patented seeds and is thus worthy of being sued. Are they spraying their unlicensed crop with Round-up? If they're not, there's no legitimate reason for anyone to sue, and Monsanto doesn't appear to be suing anyone who isn't using Round-up. There's no legitimate reason for a farmer to spray a healthy, "natural", crop with Round-up unless they want to destroy their own crop.)
The argument against terminator seeds is that if Round-up Ready seed ever becomes the default, terminator seeds would endanger the world's food supply. That's rather more serious than preventing non-existent lawsuits.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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'.
The argument against terminator seeds is that if Round-up Ready seed ever becomes the default, terminator seeds would endanger the world's food supply.
But that's clearly not going to happen; the backlash has already begun. More and more of the world is saying it doesn't want GM crops, because they aren't undergoing the kind of testing regimen that would determine their effects before they become food — or the default means of food production, which might have significant secondary effects. Roundup might not be harmful in the environment when used as intended, but overapplication is often a thing when chemicals are relatively inexpensive. Roundup persists for a very long time in the soil, so trials which show it not harming soil diversity over one or two seasons only tell part of the story.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Aren't all crops genetically modified?"
Yes, in that traditional hybridization means the intentional mating of strains of a species that include desired traits, followed by the culling of offspring that do not express the trait, a process which is repeated until the species breeds true for the desired traits. But anti-GMO activism refers to transgenic processes, engineering the transfer of DNA from one species into another in a precisely controlled manner. The opposition came from the assumption that transgenic processes are unnatural, which we now know to be wrong.
So what if he did? Monsanto should be glad he didn't sue them because their shit infected his land.
It's fairly simple. Generically modified crops will appear fine at first. People will happily eat them, unaware that anything is wrong.
Then, wham! One day, we all wake up. Zombies everywhere.
Same dealio with irradiated foods. Except Mutants everywhere.
Also Monsanto is evil. If they can genetically engineer food, they're probably grafting other things to create X5s and Nexus 6es. BMW has already released an "X5", but where did they get the design from? Likewise, where did Google get its Nexus 6 from? Monsanto, that's where.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Monsanto's seeds don't carry a terminator gene.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
That means they can still export their crops to the European mainland, while noone wants the English Monsanto food. The English can try to export it to the US, that's about the only country where they eat that stuff.
' "accidental contamination gets you sued" argument that they made is also a myth.'
In any case, this argument conflates a technology with a legal problem which is totally a construct of human society. Anti-GMO activists are a bunch of liberal arts majors who think that every GM organism contains a snippet of DNA from Bungarus caeruleus, the common Monsanto lawyer. This is why they're ripping up fields of open-source, non-corporate crops like golden rice.
What happens if I repeatedly apply a light glyphosate spray to untampered soy, culling down the plants that react the worst and keeping the ones that manage to somehow survive; then start moving down through their descendants with younger and younger applications, keeping those seedlings which don't die; then start raising the dosage, culling out those which react most poorly?
We already have superweeds. Monsanto transposed the RR gene from weeds adapted in the wild. If I adapt it into soy by another process, is it still patented? Is the fact that a cultivar has resistance patented, or just that it's injected from Monsanto's GM process?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Lumping lots of things together and calling them "GMOs" is like lumping things together and calling them all "chemicals". Sure, there are chemicals that we need to ingest. Does that mean all chemicals are safe to ingest?
We need to be talking about - and the manufacturers and/or government need to be certifying the safety of - each specific genetic modification. Some might be harmless to ingest, but have other side effects, like propagating the use of pesticides that are wiping out bee populations or other similar environmental damage. Show me that the changes you made have benefits that outweigh side effects that will affect consumers or dump on the commons, and I'd approve and/or eat them. I just don't see that happening, which is my concern.
And people lumping all possible genetic modifications together and saying "GMOs are safe you are idiots for doubting science!" scare me just a little more than hippies saying "All GMOs are evil!" Both groups are stupid, but while the latter might impact global food scarcity at some time in the future, the former give a blank check to manufacturers to do things that might hurt me or my family now.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Besides thistles?
And of course if you were worried about some of the GM gene's getting into the "wild", this would be a good thing.
Yes, of course, "because we've never, ever screwed anything up".
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"
Pretty easy to ban crops when you don't really have agriculture other than sheep :p
OK, so let's say we've made that tradeoff. Now we don't have Bt corn and Roundup Ready soybeans, which are both insanely popular among farmers. What have we gotten in return, aside from a good feeling about not patenting lifeforms?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
If raw food item A is vulnerable to pests, and raw food item B produces a protein that pests don't like, why not splice the ability to produce that protein into item A? Is that any different from eating a meal where A and B are mixed together on your plate?
Genetic testing would show that you're not using Monsanto's genes, so you'd probably be in pretty good shape on that one. Given that the gene is from a bacterium, odds are very strongly against you ending up with the same gene in your soybeans. Although my guess is that you'll waste enormous amounts of money and soybeans doing it, and you probably won't succeed. If you do, what have you saved? You could try to sell them, but if everybody agrees it's wrong for you to insist on any IP protection or replanting agreements, you won't make any money after the first generation. You could plant them for yourself, but it would have been massively cheaper just to buy them from Monsanto.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I'd like to see some data on that. From what I can tell, the dominance of Monsanto IP in corn is generally because farmers are buying it for its traits. I didn't know there was data to support that it was more a contamination issue than anything else.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
My baseball falling onto your property does not give you the right to mass produce that exact style/design of ball.
Just because something fell onto your property, it doesn't give you the right to break copyright on that item, no matter how much you twist the law.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That seems like something very strange to do, given that he seems to have wanted "their shit" more than his own. If he was the "victim" of contamination that everybody wants to paint him as, he could have just called Monsanto and had them remove the plants in question. They do that.
No wait, he actually did that later on because of sour grapes over the lawsuit. They couldn't agree on terms, so he did it himself and billed them for it. $600. Big money. I can't believe any farmer would tolerate such an overwhelming burden.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
FYI, Round Up is an herbicide. Round Up Ready is a marketing term for the seed.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
So I don't quite know what the submission is trying to say with their "statistic". After all, we neither have a direct democracy which would be a tyranny of the majority, nor do we have policy driven by the average joe's "feelings" on a science subject.
The problem with GMO is the commercial nature of it that makes it Agri-business.
And all intensive farming methods have done is demand a higher and higher use of chemicals to make up for what is being taken out of the ground and not replaced, for an actual reduction in the yield (though less than the reduction you could expect dropping the current net-negative methods without re-improving the soil before starting again).
Natural modifications spread slowly at a speed that the rest of the biosphere ALSO modifies itself. That modification may not be safe or wanted, but the change happens slowly enough that we can spot the trend and avoid the end result.
UN-natural modifications dump a superabundance and are no different in their insecurity to the biosphere as the introduction of cane toads to australia or cats to indoneisan islands have been.
But rolling out very slowly the changes removes all "profitability" from a GMO scheme. So will never be used.
Even if it wasn't a myth, at least from a commercial farming point of view, most don't harvest seed for replanting anyway, and buy it from one of the large seed producers anyway (GMO or not).
I'd like to see some data on that. From what I can tell, the dominance of Monsanto IP in corn is generally because farmers are buying it for its traits. I didn't know there was data to support that it was more a contamination issue than anything else.
I'd have to figure out which documentary I saw it in, and which expert in Mexico (they know a lot about corn) said it... You could probably find it with google as quickly as I could dig it out of my brain. I think I have FAT corruption.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is the gene from a bacterium, or is it a weed gene inserted into a bacterial cassette and transferred into a soy bean?
The goal would only be to make it expensive for Monsanto to litigate, by genetic testing and estimation of how much of a crop is Monsanto RR and how much is Selected RR. That, coupled with legal good faith--that a person can't reasonably tell that his original, Selected RR seeds were cross-contaminated with Monsanto RR--and the reasonable person's expectation that he can replant RR soy every year and still get RR soy, thus has no way to test and verify that his RR soy is Selected RR and not Monsanto RR (thus, good faith), would damage Monsanto's ability to litigate.
It's purely to be an asshole about things. I can confirm it would have positive economic benefits, but also that I'm not concerned much with that.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Am I the only one scared of a banana that after a month of sitting on a kitchen counter is still firm, yellow and ready to eat? Maybe this is the future of fruits and vegetables, but right now I'd be hard pressed to pick it up and eat it. I'll stick to my every 3-4 days of hitting the farmer's market on the way home and buying only what I plan to eat for a few days.
Why isn't it?
If raw food item A is vulnerable to pests, and raw food item B produces a protein that pests don't like, why not splice the ability to produce that protein into item A? Is that any different from eating a meal where A and B are mixed together on your plate?
Oh, so that's how gene splicing works! You just get two different things together and shuffle them around a bit! Who'd have thought?
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Slate has an excellent summary on the GMO scare.
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
To quote Will Saletan "But the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust."
There is an exemption in patent law for farmers saving seed (and selling the produce for consumption).
I think people are massively overestimating the amount of litigation that goes on over this issue. Monsanto only goes after the egregious cases already, so I'm not sure how much of a win this would be. Having another source of Roundup Ready plants would be good for farming in general, though. That being said, the original Roundup Ready patent expires this year, so it shouldn't be long before we see more products with it. Monsanto has a Gen2 product, so we'll see how IP enforcement works when it's not as easy to investigate without actually testing plants.
My guess is that we'll still see a low incidence of lawsuits and the whole thing will continue to be a nothingburger, practically speaking.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I'd think that the burden would be on people who want to prove that Monsanto is doing terrible things to come up with specific examples of terrible things. The examples that actually do come out with enough information for scrutiny don't usually support the idea that the farmers were innocent victims.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I don't think that's completely true. It looks like safe "middle of the road" estimates in practical is on the order of 47 days. In the worst case of 197 days, that could work out to some noticeable accumulation, but that seems like an outlier estimate. The chemical has also been in use for 40 years, so it seems like we should see some serious data if it had serious effects. That's not to count out the possibility of really subtle second and third order problems, but that's true for anything.
The other thing we should remember is that it's not the first herbicide to be used in farming, and using less of it may well mean using more of a more toxic herbicide. I mean, it's easy to make an herbicide. Just put a really toxic liquid in a bottle. It's harder to make an herbicide that just kills plants and is pretty neutral on other stuff we don't want to kill. Glyphosate is a pretty big win on that front.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Yes, and companies have already found away around the GMO labeling by using genetic information and cross-breeding (story here).
Back in the 90s, he could easily have been ignorant about GMOs as a special class of intellectual property.
Schmeizer found a trait that was useful and did not cultivate his crops for seed production. Without the GMO aspect, that could fall under the traditional exemption in patent law for seed savers.
There has been no case where the farmer accidentally grew the GMO. Every case that has been pursued in court was over a farmer intentionally concentrating the seed and planting it. Not accidental anything.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You really think they can get away with holding millions of hungry people hostage? If they should ever be so fucking ignorant as to do so it'd be their death warrant. People are sheep when well fed. When hungry they become ravenous wolves.
People who paid attention in biology class should know this. Different plants have different pollination methods. Most corn is hybrid and saved seed will not produce. Canola, cotton, and soybeans are open pollinated and saved seed will grow exactly like the parent plant. Terminator seeds from open pollinated plants will not grow. Pollen from any of these plants will affect any nearby plants of the same species.
I'm still waiting for someone on the anti-GMO food side to explain what, precisely, they mean by "GMO" foods.
- Is it any genetically-altered food? In that case, EVERY apple, corn, grain, etc that's not entirely synthetic is technically "genetically modified" from its original wild form. Humans have been doing that long before Mendel explained the mechanisms.
- is it lab-modified plants? Because then that would EXclude Roundup-Ready, which I believe the first generations were developed by (more or less) drenching plants in Roundup and just re-breeding the ones that lived.
I can't quite seem to understand what GMO means, exactly, except by a very subjective yardstick of "that icky franken food" which is meaningless, claddistically.
-Styopa
I think people are massively overestimating the amount of litigation that goes on over this issue.
People would just stop buying RR licenses, is the point. They would have reason to believe they're not subject to the license, and would take no action to subvert that license--in the same way Toyota is not taking an action to subvert paying Nissan to use their brand on their cars.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
The synthetic strains of DNA in GMO's are allot like the History-Eraser-Button in that we don't know will happen each time we press that button... Maybe something good, Maybe something bad.
All the paranoid/under-informed non-scientific folks out avoiding GMO's at Whole Foods are essentially in Ren's camp; DON'T PRESS THE JOLLY CANDY LIKE BUTTON!
The real question is, are you Ren, or are you Stimpy?
If you look at Wikipedia's Monsanto page you will see that they make no mention of any farmer ever being sued for such a thing. We can reasonably conclude that they would mention that. I have seen a number of other sites that go into this. I was not sure what to believe so I investigated. Monsanto may be evil dicks, I do not know, but they are not doing that whole sue farmers into oblivion thing - yet.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Except he plainly admitted that he knew about it and did it intentionally and that his motive was to not pay for the seed by claiming it was justified because he grew the crops that he harvested for seed. We can argue the merits of IP, but let's be honest about it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I can't tell where you're pointing that sarcasm.
Well, we don't have a time machine, so in this particular hypothetical situation, we'd still have Bt corn and Roundup-ready soybeans. I bet that Monsanto would even still be the one to produce them, at least until their competitors manage to economically produce generic alternatives, which conceivably might take a while.
But I guess what you mean is, if we abolished plant patents today, no one will be willing and/or able to develop whatever the future, "new-and-improved" versions of these crops are. Or, if these hypothetical laws had been in place 20 years ago, we wouldn't have these crops today.
I think a large fraction of Slashdot users reject this premise. It's basically the biotech equivalent of the open-source-versus-closed-source debate, or the idea that bands would stop making music if people refused to pay money for their recordings. Granted, a genetics lab is a much bigger investment than a few guitars and drums, or a laptop running a software development environment. But I personally believe that, if there were no plant patents, eventually all the farm co-ops around America and the world would pool their resources to develop their own GM crop lines. The yield increases still provide adequate incentive, plus the farmers' collective wouldn't have to compete with Monsanto on cost while developing their own alternatives, and best of all, they wouldn't be sued into oblivion by Monsanto's fleets of lawyers.
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.
He was deliberately attempting to acquire the gene without paying for it
This, in a nutshell, is my problem with GMOs. Nobody should have to pay for genes, period. Exclusive ownership of lifeforms and genes (which after all are just information) is wrong. It's that simple. If we allow this, and we do, we venture out on a very dark and extremely slippery-sloped road. Not buying GM-ed products is a way of protesting the "life can be IP" meme, which is why I support labeling laws despite the fact that I don't believe GMO food is harmful. It's about ethics and the future, not public health.
That's a very interesting article. Thanks for the link.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Monsanto doesn't sell "terminator seeds". Furthermore, plenty of farmers buy new seed each year because many desirable features come about when a plant is heterozygous at an allele, which means that they don't breed true. It's much easier to buy known heterozygotes each year than it is to try to select your own.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
This is one of those sentences that doesn't inspire confidence in the technical accuracy of what's to follow. Kind of like talking about sending your kid "an internet."
You mean they've classified it in a class of carcinogens that includes "emissions from high temperature frying" and not quite in the class that includes "sawdust." Lots of things are probably carcinogenic. The question is how seriously carcinogenic they are and whether they're toxic in other ways. And all of that is assuming that you want to take this one agency's conclusions over the conclusions of a bunch of other agencies that reached a different one.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Bullshit. The RoundUp-Ready trait is useful only because you douse your whole plot with RoundUp and every plant not resistant to it dies in 2-3 days.
Schmeiser did not "find" the useful trait. To find it, he would have had to use RoundUp before *knowing* that some plants are resistant to it. However, RoundUp has no practical use except as a herbicide together with RoundUp-Ready plants, so he had no reason to have some around.
I have no love for Monsanto and their horrible legal practices, but that Schmeiser guy was clearly a smartass trying to rig the system.
1) Not every place has so much food that they can afford to let it go to waste the way we can.
2) Food waste is not the only problem GM crops can solve. Disease resistance (e.g. the papayas in Hawaii) helps make more efficient use of resources and prevent catastrophic collapse of farms or even full industries. Vitamin foritifcation (e.g. golden rice) can help prevent disease in areas where food variety is limited. Pest resistance can reduce the use of insecticide. Lowering water usage is another possible benefit. There are a bunch of others that are potentially out there as well (e.g. a peanut that doesn't trigger peanut allergies).
3) Even if you don't need more food, a 40% increase in yield would potentially mean a substantial decrease in land, labor, or other resources required to produce the same amount of food.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
With crops the downsides can not be measured. The upsides can be crudely measured. In a way it is the exact opposite of the problem with bars and night clubs. The downsides of a bar are easy to see. Alcoholism, traffic wrecks with drunks, fights and drunken behavior are all part of allowing bars and nightclubs and frankly good jobs in bars and nightclubs are often few and not really good at all. But there is no way to measure the good that is done. Business deals and relationships struck up in bars and clubs might be super important for a community and just might out weigh all the bad. And even the negatives can have an upside. if it wasn't for alcohol arrests we might not be able to afford our police department. Alcohol use creates jobs for judges, police, rehab workers, hospitals, car body shops, ambulance workers, jail guards and even funeral home workers. I wonder if we could ever afford to eliminate alcohol which is nothing more than dope in liquid form.
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.
Completely false. Almost everything we eat on a large scale we have transformed. Corn in its "natural" state only produces ears that are about 1.5" long (so they are about 12x their original size). Wheat, rye, and most of our livestock has undergone similar transformations. In the cases of the grains, its likely that it began as a "natural" process that humans observed and accelerated. There are entire books written on this topic alone and literally dozens of counterexamples to your claim and I know of no crop that humans haven't artificially modified through breeding, often for 100s or years or more.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
banning gmo products doesnt make any sense... we have been genetically modifying organisms since the dawn of animal husbandry... you know that thing that is one of the first techs in civilization? literally ALL of the food we eat has been genetically modified at some point.
Shouting "shill alert!" doesn't make anything he said less true.
a) As other have said, this is a myth. All seeds are viable to some degree, specially those that produce seed crops, ie corn, wheat, soy, etc. You can't be sued for planting seeds with a terminal gene, since the child seeds wouldn't be viable.
b) You mean the process of introducing genes from another organism, like what happened to the sweet potato naturally?
c) Again, another myth. Monsanto(and other GMO makers) have not randomly sued poor farmers who didn't know what they were planting. But people who replanted seeds(which directly contradicts a) that they knew were "special". The cases that Monsanto won they showed that the farmer(usually a corporate farmer, not some poor guy who barely grows enough to pay his bills with) knew that he had seed that was protected by Monsanto's IP & that he willfully planted it without paying for it. Not much different than if Gearbox decided not to pay for the use of the Unreal engine.
But that's just it. Monsanto hasn't sued people for accidental contamination of their patented genes. They'll even pay you to have those crops removed, or something like that. Remember, the guy willfully killed his crops so that he could know which plants were resistant. His actions directly contributed to his acquiring the patented genes.
I keep hearing this "insect-resistant crops mean less insecticide" argument.
And yet pesticide use in North America has risen exponentially over the past two decades, as GM crops have taken off. (Source: EPA.) So I put that argument firmly in the "pro-IP propaganda" bucket.
Well, your data source doesn't seem to cover two decades. Two years is what I see.
But your problem here is that you started with "insecticide" (which is what insect resistant crops would reduce) and jumped to "pesticides" which is a superset that includes herbicides and fungicides (which insect resistant crops would not affect at all). If you look just at the insecticide field in your own data set, you'll notice that it dropped from 2006 to 2007. If you want to grab 20 years' worth of data, we can look over it, but I'm guessing that the majority of the general pesticide use growth is in herbicides, just like it is for the two year window in that document.
Now to be fair, the increased herbicide use is almost certainly glyphosate used in concert with Roundup Ready crops. Those crops definitely increase herbicide use. But it's a pretty benign herbicide
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
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.
The other reason maybe that they can't use other seeds because they may be :
- unavailable
- illegal : there is a registry of seeds that farmers are allowed to grow. Originally it was for safety reason, to avoid potentially toxic species.
- unsubsidized : in some countries farmers wouldn't be able to make a living without subsidies due to the competition from other countries.
This is just wrong. Farmers can still grow their own seed, and if Monsanto's crops happen to cross-pollinate (and the farmer doesn't intentionally select for this or try to make it happen) then that's fine. If the farmer tries to select for hybrids, then they get sued for patent infringement.
Moreover, the reason farmers (even non-GMO farmers) tend to not grow their own seeds any more is because many plants grow better when they're heterozygous at some alleles. Because they're heterozygous, they don't breed true, so companies keep breeding them up and then selling them.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Seems you've attracted an AC stalker friend.
At least he's not as annoying as APK, be thankful for that.
Joy.
Well, if people watching the debate see factual points made on one side and "Keep shillin', dipshit" on the other, I suppose that's pretty good. I guess "shill" is the grown up hackey sack circle equivalent of "poopyhead" and they just don't realize it's not seen as a devastating comeback outside their own clique.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Where do people get this shit?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
IP laws are largely about what you can do with your own property. If I don't have a copy of something, I can't infringe on its copyright. Patent law prevents me from doing certain things in my basement or computer room with stuff that's unequivocally mine. It's not possible to separate IP arguments from property arguments.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Your quote does not support your apparent position. Over thirteen years, it seems very likely that 144 farmers would have tried violating Monsanto patents and been caught. In order to support your anti-Monsanto position, you should come up with at least one case in which Monsanto sued an innocent farmer. I know of two cases, and both were farmers attempting to use patented seed and coming up with lame excuses. Is there a specific case among the remaining 112 that you would like to bring up?
The Huffington Post article doesn't support your position, either. Some farmers were seeking an injunction against Monsanto filing certain lawsuits that Monsanto claims not to file. The judge denied the petition, pointing out that Monsanto had made a legally binding commitment not to file those suits. So, if Monsanto claims that it doesn't file suits against farmers with accidental contamination, and has made a legally binding promise not to, what's the problem?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So, no answer then?
Got it.
-Styopa
Really? You mean the book by this guy, who has literally no educational background in genetics (or for that matter, any kind of science).
But he appeared on the DR OZ SHOW!! Dr Oz! Come on, you know the sorts of high standards it takes to get a spot there.
ah yes, of course we should trust a Monsanto study into the safety of GMOs just like we should trust the Coca Cola study into the link between diet and obesity. ::rolleyes::.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Errr... you do know that there are other GM crops beyond herbicide tolerant ones, right? Like Bt corn, golden rice, and ringspot virus tolerant papaya? And a whole litany of other products coming down the pipeline that have nothing to do with herbicide one way or another? "You have to use chemicals" isn't true in any meaningful sense. It's peripherally related to some part of the subject, but for God's sake, it's not even technically correct enough to be called "true but misleading."
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Start making actual arguments, or just go away, troll.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I'm sorry, who are you? Did I miss you making an actual argument addressing anything I said somewhere? If so, I'm sorry.
I don't know, your posting "Nuh uh!" after all of my posts could skew the numbers a little bit. If we keep it up we'll asymptotically approach 50% each.
I'm not even in the biotech or agriculture industry. I just find pseudoscience fascinating, so I end up in threads about young earth creationism, anti vaccine nonsense, hilarious audiophile products, etc. The GMO debate has proved to be a rich source of all sorts of interesting half-truths, passionate ignorance, and general nutbaggery.
/. come up with fascinating and engaging rationalizations in the face of overwhelming evidence, the anti-GMO people here seem to mostly just shout "Shill!" while arguments bounce right off them. It's like doing a card trick for an audience of housecats.
Unfortunately, while the creationists on
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
What I truly find disturbing is that the GM companies have managed the debate to include only the issues mentioned here in this discussion: costs, viability, litigation, effectiveness and humor (as in laughing at the "anti-scientific fools who don't trust science"). I am replying to this post because the P fell into the trap: "the last twenty years."
Well, let grandpappy tell you about the bad old days, when "science" was used to support the growth of an industry that was producing a great product, making it cheaper, tastier and more available to people all over the world who wanted and needed it. People who were advocating government controls, advertising against this "dangerous and harmful" product ("it can cause cancer!") were being laughed at and called scaremongers and health-nuts and all the varieties of names used against the anti-GMO crowd today. The product, like the new GMO products had been around in many forms since the dawn of time and had been used safely by humans for a large part of it.
But, in the 50s and 60s, crop scientists started to mess with it. They also worked on its delivery and how to make it appealing to more people. They advertised to a wider market and made it more .. palatable? ... to more people. It was a wild success and spread around the world faster than a wildfire. Concerns about health risks were knocked down as not being empirical, not being valid and not being "scientific." Marketing was rampant, TV, radio, billboards, everywhere people saw it and bought it. I remember in the 80s, seeing an billboard ad that caught my eye for one of the variety of forms of this product, it involved a subliminal of a nude woman spread-eagled across a small tin of the product. That billboard stayed up for months, nobody said a word, even there within 5 miles of Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church!
If you haven't guessed, the product was tobacco. When I was 7 years old I started smoking, and continued for most of the next 42 years. The science that was argued was the difference between causation and correlation in the incidence of cancer. The original data about correlation was done in the 50s, but it was done by the tobacco companies themselves and they buried it. It was a whistleblower who brought the data out, and he was ruined because of it. It was 30 years or more before the government banned cigarette advertising, but other forms still were advertised into the 90s AFAIK. Scientists could prove that there was no data to support causation, therefore cigarettes were not cancer causing. Correlation data took generations to amass, so by the time we had it we had hundreds of thousands of deaths and mouth and tongue and throat cancers, lung transplants and emphysema, COPA, all from tobacco.
For these reasons I don't feel the need to point to science and say "there is no proof." I do feel the need to be mistrustful and cautious when a mega corp says, "Our scientists can prove it is safe!" I have heard that before and believed it then. But you know the old saw "Fool me once shame on you, etc." I won't be fooled again, no matter what the science that the company produced says. It will be generations before we know what the downside (and there is always a downside to everything that happens) is and how bad it will be.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
I know this is probably a waste of time, but in case there are people who are interested in something more than bald assertions:
It's pretty easy to make an herbicide. Just make something that's ridiculously toxic and kills stuff. Making a *good* herbicide that just kills plants is a lot harder. Roundup works by preventing a chemical process that happens only in plants and bacteria, which is pretty damned specific. Its toxicity to mammals is incredibly low, especially relative to the quantities it's used in as an herbicide. It's *possible* that it may have a chronic affect by damaging your gut flora, but in terms of what it actually does to you, it's pretty damned inert. Find me an example of a reasonably useful herbicide that's less toxic to humans.
Of course, it's made by MONSANTO, so it must be a super-duper-double-secret conspiracy to give us autism or something. Anybody who points to the actual toxicity data is just a shill, and anonymous trolls who toss off one-liners have the real truth.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
So no arguments then? None at all?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"