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Tiny Vermont Brings Food Industry To Its Knees On GMO Labels (ap.org)
schwit1 writes: General Mills' announcement on Friday that it will start labeling products that contain genetically modified ingredients to comply with a Vermont law shows food companies might be throwing in the towel, even as they hold out hope Congress will find a national solution. Tiny Vermont is the first state to require such labeling, effective July 1. Its fellow New England states of Maine and Connecticut have passed laws that require such labeling if other nearby states put one into effect. The U.S. Senate voted 48-49 Wednesday against a bill that would have blocked such state laws. The food industry is holding out hope that Congress will prevent states from requiring such labeling. Some companies say they plan to follow Vermont's law, while others are considering pulling their products from the small state.
while a free market economy is much better at allocating scarce resources than any other method(especially government controlled or regulated economy), for a truly free market to work , there should be full information and perfect competition, impossible conditions.
it doesn't help that in real world people who are most vocal for free capitalism tend to be the same who are against full information disclosure. i am willing to bet that those who voted against this labeling were such 'supporters' of 'free market capitalism'.
If all products grown in light had to be labeled that they were grown in "radiation" then why would you even be talking about organics? That would still be a different part of the label.
If there is demand for products grown only with light in the 400-500nm range, then it would make sense to add it to the standardized labels. Presumably nobody cares.
Nobody is asking you or anybody to agree if you should care about that part of the label. The purpose is because people want the information, not because it is believed to be "different." In the same way that one brand might command a different price than another that you consider the same. Maybe one has a nicer logo. That is a difference in the product. Just like having the country of origin. Maybe you don't believe there is any difference in a product if it came from one side of a political line, or the other. But people want the information, so it is on the label.
Saying we shouldn't be allowed to have the information because we might make illogical purchasing decisions is like trying to ban logos because people might irrationally prefer one logo to the other.
Do you want research and development to be done on seeds that have been engineered to get all or part of their nitrogen from the air? It is a major area of research to make nitrogen fixing plants and it would HEAVILY cut the usage of fertilizers and that would have a HUGE environmental benefit.
If it takes decades to get it to work right and billions of dollars but you can't license the technology you realize we won't get that tech right?
Would it be better for us as a species if the seed company was able to make and license those seeds and tell them at a price where the farmer pays more for the seed that a regular seed but less for fertilizer so in the end the farmer pays less than they do now? The environment is helped and the farmer is better off than before and the research gets done.
There is lots of effort in trying to make the food healthier and better for the environment. All of that would go away if you can't own and license the seeds for at least a limited time. The problem is that this effort takes many billions of dollars and large teams of scientists to do the work. Government is not funding this research on anything other than a trivial scale. If you ever want to see this actually get used then allowing a corp to temporarily own their work and charge for it is the only way.
Monocultures are a huge problem but they are not a GMO problem. Organic and GMO are both grown as monocultures.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
If it was old-fashioned breeding techniques, no problem. If scientists used a virus to splice genes to/from an organism, I want to know. That technique has not been proven to be completely accurate or side-effect free.
Vermont resident here. Best argument I heard against the labelling requirement was that it's TMI. Similar to the arguments about packaging being "recycled content" or "recyclable", or "made in USA", the opponents make the case that every additional disclosure requirement obfuscates ingredient and nutrition information, or dolphin-safe etc. If Vermont required companies put the number of women employed as a percentage of labor, or minority representation on company board of directors, or employee-owned stock, etc. etc., SOMEONE will always be in favor of "disclosing" it on the label. But there's a legitimate concern that the net effect is "noise". Consumers engage in a form of "moral licensing", giving more weight to "recyclable" than "carbs". T
here is a social cost to obfuscation and "Too Much Information" on labels.
Many in Vermont have a legitimate purpose in branding the state as more natural and organic because it's basically impossible to operate factory farming here. But while legitimate, it's also legitimate to argue Vermont's concerns are basically protectionism against milk and cheese made more cheaply in Ohio. My concerns over GMO has to do with monoculture and unintended consequences of reduced genetic diversity, and eventual loss of rights to plant your own seeds. And I feel strongly about it. But trying to make other people who are less educated, who think GMO is a health concern, share my agenda is a "poster child" technique which will produce fewer returns the more information is packed onto a label. If we put every "true" thing on a label, people will be deluged and stop reading labels. And THAT is the tactic I hope food labels don't embrace - EULA Agreement scale labels that provide so much "information" that the consumers are lost in politics, packaging, nutrition, ingredients, weight, volume, etc.
Gently reply
Conventional strains can be patented and owned by big corporations. Agricultural products developed via genetic engineering can be free and open source. The two issues have nothing to do with each other at all. Seed patents date back to the 1930s. Genetic engineering wasn't commercialized until the 1980s.
... except for salt. I guess salt has never been genetically modified compared to (say) 1000 to 5000 years ago, perhaps because it doesn't contain any genes.
Everything else -- arguably including wild game -- has been modified by humans manipulating its genes, most often by the tried and true method of waiting for "nature" to cause a mutation and then selectively breeding to stabilize it in a domesticated population.
So General Foods etc should retaliate by simply labelling all food products as having been modified relative to their "natural" state prior to the existence of mankind. Then consumers will get bored looking at the label (and possibly might be educated about the meaning of "GMO" relative to the biological human universe). End of problem.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Lots of people who are scientists support food labeling, of whatever things people want to know about the product.
I happen to be one of the scientists you are referring to. I work in plant science, where my opinion on this is not uncommon. I'm not against information, far from it, I want more people to know about what it is we really do in my field. What I am against is selective reporting of information, leaving out critical details, to make a falsehood appear true. There is a big difference between that and actual education. Why do you accuse me of being anti-information and anti-choice for demanding labeled be complete, honest, and accurate information while saying exactly what a GMO is?
Socialism is only a dirty word in places that have experienced it.
Quite the opposite.
A free market according to its model requires one thing that does not exist in our reality: A consumer with total information available to him. And while this is impossible, we can still try our best to get to it as close as we possibly can. Because that's what the market model demands.
That is pretty much the ideal. Give the person all the information and let them make choices based on it.
Unfortunately it gets back to the great-great-great-however-many-greats-granparent post: Several large, well-funded activist groups have been pushing for labeling of the products plus some disinformation campaigns. Not in an attempt to educate people about the truth of GMO food, but in an attempt to get GMO products killed.
I'm all for complete labeling and consumer education, but it doesn't play nicely with disinformation and misinformation campaigns.
Too many people are uninformed or misinformed. This is not just "Roundup Ready" plants. Many in the "natural" movement have caused serious regressions, such as using far more harmful "natural" pesticides when we have alternatives that are tightly focused and less harmful overall. Yet they forget all of the modern fruits and veggies we eat today are the product of several millenna of cross-breeding, selective-breeding, and cultivation.
Many of those cultivation are dangerous for many reasons. It isn't just superficial things like carrots that are an unnatural orange rather than their natural deep purple. The world loves modern bananas without seeds but can no longer naturally reproduce. A few decades ago thanks to eliminating natural variance, a disease destroyed the world's banana population and a new strain needed to be cultivated. We crave seedless oranges that are so large they are dangerous to the trees and have so few seeds they are also requiring human intervention to reproduce, have less juice and less flavor and are prone to several diseases ... but they are popular because they have easy-to-remove peels and no seeds. Most of the world's avocados are all splices from a single tree, the genetic diversity has vanished in under a century, but it seems growers around the world turn down genetic diversity in favor of the single Hass tree's fruit. Wheat and corn once had long deep roots and low yield; today the plants have barely enough root structure to stand but the wheat plants produce far more wheat kernels, and ears of corn went from a single 25mm cob per plant to multiple cobs more than ten times the size, and now both of them are getting even less genetic diversity with Roundup Ready cultivations being the popular single survivor. Giant, bright-red tomatoes are more colorful and juicy than ever, and in the last 50 years cultivation has been for mass and color rather than flavor, and we are quickly losing genetic diversity.
Somehow GMO activists tend to not mind the changes giving bigger fruit or popular features over the past many thousand years. It is only the ones done in a chemical lab most activists seem concerned about.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
It maybe news to you, but food is sold on the assumption that it is non-radioactive.
Uh, no. Food is sold on the assumption that it is always radioactive. It isn't labeled as radioactive because every food item would have that label.
And I really am in favor of labeling all food with the measure of radioactivity per serving. It would be educational for paranoid idiots whose stupidity is harming my health.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
just like how the Mongols bypassed the great wall of China
Minor historical quibble: It was the Manchurians, not the Mongols, that breached the wall by "bribing the guards", and they didn't just bribe a few sentries. They used a combination of bribes and threats to cause entire Han armies to defect to their side. In 1644, Manchuria had about 2% of the population of Ming Dynasty China, yet they were able to conquer all of China, and much more surrounding territory, including Tibet, Xinjiang, and much of southern Siberia. China the only empire that expanded, not by conquering, but by being conquered and then demographically swamping and absorbing their conquerors.
There is a little problem with your narrative. For decades now the US pharma companies almost exclusively concentrate on drugs that treat symptoms rather than underlying diseases. Every drug also has a laundry list of side effects for which you take other drugs to manage those. It is madness. On top of it, they are allowed to advertise their products. I have zero confidence in this industry actually producing anything beneficial other than profits.
The food industry is even worse. When I live in a totalitarian communist country a chocolate had cocoa butter, milk and sugar. Now that Nestle took over the factory, it has palm oil, high fructose corn syrup, lactose, milk powder and dozens of color and taste enhancers. How is this better?
Socialism might be dirty word, but it is the norm across the Western Europe and now with the fall of Soviet Union also across the Eastern part. Before there was a dictatorship of proletariat, authoritarian system that had nothing to do with socialism except for name.
And when it comes to Bernie Sanders, he could not run in any country in EU. You know why? He is a right wing nut. Yes, that is right. If his policies were proposed in any EU country, including UK, the people there would revolt against them. Because 10 days of paid vacation is simply inhuman. Only 12 weeks of maternity is barbarity. Nobody would stand for such right wing craziness. Even the Tories in UK are left of Sanders on social issues.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.