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CRISPR-Altered Plants Are Not Going To Be Regulated (For Now) (fastcompany.com)
Good news for people who like genetically altered tomatoes and other plants. The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will no longer regulate them. From a report: The USDA not only rolled back Obama-era rules regulating genetically edited plants, but now it claims that plants whose genomes have been altered using gene-editing technology (read: CRISPR) pose "no risk," MIT's Technology Review reports. While CRISPR engineering is still a relatively new science whose full impact is not yet known, the USDA has decided that it is merely an innovative shortcut to the age-old practice of plant breeding.
I, for one, am looking forward to CRISPR-enhanced lettuce, at my local grocery.
Also, I'm shocked a Republican administration would do any pro-GMO move, even if they frame it as 'less regulation'.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It just ends up as proteins and starches when you eat it. Now if they produced some kind of chemical that ended up as poisonous that's a different story. The only reason you'd prefer one over the other as an end user is either taste or cost.
It's just a more engineered version of why the Irish nearly replaced their entire crop with potatoes back in the day. They were easier to plant and produced good yield... until they didn't. Variety is the space of life after all.
I don't read AC
"...which means plant scientists can tweak the DNA of soy, corn, tomatoes, or asparagus and make them taste sweeter, last longer on the shelf, and hopefully not come alive and destroy us all."
For a moment I imagined walking corn plants.
In any case, this unregulation seems dangerous.
Most of the common vegetables you eat are super-mutants of their natural ancestors. The equivalent of turning worms into anacondas. Don't underestimate selective breeding, nor think it can't produce anything more dangerious than crossing genetics. Also, there are natural mechanisms to copy genes of one species to another. But spiders to plants would be naturally difficult.
+1 underrated.
All well and good until some cunt company sues me for copyright infringement because natural cross pollination alters my natural harvest to include what they claim they own. Fuck off.
Seriously, anyone who realizes the potential and ease of CRISPR wit a "gene drive", knows somewhere out there, a student or lab worker is just a hair away form creating an extinction event.
I mean the way Gates wanted to wipe out mosquitoes in Africa would work just like that to wipe out all of humanity.
Sure, you could use another gene drive to undo it. But that requires being aware of it. And if it was already done, we would not know.
I know US culture is usually to try it first, and regulate later, while the EU managed to have an opposite that is just as silly,
but maybe we should first learn to be good with fire and knives, before juggling with burning knives on a stage made of straw and wood.
"Good news for people who like genetically altered tomatoes and other plants."
Both of them?
Lettuce in an eggplant,
Avocado!
Human gene editing is just equally safe and useful. Why not find that politico gene group and edit your children to inherit the political values of the parents? Evolutionary speaking that would be bad, but since we don't do evolution everything is really alright. Those Germans and their Christian values of holding life sacred, phhlease! At least now we can start competing with the Chinese on glowing corn!
Fair enough, lable it as GMO and label products made with it as GMO.
Consumer will then choose.
What's they're doing here is to say "all changes within the same gene pool don't need to prove they are safe before being sold". And if you're fine with that, terrific, you eat it. You be the early adopter, who discovers the unexpected toxicity.
Deal?
I also don't think these changes benefit taste or cost. They benefit profit. Typically it might increase shelf life a week, so Walmart can sell you last weeks unsold fruit as if it was this weeks.
And usually to sustain that, they demand no labelling of GMO to hide the trick from the consumers.
So maybe there's still hope I might get glowing plants from the Kickstarter many years ago?
Good news for people who like genetically altered tomatoes and other plants
I defy anyone to find me a crop we raise that is NOT genetically altered. Seriously, wander around any grocery store and find me a single vegetable, fruit, grain, or protein for sale that humans have not genetically altered substantially. The only item I can think of are wild caught seafood. The only difference between them is the techniques used but they ALL have been genetically altered. Same goes for your household pet, the fibers in the clothes you wear, etc. We've been at this genetic alteration game for as long as we've been raising crops. Odds are that a good approximations of none of the food you've ever eaten wasn't genetically modified by humans at some juncture.
The USDA not only rolled back Obama-era rules regulating genetically edited plants, but now it claims that plants whose genomes have been altered using gene-editing technology (read: CRISPR) pose "no risk,"
While I'm not remotely against GMOs and gene editing, claiming that there is "no risk" given our current knowledge is more than a little absurd. Every researcher I've ever spoken with about CRISPR (my wife works with several of them) says something to the effect of "whoa that's powerful stuff... we should be careful until we understand it better". (their real concerns tend to be more in the area of bio-weapons and pathogens but crops are a mild concern of theirs) While it might turn out that there is actually no meaningful risk from CRISPR on crops, that doesn't mean we should rush headlong into the unknown without thinking through each step and making sure we know what we are doing as best we can. Modifying plants demonstrably affects ecosystems, sometimes in ways we didn't predict. Sometimes the modifications themselves aren't harmful but the actions they permit are - see modifying crops to be resistant to chemicals like glyphosate where the genetic modification isn't harmful itself but the herbicides or behaviors they facilitate clearly are harmful on some level. I see no evidence that we shouldn't use technologies like CRISPR but spending some years testing and learning seems like a practical first step and if we need some regulations to make that happen, so be it.
A simpler example is 'Roundup ready crops'. When Monsanto made crops that could be sprayed with more of their Roundup pesticide before dying. So farmers found they could grow more crops despite spraying Roundup glysophate to control weeds.
Monsanto added terminator genes in it, second generation seeds are sterile. So farmers have to rebuy from Monsanto.
Monsanto loves this of course, its great for profits, but that benefit doesn't make its way to the market.
But things are going wrong, alfalfa had to be withdrawn as not safe to eat, the concentration of roundup in food has gone up, it's concentration in drinking water has gone up, soybeans with brazil nut genes are causing nut allegies and so on. Of course the terminator gene will mutate, or become dormant, evolution and all.
So these things need to be monitored, EPA will no longer monitor drinking water, thanks to Monsanto's purchase of Scott Pruit. And now the USDA says it won't check a lot of CRISPR foods, simply assuming they are safe.
Just because we're doing it doesn't mean we should.
What are you talking about? We've been genetically modifying plants for as long as there have been humans and it is fine. Yes we should be doing it, we will continue to do it, and the techniques for doing it are only going to get more effective. It will be effectively impossible to feed the human population without GMOs. It's not even a choice really.
I won't be satisfied about the safety of GMO until we've had a couple hundred years of informed consent trials.
So you are saying you'll never be satisfied. That isn't going to happen. Seven billion people on the planet, widespread use of GMOs using modern techniques for decades now (plus thousands of years of older techniques) and zero evidence of any negative nutritional effects across generations. If that sort of evidence isn't good enough for you then you will never be satisfied. The nutritional question is settled for all practical purposes and any negative health effects from them that might exist are clearly extremely subtle at worst. The experiment has already been run and the evidence seems clear that GMOs aren't a nutritional health risk either in the short or long term.
Now if you want to make an argument about the effects of GMOs on ecosystems being potentially harmful then you might have an argument. There the evidence is a lot less clear and there is clear evidence that use of GMOs (think roundup ready) influences our behavior in ways that have clear and demonstrable harms both direct and indirect.
Also, I defy anyone to point out a time when Nature has allowed the mixing of tomato and frog genes to produce a superior tomato.
Your DNA is absolutely loaded with code from species that are not human. The fact that you can't wrap your brain around mixing genes from seemingly unrelated species isn't evidence of a problem. You talk about nature "allowing" things as if genetics is somehow planned. That's not how it works. Genetic code doesn't have an agenda beyond reproduction. Read The Selfish Gene sometime for a more eloquent argument.
Just like cyanide.
Nice propaganda.
You don't think a couple hundred years of extensive fishing has not exerted a evolutionary selective pressure on them then?
I'm sure it has but didn't want to get bogged down with caveats. My point was that wild caught fish are the only possible exception compared with just about everything else which was very intentionally modified one way or another. You are quite right that we've probably caused some amount of genetic changes to seafood through selective pressures though comparatively minimal ones compared with something like a cow or a watermelon. I can think of a few others that perhaps were subject to selection pressures but not intentional modifications but the list isn't very long in a grocery store.
Which is a legal problem, not a problem with genetic engineering. Note that the No GMO cranks hate open source projects like Golden Rice just as much as they hate Monsanto products.
mad or naive scientists creating a "what could possibly go wrong" situation
I don't think that is the real problem. Atleast it's not one that is going to be solved by banning or making things "illegal".
We NEED them to have specific NEW variety names.
If I buy it and I would be sued if I plant the seeds, I need to know.
(Monsanto does this with "Corn")
If it has a unique genome, it should have a unique name and that name should be on the signs.
I may prefer to buy the $.02 Tommmyato vs the $.50 Tomato. But I want to KNOW what I am buying.
The Zika virus wasn't a problem until genetically-altered mosquitoes were released in Brazil.
Huh what? Citation please! The Zika problem is being SOLVED by genetically altered mosquitoes that are eradicating the specific species that carries the virus. This method has been far more effective at the destruction of specific targeted mosquito species than any method in the history of mankind (maybe not as much as a nuke).
The primary reason it became an epidemic in South America is because it is very new there. It's been around for centuries in Asia but cropped up in Brazil less than 5 years ago! It was brand new to the locals' immune system and thus spread like wild fire.
I don't know if you posted in jest or accidentally but if serious, it is a major disservice to BOTH sides of the debate. This example is literally the perfect, responsible type of solutions that we HOPE to achieve with genetic modification.
It always astonishes me that anyone would deliberately breed the rather astonishing flavorless, but pretty much indestructable, "tomatoes" sold in America's supermarkets. Now the process of producing inedible foodstuffs can be accelerated.
Ain't science grand?
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
They're anti GMO when it is convenient for them.
Most of the common vegetables you eat are super-mutants of their natural ancestors.
Most of the common vegetables you eat are the produce of selective breeding, but this is not the same process as direct editing of genes. They are different processes that work by different mechanisms and have different kinds of results.
The equivalent of turning worms into anacondas.
That is exactly the kind of thing that selective breeding is not capable of doing. You don't make a snake, a lunged vertebrate, by selective breeding of worms.
Don't underestimate selective breeding, nor think it can't produce anything more dangerious than crossing genetics. Also, there are natural mechanisms to copy genes of one species to another. But spiders to plants would be naturally difficult.
The fact that one thing can produce dangerous results does not mean that a different thing may be dangerous in a different way.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"...which means plant scientists can tweak the DNA of soy, corn, tomatoes, or asparagus and make them taste sweeter, last longer on the shelf, and...."
You know, every two years there's another report in the news that says scientists have just created a genetically engineered tomato that will actually have flavor after being sold in the supermarket, and every single time the result is, sorry, nope, same old cardboard flavor.
The promise of grocery tomatoes that actually taste good is the illusion they keep using to sell us on the technology, and we keep falling for that empty promise. I just don't believe it anymore.
You want tomatoes with flavor, you have to grow them yourself.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It astonishes you that people want readily-available, inexpensive, undamaged, food year-round? Really? And learn the meaning of 'inedible' - flavorless is not a synonym.
CRISPER is how the liberal left will turn us all gay and muslim. The process is already well under way, too. Sharia law will turn you into a cuck and CRISPER is how they will do it.
Walking corn plants can be herded to new fields... They also reduce the number of combines a Farmer needs, instead of needing five or six to harvest a farm working one field at a time. This will allow one to be set in a stationary position at the end of a harvest funnel, and the Corn is herded from all the fields of the farm into the combine. ...
And we just use a genetically-engineered dog to herd the corn to the round-up. We'll need a name for that... I suggest we call them corn-dogs.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
CRISPR does not belong in my lettuce.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The first genetically modified mosquitoes were released in Brasil in 2012. Previous outbreaks of dengue fever and Zika (tests can not distinguish between the two) had never resulted in the scale of microcephaly. Zika is more mild than dengue fever, too. It's something that should be investigated.
The Plutocrat Party only believes in "real science" if they can make a buck off of it. See also: climate change.
Yeah, I know, AL GORE!
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
This is what happens when you elect a party that believes in real science,
Hilarious. You mean stuff like 'intelligent design'? Shit for brains.
There are some protein which are actually damaging to us, e.g. how do you feel if soja protein/ peanuts protein starts to come up in salad ? Probably nothing unless you are allergic. Now how would you feel if they accidentally have the bacteria used in gene editing put in peanuts protein everywhere because they got released in the wild ? Or horizontal gene transfer of resistance to herbicide into the plant you don't want ? It may not necessarily be directly damaging to human but could be. And before you start telling me I am stupid, this actually do happened at the start of GMO that some guy had added peanuts gene thankfully they realized how stupid it was (you can find the reference to that under GMO in wiki). But where you have no regulation, company tend to not care and externalities are then shoved into the public's to handle themselves while the companies profit. So if anything can go wrong, or if there is protection / security that companies can spare money by NOT doing, it will happen.
PS: Stating CRISPR is like standard crop hybridizing is misleading and everybody can see that. While it is true that by combination of evolution, horizontal and vertical gene transfer, virus, you could after a few dozen million years fish skin gene into wheat, it is quite clearly nigh impossible to get in all practicality within human lifetime, and anyway the eco system would have had time to adapt. Compare that to a few weeks experiment with CRISPR... Yes your coal oven and your nuclear plant are basically the same principle by that stupid argument comparing CRISPR to hybridization, but anybody not a total tool can see why one is heavily regulated and not open to the public while the other is not.
The world is on the edge of a massive food shortage. We need new plants that can survive in environments that would normally kill them. being able to use a salt marsh to raise potatoes or rice are an example. And yes, with any new technology someone's ax always gets gored but the real deal is to look into the benefits as well as the losses and see if a product is good or bad. Look how many people can die from a peanut allergy for example. That does not mean that we should outlaw peanuts. we simply need to be certain of the level of harm that we create.
Intelligent Design is not real science, of course.
But at least believing in Intelligent Design does not kill people the way stopping GMO products or refusing to vaccinate children does. So why do you support people whose beliefs are actively harmful rather than those with more harmless delusions?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wish the U.S. had a functioning government.
The thing I think is weird about those who believe in Intelligent Design is that they think the design should be able to be understood by their own intelligence. The intelligence level of a being that could do ID would be so much higher than us that we probably could never see the design.
Lets migrate the whole company to the new 1.0 because it has more buzzwords! The developer has a decent track record with only a few major scandals and those were only the fault of some traitor whistleblower. We don't need to waste time testing it, everything will be perfect! Vendor lock in is perfectly safe.
Why is it so many tech people won't allow me to install free apps on their servers BUT will insult my intelligence for not promoting Monsanto monopoly GMO crops in my body or my yard or my environment? Without even external tests? Oh, and when things go wrong I can't cautiously roll it back either.... am NOT I even allowed the personal option (ex labeling, cross contamination.)
Hell, if Oracle created a VIRUS which infected your computers and then used the DCMA to force you to pay them for their software... you'd all be OK with that in the farming domain.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
No one hates golden rice.
That is a /. or "anti anti GMO" haters myth.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I believe meanwhile all over the world tomatoes are close to inedible. ... ... I already wonder if a "insalata caprese" with slightly cooked and then cooled tomatoes would be an interesting variation.
When I move house I plan to have a small garden and breed some 100 - 200 year old tomato variations.
What you can get here in a supermarket is so bad, I only buy them once a year over the last 30 years
You can only eat them cooked
Raw tomatoes are so bad now, I remove them from any food they are inside, they are close to make me vomit.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
My triffids are almost ready to market.
You are purposefully ignorant.
Refusing GMO products does not kill people either. ... just saying.
Most GMO products are either only used in animal food (as they are not cleared for human usage) or in non food plants like cotton
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Golden rice is engineered to have vitamin A. Using it could prevent blindness for millions. It is still being held up because it's a GMO even though it was created many years ago..
GMO is not wide spread.
The USDA data says otherwise. So does data from the NIH. You might want to look into it. For many key crops the vast majority of acreage (80%+) is genetically engineered varieties.
Lol ... what a fucked argument is that?
It's called evolution. Do I really have to spell it out for you? 90+% of your genome is identical to dozens of other species and double digit percentages of it is identical to most species on earth. That's how evolution works. We have DNA from every species up the chain in our evolutionary tree, most of which are not human.
ALL DNA in a human is either human or from an RNA virus, as sure as hell you have no Dandoline or jelly fish DNA in your body ...
Wrong again my friend. A non-trivial percentage of your DNA is IDENTICAL to those species. And the origin of that DNA wasn't from humans.
Actually? No? Why would it? How would it work?
It's called evolutionary pressure. Please spend 20 seconds looking up the term on wikipedia next time before you post. If you heavily fish a species it changes the genetic profile of the uncaught fish. If you catch and keep only the big fish then you have created an evolutionary pressure for the fish to be smaller. Really it's just a form of selective breeding at that point. And we have done this to fish species.
At the supermarket produce section:
Me: Is this lettuce CRISPR-altered?
Store Worker: No, why do you ask?
Lettuce: Yeah, why do you ask?
Refusing GMO products does not kill people either.
Refusing GMO products lowers crop yields, starving millions.
As an AC posted, GMO crops have also done thing like add more vitamin A, saving millions from blindness or other diseases.
Holding up GMO crops is in a close race with Stalin for number of people DIRECTLY harmed, either killed or permanently maimed.
You are a fucking monster, remember that as more people die because of your faith-based fear.
Note that *I* am not a Republican or Democrat, instead I actually choose to believe real things. You should try it sometime.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The thing I think is weird about those who believe in Intelligent Design is that they think the design should be able to be understood by their own intelligence.
How can any programmer not believe in recursion as a fundamental trait of any system?? :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sure, except of course for anything that involves human reproduction, no matter how tangentially.
New mandatory banana stickers: Warning: Product known to cause cancer by the state of CA.
Imagine a chicken with 100 drumsticks!
Anti-GMO organizations like Greenpeace have come out against Golden Rice as viciously as if it were a Monsanto product:
http://thehill.com/opinion/hea...
And have actually destroyed test plots of it in the Philippines:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
Now that Duterte is in office there, I'm hoping that next time the Luddites invade the test fields, he will machine-gun them rihgt there and let their bodies fertilize the plants.
Sometimes good things happen for bad reasons. Billionaires don't want to be eaten, hence, the never-ending flow of money into bigger, and more cheap, and more tasteless (less tasteful?) foods.
I think GMOs are great. No matter the taste, hunger is always the best sauce.
Are there still starving children in Africa?
I would also like to be filthy rich one day, and would rather not be eaten.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
And why would the Philippines need golden rice?
Obviously they don't like GMO _food_ like no one else wants it.
You are a typical imperialistic asshole. Let a 'third world country' do the tests. Why don't you step forward and buy a farm, plant the rise and most importantly eat it?
The golden rice thing is just another attempt to subdue a country in the developing world, it produces vitamin A, you know? For what funk sake reason would a country like the Philippines need a GMO rice that produces vitamin A? Why would they need to pay patent fees to plant that rice? Why would they need to have half of their farmers run bankrupt because they can not pay for the fees, or can not plant their original rice anymore?
You are an idiot. You have no clue what is going on. And you have no clue about GMOs or about countries where you like to test them.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Once upon a time Og, a caveman, picked up a stick and started whacking some rocks. Music was invented. 1,000,000 years later a big black rectangle came along and cavemen started hitting tapirs and skulls with sticks. No technology is 100% safe. Nor 100% dangerous.
Yet, some people insist that nothing can go wrong with nuclear, GMO, voting machines, self driving cars, internet based social connection sites, etc. Yes, I'm only picking on one side.
The only exception I've heard of was the Frisbee: supposedly the military back in the 1970's? looked into it as a possible weapon and concluded that it can support only a very small 'payload,' making it not useful.
On the other hand, I can imagine some enthusiasts or dogs chasing after a Frisbee off a cliff, or in front of traffic, or into a wood chipper. So, not 100% safe.
But, please, before you claim any technology is 100%, please watch a few random sci-fi movies from the 1950's, the ones where they dare take on the question, "What could possibly go wrong?"
Prediction: in 5 or 10 years, something bad will come from Crispr, and it will join my list above.
===
Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, Jennifer Doudna is a book by one of the major researchers into Crispr.
As I was reading the book on several occasions I had the sense of talking to many of my Liberal friends (I'm a Liberal on Saturdays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays): they, and she, are in denial of the existence of assholes, evil people, and evil assholes.
When I was reading Doudna's book, I kept thinking, "She's putting a big spotlight on the good wonderful things that will come from Cripsr. Everybody sing Kumbaya!"
Meanwhile I kept imaging Crispr may be the next weapon of mass destruction. You have to take into consideration what an evil asshole will do with it. And realize they are out there.
In yesterday's post you claimed that:
No one hates golden rice. /. or "anti anti GMO" haters myth.
That is a
Anyway, Cornell explains the Philippine position: https://allianceforscience.cor...
The opposition there is a tiny minority of anti-GMO activists, not "the Philippines."
No one has ever been sued because of natural cross pollination. And it's almost hilarious that anti-GMO asshats use that as a reason to be opposed to them when you also go into irrational rages over "terminator seeds".
Also, I doubt you're a even farmer
I don't get your point. ... because you farm it in monocultures spreading for dozens if not hundreds of kilometers.
Philippines is not a country that is notorious for having a vitamin A problem.
So they will have a hard time to sell the rice there, regardless of "anti GMO" wackos or not.
Look at the colour, it looks ugly, I would not eat it bases on that already.
This "VAD" thing is a made up myth. No one needs extra vitamine A in asia. The GMO industry simply wants to earn money via patent fees, thats all. And that is why greenpeace and others are against GMOs.
I'm against most of them, because they have nothing to do in our food chain. Why the fuck would I eat a roundup(TM) resistent crop? Why do you need to use round up on it? Ah
Again: 40% - 50% of the world wide food production is thrown away, after it reached the shops. That does not even include the food that does not reach the shops because of esthetic reasons (cucumber to curved etc.)
If people think there is a need for golden rice, they should grow it on their own fields and ship it to the crisis regions and give it away (or sell it).
Destroying the local rice production by forcing farmers to plant crops/rice they can not afford the seeds of is basically a war declaration. Actually not a war declaration but a war ...
https://seedfreedom.info/campa...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Hilarious. You mean stuff like 'intelligent design'? Shit for brains.
Can you name a single instance of fundie Christian intelligent design believers blocking a vital infrastructure project or ripping up a field of crops that conflicted with their religious beliefs?
Golden Rice is an open source project that is not controlled by Monsanto or any other corporation.
And why would the Philippines need golden rice?
Because they're suffering from widespread malnutrition.
Obviously they don't like GMO _food_ like no one else wants it.
Which is why they're growing Golden Rice and other GMO crops and it's outsiders who oppose their use of GMO crops? And what do you mean no one wants GMO food? I, and many other people, want GMO food; we're excited about the benefits for the environment and for the potential to improve the quality of life of people around the world.
You are a typical imperialistic asshole.
Says the asshole who has no problem with wealthy westerners vandalizing the crops of Filipino farmers.
The golden rice thing is just another attempt to subdue a country in the developing world, it produces vitamin A, you know? For what funk sake reason would a country like the Philippines need a GMO rice that produces vitamin A?
Because they're suffering from widespread malnutrition.
Why would they need to pay patent fees to plant that rice?
Because they choose to? Seriously, no one is going to force farmers to grow the crop. They will be able to choose whether to grow conventional rice or Golden Rice based on their own situation. But wait, because the Philippines is a developing country according to the FAO, they don't have to pay the IP licensing cost. This is something you would know if you weren't willfully ignorant.
Why would they need to have half of their farmers run bankrupt because they can not pay for the fees, or can not plant their original rice anymore?
Farmers are free to plant whatever crop they're willing and able to pay for. They won't go bankrupt from planting GMO crops unless either they make bad business decisions or they suffer the sort of tragedies that would make them go bankrupt while planting conventional crops. Also, as pointed out above, Filipino farmers don't have to pay these fees. They're also free to go back to growing conventional rice if they so choose.
You are an idiot. You have no clue what is going on. And you have no clue about GMOs or about countries where you like to test them.
You're a willfully ignorant moron. You don't care about what's true and what's not; you only care about your virtue sginaling, and you don't care if people - childrend - die because of it.
hey won't go bankrupt from planting GMO crops unless either they make bad business decisions
No one will buy it.
Again: which part of the "malnutrition myth" do you not get? There is no vitamin A deficit in the Phillipines, how the FUCK (sorry for the language) should that be possible?
https://www.seafoodhealthfacts...
Oops, you did not know that Phillipines are an chain of islands and people there mostly eat sea food?
You're a willfully ignorant moron.
Looks more like you are the moron.
But wait, because the Philippines is a developing country according to the FAO, they don't have to pay the IP licensing cost. ... how do you come to that retarded idea? Ever looked at India and the GMO cotton farmer disaster there? Everyone who wants some IP has to pay it, perhaps some UN branch is paying for it. But most certainly it is not "free".
Hahaha
I really wonder what is worse, people who have no clue about problems of GMO -food- or people who have no clue about geography, or people that have no clue about politics/development of other countries.
I should post this conversation on FB and let my friends in the Philippines comment on it: "developing country" my ass.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Good thing the only thing that matters is the next fiscal quarter's numbers. /sarc