It's a lot more than that; plenty of non-GE crops are patented. For example, say you go to buy a Fuji apple. What could be more open source than that right? Not if it is a Gale Gala, a patented bud sport of Fuji, or if he picks up a peach, it might be one of the many patented Flamin' Fury peaches. If he eats a carrot, it might have the patented line S-D813B as a parent, or if he eats a pepper, it might be the patented hybrid 9942815. Lots of plants, not just genetically engineered ones, are patented, so avoiding every patented fruit, vegetable, grain, nut, oil crop, ect. and any food produced with them would be quite the challenge.
I don't know how things are in Germany, but I'd have to imagine they grow their share of patented crops there, and even if they didn't he'd have to watch out for anything imported from countries where those varieties are grown. You'd pretty much have to eat exclusively whole fruits and vegetables that you know the variety, or things where the varieties are very likely to be not under patent like lychee or persimmon, and maybe things that haven't had much breeding work done on them like kiwanos and jícamas.
If we're going to assume conspiracy, put down the DEA, prisons, and drug cartels as behind it too, since they all benefit (speaking of which anyone who talks about 'securing the border' but opposes legalization is an absolute tool).
I think the real reason is simply that too many people think that legalizing cannabis is condoning drugs and criminals and reefer madness and stupid potheads like Carl Sagan and will cause an unacceptable increase in crime and all this negative imagery, while outlawing alcohol is anti-freedom because it is your right to get drunk and its acceptable some people get flattened by drunk drivers in a free society. I'm not saying it makes any sense whatsoever, but I think it is a more plausible explanation than blaming alcohol and tobacco companies (and I've heard pharmaceutical companies blamed too) companies, unless you have evidence that it is actually happening. Not saying I'd be surprised, I know some of the original push involved paper industry money IIRC that didn't want competition from hemp fiber, just that I'd like hard proof it is corruption as opposed to politicians simply catering to irrationality.
I buy a bag of Golden Delicious, or Granny Smith, or some other breed.
That is probably the worst example to use. A lot of the apples you eat are actually bud sports. Basically, when a bud develops, sometimes there is a mutation in the cells that the bud originates from, resulting in a mutated branch. sometimes these have desirable properties, and are cultivated, but go labeled as the original cultivar, for example, that Golden Delicious might actually be a Gibson Golden Delicious, and you'd never know because they aren't labeled. You didn't even know that bud sports were a thing until just now I'd bet. Of course, you don't know if your peaches are Flamin' Fur or Redhaven, or if your blueberries are Patriot or Bluecrop, or if your raspberries are Meeker or Heritage, or the variety of the vast majority of your vegetables, so what strain of apple you're getting is hardly the only thing you are not being told in the produce isle.
If my corn has genetic material from peanuts in it, I want to know since I have a son with an anaphylactic allergy.
Fortunately no proteins put into crops via genetic engineering are unsafe (nor are they from peanuts), so that is not even an issue.
I KNOW that it doesn't necessarily mean that it would be unsafe, but the seller does NOT have the right NOT to tell me.
What if I told you that the pathogenesis related proteins in plants may provoke allergic reactions, and that we have been, through breeding, increasing them in crops to get better disease resistance? Does the seller have the obligation to tell you that too? The problem with your argument is that there is a lot of things we do to crops, and that genetic engineering is actually only pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Thousands of genes get shuffled around while only a few well understood ones are inserted. To focus on the inserted few and ignore the rest is neither consistent nor rational.
I have the right to make that decision, not Monsanto.
I agree that you have the right to do as you will, but so do the food producers, and if you do not believe they are telling you enough, don't buy their food. Simple as that. If you wish to avoid GE crops, either eat organic, or avoid tings with corn, soy, canola, cotton, alfalfa, sugar beet, summer squash, and papaya in them (as those are the only crops currently genetically engineered).
while Monsanto's crops definitely can provide a benefit to farmers, their business practices go beyond immoral, it is truly evil
And I find reports of their evil to range from overblown to downright made up. When you look into what it is they do, sometimes its dickish, and in cases in the past (usually relating to their chemical manufacturing) it is pretty evil, but most cases today involving their crops, usually the person they are suing was in the wrong and everyone knew it. But stories like that don't sell was well as 'Evil corporation sues little guy for the heck of it'
I have a right to know whether or not I am perpetuating their crimes against small farms, but currently I don't have that option.
I'd like to know if my produce was picked by migrant workers being paid unfair wages living in exploitative conditions. I consider that pretty evil. At the same time, because it isn't something that affect the end product, I cannot support mandatory labeling for such things.
It's not GMO's or hybrids or any of that that are the issue, it is the lack of disclosure
Baloney. No one labels induced polyploidy or mutagenesis or wide crosses or embryo rescue or anything else, yet no one acts as if they are problems for not being labeled. the problem is not lack of disclosure, it is fearmongers who act as if that is something sinister and people who do not
True, although generally when we speak of genetic modification it is usually assumed that you mean modified from a currently existing population (be it a wild population or a landrace or open pollinated line or whatever), and usually it should be put in the context of what was used to modify the plant and what the modification was, for example in the case of the Green Zebra tomatoes you might say that they were modified by selective breeding to halt the conversion of chloroplasts into chromoplasts thus preventing the synthesis and accumulation of carotenoid pigments resulting in a green when ripe tomato (I think that's how that one works) or something like that. It does get pretty fuzzy when you think of it in evolutionary terms, which is why I try not to get too caught up in the exact terminology people are using.
It's a problem of language. The term 'genetically modified' literally means just that: the genetics have been modified. So, if I cross a Huge Lemon Oxheart tomato with a Carbon tomato, the resulting tomatoes will have modified genetics from the mixing of the genes of the two varieties, in other words, they will be GM. If I take a watermelon, double its chromosomes so that it has four sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two and cross that with a normal one to get a watermelon with three chromosomes (this is how you make a seedless watermelon) it will be genetically modified. If I grow out thousands of durians and select the tree that produces the least pungent fruit, then there will be modifications to the genes for certain chemical pathways in that plant, so it will be GM.
However, if I take rice and insert the psy gene from daffodil and the crtI gene from a bacteria, (the genes inserted into Golden Rice), then that rice has also been genetically modified, but it has been modified through genetic engineering, so it is both GM and GE. The problem arises in that the vast majority of the population uses the terms interchangeably. Genetically modified/GM has come to mean genetically altered via biotechnology. So, technically speaking, it is fair to say that the grass this story is about is GM, however, the majority of readers will almost certainty take that to mean genetically engineered via biotech, and most likely that is what the author meant. I try to use the terms right (although sometimes to avoid having this sort of conversation I just use whatever), but its pretty much a lost cause at this point getting people to use the right terms. The term GMO as it is almost always used is really pretty bad, and should be GEO, but that horse has already left the barn.
The GM vs GE thing causes way more confusion than it should, but since most people don't know much about crop genetics it is to be expected I suppose. Basically, almost all crops are GM, but only a few crops are GE, however GE is a form of GM, but most people use both terms to mean GE, so while I try to use the term GE when referring to GE and not use GM much at all to avoid the confusion, in the end its best to just not get pedantic about it unless someone specifically opposes GE on the basic that they don't like things to be GM in which case remind them that everything is GM.
I'm anti-GM, and this is apparently just hybridization gone wrong.
Are you now anti-hybrid? Why or why not? And why oppose something based on its creation instead of its properties? The term 'anti-GM' simply does not make sense, because a Bt cotton is not a Round-Up Ready sugarbeet is not a Rainbow papaya is not an Arctic apple is not a Golden Rice is not a Vistive Gold soybean is not a DroughtGard corn is not a Flavr Savr tomato is not an Applause rose. Those are all very different and to oppose them based on their origin is irrational.
If anything, this shows how careful we have to be and not proceed with such a cavalier attitude towards research and implementation.
Strange that no one will suggest that we should not change thousands of genes at once and instead stick with simply moving one or two at a time, hm? And no one is disagreeing with you there either, however, that does not imply that we attempt to prove a negative either.
my biggest gripe with GM is what I see as dangerously performed research (practically no containment of any kind)
Most research does have strict regulations as to pollination barriers. There are mistakes sure (like the Liberty Link rice indecent) but for the most part that is well considered.
dangerous precedents in patent law (owning genetic sequences)
I guess that's more a matter of opinion. I don't really see anything wrong with patenting what one creates. It really isn't much more of an extension fo the plant patent laws we've had for decades (and considering that improved plants benefit everyone, plant breeders and by extension genetic engineers should be the first to get patents). I can certainty see how that would seem to offer potential for abuse, but then again, the slippery slope is a fallacy.
using it as an excuse to saturate farms with pesticides (bad for environment, bad for food, and allows for rapid evolution of countermeasures in affected species)
That's not anti-GM, that's just just downright wrong. Ge crops have reduced pesticide use, perhaps you're thinking herbicides? And if so, not all herbicides are created equal. I'm much rather have glyphosate used than some of the other ones out there. Don't forget, when controlling weeds, you've got about three choices: herbicides, tillage (which results in soil erosion and fertilizer runoff), or an army of people doing the backbreaking task of picking weeds (usually migrant workers who may or may not be working in exploitative conditions). Me, I choose herbicides. And as for rapid evolution of resistances, yet, that happens in insects, weeds, and pathogens even in conventionally bred improvements. Don't confuse the issues of resistance breakdown and resistant weeds for GE exclusive issues, be it late blight strains overcoming resistance genes in tomato or hessian flies overcoming resistance genes in wheat (neither of which are GE). These are problems, but they are arguments for better management of crops, not stopping crop improvements.
and its affect (by use) on seed diversity.
Lets not forget that all improvements come from diversity, and all improvements reduce biodiversity. Biodiversity is extremely important, but biodiversity is represented by many many genes within the species. The reduction of these genes and the insertion of a genes via GE are independent events. Personally, I'd like to see GE be used to improve undercultivated species like sunchoke, jujube, and teff. The current level of research on such species is, quite frankly, dangerous, but again, this has bugger all to do with genetic engineering.
. Monsanto deserves to burn in hell for all the grief they have given farmers simply
I do agree with that. I personally like them because they tend to have unique traits not usually found in the widely grown hybrid lines (for example, I've got heirloom purple broccoli, white watermelons, and exceptionally tasty orange tomatoes that I grow) and the ability to save seeds and maintain the line for a long period of time is nifty. When I support hybrids & GE crops and talk of their benefits I do not mean to imply being dismissive of heirlooms. They've got some genetic diversity that could be useful or at least novel. I like heirlooms, its just that some of the people who very strongly promote them go a bit off the deep end.
That reminds me of a time I heard people complaining about research on genetically engineered tobacco, because God forbid something potentially dangerous be put into your cancer sticks.
There are actually some people who oppose hybrids already. I've encountered some real extreme heirloom crop zealots who believe that hybrids are generally bad things. Funny enough, people once said of hybrids, unknowingly foreshadowing what would later be said of GMOs, that they 'did violence to the plant' and they would 'befoul the soil'. Of course, we know know that hybridization ranks right up there with vaccination in terms of life saving technologies, and I have no idea how anyone could oppose something that the world could not get by without. Well, without being ignorant anyway, which no doubt they are.
Fun fact: once there were people who opposed grafting, which is now used for pretty much every fruit tree. Johnny Appleseed was actually one of the, who believed that grafting was against the will of God, or some nonsense like that. He was something of a religious nut. Ironically because the trees he spread were seed grown and not grafted, they were only good for making applejack (well, I guess you could make other things out of them too, but take a wild guess as to what most people did with them back then). I guess grafting was ungodly but getting hammered on that stuff wasn't.
Since this was not a GMO at all, I expect this will be a big blow to conventional hybridization, right? Or are we going to apply a double standard and act as if dangers produced via hybridization should be ignored while dangers form GE (real or imaginary) are cause for panic?
Meddle with nature and suffer the concequences you say? Enjoy your teosinte and goatgrass, and your poisonous potatoes, tomatoes, and beans. Enjoy your seedy bananas.and grapes, your small sour apples, your gritty pears, and the little flower heads on the wild mustard plants broccoli and cauliflower came from.. Because to do otherwise would be messing with nature. Hope those chemical defenses that were bred out of all our crop plants don't give you cancer.
Even if this grass were GMO (and its not), the anti-GMO crowd would still be quacks, for the same reason an evolutionary theory being disproven does not vindicate creationists and a bad batch of vaccines does not vindicate anti-vaxxers. They are not quacks for their position. Three decades ago, it was a reasonable enough position, just like creationism was before the overwhelming evidence for evolution was put together. No, they are quacks for how they support their position, although for some things, the evidence so strongly says one thing that opposing it pretty much requires crank tactics. They are cranks for disregarding all the evidence that demonstrates them wrong, cherrypicking studies that suit them (even when the studies are flawed), being deceitful to people who do not understand the topic, and misrepresenting facts to make themselves sound reasonable.
Oh, and if they used this to act as if all GMOs were bad, that would be a pretty quack thing to do. It was hybridized, yet no one would use this to say that hybridization is uniquely dangerous because that would be ridiculous. Why would doing that for GMOs be any more reasonable?
Damn. I was just pulling my pitchfork and torch out of the shed.
That right there sums up the problem with the GMO debate (well, one of them). Caring about the process, not the product. You can bet your ass that none of the anti-GMO groups out there are going to see this and other problems that have arisen from breeding (like the Lenape potato and high psoralens celery) are going to take this story and call for more stringent research of conventionally bred crops where heaven only known how many genetic changes may be happening. No one is going to say that breeding is unpredictable with dangerous results,or that is should be labeled, or that it should be banned until the precautionary principle proves a negative, or anything else people say about GMOs, but if this really were the product of biotechnology, you know damned well that is exactly what they, and many others, would be saying.
Yes and no on those. Bananas are not going to go extinct, but there may be sever problems with the Cavendish, as there was with the Gros Michael. It certainly isn't doomsday thing, but it could be pretty bad. There are actually a lot of varieties of banana, but only a few major export varieties. What I'd really worry about here is not the fungal diseases of black sigatoka and Panama disease, but the bacterial disease banana xanthomonas wilt, which could pose dangerous problems for areas of Africa where bananas and plantains are a major source of calories. I don't think there is much, if any, naturally occurring resistance to BXW so genetic enginering might be the only option for this one (which rules out the home breeding thing).
Citrus on the other hand is very threatened by citrus greening. I don't think there is any natural resistance to it. Grafting to rootstocks does help for some diseases in some cases, but not this one. Biotech looks to be the only option for this one too.
Chocolate problems are partially due to the aging trees that are not being replaced, but diseases like witches' broom are also a major limiting factor in production.
As for wheat, Ug99 is still a major threat to wheat production in some parts of the world, so I would not call that misinformation.
That is a good idea, but one thing I'd add is trying under cultivated species. There are a lot of plants that represent potentially significant agricultural species, but often there has been limited work on these plants. There is little funding for these things in major private or university programs because there isn't much consumer demand for them, and of course without superior varieties you might not be able to create demand, so you won't be able to justify programs on them, and its a nasty circle. Your examples would be pretty tough because there are already people working on them so an individual's contributions will be relatively smaller, and in some cases the problems themselves are pretty tough. Citrus greening for example IIRC has no known natural sources of resistance, so its pretty hard to breed in something not found in the family.
So, if you get some land, I'd suggest trying to breed undercultivated fruit like Japanese raisin tree, goumi, honeyberry, maypop, mulberry, ect., and if you live in a tropical spot you've got lots more options (or course, breeding fruit takes lots of room and thousands of plants and takes a long time so this would be a long term project) or undercultivated vegetables like yacón, jícama , kutjera, salicornia, New Zealand spinach (which is actually not a spinach and is more closely related to living stone plants), or undercultivated grains like quinoa, teff, and Job's tears, just to name a few of varying degrees of cultivation and existing improvement work. Even 'weeds' like spurge nettle are edible. There is a lot of potential, both in terms of agricultural benefit and culinary value, but since there is so little work being done on these types of things, perhaps crowd-sourced breeding is the best option for the advancement of biodiversity. I'd love to do this myself if I had the land.
Ok, understood. My mistake, although in my defense I've heard people claim GE crops don't produce seed before. I hope I'm not sticking my foot in my mouth again and saying something you already know, but the traits that produce sterile seed are not currently in use. I think it would still be considered a form of sterility though in that, while pollination and fertilization could occur, the progeny would not be viable. It would be less sterile than, say, sporophytic incompatibility (where the pollen tube from the pollen is rejected at the stigma of the flower thus preventing the sperm from reaching the egg) or when pollen from for example a triploid apple pollinates a normal apple (which will do absolutely nothing for other apples) or in that fertilization would occur, but still considered a form of sterility nonetheless I think.
To have one company have total control over a food source is disturbing.
Agreed, but how much of the world seed market does any given company have? Also, there are others, like Pioneer and Syngenta, than any farmer can choose if they want to (there's always a Syngenta Liberty Link ad on RFD-TV).
risked destroying non GM crops through cross-contamination
How is that intrinsically different than any other type of cross pollination? That is like saying that hybrid watermelon lines risk 'destroying' the Cream of Saskatchewan (an open pollinated type of white fleshed watermelon) in my garden because they have genes I don't want.
it should be Monsanto that should be paying damages to farmers who do not want to deal with GM crops.
Consider this. Lets just say you grow red watermelons, I grow the Cream of Saskatchewan I mentioned. You buy new seed next year, and because I did not take adequate measures to ensure the purity of my seed my watermelons are no longer white. Should I be able to sue? Or if you are goring dent corn and I'm growing sweet corn, should I be able to sue when your corn turns mine starchy? Or If I'm growing seedless citrus or persimmons and you plant one that produces pollen and puts seeds in my crop, what then? My point is that there's a lot more to that issue than just transgenes, and they've all been worked out in the past by communication, not lawsuits. I don't think that lawsuits are suddenly necessary for cross pollination.
Citing Jeffrey Smith on GE is as bad as citing Andrew Wakefield on vaccines (read this, watch this). In the first link, the study he cites was widely criticized by the UFSA, FSANZ, and French HCB. In the second link, the first two studies he cites were not published in peer review journals, the third was withdrawn for flaws, and the fourth has nothing to do with GE if you actually read it except for sing a GE variety and stating that some of the chemical components of GE varieties are different than non GE varieties (duh, different lines have differences). Strangely, your links do not mention this. Wonder why?
basically, no one does ANY testing, they just trust that Monsanto says that it is safe,
Nature does not insert random genes from some weird funguses or fish into corn (or other plants).
Says the organism that needs the viral transgene syncytin to reproduce. Nature does it all the time and even if it didn't that proves nothing. Nature doesn't use somaclonal variation to develop new varieties either
Sooner or later, we may just find our that our improved food is killing us and we don't know why.
Appeal to ignorance. Anti-vaxxers say the same thing about their quackery, and they're just as wrong and for the same reasons.
We have evolved to eat the food we have available, not the other way around.
Bullshit. We have evolved to consume a wide variety of things. My ancestors did not have corn, or quinoa, or tomatoes, or potatoes, or cassava, or taro, or peanuts, or lychees, or bananas, or durians, or blueberries, or loads of other edible species yet I consume these things just fine. One more protein isn't going to throw your body out of whack, and if you truly believe it will, never eat any biodiverse crop that didn't originate from wherever your great great grandparents lived, because I promise you there is a lot more new proteins and other chemicals in a new species than there are in one with a cry gene or epsps gene inserted.
We are FAR away from an understanding how our body works completely. We know the big picture, but that's it.
Appeal to ignorance. Furthermore, you could say the same thing about every other method of plant improvement (like mutagenesis and somaclonal variation, wide crosses and embryo rescue, bud sport selection, induced polyploidy, ect.), which is why the appeal to ignorance is a fallacy.
However to play devil's advocate, are there any benefits to a company such as Monsanto?
A better question to ask would be how valid are the criticisms of Monsanto. Most of the time they turn out to be half truths or whole lies by anti-GMO people looking to demonize the company then create guilt by association. I used to think Monsanto was pretty bad, but the more I read about them, the less the claims about them held true, from suing farmers to suicides in India. Now when I reads some story about their evils I wonder what really happened.
For the same reason that if some random person drops a DVD of a movie off at a movie theater that theater can't start having showings of the movie simply because they found the DVD on their property. Just getting the DVD isn't illegal, but intentionally using it afterward is. Likewise, nothing happens if you are cross pollinated, only if you intentionally select for the trait.
I don't know if they are shills or not (I doubt it since I forgot to wear my tinfoil hat today) but what they are saying is true. the only people who cite the Schmeiser case do so without giving the complete picture. He knew darned well what he was doing.
Maybe I'm just misreading your comment, but are you implying GE crops do not produce seed? You do realize that the thing in corn, canola, cotton, and soy (four of the big GE crops) that you use is the seed? It would be news to, well, everyone if those crops did not produce seed. Learn some basic crop physiology before making obviously baseless accusations.
Never has one company been so close to totally controlling the food supply for the entire planet.
Yeah, its too bad you can't buy seed from Syngenta, Bayer Cropscience, Dow Agrosciences, or Pioneer, or just grow you own open pollinated varieties.
Their abusive practices with farmers both home and abroad have been well documented
Such as? Blogs and biased documentaries are not well documented. I'm not saying that they don't have their fair share of corporate dick moves (like their deal with polychlorinated biphenyls and other pollution issues) tbut the vast majority of those 'well documented' abusive practices really aren't anything more than internet myths.
Would you people PLEASE learn the difference between hybrid seed and GE seed. Ok, imagine you want to grow pink flowers (genetype Ww). you have to cross red flowers (genotype WW) and white flowers (genotype ww) to get them. You cross the white and red to get a hybrid which is pink, but the seed from the pink will be segregated in a 1:2:1 ratio of red, pink, and white flowers (do a punnett square for proof). Hybrid seed are heterozygious for many traits (this is the basis of heterosis, or hybrid vigor) and are therefore unsuitable for seed saving They are not sterile, you just shouldn't save the seed if you want to get good yield every year. GE traits are bred into hybrid lines, so basically all current GE crops are hybrids (though not all hybrids are GE and GE crops do not necessarily have to be hybrids). This is why farmers buy seed every year, and they have been doing this since the 1930's. Please, before going on some anti-GE anti-Monsanto rant, if all you know about the topic came from blogs and documentaries like food Inc read a bit about agriculture and plant biology//genetics! This right here it the biggest problem with the GMO debate...so many people with such strong opinions with no knowledge of the topic.
Also the seeds cross-polinate to non-Monsanto seeds, polluting nature's generic seeds with Monsanto genes.
Cross pollenation is not pollution and it happens with every other crop out there. This year I'm growing several types of heirloom squash which I must protect from both the different varieties and anyone else in the area's squash if I wish to keep the lines true. Genes, wanted or not, transgenic or not, spread, and methods to prevent one type of gene flow work on preventing transgenic gene flow too. Or you could just talk to each other, like sweet corn and field corn farmers do (for those of you who do not know, and I suspect this is most people, because the endosperm is produced by double fertilization, and the endosperm is what you eat in corn, it can be affected by whatever pollinates it, so if you grow sweet corn and someone else grows field corn your sweet corn will taste bad).
Monsanto has a nasty habit of suing innocent farmers who have decided to continue using the "generic" seeds provided by nature.
Name me one case of that happening. Every case I've seen so far, be it the Schmeiser case, the Parr case, the Ralph case, the Roush case, sometime more than that happened, either someone broke the contract they signed or intentionally selected for the trait. No one has been sued for cross pollination alone, although if that statement is inaccurate I'd love to see court documents stating otherwise.
To eliminate people who are not using their products.
Yeah, because they want less farmers (the people they sell their products to). That motive makes no sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Grafting does not influence the genome or the genome settings.
Technically, that's not true, although I doubt the gene transfer will get into the fruit producing buds.
It's a lot more than that; plenty of non-GE crops are patented. For example, say you go to buy a Fuji apple. What could be more open source than that right? Not if it is a Gale Gala, a patented bud sport of Fuji, or if he picks up a peach, it might be one of the many patented Flamin' Fury peaches. If he eats a carrot, it might have the patented line S-D813B as a parent, or if he eats a pepper, it might be the patented hybrid 9942815. Lots of plants, not just genetically engineered ones, are patented, so avoiding every patented fruit, vegetable, grain, nut, oil crop, ect. and any food produced with them would be quite the challenge.
I don't know how things are in Germany, but I'd have to imagine they grow their share of patented crops there, and even if they didn't he'd have to watch out for anything imported from countries where those varieties are grown. You'd pretty much have to eat exclusively whole fruits and vegetables that you know the variety, or things where the varieties are very likely to be not under patent like lychee or persimmon, and maybe things that haven't had much breeding work done on them like kiwanos and jícamas.
If we're going to assume conspiracy, put down the DEA, prisons, and drug cartels as behind it too, since they all benefit (speaking of which anyone who talks about 'securing the border' but opposes legalization is an absolute tool).
I think the real reason is simply that too many people think that legalizing cannabis is condoning drugs and criminals and reefer madness and stupid potheads like Carl Sagan and will cause an unacceptable increase in crime and all this negative imagery, while outlawing alcohol is anti-freedom because it is your right to get drunk and its acceptable some people get flattened by drunk drivers in a free society. I'm not saying it makes any sense whatsoever, but I think it is a more plausible explanation than blaming alcohol and tobacco companies (and I've heard pharmaceutical companies blamed too) companies, unless you have evidence that it is actually happening. Not saying I'd be surprised, I know some of the original push involved paper industry money IIRC that didn't want competition from hemp fiber, just that I'd like hard proof it is corruption as opposed to politicians simply catering to irrationality.
That's more or less what everyone says about the crazies who killed in the name of [insert religion here].
I buy a bag of Golden Delicious, or Granny Smith, or some other breed.
That is probably the worst example to use. A lot of the apples you eat are actually bud sports. Basically, when a bud develops, sometimes there is a mutation in the cells that the bud originates from, resulting in a mutated branch. sometimes these have desirable properties, and are cultivated, but go labeled as the original cultivar, for example, that Golden Delicious might actually be a Gibson Golden Delicious, and you'd never know because they aren't labeled. You didn't even know that bud sports were a thing until just now I'd bet. Of course, you don't know if your peaches are Flamin' Fur or Redhaven, or if your blueberries are Patriot or Bluecrop, or if your raspberries are Meeker or Heritage, or the variety of the vast majority of your vegetables, so what strain of apple you're getting is hardly the only thing you are not being told in the produce isle.
If my corn has genetic material from peanuts in it, I want to know since I have a son with an anaphylactic allergy.
Fortunately no proteins put into crops via genetic engineering are unsafe (nor are they from peanuts), so that is not even an issue.
I KNOW that it doesn't necessarily mean that it would be unsafe, but the seller does NOT have the right NOT to tell me.
What if I told you that the pathogenesis related proteins in plants may provoke allergic reactions, and that we have been, through breeding, increasing them in crops to get better disease resistance? Does the seller have the obligation to tell you that too? The problem with your argument is that there is a lot of things we do to crops, and that genetic engineering is actually only pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Thousands of genes get shuffled around while only a few well understood ones are inserted. To focus on the inserted few and ignore the rest is neither consistent nor rational.
I have the right to make that decision, not Monsanto.
I agree that you have the right to do as you will, but so do the food producers, and if you do not believe they are telling you enough, don't buy their food. Simple as that. If you wish to avoid GE crops, either eat organic, or avoid tings with corn, soy, canola, cotton, alfalfa, sugar beet, summer squash, and papaya in them (as those are the only crops currently genetically engineered).
while Monsanto's crops definitely can provide a benefit to farmers, their business practices go beyond immoral, it is truly evil
And I find reports of their evil to range from overblown to downright made up. When you look into what it is they do, sometimes its dickish, and in cases in the past (usually relating to their chemical manufacturing) it is pretty evil, but most cases today involving their crops, usually the person they are suing was in the wrong and everyone knew it. But stories like that don't sell was well as 'Evil corporation sues little guy for the heck of it'
I have a right to know whether or not I am perpetuating their crimes against small farms, but currently I don't have that option.
I'd like to know if my produce was picked by migrant workers being paid unfair wages living in exploitative conditions. I consider that pretty evil. At the same time, because it isn't something that affect the end product, I cannot support mandatory labeling for such things.
It's not GMO's or hybrids or any of that that are the issue, it is the lack of disclosure
Baloney. No one labels induced polyploidy or mutagenesis or wide crosses or embryo rescue or anything else, yet no one acts as if they are problems for not being labeled. the problem is not lack of disclosure, it is fearmongers who act as if that is something sinister and people who do not
True, although generally when we speak of genetic modification it is usually assumed that you mean modified from a currently existing population (be it a wild population or a landrace or open pollinated line or whatever), and usually it should be put in the context of what was used to modify the plant and what the modification was, for example in the case of the Green Zebra tomatoes you might say that they were modified by selective breeding to halt the conversion of chloroplasts into chromoplasts thus preventing the synthesis and accumulation of carotenoid pigments resulting in a green when ripe tomato (I think that's how that one works) or something like that. It does get pretty fuzzy when you think of it in evolutionary terms, which is why I try not to get too caught up in the exact terminology people are using.
It's a problem of language. The term 'genetically modified' literally means just that: the genetics have been modified. So, if I cross a Huge Lemon Oxheart tomato with a Carbon tomato, the resulting tomatoes will have modified genetics from the mixing of the genes of the two varieties, in other words, they will be GM. If I take a watermelon, double its chromosomes so that it has four sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two and cross that with a normal one to get a watermelon with three chromosomes (this is how you make a seedless watermelon) it will be genetically modified. If I grow out thousands of durians and select the tree that produces the least pungent fruit, then there will be modifications to the genes for certain chemical pathways in that plant, so it will be GM.
However, if I take rice and insert the psy gene from daffodil and the crtI gene from a bacteria, (the genes inserted into Golden Rice), then that rice has also been genetically modified, but it has been modified through genetic engineering, so it is both GM and GE. The problem arises in that the vast majority of the population uses the terms interchangeably. Genetically modified/GM has come to mean genetically altered via biotechnology. So, technically speaking, it is fair to say that the grass this story is about is GM, however, the majority of readers will almost certainty take that to mean genetically engineered via biotech, and most likely that is what the author meant. I try to use the terms right (although sometimes to avoid having this sort of conversation I just use whatever), but its pretty much a lost cause at this point getting people to use the right terms. The term GMO as it is almost always used is really pretty bad, and should be GEO, but that horse has already left the barn.
The GM vs GE thing causes way more confusion than it should, but since most people don't know much about crop genetics it is to be expected I suppose. Basically, almost all crops are GM, but only a few crops are GE, however GE is a form of GM, but most people use both terms to mean GE, so while I try to use the term GE when referring to GE and not use GM much at all to avoid the confusion, in the end its best to just not get pedantic about it unless someone specifically opposes GE on the basic that they don't like things to be GM in which case remind them that everything is GM.
I'm anti-GM, and this is apparently just hybridization gone wrong.
Are you now anti-hybrid? Why or why not? And why oppose something based on its creation instead of its properties? The term 'anti-GM' simply does not make sense, because a Bt cotton is not a Round-Up Ready sugarbeet is not a Rainbow papaya is not an Arctic apple is not a Golden Rice is not a Vistive Gold soybean is not a DroughtGard corn is not a Flavr Savr tomato is not an Applause rose. Those are all very different and to oppose them based on their origin is irrational.
If anything, this shows how careful we have to be and not proceed with such a cavalier attitude towards research and implementation.
Strange that no one will suggest that we should not change thousands of genes at once and instead stick with simply moving one or two at a time, hm? And no one is disagreeing with you there either, however, that does not imply that we attempt to prove a negative either.
my biggest gripe with GM is what I see as dangerously performed research (practically no containment of any kind)
Most research does have strict regulations as to pollination barriers. There are mistakes sure (like the Liberty Link rice indecent) but for the most part that is well considered.
dangerous precedents in patent law (owning genetic sequences)
I guess that's more a matter of opinion. I don't really see anything wrong with patenting what one creates. It really isn't much more of an extension fo the plant patent laws we've had for decades (and considering that improved plants benefit everyone, plant breeders and by extension genetic engineers should be the first to get patents). I can certainty see how that would seem to offer potential for abuse, but then again, the slippery slope is a fallacy.
using it as an excuse to saturate farms with pesticides (bad for environment, bad for food, and allows for rapid evolution of countermeasures in affected species)
That's not anti-GM, that's just just downright wrong. Ge crops have reduced pesticide use, perhaps you're thinking herbicides? And if so, not all herbicides are created equal. I'm much rather have glyphosate used than some of the other ones out there. Don't forget, when controlling weeds, you've got about three choices: herbicides, tillage (which results in soil erosion and fertilizer runoff), or an army of people doing the backbreaking task of picking weeds (usually migrant workers who may or may not be working in exploitative conditions). Me, I choose herbicides. And as for rapid evolution of resistances, yet, that happens in insects, weeds, and pathogens even in conventionally bred improvements. Don't confuse the issues of resistance breakdown and resistant weeds for GE exclusive issues, be it late blight strains overcoming resistance genes in tomato or hessian flies overcoming resistance genes in wheat (neither of which are GE). These are problems, but they are arguments for better management of crops, not stopping crop improvements.
and its affect (by use) on seed diversity.
Lets not forget that all improvements come from diversity, and all improvements reduce biodiversity. Biodiversity is extremely important, but biodiversity is represented by many many genes within the species. The reduction of these genes and the insertion of a genes via GE are independent events. Personally, I'd like to see GE be used to improve undercultivated species like sunchoke, jujube, and teff. The current level of research on such species is, quite frankly, dangerous, but again, this has bugger all to do with genetic engineering.
. Monsanto deserves to burn in hell for all the grief they have given farmers simply
I do agree with that. I personally like them because they tend to have unique traits not usually found in the widely grown hybrid lines (for example, I've got heirloom purple broccoli, white watermelons, and exceptionally tasty orange tomatoes that I grow) and the ability to save seeds and maintain the line for a long period of time is nifty. When I support hybrids & GE crops and talk of their benefits I do not mean to imply being dismissive of heirlooms. They've got some genetic diversity that could be useful or at least novel. I like heirlooms, its just that some of the people who very strongly promote them go a bit off the deep end.
That reminds me of a time I heard people complaining about research on genetically engineered tobacco, because God forbid something potentially dangerous be put into your cancer sticks.
There are actually some people who oppose hybrids already. I've encountered some real extreme heirloom crop zealots who believe that hybrids are generally bad things. Funny enough, people once said of hybrids, unknowingly foreshadowing what would later be said of GMOs, that they 'did violence to the plant' and they would 'befoul the soil'. Of course, we know know that hybridization ranks right up there with vaccination in terms of life saving technologies, and I have no idea how anyone could oppose something that the world could not get by without. Well, without being ignorant anyway, which no doubt they are.
Fun fact: once there were people who opposed grafting, which is now used for pretty much every fruit tree. Johnny Appleseed was actually one of the, who believed that grafting was against the will of God, or some nonsense like that. He was something of a religious nut. Ironically because the trees he spread were seed grown and not grafted, they were only good for making applejack (well, I guess you could make other things out of them too, but take a wild guess as to what most people did with them back then). I guess grafting was ungodly but getting hammered on that stuff wasn't.
Since this was not a GMO at all, I expect this will be a big blow to conventional hybridization, right? Or are we going to apply a double standard and act as if dangers produced via hybridization should be ignored while dangers form GE (real or imaginary) are cause for panic?
Meddle with nature and suffer the concequences you say? Enjoy your teosinte and goatgrass, and your poisonous potatoes, tomatoes, and beans. Enjoy your seedy bananas.and grapes, your small sour apples, your gritty pears, and the little flower heads on the wild mustard plants broccoli and cauliflower came from.. Because to do otherwise would be messing with nature. Hope those chemical defenses that were bred out of all our crop plants don't give you cancer.
Even if this grass were GMO (and its not), the anti-GMO crowd would still be quacks, for the same reason an evolutionary theory being disproven does not vindicate creationists and a bad batch of vaccines does not vindicate anti-vaxxers. They are not quacks for their position. Three decades ago, it was a reasonable enough position, just like creationism was before the overwhelming evidence for evolution was put together. No, they are quacks for how they support their position, although for some things, the evidence so strongly says one thing that opposing it pretty much requires crank tactics. They are cranks for disregarding all the evidence that demonstrates them wrong, cherrypicking studies that suit them (even when the studies are flawed), being deceitful to people who do not understand the topic, and misrepresenting facts to make themselves sound reasonable.
Oh, and if they used this to act as if all GMOs were bad, that would be a pretty quack thing to do. It was hybridized, yet no one would use this to say that hybridization is uniquely dangerous because that would be ridiculous. Why would doing that for GMOs be any more reasonable?
Damn. I was just pulling my pitchfork and torch out of the shed.
That right there sums up the problem with the GMO debate (well, one of them). Caring about the process, not the product. You can bet your ass that none of the anti-GMO groups out there are going to see this and other problems that have arisen from breeding (like the Lenape potato and high psoralens celery) are going to take this story and call for more stringent research of conventionally bred crops where heaven only known how many genetic changes may be happening. No one is going to say that breeding is unpredictable with dangerous results,or that is should be labeled, or that it should be banned until the precautionary principle proves a negative, or anything else people say about GMOs, but if this really were the product of biotechnology, you know damned well that is exactly what they, and many others, would be saying.
Yes and no on those. Bananas are not going to go extinct, but there may be sever problems with the Cavendish, as there was with the Gros Michael. It certainly isn't doomsday thing, but it could be pretty bad. There are actually a lot of varieties of banana, but only a few major export varieties. What I'd really worry about here is not the fungal diseases of black sigatoka and Panama disease, but the bacterial disease banana xanthomonas wilt, which could pose dangerous problems for areas of Africa where bananas and plantains are a major source of calories. I don't think there is much, if any, naturally occurring resistance to BXW so genetic enginering might be the only option for this one (which rules out the home breeding thing).
Citrus on the other hand is very threatened by citrus greening. I don't think there is any natural resistance to it. Grafting to rootstocks does help for some diseases in some cases, but not this one. Biotech looks to be the only option for this one too.
Chocolate problems are partially due to the aging trees that are not being replaced, but diseases like witches' broom are also a major limiting factor in production.
As for wheat, Ug99 is still a major threat to wheat production in some parts of the world, so I would not call that misinformation.
That is a good idea, but one thing I'd add is trying under cultivated species. There are a lot of plants that represent potentially significant agricultural species, but often there has been limited work on these plants. There is little funding for these things in major private or university programs because there isn't much consumer demand for them, and of course without superior varieties you might not be able to create demand, so you won't be able to justify programs on them, and its a nasty circle. Your examples would be pretty tough because there are already people working on them so an individual's contributions will be relatively smaller, and in some cases the problems themselves are pretty tough. Citrus greening for example IIRC has no known natural sources of resistance, so its pretty hard to breed in something not found in the family.
So, if you get some land, I'd suggest trying to breed undercultivated fruit like Japanese raisin tree, goumi, honeyberry, maypop, mulberry, ect., and if you live in a tropical spot you've got lots more options (or course, breeding fruit takes lots of room and thousands of plants and takes a long time so this would be a long term project) or undercultivated vegetables like yacón, jícama , kutjera, salicornia, New Zealand spinach (which is actually not a spinach and is more closely related to living stone plants), or undercultivated grains like quinoa, teff, and Job's tears, just to name a few of varying degrees of cultivation and existing improvement work. Even 'weeds' like spurge nettle are edible. There is a lot of potential, both in terms of agricultural benefit and culinary value, but since there is so little work being done on these types of things, perhaps crowd-sourced breeding is the best option for the advancement of biodiversity. I'd love to do this myself if I had the land.
Ok, understood. My mistake, although in my defense I've heard people claim GE crops don't produce seed before. I hope I'm not sticking my foot in my mouth again and saying something you already know, but the traits that produce sterile seed are not currently in use. I think it would still be considered a form of sterility though in that, while pollination and fertilization could occur, the progeny would not be viable. It would be less sterile than, say, sporophytic incompatibility (where the pollen tube from the pollen is rejected at the stigma of the flower thus preventing the sperm from reaching the egg) or when pollen from for example a triploid apple pollinates a normal apple (which will do absolutely nothing for other apples) or in that fertilization would occur, but still considered a form of sterility nonetheless I think.
To have one company have total control over a food source is disturbing.
Agreed, but how much of the world seed market does any given company have? Also, there are others, like Pioneer and Syngenta, than any farmer can choose if they want to (there's always a Syngenta Liberty Link ad on RFD-TV).
risked destroying non GM crops through cross-contamination
How is that intrinsically different than any other type of cross pollination? That is like saying that hybrid watermelon lines risk 'destroying' the Cream of Saskatchewan (an open pollinated type of white fleshed watermelon) in my garden because they have genes I don't want.
it should be Monsanto that should be paying damages to farmers who do not want to deal with GM crops.
Consider this. Lets just say you grow red watermelons, I grow the Cream of Saskatchewan I mentioned. You buy new seed next year, and because I did not take adequate measures to ensure the purity of my seed my watermelons are no longer white. Should I be able to sue? Or if you are goring dent corn and I'm growing sweet corn, should I be able to sue when your corn turns mine starchy? Or If I'm growing seedless citrus or persimmons and you plant one that produces pollen and puts seeds in my crop, what then? My point is that there's a lot more to that issue than just transgenes, and they've all been worked out in the past by communication, not lawsuits. I don't think that lawsuits are suddenly necessary for cross pollination.
Citing Jeffrey Smith on GE is as bad as citing Andrew Wakefield on vaccines (read this, watch this). In the first link, the study he cites was widely criticized by the UFSA, FSANZ, and French HCB. In the second link, the first two studies he cites were not published in peer review journals, the third was withdrawn for flaws, and the fourth has nothing to do with GE if you actually read it except for sing a GE variety and stating that some of the chemical components of GE varieties are different than non GE varieties (duh, different lines have differences). Strangely, your links do not mention this. Wonder why?
basically, no one does ANY testing, they just trust that Monsanto says that it is safe,
You mean except for these hundreds of studies?
Nature does not insert random genes from some weird funguses or fish into corn (or other plants).
Says the organism that needs the viral transgene syncytin to reproduce. Nature does it all the time and even if it didn't that proves nothing. Nature doesn't use somaclonal variation to develop new varieties either
Sooner or later, we may just find our that our improved food is killing us and we don't know why.
Appeal to ignorance. Anti-vaxxers say the same thing about their quackery, and they're just as wrong and for the same reasons.
We have evolved to eat the food we have available, not the other way around.
Bullshit. We have evolved to consume a wide variety of things. My ancestors did not have corn, or quinoa, or tomatoes, or potatoes, or cassava, or taro, or peanuts, or lychees, or bananas, or durians, or blueberries, or loads of other edible species yet I consume these things just fine. One more protein isn't going to throw your body out of whack, and if you truly believe it will, never eat any biodiverse crop that didn't originate from wherever your great great grandparents lived, because I promise you there is a lot more new proteins and other chemicals in a new species than there are in one with a cry gene or epsps gene inserted.
We are FAR away from an understanding how our body works completely. We know the big picture, but that's it.
Appeal to ignorance. Furthermore, you could say the same thing about every other method of plant improvement (like mutagenesis and somaclonal variation, wide crosses and embryo rescue, bud sport selection, induced polyploidy, ect.), which is why the appeal to ignorance is a fallacy.
However to play devil's advocate, are there any benefits to a company such as Monsanto?
A better question to ask would be how valid are the criticisms of Monsanto. Most of the time they turn out to be half truths or whole lies by anti-GMO people looking to demonize the company then create guilt by association. I used to think Monsanto was pretty bad, but the more I read about them, the less the claims about them held true, from suing farmers to suicides in India. Now when I reads some story about their evils I wonder what really happened.
For the same reason that if some random person drops a DVD of a movie off at a movie theater that theater can't start having showings of the movie simply because they found the DVD on their property. Just getting the DVD isn't illegal, but intentionally using it afterward is. Likewise, nothing happens if you are cross pollinated, only if you intentionally select for the trait.
I don't know if they are shills or not (I doubt it since I forgot to wear my tinfoil hat today) but what they are saying is true. the only people who cite the Schmeiser case do so without giving the complete picture. He knew darned well what he was doing.
Maybe I'm just misreading your comment, but are you implying GE crops do not produce seed? You do realize that the thing in corn, canola, cotton, and soy (four of the big GE crops) that you use is the seed? It would be news to, well, everyone if those crops did not produce seed. Learn some basic crop physiology before making obviously baseless accusations.
Never has one company been so close to totally controlling the food supply for the entire planet.
Yeah, its too bad you can't buy seed from Syngenta, Bayer Cropscience, Dow Agrosciences, or Pioneer, or just grow you own open pollinated varieties.
Their abusive practices with farmers both home and abroad have been well documented
Such as? Blogs and biased documentaries are not well documented. I'm not saying that they don't have their fair share of corporate dick moves (like their deal with polychlorinated biphenyls and other pollution issues) tbut the vast majority of those 'well documented' abusive practices really aren't anything more than internet myths.
Monsanto designed these seeds to be sterile
Would you people PLEASE learn the difference between hybrid seed and GE seed. Ok, imagine you want to grow pink flowers (genetype Ww). you have to cross red flowers (genotype WW) and white flowers (genotype ww) to get them. You cross the white and red to get a hybrid which is pink, but the seed from the pink will be segregated in a 1:2:1 ratio of red, pink, and white flowers (do a punnett square for proof). Hybrid seed are heterozygious for many traits (this is the basis of heterosis, or hybrid vigor) and are therefore unsuitable for seed saving They are not sterile, you just shouldn't save the seed if you want to get good yield every year. GE traits are bred into hybrid lines, so basically all current GE crops are hybrids (though not all hybrids are GE and GE crops do not necessarily have to be hybrids). This is why farmers buy seed every year, and they have been doing this since the 1930's. Please, before going on some anti-GE anti-Monsanto rant, if all you know about the topic came from blogs and documentaries like food Inc read a bit about agriculture and plant biology//genetics! This right here it the biggest problem with the GMO debate...so many people with such strong opinions with no knowledge of the topic.
Also the seeds cross-polinate to non-Monsanto seeds, polluting nature's generic seeds with Monsanto genes.
Cross pollenation is not pollution and it happens with every other crop out there. This year I'm growing several types of heirloom squash which I must protect from both the different varieties and anyone else in the area's squash if I wish to keep the lines true. Genes, wanted or not, transgenic or not, spread, and methods to prevent one type of gene flow work on preventing transgenic gene flow too. Or you could just talk to each other, like sweet corn and field corn farmers do (for those of you who do not know, and I suspect this is most people, because the endosperm is produced by double fertilization, and the endosperm is what you eat in corn, it can be affected by whatever pollinates it, so if you grow sweet corn and someone else grows field corn your sweet corn will taste bad).
Monsanto has a nasty habit of suing innocent farmers who have decided to continue using the "generic" seeds provided by nature.
Name me one case of that happening. Every case I've seen so far, be it the Schmeiser case, the Parr case, the Ralph case, the Roush case, sometime more than that happened, either someone broke the contract they signed or intentionally selected for the trait. No one has been sued for cross pollination alone, although if that statement is inaccurate I'd love to see court documents stating otherwise.
To eliminate people who are not using their products.
Yeah, because they want less farmers (the people they sell their products to). That motive makes no sense.