The problems with your point is that it is also applicable to conventionally bred resistances. Resistance breakdown is not a new phenomenon. Pathogens and bugs adapt to resistances, and evolution does not care if that resistance came about as a result of selective breeding, wide crossing, mutagenesis, or genetic engineering. Anything that works and is widely used is susceptible to genetic breakdown. People make a big stink about Bt genes losing effectiveness against European corn borer (as they should; it is a big deal that threatens to take away the benefits GE corn has had) but why don't they fuss over, say, wheat and hessian flies? Make no mistake, it is a problem (although hopefully with the new stacked traits with different types of the Bt protein and better refuge area enforcement [apparently Monsanto is going to stop selling to farmers who do not sustainably manage their corn] it will be less of a problem), but lets not forget that such problems are applicable to all forms of resistance. Anti-GE groups often use resistant insects and weeds as an argument against GE, but don't give the proper context to let you know that such issues are caused by over reliance on one or a few genes and cultivation techniques that put too much selection pressure on the pests and that it is a problems of resistant crops, not GE crops.
That is, of course, true. The only thing that will end hunger is if everyone lives in a free open democratic country with a decent market economy and a government that actually cares about its people, with decent education, healthcare, infrastructure, ect. Obviously, hunger is a complex social issue and a scientific solution isn't going to change the root cause of the problem. However, it is not a binary choice between GMOs will save the world vs GMOs are no help. Improved genotypes, be they transgenic drought tolerant traits or viral resistance traits, or conventionally bred traits (I follow some very fascinating research that seeks to alter the internal structure of roots and the overall architecture of the roots to improve nutrient uptake), can help people. They won't solve every problem, but look at it this way: assume you are a poor sustenance farmer in Africa where your soils are poor (phosphorus is a problem). Would you want the improved root genotype? Or maybe BXW is going to wipe out the banana crop you rely on, even if it doesn't fix all your problems, would you rather have a GE banana resistant to BXW or lose your crop? Improved crops, GE or otherwise , are no silver bullet (and I'd add biodiverse underutilized crops to the list of things of great importance...the amount of research in that field is so stupidly low it is quite frankly dangerous), but lets not forget that does not imply they are without a role, and most likely a significant one, to play in ending hunger and improving agriculture in general.
you can be sued by a big corporation because of something perfectly legal your neighbor did
I agree with that. However, if you look at any high profile case where a farmer was sued, the Schmeiser case, the Parr case, the Roush case, the Rinehart case, the Ralph case, ect., you find that when charges were pressed there was more than simple cross pollination occurring. I've often asked people who make that claim to direct me to a case where it actually happened but every time deeper investigation reveals it did not (though if that's not the case I'd rather have my foot in my mouth than go uncorrected). The lawsuits come from one of two sources: either someone signed a contract agreeing not to save seed, then did anyway, or someone was cross pollinated and was found to have intentionally selected for the trait. Don't do either of those and you don't get sued. So, the patent violation angle really doesn't pan out very well as an argument for keeping GE crops in a glass bubble. If you are talking about what courts should find, here's what they did find: a recent lawsuit filed against Monsanto, suing them to prevent Monsanto from suing farmers for cross pollination, was dismissed on the grounds that it does not happen. If it did happen it would be a concern, no one disagrees with that, however, whether or not it actually happens is important.
I doubt you'll see sterile crops after the uproar over the terminator gene, despite it being able to prevent cross pollination issues. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Look up 'rafflesia', it's a plant that exchanges DNA with the organism it's a parasite on.
You don't even have to get that exotic. Plants can exchange genes via graft unions. Most all fruit you eat is propagated by grafting, so it may be that every grafted plant has some gene transfer going on. Or to get even closer, here's a good example. Turns out the Syncytin genes critical for human reproduction probably came from a virus. Everyone who says transgenes don't occur in nature had their syncytiotrophoblast made by one.
And how is that different from every other random mutation and genetic alteration? Genetic engineering is different from selective breeding, sure (so is every other breeding technique like back crossing and wide crossing, and other similar techniques like hybridization, and other plant improvement methods like induced polyploidy, mutagenesis, sport selection, embryo rescue, ect.) and the genes come from farther, but why exactly is that a bad thing (provided you understand the genes being used)? Okay, the genes may be from another species. Well, so what?
we're pretty sure" they won't go Terminator on us.
Stop making baseless assertions unless you know how inserting a gene is suddenly going to make the plant do something radical. Genetic engineering does not anything can happen at anytime for any reason.
Create plants with sterile seeds, so Monsanto can then grab all of the farmer's money? Sue farmer's whose fields are next to Monsanto seed fields, alongside the blowing winds, and get the courts and government's to side with them against small farmers?
So which is it, are they sterile or spreading everywhere? Second, this is publicly funded research. As in, not Monsanto. The only antiquated ideas I see here are placing superstition & conspiracies over science in the name of politics & anti-corporatism.
ensure that they cannot contaminate conventional or organic farms
In the Italian case, these are perennial asexually propagated crops, so even if cross pollination did occur, it would have zero effect on a farm. Second, I grow in my garden open pollinated plants. I save the seed because they are some oddball varieties that cannot be bought in stores. If they are cross pollinated, I lose the pure variety, and I'm out of luck. If you do the same on a farm, the same holds true, and this is for any gene. Singling out transgenes does not make sense. Sure, I get that there is a market for it, but that shouldn't put undue burdens on other growers. I mean, what if suddenly there is a market for rice without the sd-1 gene, should every rice grower out there bend over backwards to prevent cross pollination?
with patented gene
Perhaps you missed the first two words in the title. What you are saying would be like bashing Linux because you hate Microsoft because you saw a documentary about how Microsoft goes around kicking puppies.
the reason there's such a strong backlash against GMO plants is the widespread use of a *particular sort* of GMO plant.
While there is some truth to that, I really can't say I agree with that for a couple of reasons. A few considerations in no particular order of importance: glyphosate is actually one of the better herbicides out there in terms of both human and environmental safety, and while no agrochemical input is desirable input, it is one of the least damaging ones (also, not many in the opposition to herbicide tolerant crops will mention the environmental benefits they have provided by facilitating the conversion to no till and conservation tillage systems). You mention the crops with a toxin to insects in them. This is true, but it is hardly new, in fact, this same toxin has been used in organic farming for decades. There is no evidence it is harmful to humans aside from a handful of widely criticized studies. You're partially right in that those are listed as reasons for opposition to GE crops, and contribute to some of the opposition (whether or not they make scientific sense), but realistically, people would oppose them regardless. Remember that there was opposition to the first GE crop used in the US, the Flavr Savr, and all it had was an antisense polygalacturonase gene and the NPTII gene, and that you see the same opposition to things like the virus resistant Rainbow papaya, the Arctic Apple (a non-browning apple awaiting approval), and even Golden Rice. So, to say that people oppose GE for the herbicide tolerant and Bt crops is like saying people oppose evolution based on lack of transition fossils. It may be the case in the minds of some people (again, rational or not), but make no mistake, there is a deeper reason.
It is worth noting that kiwis are not propagated by seed (like most perennial fruits they are asexually propagated), so even if cross pollination were to occur, it isn't likely to have an effect. Also worth noting that kiwis are generally pollinated by bees (with a minor role played by wind), which dislike kiwi flowers and generally pollinate everything else first, so unless they've got bunch of hungry hives on site pollen isn't likely to go far. I don't know what kind of wind drift you see with kiwi pollen or how long it remains viable, but I'd have to assume they have some sort of distance barrier in place too to account for even that, as most trials do take pollination into consideration when selecting a site. I'm not saying there is zero risk, just that it is pretty unlikely to happen, especially if the orchard is managed as it is, and that expecting completely zero risk is not an exceptionally reasonable expectation.
General role of thumb: if though of something about a thing you just heard about something three minuted age, chances are the people who have been working on it for three decades thought of it too. Zero risk
Glad you've got the final say on what is and isn't human enough to kill and not some misogynist Bedouin or sheet wearing redneck. That could get morally messy, since every other time in history someone decided to use any sort of qualitative factor to determine humanity has worked out so well..
I'd love to see those regulations. As far as I know, the FDA basically said said that they frowned on those labels, because the term GMO indicated modification (which describes everything) not engineering (in the case where the term GMO or genetically modified is used), and also because they don't like labels that have the implication that something is superior when in fact there is no difference, and a few other reasons that the label can be misleading (like if a bottle of pure orange juice said it was non-GMO, when there are no GE oranges). However, they have not banned it, merely expressed disapproval. I agree it would not be justified, just as I do not feel going the other way and forcing labeling of either containing or not containing GE ingredients is justified.
I don't get how so many people can keep making that claim. Have you been to a grocery store at all? there's plenty of products that say 'contains no GMOs' or 'Contains no genetically engineered ingredients.' There's also the organic label, which is a bit different in that it also covers cultivation practices, but it guarantees that the crops are not GE. If I would have known so few people paid attention to this I would have bought a few and uploaded pictures to link to.
You cannot unknowingly/unwittingly make a toxic hybrid
Not true. Off the top of my head, I can think of the Lenape potato, which was a conventionally bred hybrid that ended up producing toxic amounts of the glycoalkaloid solanine, and celery which produced so much psoralen that it gave the people who harvested it blisters. I doubt those were intentional (although it is possible that the parents may have also had those traits)..
In order to hybridize, the plants must already be of the same Genus
Not related to the topic at hand, but that isn't true either. I've got a shipova tree in my yard which is a Pyrus x Sorbus cross. Triticale is another example, among plenty of others.
No, it's clearly a value-based term when discussing the information you consider when buying a food product.
Here's a link that might help. Peanuts might kill someone. wheat might make someone sick. GMOs, or anything else not labeled, will not. The difference is pretty clear. You want to know something like that? Fair enough. You want to force others to tell you? Nope, just don't buy it then.
It's being a market worshiper to say that those dominant in the market should be able to determine what information they withhold from their customers rather than their customers being able to determine what information they choose to base their purchase decisions on.
First off, there is a big difference between withholding information and not putting it on a label. If you did that, there would be way too much to label. It isn't being a market worshiper if you say that only essential items should be labeled any anything after than should be voluntary. How hard is that to comprehend?
Yep! People do deserve to know about their food. All of the details they choose to know.
I want to know the complete list of mutations in my food. Do you care? Too bad, I want you to pay for it.
That includes knowing whether or not a vaccine uses mercury or any other ingredient they would base this decision on.
And if you look at food ingredients you can already tell if something is GE.
Er, I'm saying that democracy should be able to promote knowledge—you're the one insisting that GMO food producers should be entitled to use their market weight to ensure ignorance by preventing informed consent.
So, if an apple grower does not tell you what sport they use every time you buy their apples, that is promoting ignorance? No. there is a difference between preventing people from knowing things and not telling them.
You cannot discover the information unless it is labeled.
Tell that to vegans who call companies up to discover what exactly is in the 'natural ingredients' portion of the label, or to the Muslims who call companies to find out what type of gelatin they use. Has doing the homework ever occurred to you?
You're promoting a labeling regime that reinforces this, I'm promoting a labeling regime that allows customers to seek out the information.
No, I'm promoting letting science determine a baseline for what, at minimum, must be labeled, then letting everything else follow market demand. You are promoting an unrealistic system of forcing what you want upon food producers and demanding everyone else pay for it.
I'm promoting informed consent.
When you buy something, it has the ingredients on it. That is informed consent. Is there more you would like to know that it does not say? Don't buy it then. You are free to walk away, just like a Muslim who does not know how a piece of beef was slaughtered is free to not eat it.
In the post you're replying to, I reiterated a list of aspects of food that I want to know about. You ignored it twice. I'm not singling out anything. And I'm not making any comment about the science of GMO, nor calling it "bad", nor asking for "warning" labels. I'm promoting an effort of customers to be better informed about the products they're purchasing.
Fair enough. I must have missed the comment the first time around. It is still unrealistic. If you want to know what state something came from, what variety of crops were used, how they were developed, what genes they have, what proteins are produced, the nature of those proteins, what lines were crossed to make them, who developed the crops, how the crops were propagated, who propagated them, what fertilizers were used, where those fertilizers c
Looking voer your links, link one comes from a report by 'Coalition for GM-Free India,' which I suppose I'd have to look over, but given that those claims contradict data and those organizations with GMO Free in the title rarely have a reputation of honesty (which I know is a poor argument but giving their report a quick look over doesn't really blow me away), it isn't high on my to do list. Link two is about resistance, and that has more to do with cultivation issues, in not unique to any strain of resistant plant, GE or not, so to call it a failure is not very nuanced or accurate. Third links is the same source as the first, and the fourth mentions that there has been a downward trend from earlier years, and even mentions Bt cotton as a reason.
Huber's work was never published. He made some pretty extraordinary claims, then never published his data, so if you are calling that important research, well, that isn't good. I can't really comment on it besides pointing out some of the absurdity and inaccuracy of his claims because there is nothing but claims, no fact, to talk about. You can not disprove him because he has nothing solid to disprove. The CSMonitor link isn't too hot either, failing to consider a number of important details. The Séralini study in the next link has been widely criticized for shoddy methodology and unsupported conclusions, including by the EFSA, FSANA, and the French HCB. Citing him does not advance your position among those who closely follow this topic, nor does citing Huber.
As for the next two links, it would not hesitate to believe them. I do not mean to imply that Monsanto does no wrong, especially with some of the chemicals they have produced in the past. The EPA link looks like they made made a mistake (since companies don't normally not brand their premium products). The bribery link is bad, although hardly unique for a company, and usually is unfortunately required to do business in certain places (not that this excuses it, just that you are talking about big business, not solely Monsanto). As for the last link, biopiracy is a stupid crime designed to get money from companies, and IIRC (it would be akin to me saying that because I live in an area where mayapple naturally grows that I deserve a cut from the profits of a company using the podophyllotoxin in mayappe to produce cancer drugs), Monsanto filed the proper paperwork, and someone else made the mistake elsewhere. Not really damning. The link in you second post looks like a mix of fact, science by jury (and a French one at that), and hot air (and naturally doesn't mention them doing things like compensating farmers in South Africa for their wrongly hybridized corn seed).
So, I stand by what I said. Most of the things out there about Monsanto are baseless. If they are so bad, base the accusations on fact. Also, since you bring up biodiversity, GE is a way of improving plants, biodiversity is what you grow. Two different things, and while you could accuse companies of reducing biodiversity, that is what agri
You are not the arbiter of what factors people consider "essential" when buying a product.
Essential has a pretty clear definition. Knowing if something has peanuts or gluten or soy is essential. Knowing that a product contains corn sold by a particular seed company planted on a particular date by a particular farm in a state and fertilized with various fertilizers and harvested with one brand of harvester and stored in a blue silo ect. is not. Pretty cut and dry really. It isn't being a market worshiper to say that rules and regulations should be based on what makes sense, not whoever shouts the loudest.
It's bewildering to hear it suggested that market demand should be determined based on ignorance about a product feature that customers want to know about.
Haram food m might send you to hell. Don't people deserve to know that about their food? Some people think that vaccines cause autism, and some people want textbooks to carry warning labels for evolution. Hey, some people believe it, or doesn't democracy mean that your ignorance is just as good as my knowledge? The information IS out there. Just because one does not seek it out does not meet that it should be forced onto products. You are just playing the lazy victim and trying to scare people about a non-issue. You are just trying to justify irrationally singling out a single aspect of food because anti-science assholes have spend years demonizing it and now want to give their nonsense validity by requiring special warning labels.
If GM food is awesome, then why aren't they proud enough to slap a big 'ol label on it and say so?
That might have something to do with all the groups out there lying about the safety of GE crops. furthermore, if food produced by hybrid seed is so good, why isn't it labeled? If food produced by mutagenesis is so good, why isn't it labeled? Do you see how absurd that argument is?
And anti-GMO people are not entitled to special treatment because they complain really loudly. You want a non-essential label? Get in line behind every other group and create a market demand for it. Don't go to the government and demand to be catered to.
If you think Monsanto is somehow an upstanding corporate citizen then you've completely delusion
I never said that. i just think that if you have to use lies and deceit to make your point against them then maybe they're not the great evil they are often made out to be. Is pointing out falsehoods and mentioning what actually happened bad if the accusations are serious enough? does that mean I support everything they do if I demonstrate that a claim against them is factually false?
Monsanto comes up as 80% of the results. No - that's not proof - but it certainly is a consensus.
That's amazing to me. BP fucks the ocean, and Haliburton makes money disappear for a war, and the guys who sell this are the evil ones.
Monsanto is not a food company, they are a pesticide company that makes seed crops to sell more pesticide.
Ah, that explains why they are selling the insecticide reducing Bt crops in the above link.
Monsanto is potentially creating a host of ecological problem which are much bigger than the original problem of weed and pest management.
How so? Let me guess, 'superweeds' and 'superpests'? Please, resistance breakdown and herbicide resistance are nothing new, are more cultivation issues than crop issues (particularly the resistant pests) and worst case scenario is you lose the benefits already provided.
Monsanto is not one of those companies.
That must be why farmers willingly buy them, why farmers in developing countries wait in lines to get their bag of GE seed.
There are thousands of news articles concerning the twisted nature of Monsanto - go read them.
And there's thousands of articles describing how terrible Merck and Pfizer are for causing autism with their horrible horrible vaccines. So what? The vast majority of those articles turn out to be bullshit. Look at the cases above, and dig deeper.
Bottom line: no one is saying Monsanto is perfect. They are a profit driven company with too little competition and a bit of a problem with revolving doors. But most of the things said about them are lies and deceptions, and that is never a good way to make an argument. That's what gets me the most, all these anti-GMO groups out there who publish the stuff about GMOs and Monsanto. They lie (go to 42:25 to see the biggest most trusted most frequently cited name in the anti-GMO movement lie about something in the very abstract of the paper he's citing for a good example).. I used to think they were outright assholes, but the more misinformation and falsehoods I see about them the more sympathetic I feel toward them (maybe that's part of their grand conspiracy half the GMO denialists out there think they're conducting. You want to be against Monsanto? Fair enough, but you shouldn't do so because some blogger who wouldn't know a corncob from his asshole said their CEO eats a bowl of kittens everyday fro breakfast, and you certainly shouldn't reject the science of the things they sell over it.
Personally, I think the whole Monsanto thing is pretty clever. If you can;t win in the court of science, demonize the one associated with the science and try to hit the science through guilt by association and win in the court of public opinion. Bonus is that anyone who does fact checking is clearly in on it and thinks they are an upstanding corporate citizen and therefore probably should not be trusted.
Tell me then, where can I freely, and relatively easily find food products that do not contain genetically UNmodified corn or soy?
About everywhere.
Your statement that this information is "non-essential" is strange.
No it isn't. Knowing if something has peanuts is essential. Knowing if something has gluten is essential. Knowing the details of the variety of an ingredient is not.
Roundup ready crops have been modified to be resistant to the broad-spectrum herbicide Roundup. They were created basically for the purpose of selling more of Monsanto's best selling herbicide.
First, I know that, second, so what? Really, so what? Do you have any idea how agriculture works? People use herbicide with plants that can tolerate them, GMO or not, deal with it, and they've been doing this since long befor eGMOs where a thing.
Roundup is toxic, it is an endocrine disruptor, and it damages DNA. In addition is has a profound negative ecological impact.
Yeah, I'd love to see a strong source for that in the amounts of Round Up you get in your food, preferably several.
Well because direct manipulation of genetic code is very new
First GMO crop: tobacco, China, 1988. How is that new?
very radical
Any more radical than a doubled haploid four way hybrid, or something cultured from an irradiated blob of callus cells? Ok, you're binging in DNA in a new way, as opposed to more traditional methods, which do some pretty unusual things sometimes. So what?
only sparsely tested
Bull.Shit. Unless by sparely tested you mean have been studied for decades with hundreds of studies done across the world and millions of dollars spend to reach the widely held scientific consensus that they are safe.
Each of those criteria is worthy of making an exception and forcing monoplistic predatory corporations to disclose what they are feeding to the public.
No they don't, and even without getting into the Monsanto thing (which is usually overblown anyway), labeling should not be based on non-scientific things. I want to know if my food is picked by migrant farm workers laboring under abusive exploitative conditions being paid an unfair wage, but that doesn't merit a mandatory label.
When some of these crops turn out to be really bad, all of society will have to bear the medical costs.
Yeah, I'm sure that will happen right after it turns out that vaccines cause autism. I'm interested, what could possibly be the biochemical basis for how the cry genes, nptII, c4 epsps, bar, cspB, prv cp, and/or cmv cp (the transgenes used in presently approved GE crops) could possibly in any way be harmful to humans? Because for all the accusation, no one ever wants to talk biochemistry to back their musing. I wonder why? Could it be that the accusations have no scientific merit whatsoever?
Now in the case of GM foods, it is illegal for a food to be labeled as non-GMO food.
A number of people have said this, and all I can say is, do you people go to grocery stores? There are quite a number of items that say this on them. It isn't illegal, the FDA just frowns upon it because it gives the false impression that non-geneitcally engineered foods are superior, and because the term GMO is not technically accurate (as GMO means genetically modified organism, which every crop is, and the term should really be GEO).
You argue that there are way too many types of genetic manipulation for us commoners to be able to know the difference
No, I'm saying there is no meaningful argument that can be applied to one but not the others.
There should not be a presumption of safety, genetic tinkerers should bear the burden of proof before their crops are sold to the public or released into the ecosystem.
Ge crops are safe, also, see above.
Roundup-resistant crops and crops which produce their own pesticides.
You mean just like every other herbicide resistant plant on the planet? And as for producing their own pesticides, all plants do that. In fact, most of the pesticides in your diet are natural poisons.
Roundup-resistant means that astonishing quantities of Roundup were used on the crop to kill weeds.
And it also means that much harsher herbicides were replaced. Herbicides are pretty common.
Roundup which was touted as safe by your agribusiness "scientists" is turning out to be pretty bad for us. Roundup is teratogenic, and endocrine disruptor, and causes genetic damage.
I'm sure if you drank the stuff, but in the levels present in your food, not even close.
The second common type is even scarier since we know that you can't wash the pesticides off of these, they are inside!
See above. Plant physiology 101: all plants have pesticides in them, so that is not something innately worrying, and especially not when we know exactly how this pesticide works. You body treats it like any other protein, it works by binding to receptors humans just do not have, and it isn't even active in acidic environments like the mammalian gut anyway.
I usually fall on the science side of arguments (evolution, climate change, etc.) but there are currently two areas of science that have been totally corrupted by money and corporate influence: Pharmacology, and agricultural biology.
Ah, so you're liberal unscientific then. Accept the science of climate change and evolution, but reject that of medical and agricultural science. Sorry, but that's no better than rejcting evolution or climate change.
Anyone who follows this story knows that new GMO crops are invented all the time and the FDA rubberstamps them because the FDA is a captured agency.
Nonsense! It takes so long for new crops to get on the market. That is another anti-GMO talking point that falls flat. There are tons of crops in development that get stuck at the regulatory process because of how strict is is. It took years to get DroughtGard approved, and look at the rough time the AquaAdvantage salmon is having.
There is no way that the kind of large scale long-term studies have been done to validate the safety of GMO crops.
You might be interested to know that plant petents are nothing new. They've been around since the plant patent acts were passed in 1930 and 1970. Ever seen a Honeycrisp apple? Petented. Illegal to propagete. Well, it was, the patent has recently expired, but it is true of its (hopeful) successor, SnowSweet. I wanted to graft a branch of it from an orchard to my own apple, but didn't, because that would be breaking the law. Yet it is not a GMO. To be fair, it is true that things have gotten a bit deeper, now that the transgenes themselves are patented, but it is not as if patents of crops are new (and I'm not against them either, after all, plant breeding is hard and takes many years, so if anyone deserved patents, it is plant variety developers).
If you are concerned about increases in pesticides, good news, the insect resistant ones do just that. Perhaps you are thinking of the herbicide tolerant ones? They are often accused of increasing heribicde usage, and that is true for the herbicides they are designed to resist, but an often neglected flip side is that they decrease the usage of every other type of herbicide, most of which are much worse than the one they resist.
There is no known link between CCD and GE crops, although there is so much baseless speculation and accusation out there that I can see how one would assume that to be the case.
Have you even been to a grocery store lately? I see non-GMO all the time. I have no idea how people can make the claim that you can;t label things as non-GMO...oh, Organic Consumer's Association, that's how.
sounds like every other patented crop out there. You are aware that they have been patenting plants since the Plant Patent Act of 1930? Yet, notne of those require special labels, and no one complains about it. That's very inconsistent.
Lets see here. In the first link, it was not a case of cross pollination. A quick look over at the case, and it looks he obtained them either through his gin or from an unlabeled bag. A dick move to sue him to be sure (especially if it was the later case where he simply bought something that was illegal), and a bad ruling IMO, but certainty not a matter of cross pollination. Also of note is that he was sued for violating the plant variety patent, which does not concern genetic engineering. In the second link, it looks like the guy just got blacklisted, not sued. The case of Moe Parr in the second and third links can be found here. Looks like he knew what he was doing. So, those links don't give what I asked. I want to see someone who got cross pollinated, didn't know, and got sued out of the blue over it. The pdf from the Center for Food Safety will take a while to go through, but considering some of the other things they say about genetic engineering, I doubt it will be worth my time to look through it.
And I'd like to know if my produce is picked by migrant workers living in exploitative conditions. That doesn't mean that deserves mandatory labels though. Furthermore, have you considered the issues posed hybrid seed, or that farmers make the decision to sign Monsanto's contracts willingly because they like the seed they sell?
Slashdot Mirror
The problems with your point is that it is also applicable to conventionally bred resistances. Resistance breakdown is not a new phenomenon. Pathogens and bugs adapt to resistances, and evolution does not care if that resistance came about as a result of selective breeding, wide crossing, mutagenesis, or genetic engineering. Anything that works and is widely used is susceptible to genetic breakdown. People make a big stink about Bt genes losing effectiveness against European corn borer (as they should; it is a big deal that threatens to take away the benefits GE corn has had) but why don't they fuss over, say, wheat and hessian flies? Make no mistake, it is a problem (although hopefully with the new stacked traits with different types of the Bt protein and better refuge area enforcement [apparently Monsanto is going to stop selling to farmers who do not sustainably manage their corn] it will be less of a problem), but lets not forget that such problems are applicable to all forms of resistance. Anti-GE groups often use resistant insects and weeds as an argument against GE, but don't give the proper context to let you know that such issues are caused by over reliance on one or a few genes and cultivation techniques that put too much selection pressure on the pests and that it is a problems of resistant crops, not GE crops.
That is, of course, true. The only thing that will end hunger is if everyone lives in a free open democratic country with a decent market economy and a government that actually cares about its people, with decent education, healthcare, infrastructure, ect. Obviously, hunger is a complex social issue and a scientific solution isn't going to change the root cause of the problem. However, it is not a binary choice between GMOs will save the world vs GMOs are no help. Improved genotypes, be they transgenic drought tolerant traits or viral resistance traits, or conventionally bred traits (I follow some very fascinating research that seeks to alter the internal structure of roots and the overall architecture of the roots to improve nutrient uptake), can help people. They won't solve every problem, but look at it this way: assume you are a poor sustenance farmer in Africa where your soils are poor (phosphorus is a problem). Would you want the improved root genotype? Or maybe BXW is going to wipe out the banana crop you rely on, even if it doesn't fix all your problems, would you rather have a GE banana resistant to BXW or lose your crop? Improved crops, GE or otherwise , are no silver bullet (and I'd add biodiverse underutilized crops to the list of things of great importance...the amount of research in that field is so stupidly low it is quite frankly dangerous), but lets not forget that does not imply they are without a role, and most likely a significant one, to play in ending hunger and improving agriculture in general.
you can be sued by a big corporation because of something perfectly legal your neighbor did
I agree with that. However, if you look at any high profile case where a farmer was sued, the Schmeiser case, the Parr case, the Roush case, the Rinehart case, the Ralph case, ect., you find that when charges were pressed there was more than simple cross pollination occurring. I've often asked people who make that claim to direct me to a case where it actually happened but every time deeper investigation reveals it did not (though if that's not the case I'd rather have my foot in my mouth than go uncorrected). The lawsuits come from one of two sources: either someone signed a contract agreeing not to save seed, then did anyway, or someone was cross pollinated and was found to have intentionally selected for the trait. Don't do either of those and you don't get sued. So, the patent violation angle really doesn't pan out very well as an argument for keeping GE crops in a glass bubble. If you are talking about what courts should find, here's what they did find: a recent lawsuit filed against Monsanto, suing them to prevent Monsanto from suing farmers for cross pollination, was dismissed on the grounds that it does not happen. If it did happen it would be a concern, no one disagrees with that, however, whether or not it actually happens is important.
I doubt you'll see sterile crops after the uproar over the terminator gene, despite it being able to prevent cross pollination issues. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Look up 'rafflesia', it's a plant that exchanges DNA with the organism it's a parasite on.
You don't even have to get that exotic. Plants can exchange genes via graft unions. Most all fruit you eat is propagated by grafting, so it may be that every grafted plant has some gene transfer going on. Or to get even closer, here's a good example. Turns out the Syncytin genes critical for human reproduction probably came from a virus. Everyone who says transgenes don't occur in nature had their syncytiotrophoblast made by one.
And how is that different from every other random mutation and genetic alteration? Genetic engineering is different from selective breeding, sure (so is every other breeding technique like back crossing and wide crossing, and other similar techniques like hybridization, and other plant improvement methods like induced polyploidy, mutagenesis, sport selection, embryo rescue, ect.) and the genes come from farther, but why exactly is that a bad thing (provided you understand the genes being used)? Okay, the genes may be from another species. Well, so what?
we're pretty sure" they won't go Terminator on us.
Stop making baseless assertions unless you know how inserting a gene is suddenly going to make the plant do something radical. Genetic engineering does not anything can happen at anytime for any reason.
Create plants with sterile seeds, so Monsanto can then grab all of the farmer's money? Sue farmer's whose fields are next to Monsanto seed fields, alongside the blowing winds, and get the courts and government's to side with them against small farmers?
So which is it, are they sterile or spreading everywhere? Second, this is publicly funded research. As in, not Monsanto. The only antiquated ideas I see here are placing superstition & conspiracies over science in the name of politics & anti-corporatism.
ensure that they cannot contaminate conventional or organic farms
In the Italian case, these are perennial asexually propagated crops, so even if cross pollination did occur, it would have zero effect on a farm. Second, I grow in my garden open pollinated plants. I save the seed because they are some oddball varieties that cannot be bought in stores. If they are cross pollinated, I lose the pure variety, and I'm out of luck. If you do the same on a farm, the same holds true, and this is for any gene. Singling out transgenes does not make sense. Sure, I get that there is a market for it, but that shouldn't put undue burdens on other growers. I mean, what if suddenly there is a market for rice without the sd-1 gene, should every rice grower out there bend over backwards to prevent cross pollination?
with patented gene
Perhaps you missed the first two words in the title. What you are saying would be like bashing Linux because you hate Microsoft because you saw a documentary about how Microsoft goes around kicking puppies.
label your product as such.
Please read this.
the reason there's such a strong backlash against GMO plants is the widespread use of a *particular sort* of GMO plant.
While there is some truth to that, I really can't say I agree with that for a couple of reasons. A few considerations in no particular order of importance: glyphosate is actually one of the better herbicides out there in terms of both human and environmental safety, and while no agrochemical input is desirable input, it is one of the least damaging ones (also, not many in the opposition to herbicide tolerant crops will mention the environmental benefits they have provided by facilitating the conversion to no till and conservation tillage systems). You mention the crops with a toxin to insects in them. This is true, but it is hardly new, in fact, this same toxin has been used in organic farming for decades. There is no evidence it is harmful to humans aside from a handful of widely criticized studies. You're partially right in that those are listed as reasons for opposition to GE crops, and contribute to some of the opposition (whether or not they make scientific sense), but realistically, people would oppose them regardless. Remember that there was opposition to the first GE crop used in the US, the Flavr Savr, and all it had was an antisense polygalacturonase gene and the NPTII gene, and that you see the same opposition to things like the virus resistant Rainbow papaya, the Arctic Apple (a non-browning apple awaiting approval), and even Golden Rice. So, to say that people oppose GE for the herbicide tolerant and Bt crops is like saying people oppose evolution based on lack of transition fossils. It may be the case in the minds of some people (again, rational or not), but make no mistake, there is a deeper reason.
It is worth noting that kiwis are not propagated by seed (like most perennial fruits they are asexually propagated), so even if cross pollination were to occur, it isn't likely to have an effect. Also worth noting that kiwis are generally pollinated by bees (with a minor role played by wind), which dislike kiwi flowers and generally pollinate everything else first, so unless they've got bunch of hungry hives on site pollen isn't likely to go far. I don't know what kind of wind drift you see with kiwi pollen or how long it remains viable, but I'd have to assume they have some sort of distance barrier in place too to account for even that, as most trials do take pollination into consideration when selecting a site. I'm not saying there is zero risk, just that it is pretty unlikely to happen, especially if the orchard is managed as it is, and that expecting completely zero risk is not an exceptionally reasonable expectation.
General role of thumb: if though of something about a thing you just heard about something three minuted age, chances are the people who have been working on it for three decades thought of it too. Zero risk
Glad you've got the final say on what is and isn't human enough to kill and not some misogynist Bedouin or sheet wearing redneck. That could get morally messy, since every other time in history someone decided to use any sort of qualitative factor to determine humanity has worked out so well..
I'd love to see those regulations. As far as I know, the FDA basically said said that they frowned on those labels, because the term GMO indicated modification (which describes everything) not engineering (in the case where the term GMO or genetically modified is used), and also because they don't like labels that have the implication that something is superior when in fact there is no difference, and a few other reasons that the label can be misleading (like if a bottle of pure orange juice said it was non-GMO, when there are no GE oranges). However, they have not banned it, merely expressed disapproval. I agree it would not be justified, just as I do not feel going the other way and forcing labeling of either containing or not containing GE ingredients is justified.
I don't get how so many people can keep making that claim. Have you been to a grocery store at all? there's plenty of products that say 'contains no GMOs' or 'Contains no genetically engineered ingredients.' There's also the organic label, which is a bit different in that it also covers cultivation practices, but it guarantees that the crops are not GE. If I would have known so few people paid attention to this I would have bought a few and uploaded pictures to link to.
You cannot unknowingly/unwittingly make a toxic hybrid
Not true. Off the top of my head, I can think of the Lenape potato, which was a conventionally bred hybrid that ended up producing toxic amounts of the glycoalkaloid solanine, and celery which produced so much psoralen that it gave the people who harvested it blisters. I doubt those were intentional (although it is possible that the parents may have also had those traits)..
In order to hybridize, the plants must already be of the same Genus
Not related to the topic at hand, but that isn't true either. I've got a shipova tree in my yard which is a Pyrus x Sorbus cross. Triticale is another example, among plenty of others.
No, it's clearly a value-based term when discussing the information you consider when buying a food product.
Here's a link that might help. Peanuts might kill someone. wheat might make someone sick. GMOs, or anything else not labeled, will not. The difference is pretty clear. You want to know something like that? Fair enough. You want to force others to tell you? Nope, just don't buy it then.
It's being a market worshiper to say that those dominant in the market should be able to determine what information they withhold from their customers rather than their customers being able to determine what information they choose to base their purchase decisions on.
First off, there is a big difference between withholding information and not putting it on a label. If you did that, there would be way too much to label. It isn't being a market worshiper if you say that only essential items should be labeled any anything after than should be voluntary. How hard is that to comprehend?
Yep! People do deserve to know about their food. All of the details they choose to know.
I want to know the complete list of mutations in my food. Do you care? Too bad, I want you to pay for it.
That includes knowing whether or not a vaccine uses mercury or any other ingredient they would base this decision on.
And if you look at food ingredients you can already tell if something is GE.
Er, I'm saying that democracy should be able to promote knowledge—you're the one insisting that GMO food producers should be entitled to use their market weight to ensure ignorance by preventing informed consent.
So, if an apple grower does not tell you what sport they use every time you buy their apples, that is promoting ignorance? No. there is a difference between preventing people from knowing things and not telling them.
You cannot discover the information unless it is labeled.
Tell that to vegans who call companies up to discover what exactly is in the 'natural ingredients' portion of the label, or to the Muslims who call companies to find out what type of gelatin they use. Has doing the homework ever occurred to you?
You're promoting a labeling regime that reinforces this, I'm promoting a labeling regime that allows customers to seek out the information.
No, I'm promoting letting science determine a baseline for what, at minimum, must be labeled, then letting everything else follow market demand. You are promoting an unrealistic system of forcing what you want upon food producers and demanding everyone else pay for it.
I'm promoting informed consent.
When you buy something, it has the ingredients on it. That is informed consent. Is there more you would like to know that it does not say? Don't buy it then. You are free to walk away, just like a Muslim who does not know how a piece of beef was slaughtered is free to not eat it.
In the post you're replying to, I reiterated a list of aspects of food that I want to know about. You ignored it twice. I'm not singling out anything. And I'm not making any comment about the science of GMO, nor calling it "bad", nor asking for "warning" labels. I'm promoting an effort of customers to be better informed about the products they're purchasing.
Fair enough. I must have missed the comment the first time around. It is still unrealistic. If you want to know what state something came from, what variety of crops were used, how they were developed, what genes they have, what proteins are produced, the nature of those proteins, what lines were crossed to make them, who developed the crops, how the crops were propagated, who propagated them, what fertilizers were used, where those fertilizers c
Looking voer your links, link one comes from a report by 'Coalition for GM-Free India,' which I suppose I'd have to look over, but given that those claims contradict data and those organizations with GMO Free in the title rarely have a reputation of honesty (which I know is a poor argument but giving their report a quick look over doesn't really blow me away), it isn't high on my to do list. Link two is about resistance, and that has more to do with cultivation issues, in not unique to any strain of resistant plant, GE or not, so to call it a failure is not very nuanced or accurate. Third links is the same source as the first, and the fourth mentions that there has been a downward trend from earlier years, and even mentions Bt cotton as a reason.
Huber's work was never published. He made some pretty extraordinary claims, then never published his data, so if you are calling that important research, well, that isn't good. I can't really comment on it besides pointing out some of the absurdity and inaccuracy of his claims because there is nothing but claims, no fact, to talk about. You can not disprove him because he has nothing solid to disprove. The CSMonitor link isn't too hot either, failing to consider a number of important details. The Séralini study in the next link has been widely criticized for shoddy methodology and unsupported conclusions, including by the EFSA, FSANA, and the French HCB. Citing him does not advance your position among those who closely follow this topic, nor does citing Huber.
As for the next two links, it would not hesitate to believe them. I do not mean to imply that Monsanto does no wrong, especially with some of the chemicals they have produced in the past. The EPA link looks like they made made a mistake (since companies don't normally not brand their premium products). The bribery link is bad, although hardly unique for a company, and usually is unfortunately required to do business in certain places (not that this excuses it, just that you are talking about big business, not solely Monsanto). As for the last link, biopiracy is a stupid crime designed to get money from companies, and IIRC (it would be akin to me saying that because I live in an area where mayapple naturally grows that I deserve a cut from the profits of a company using the podophyllotoxin in mayappe to produce cancer drugs), Monsanto filed the proper paperwork, and someone else made the mistake elsewhere. Not really damning. The link in you second post looks like a mix of fact, science by jury (and a French one at that), and hot air (and naturally doesn't mention them doing things like compensating farmers in South Africa for their wrongly hybridized corn seed).
So, I stand by what I said. Most of the things out there about Monsanto are baseless. If they are so bad, base the accusations on fact. Also, since you bring up biodiversity, GE is a way of improving plants, biodiversity is what you grow. Two different things, and while you could accuse companies of reducing biodiversity, that is what agri
You are not the arbiter of what factors people consider "essential" when buying a product.
Essential has a pretty clear definition. Knowing if something has peanuts or gluten or soy is essential. Knowing that a product contains corn sold by a particular seed company planted on a particular date by a particular farm in a state and fertilized with various fertilizers and harvested with one brand of harvester and stored in a blue silo ect. is not. Pretty cut and dry really. It isn't being a market worshiper to say that rules and regulations should be based on what makes sense, not whoever shouts the loudest.
It's bewildering to hear it suggested that market demand should be determined based on ignorance about a product feature that customers want to know about.
Haram food m might send you to hell. Don't people deserve to know that about their food? Some people think that vaccines cause autism, and some people want textbooks to carry warning labels for evolution. Hey, some people believe it, or doesn't democracy mean that your ignorance is just as good as my knowledge? The information IS out there. Just because one does not seek it out does not meet that it should be forced onto products. You are just playing the lazy victim and trying to scare people about a non-issue. You are just trying to justify irrationally singling out a single aspect of food because anti-science assholes have spend years demonizing it and now want to give their nonsense validity by requiring special warning labels.
If GM food is awesome, then why aren't they proud enough to slap a big 'ol label on it and say so?
That might have something to do with all the groups out there lying about the safety of GE crops. furthermore, if food produced by hybrid seed is so good, why isn't it labeled? If food produced by mutagenesis is so good, why isn't it labeled? Do you see how absurd that argument is?
And anti-GMO people are not entitled to special treatment because they complain really loudly. You want a non-essential label? Get in line behind every other group and create a market demand for it. Don't go to the government and demand to be catered to.
If you think Monsanto is somehow an upstanding corporate citizen then you've completely delusion
I never said that. i just think that if you have to use lies and deceit to make your point against them then maybe they're not the great evil they are often made out to be. Is pointing out falsehoods and mentioning what actually happened bad if the accusations are serious enough? does that mean I support everything they do if I demonstrate that a claim against them is factually false?
Monsanto comes up as 80% of the results. No - that's not proof - but it certainly is a consensus.
That's amazing to me. BP fucks the ocean, and Haliburton makes money disappear for a war, and the guys who sell this are the evil ones.
Monsanto is not a food company, they are a pesticide company that makes seed crops to sell more pesticide.
Ah, that explains why they are selling the insecticide reducing Bt crops in the above link.
Monsanto is potentially creating a host of ecological problem which are much bigger than the original problem of weed and pest management.
How so? Let me guess, 'superweeds' and 'superpests'? Please, resistance breakdown and herbicide resistance are nothing new, are more cultivation issues than crop issues (particularly the resistant pests) and worst case scenario is you lose the benefits already provided.
Monsanto is not one of those companies.
That must be why farmers willingly buy them, why farmers in developing countries wait in lines to get their bag of GE seed.
There are thousands of news articles concerning the twisted nature of Monsanto - go read them.
And there's thousands of articles describing how terrible Merck and Pfizer are for causing autism with their horrible horrible vaccines. So what? The vast majority of those articles turn out to be bullshit. Look at the cases above, and dig deeper.
Bottom line: no one is saying Monsanto is perfect. They are a profit driven company with too little competition and a bit of a problem with revolving doors. But most of the things said about them are lies and deceptions, and that is never a good way to make an argument. That's what gets me the most, all these anti-GMO groups out there who publish the stuff about GMOs and Monsanto. They lie (go to 42:25 to see the biggest most trusted most frequently cited name in the anti-GMO movement lie about something in the very abstract of the paper he's citing for a good example).. I used to think they were outright assholes, but the more misinformation and falsehoods I see about them the more sympathetic I feel toward them (maybe that's part of their grand conspiracy half the GMO denialists out there think they're conducting. You want to be against Monsanto? Fair enough, but you shouldn't do so because some blogger who wouldn't know a corncob from his asshole said their CEO eats a bowl of kittens everyday fro breakfast, and you certainly shouldn't reject the science of the things they sell over it.
Personally, I think the whole Monsanto thing is pretty clever. If you can;t win in the court of science, demonize the one associated with the science and try to hit the science through guilt by association and win in the court of public opinion. Bonus is that anyone who does fact checking is clearly in on it and thinks they are an upstanding corporate citizen and therefore probably should not be trusted.
Tell me then, where can I freely, and relatively easily find food products that do not contain genetically UNmodified corn or soy?
About everywhere.
Your statement that this information is "non-essential" is strange.
No it isn't. Knowing if something has peanuts is essential. Knowing if something has gluten is essential. Knowing the details of the variety of an ingredient is not.
Roundup ready crops have been modified to be resistant to the broad-spectrum herbicide Roundup. They were created basically for the purpose of selling more of Monsanto's best selling herbicide.
First, I know that, second, so what? Really, so what? Do you have any idea how agriculture works? People use herbicide with plants that can tolerate them, GMO or not, deal with it, and they've been doing this since long befor eGMOs where a thing.
Roundup is toxic, it is an endocrine disruptor, and it damages DNA. In addition is has a profound negative ecological impact.
Yeah, I'd love to see a strong source for that in the amounts of Round Up you get in your food, preferably several.
Well because direct manipulation of genetic code is very new
First GMO crop: tobacco, China, 1988. How is that new?
very radical
Any more radical than a doubled haploid four way hybrid, or something cultured from an irradiated blob of callus cells? Ok, you're binging in DNA in a new way, as opposed to more traditional methods, which do some pretty unusual things sometimes. So what?
only sparsely tested
Bull. Shit. Unless by sparely tested you mean have been studied for decades with hundreds of studies done across the world and millions of dollars spend to reach the widely held scientific consensus that they are safe.
Each of those criteria is worthy of making an exception and forcing monoplistic predatory corporations to disclose what they are feeding to the public.
No they don't, and even without getting into the Monsanto thing (which is usually overblown anyway), labeling should not be based on non-scientific things. I want to know if my food is picked by migrant farm workers laboring under abusive exploitative conditions being paid an unfair wage, but that doesn't merit a mandatory label.
When some of these crops turn out to be really bad, all of society will have to bear the medical costs.
Yeah, I'm sure that will happen right after it turns out that vaccines cause autism. I'm interested, what could possibly be the biochemical basis for how the cry genes, nptII, c4 epsps, bar, cspB, prv cp, and/or cmv cp (the transgenes used in presently approved GE crops) could possibly in any way be harmful to humans? Because for all the accusation, no one ever wants to talk biochemistry to back their musing. I wonder why? Could it be that the accusations have no scientific merit whatsoever?
Now in the case of GM foods, it is illegal for a food to be labeled as non-GMO food.
A number of people have said this, and all I can say is, do you people go to grocery stores? There are quite a number of items that say this on them. It isn't illegal, the FDA just frowns upon it because it gives the false impression that non-geneitcally engineered foods are superior, and because the term GMO is not technically accurate (as GMO means genetically modified organism, which every crop is, and the term should really be GEO).
You argue that there are way too many types of genetic manipulation for us commoners to be able to know the difference
No, I'm saying there is no meaningful argument that can be applied to one but not the others.
There should not be a presumption of safety, genetic tinkerers should bear the burden of proof before their crops are sold to the public or released into the ecosystem.
Ge crops are safe, also, see above.
Roundup-resistant crops and crops which produce their own pesticides.
You mean just like every other herbicide resistant plant on the planet? And as for producing their own pesticides, all plants do that. In fact, most of the pesticides in your diet are natural poisons.
Roundup-resistant means that astonishing quantities of Roundup were used on the crop to kill weeds.
And it also means that much harsher herbicides were replaced. Herbicides are pretty common.
Roundup which was touted as safe by your agribusiness "scientists" is turning out to be pretty bad for us. Roundup is teratogenic, and endocrine disruptor, and causes genetic damage.
I'm sure if you drank the stuff, but in the levels present in your food, not even close.
The second common type is even scarier since we know that you can't wash the pesticides off of these, they are inside!
See above. Plant physiology 101: all plants have pesticides in them, so that is not something innately worrying, and especially not when we know exactly how this pesticide works. You body treats it like any other protein, it works by binding to receptors humans just do not have, and it isn't even active in acidic environments like the mammalian gut anyway.
I usually fall on the science side of arguments (evolution, climate change, etc.) but there are currently two areas of science that have been totally corrupted by money and corporate influence: Pharmacology, and agricultural biology.
Ah, so you're liberal unscientific then. Accept the science of climate change and evolution, but reject that of medical and agricultural science. Sorry, but that's no better than rejcting evolution or climate change.
Anyone who follows this story knows that new GMO crops are invented all the time and the FDA rubberstamps them because the FDA is a captured agency.
Nonsense! It takes so long for new crops to get on the market. That is another anti-GMO talking point that falls flat. There are tons of crops in development that get stuck at the regulatory process because of how strict is is. It took years to get DroughtGard approved, and look at the rough time the AquaAdvantage salmon is having.
There is no way that the kind of large scale long-term studies have been done to validate the safety of GMO crops.
Take your pick.
So I call a hearty BS on your vilifying concerned people as being anti-science. Shame on you for resulting to name-calling.
Yeah, that's what the creationists, climate change denialists, anti-vaxxers, and every ot
You might be interested to know that plant petents are nothing new. They've been around since the plant patent acts were passed in 1930 and 1970. Ever seen a Honeycrisp apple? Petented. Illegal to propagete. Well, it was, the patent has recently expired, but it is true of its (hopeful) successor, SnowSweet. I wanted to graft a branch of it from an orchard to my own apple, but didn't, because that would be breaking the law. Yet it is not a GMO. To be fair, it is true that things have gotten a bit deeper, now that the transgenes themselves are patented, but it is not as if patents of crops are new (and I'm not against them either, after all, plant breeding is hard and takes many years, so if anyone deserved patents, it is plant variety developers).
If you are concerned about increases in pesticides, good news, the insect resistant ones do just that. Perhaps you are thinking of the herbicide tolerant ones? They are often accused of increasing heribicde usage, and that is true for the herbicides they are designed to resist, but an often neglected flip side is that they decrease the usage of every other type of herbicide, most of which are much worse than the one they resist.
There is no known link between CCD and GE crops, although there is so much baseless speculation and accusation out there that I can see how one would assume that to be the case.
Have you even been to a grocery store lately? I see non-GMO all the time. I have no idea how people can make the claim that you can;t label things as non-GMO...oh, Organic Consumer's Association, that's how.
sounds like every other patented crop out there. You are aware that they have been patenting plants since the Plant Patent Act of 1930? Yet, notne of those require special labels, and no one complains about it. That's very inconsistent.
Lets see here. In the first link, it was not a case of cross pollination. A quick look over at the case, and it looks he obtained them either through his gin or from an unlabeled bag. A dick move to sue him to be sure (especially if it was the later case where he simply bought something that was illegal), and a bad ruling IMO, but certainty not a matter of cross pollination. Also of note is that he was sued for violating the plant variety patent, which does not concern genetic engineering. In the second link, it looks like the guy just got blacklisted, not sued. The case of Moe Parr in the second and third links can be found here. Looks like he knew what he was doing. So, those links don't give what I asked. I want to see someone who got cross pollinated, didn't know, and got sued out of the blue over it. The pdf from the Center for Food Safety will take a while to go through, but considering some of the other things they say about genetic engineering, I doubt it will be worth my time to look through it.
And I'd like to know if my produce is picked by migrant workers living in exploitative conditions. That doesn't mean that deserves mandatory labels though. Furthermore, have you considered the issues posed hybrid seed, or that farmers make the decision to sign Monsanto's contracts willingly because they like the seed they sell?