They make a business of killing small farm businesses
Why exactly do they want less customers?
They created life that cannot reproduce, so that farmers have to come to them each year to buy new seeds.
No, they sell hybrid seed that produces genetically unstable seed. Welcome to the 1930's. They also have contracts that you must sign before buying seed, but that's contract law.
Maybe because half the claims about them are invalid if you actually take the time to look past the nonsense. 'Monsanto is going around destroying farmers' is about as valid a statement as 'Merck is going around causing autism' and they're both made for the same reasons.
New technology befuddles and stymies religious folks who wonder why their deity(s) of choice didn't write out rules for said technologies X millennia ago
Maybe that was God's way of saying that we don't need new laws for every new tool & technology that comes out when old laws & applications of morality will work just fine (hint hint politicians).
If I'm not mistaken, the same applies to an unconscious person, also unable to give consent, being given medical services. If you're using something, even if you don't know or (eventually, after the benefit has been derived, natch) agree, it still counts as an implied contract.
Rather convenient that you did not (or could not) get by without society's help. Say what you will for the social contract theory, what you're saying sounds like a pathetic attempt to say 'I've got mine, now screw off.'
A contract requires consent. Please show me where I consented to this contract.
When you used society's services. IIRC, there are implicit contracts that don't actually require a signature or formal agreement on your part. Best example is eating at a restaurant. You walk in, pick food, eat, and at no point mention anything required on your part. But, as a fun experiment, try using that fact to get out of being caught doing a dine & dash.
That sounds more like an argument against having things set such that the very wealthy can just skip town when the taxman comes and toss aside their country when it becomes financially convenient.
"Conventional" agriculture seeds the fields with part of the last harvest, the seeds of the plants which survived in the local conditions. After about 20 generations or so, you have "land race" genetics -- plants whose genomes have self-tuned to the pests and weather of the local environment. Provided the environment remains stable and isn't affected by imported pests, such crops are far more productive than genetics imported from outside the region.
If that is conventional, what would you call the past century where so much of what was grown were hybrids between inbred lines repurchased every year, not landraces?
GMO's on the other hand, have one purpose and one purpose only: To allow the use of herbicides and pesticides that would kill the "natural" plant. I can guarantee you that if landrace genetics were resistant to those same herbicides and pesticides that they'd out-produce the imported GMOs.
I highly doubt the average land race could out compete the average hybrid. Under some circumstances sure, but not in general. There's a reason they aren't commonly used anymore, and it isn't because farmers enjoy buying new seed every year. Selection for useful genetics and use of hybrid vigor are pretty significant factors. And you are wrong about genetically engineered crops. There are some types that can withstand certain herbicides yes (not that I consider this a bad thing as these weed control methods are superior to other methods), however, there are also several others. There are the Bt crops, which are not resistant to an insecticide, they are resistant to an insect. In other words, less pesticides needed. There are also virus resistant ones (read up on the Rainbow papaya). Monsanto recently released its DroughtGard line, which has drought resistance (so when someone says that they just want to sell chemicals, look at their other traits to see how wrong that is). Vistive Gold, a soybean with healthier oils, was also just approved (don't know how that one is going to go yet, but it should be interesting). And there's tons of them still in development or awaiting approval that have all sorts of good traits, like fungal resistance, or improved nutrient content, or the ability to use fertilizer better, or even consumer orientated traits, like the non-browning Arctic apple. Also, even if the herbicide tolerance trait was a bad thing, it wouldn't be a negative to GE crops so much as for developing such traits, and there are conventionally bred herbicide tolerant crops out there too you know. Genetic engineering is a process, not a product, so you really can't make many blanket statements about GE crops as a whole.
What about when manure leads to a higher rate of runoff and nutrient leaching, or when nasty organic insecticides like Rotenone and pyrethrum?
Organic is just about marketing. I'm not saying everything that it uses is bad or that everything it doesn't is good. On the contrary, a lot of the things used in organic (or rather, popularized by organic proponents anyway) could be very beneficial. I'm saying that is is a dogmatic appeal to nature. Lets hypothetically say you have a field you hit with manure every 3-4 years, but give it an NPK fertilizing in the spring, and you use a rotation of corn, quinoa, oca, and tomato, with intercroppings of fava bean and a vetch cover every year. Sure, you're getting organic matter in the soil with the manure, preserving soil quality and getting extra nitrogen from the vetch (using it as a green manure as well), using the roots of the fava to acidify the soil to increase available phosphorus (and upping your nitrogen too), and the biodiverse rotation helps control pests. Maybe you use a mycorrhiza inoculant for good measure. But the use of the NPK fertilizer is forbidden in organic. Lets say you spray some carbaryl too. That isn't organic either. And lets say the corn is a DroughtGard hybrid, which is genetically engineered. Despite the biodiversity of the rotation, using a GE crop is a major no-no in organic farming.
A farm like that would be pretty good all around, but would not be organic. Why? Because organic is about marketing an appeal to nature to the scientifically illiterate. It's one thing to advocate biological practices. It is another to say that natural is always better and forbid the use of anything that requires science, the set up a false dichotomy (to differentiate your products from everything else) like 'organic and conventional.' We should be talking about techniques, not ideologies.
You can use patented crops in organic systems, just not genetically engineered ones. Plant patents cover more than GE crops. You are partially right though. There is good in organic, but there's bad too. Ultimately, this whole 'organic' thing needs to stop. Its a stupid false dichotomy. Its just marketing tool. We do need to make changes. But these changes shouldn't be based on an asinine appeal to nature designed to sell overpriced food to the scientifically illiterate, it should be based on what works. This includes 'organic' techniques like the use of waste products to maintain organic matter in the soil, as well as the use of chemical fertilizers when and where needed. It should include the use of intercropping, green manure, and crop rotation, the use of the rhizobia of legumes to improve soil N levels and the use of mycorrhizae fungi to acquire nutrients. It should include the proper use of insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides. Most definitely, the proper management of genetic resources, including use both inter and extra species biodiversity, and the use of improved genotypes of everything else, including genetic engineering.
Organic, as it stands, is dogma. It picks and chooses techniques based not of effectiveness, but on whether something is natural or not. That's idiotic. The use of biological factors (like complementary organisms and genetic engineering), as well as chemical ones (like pesticides and fertilizers, when needed) are both part of sustainable food production. Granted, a lot of the biological techniques could use some work to get them integrated into modern food systems and up to par in terms of yield, but they still have merit worth being looked into, and don't mean other methods should be rejected. I don't get why so many people get caught up in false dichotomies.
And I'll bet the non-organic ones I grow are even better. Of course, that's because I use a kick ass variety (like Kellogg's Breakfast) and pick them when they're at the peak of ripeness. The var are the keys hear. Picking something bred for durability at its earliest harvestable maturity and gassing it with ethylene is going to lose flavor. Growing it with synthetic pesticides and fertilizers isn't. That's the difference. No need to get caught up in the conventional vs organic dichotomy.
Those aren't quite the same things. In the case of warming up the car, that's not magical thinking, it is thinking something wrong. Not everyone knows everything, so all of us are going to think things that are false if they are about topics beyond our knowledge, but being wrong isn't the same as magical thinking. I don't know how cars work that well. For all I know, doing that could be problematic for a valid, scientifically explainable reason. I could tell a skeptic, as a random example, that putting nitrogen on their lawn will improve its ability to stay green in the middle of summer, and since a lot of people wouldn't know one way or the other about that, it would be easy to accept that as fact and assume there's a biological explanation they simply don't know, when it is not. That does not indicate magical thinking, just that it is not humanely possible to investigate every single thing you hear, so some untrue things are going to slip past the ol' BS detector. The second example is just emotion, and everyone gets irrational emotions every now and again. Again, it isn't the same as magical thinking. The examples the article mentions (fear of Friday 13th, thinking your pants will summon friends, and the organ transplant thing) on the other hand are pretty clear examples of magical thinking. Believing in connections that aren't there and make no sense is what magical thinking is about, not simply being wrong or having an irrational moment.
Now Monsanto is suing organic farmers for 'using' plants with 'monsanto's genes' in them
Can you name any specific examples of this? Last I heard, Monsanto only sued when someone intentionally selected for the trait and had a large portion of their field with it. I can't imagine any honest organic farmer doing that, os it would be rather interesting to hear a real example of an organic farmer being sued for it.
So that's why I've never seen any organic horseradish. No pesticides must mean no yummy insecticidal allyl isothiocyanate. Allyl isothiocyanate is the tastiest pesticide. Unless by no pesticides you mean that only natural poisons are allowed, and synthetic ones, regardless of the actual risk posed by the low dose, are not, in which case, appeal to nature.
Remember when some twat said that pepper spray is 'basically a food product'? Ignoring the dose and focusing on the origin is just as nonsensical here.
If people are planting non-Monsanto crops and Monsanto seed pollinates their crop then the Monsanto trans-gene will be in the pollinated crop and therefore the non-Monsanto crop is contaminated with the Monsanto trans-gene. This is a fact.
That describes every variety on the planet, GE or not. If I'm growing Blue Bonnet rice and you're growing a modern, non-GE, not-from-Monsanto hybrid, I can still get, say, the sd-1 gene from your rice. What if I don't want that gene?
Only industry types are pushing back against that fact because the world "contamination"
Industry types and those of us who know enough about agriculture to know what the word means.
If people are planting non-Monsanto crops and Monsanto seed pollinates their crop then the Monsanto trans-gene will be in the pollinated crop and therefore the non-Monsanto crop is contaminated with the Monsanto trans-gene. This is a fact.
Mandatory labeling of food as non-vegan, non-Kosher, or Haram is also not favorable to industry, nor is labeling if something is produced via embryo rescue, mutagenesis, induced polyploidy, somaclonal variation, or any other plant improvement method.
If people are planting non-Monsanto crops and Monsanto seed pollinates their crop then the Monsanto trans-gene will be in the pollinated crop and therefore the non-Monsanto crop is contaminated with the Monsanto trans-gene. This is a fact.
But it does. If you think patents are unique to genetic engineering I suggest you pick up a wholesale catalog and see how many plants have royalty fees, their existence brought about by the protection of plant patents.
Its good that Monsanto found problems with their product in the labs and hid them from the public? What about all the fertility problems with animal tests that were swept under the rug? You cheer for this?
I'm saying that never happened. Yes, there have been lawsuits. The notion they were over simple cross pollination is an internet myth.
The assumption that the motivation for genetic engineering is because of patents does a dis-service to many who spend their lives in the field. It's like claiming software exists because of patents. Its laughable. Farmers have been developing and saving their seed for replanting the next crop for over 2000 years
Ant there's a reason we say the rise of hybrid seed in the last century. You think that even involves genetic engineering? Read up on the history of breeding.
Its good that Monsanto found problems with their product in the labs and hid them from the public? What about all the fertility problems with animal tests that were swept under the rug? You cheer for this?
GMOs cause fertility problems like vaccines cause autism. There a few studies associated with that. They all fall into one of three categories: very poorly done, never published, or good studies that are completely misrepresented by anti-GE groups (like the time they went around telling people that livestock fed GE feed went sterile, while conveniently neglecting to mention that the feed was contaminated with sterility causing mold...such honest people).
they are fighting tooth and nail to stop any effort to label products that have a trans-gene from a frigging bacterium inserted in them.
What do you mean, Monsanto does label their seed. It is the next group in the supply chain, those who process the food, who do not label. And if they don't want to, why should they?
The fact that you can take a gene from one life form, insert it into another life form and patent the result, and sue others when your genetic combination contaminates their property is totally ludicrous.
If that ever happened, it would be. That's just an internet myth though. There have been a handful of lawsuits (17 per year on average IIRC) but in all those cases in was more than just cross pollination involved. And please, contamination is when you get contaminants. Pollen is not pollution.
Lets hope the "You can't patent nature" rule sticks
You must really like Red Delicious apples. A lot of people prefer other varieties like HoneyCrisp, but since you don't want patents on life, you must be opposed to all things developed as a result of those patents. People who work with plant improvement, including genetic engineering, deserve to make a living too. Patents help them do this, and have been in play for years after pushing from old time breeders like Luther Burbank.
There's a big difference between patenting something you found and patenting something you made. Ignoring the difference is just disingenuous.
And contamination? If I grow open pollinated crop variety A, and someone else grows variety B, the pollen of variety B, although it will cross with mine and thus cause me damage if I wish to maintain my variety, is not 'contamination.'
That's an interesting take on it. How exactly do they do that? Most (not all) of the criticism I've seen boils down to either a conspiracy, or anti-science nonsense, like from anti-vaccine or anti-genetic engineering groups (and speaking of which, corporations aside, I hope that concept isn't the source of the disagreement about 'green development'). I happen to know someone who has been around the world doing a lot of work in his field in developing countries. I'll have to see what he thinks.
(a legal requirement in most of the civilised world)
I hope you're not trying to imply that a government legally mandating something like that, even if it is for one's own good and absolutely idiotic to not do it, constitutes a civilized act. Also, I don't know how it is in the rest of the US, but in my state, Pennsylvania, it is illegal to drive or ride a car without a seatbelt, though strangely you don't have to wear a helmet on a motorcycle (and I'm not saying that should be legally required either, just that our law is nice and inconsistent).
These plants aren't actually genetically engineered. They were bred with a traditional breeding technique, specifically, mutant breeding...basically, taking the plants (in this case the seeds) and treating them with some sort of mutagen and seeing if any useful mutants come out. Apparently they tried to use genetic engineering, but since there are multiple pathways that make caffeine in coffee, they couldn't really do it successfully. I guess in theory they could, but between shutting down all the pathways, working with coffee (which I guess is hard to work with), and the idiotic levels of over regulation on genetically engineered crops, they couldn't make it work with GE. I think I once heard of someone trying to use genetic engineering to regulate flowering in coffee before, which is pretty cool. Because the beans on a tree may be at different stages of ripening, this prevents coffee from being mechanically harvested, so this might make coffee cheaper if production can be mechanized.
I doubt there will be cross pollination problems. Like most tree crops, coffee is not grown from seed, it is asexually reproduced in cultivation. So even if there were cross pollination (and there will be) it won't make the caffeine free genes spread.
If I recall correctly (I really should start keeping an orderly list of sources) that has been investigated. When they develop GE lines, they obviously want to breed the trait into the best hybrid lines, so it can be hard to separate that if you're looking at the whole of agriculture (as opposed to comparing a GE and isogenic non-GE line in a controlled study). In developed countries, this is actually rather small (though still present and meaningful), only something like 4%. Of course, that is because we spray pesticides in developed countries, so making something resistant to those insects obviously isn't going to increase the yield by much. Of course, raising yield in that case really wasn't even the point. It is pretty nice to avoid having to spray so much. In developing countries the story is different. There they aren't spraying as much because they can't afford as much. The yield gains there are quite sizable.
Also, the crops are made to be tolerant of herbicides, not pesticides. The main one, glyphosate, is no longer patented. The patent expired a while ago. Anyone can produce it now. It isn't a coincidence that both those crops and that herbicide were developed by the same company, no, but I don't see anything exceptionally wrong with the company doing that. No one was locked in, since the herbicide doesn't persist in the soil very long it could still be used with a rotation of non-GE crops, meaning the farmers were free to change seed vendors after a season if the so choose. Its just that doing so would mean they would have to go back to harder, more costly (both to them and the environment) weed control methods, so the herbicide tolerant varieties remain popular. If a company sells a superior producing that the product is often used.
Do you not see the irony of complaining about the terminator genes then one sentence later complaining about containment?
First, most farmers don't save seed anyway. That's how it has been since hybrid seed, which loses genetic stability in the F2 generation, became widespread. The terminator traits would prevent people who don't want those genes from getting them though, but so many people protested the technology that it was shelved, so now they protest genes spreading. Facepalm. Yes, genes spread. All genes do this. Why is it that no one complains about every other gene spreading? If a land race has been cross pollinated (or as some say, contaminated) and now has transgenes it was by a hybrid variety. In other words, it is now only half the old heirloom variety and it now has tons of genes from the modern variety. Singling out the transgene there doesn't make much sense. Anyone who grows open pollinated plants knows that if an OP line is hybridized with anything, another line, a hybrid, or a GE hybrid, it has lost its genetic uniqueness as an OP line and its genetic stability and ability to have its seed saved from generation to generation as that particular variety..
Sure you save some spraying costs but does that make it worth it?
Yes. Proven benefits outweigh vague, unknown, and undescribed drawbacks.
I'd post a link to a paper saying otherwise, but I've read so many I wouldn't know where to start. Tthink about it, how in the world is a beneficial gene supposed to make a plant yield less? Yield is a complex feature which is a function of soil nutrition, insect & pathogen attack, climate, water, ect. It would be quite interesting if you could explain how reducing insect attack or improving nutrient acquisition actually decreased yield. You might be thinking of the report Failure to Yield. You should read it. It is probably the most famous of the papers used by anti-GE proponents to argue that point. Too bad it was based on data showing an increase in yield.
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They make a business of killing small farm businesses
Why exactly do they want less customers?
They created life that cannot reproduce, so that farmers have to come to them each year to buy new seeds.
No, they sell hybrid seed that produces genetically unstable seed. Welcome to the 1930's. They also have contracts that you must sign before buying seed, but that's contract law.
Maybe because half the claims about them are invalid if you actually take the time to look past the nonsense. 'Monsanto is going around destroying farmers' is about as valid a statement as 'Merck is going around causing autism' and they're both made for the same reasons.
New technology befuddles and stymies religious folks who wonder why their deity(s) of choice didn't write out rules for said technologies X millennia ago
Maybe that was God's way of saying that we don't need new laws for every new tool & technology that comes out when old laws & applications of morality will work just fine (hint hint politicians).
If I'm not mistaken, the same applies to an unconscious person, also unable to give consent, being given medical services. If you're using something, even if you don't know or (eventually, after the benefit has been derived, natch) agree, it still counts as an implied contract.
Rather convenient that you did not (or could not) get by without society's help. Say what you will for the social contract theory, what you're saying sounds like a pathetic attempt to say 'I've got mine, now screw off.'
A contract requires consent. Please show me where I consented to this contract.
When you used society's services. IIRC, there are implicit contracts that don't actually require a signature or formal agreement on your part. Best example is eating at a restaurant. You walk in, pick food, eat, and at no point mention anything required on your part. But, as a fun experiment, try using that fact to get out of being caught doing a dine & dash.
That sounds more like an argument against having things set such that the very wealthy can just skip town when the taxman comes and toss aside their country when it becomes financially convenient.
"Conventional" agriculture seeds the fields with part of the last harvest, the seeds of the plants which survived in the local conditions. After about 20 generations or so, you have "land race" genetics -- plants whose genomes have self-tuned to the pests and weather of the local environment. Provided the environment remains stable and isn't affected by imported pests, such crops are far more productive than genetics imported from outside the region.
If that is conventional, what would you call the past century where so much of what was grown were hybrids between inbred lines repurchased every year, not landraces?
GMO's on the other hand, have one purpose and one purpose only: To allow the use of herbicides and pesticides that would kill the "natural" plant. I can guarantee you that if landrace genetics were resistant to those same herbicides and pesticides that they'd out-produce the imported GMOs.
I highly doubt the average land race could out compete the average hybrid. Under some circumstances sure, but not in general. There's a reason they aren't commonly used anymore, and it isn't because farmers enjoy buying new seed every year. Selection for useful genetics and use of hybrid vigor are pretty significant factors. And you are wrong about genetically engineered crops. There are some types that can withstand certain herbicides yes (not that I consider this a bad thing as these weed control methods are superior to other methods), however, there are also several others. There are the Bt crops, which are not resistant to an insecticide, they are resistant to an insect. In other words, less pesticides needed. There are also virus resistant ones (read up on the Rainbow papaya). Monsanto recently released its DroughtGard line, which has drought resistance (so when someone says that they just want to sell chemicals, look at their other traits to see how wrong that is). Vistive Gold, a soybean with healthier oils, was also just approved (don't know how that one is going to go yet, but it should be interesting). And there's tons of them still in development or awaiting approval that have all sorts of good traits, like fungal resistance, or improved nutrient content, or the ability to use fertilizer better, or even consumer orientated traits, like the non-browning Arctic apple. Also, even if the herbicide tolerance trait was a bad thing, it wouldn't be a negative to GE crops so much as for developing such traits, and there are conventionally bred herbicide tolerant crops out there too you know. Genetic engineering is a process, not a product, so you really can't make many blanket statements about GE crops as a whole.
What about when manure leads to a higher rate of runoff and nutrient leaching, or when nasty organic insecticides like Rotenone and pyrethrum?
Organic is just about marketing. I'm not saying everything that it uses is bad or that everything it doesn't is good. On the contrary, a lot of the things used in organic (or rather, popularized by organic proponents anyway) could be very beneficial. I'm saying that is is a dogmatic appeal to nature. Lets hypothetically say you have a field you hit with manure every 3-4 years, but give it an NPK fertilizing in the spring, and you use a rotation of corn, quinoa, oca, and tomato, with intercroppings of fava bean and a vetch cover every year. Sure, you're getting organic matter in the soil with the manure, preserving soil quality and getting extra nitrogen from the vetch (using it as a green manure as well), using the roots of the fava to acidify the soil to increase available phosphorus (and upping your nitrogen too), and the biodiverse rotation helps control pests. Maybe you use a mycorrhiza inoculant for good measure. But the use of the NPK fertilizer is forbidden in organic. Lets say you spray some carbaryl too. That isn't organic either. And lets say the corn is a DroughtGard hybrid, which is genetically engineered. Despite the biodiversity of the rotation, using a GE crop is a major no-no in organic farming.
A farm like that would be pretty good all around, but would not be organic. Why? Because organic is about marketing an appeal to nature to the scientifically illiterate. It's one thing to advocate biological practices. It is another to say that natural is always better and forbid the use of anything that requires science, the set up a false dichotomy (to differentiate your products from everything else) like 'organic and conventional.' We should be talking about techniques, not ideologies.
You can use patented crops in organic systems, just not genetically engineered ones. Plant patents cover more than GE crops. You are partially right though. There is good in organic, but there's bad too. Ultimately, this whole 'organic' thing needs to stop. Its a stupid false dichotomy. Its just marketing tool. We do need to make changes. But these changes shouldn't be based on an asinine appeal to nature designed to sell overpriced food to the scientifically illiterate, it should be based on what works. This includes 'organic' techniques like the use of waste products to maintain organic matter in the soil, as well as the use of chemical fertilizers when and where needed. It should include the use of intercropping, green manure, and crop rotation, the use of the rhizobia of legumes to improve soil N levels and the use of mycorrhizae fungi to acquire nutrients. It should include the proper use of insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides. Most definitely, the proper management of genetic resources, including use both inter and extra species biodiversity, and the use of improved genotypes of everything else, including genetic engineering.
Organic, as it stands, is dogma. It picks and chooses techniques based not of effectiveness, but on whether something is natural or not. That's idiotic. The use of biological factors (like complementary organisms and genetic engineering), as well as chemical ones (like pesticides and fertilizers, when needed) are both part of sustainable food production. Granted, a lot of the biological techniques could use some work to get them integrated into modern food systems and up to par in terms of yield, but they still have merit worth being looked into, and don't mean other methods should be rejected. I don't get why so many people get caught up in false dichotomies.
And I'll bet the non-organic ones I grow are even better. Of course, that's because I use a kick ass variety (like Kellogg's Breakfast) and pick them when they're at the peak of ripeness. The var are the keys hear. Picking something bred for durability at its earliest harvestable maturity and gassing it with ethylene is going to lose flavor. Growing it with synthetic pesticides and fertilizers isn't. That's the difference. No need to get caught up in the conventional vs organic dichotomy.
Those aren't quite the same things. In the case of warming up the car, that's not magical thinking, it is thinking something wrong. Not everyone knows everything, so all of us are going to think things that are false if they are about topics beyond our knowledge, but being wrong isn't the same as magical thinking. I don't know how cars work that well. For all I know, doing that could be problematic for a valid, scientifically explainable reason. I could tell a skeptic, as a random example, that putting nitrogen on their lawn will improve its ability to stay green in the middle of summer, and since a lot of people wouldn't know one way or the other about that, it would be easy to accept that as fact and assume there's a biological explanation they simply don't know, when it is not. That does not indicate magical thinking, just that it is not humanely possible to investigate every single thing you hear, so some untrue things are going to slip past the ol' BS detector. The second example is just emotion, and everyone gets irrational emotions every now and again. Again, it isn't the same as magical thinking. The examples the article mentions (fear of Friday 13th, thinking your pants will summon friends, and the organ transplant thing) on the other hand are pretty clear examples of magical thinking. Believing in connections that aren't there and make no sense is what magical thinking is about, not simply being wrong or having an irrational moment.
Now Monsanto is suing organic farmers for 'using' plants with 'monsanto's genes' in them
Can you name any specific examples of this? Last I heard, Monsanto only sued when someone intentionally selected for the trait and had a large portion of their field with it. I can't imagine any honest organic farmer doing that, os it would be rather interesting to hear a real example of an organic farmer being sued for it.
So that's why I've never seen any organic horseradish. No pesticides must mean no yummy insecticidal allyl isothiocyanate. Allyl isothiocyanate is the tastiest pesticide. Unless by no pesticides you mean that only natural poisons are allowed, and synthetic ones, regardless of the actual risk posed by the low dose, are not, in which case, appeal to nature.
Remember when some twat said that pepper spray is 'basically a food product'? Ignoring the dose and focusing on the origin is just as nonsensical here.
If people are planting non-Monsanto crops and Monsanto seed pollinates their crop then the Monsanto trans-gene will be in the pollinated crop and therefore the non-Monsanto crop is contaminated with the Monsanto trans-gene. This is a fact.
That describes every variety on the planet, GE or not. If I'm growing Blue Bonnet rice and you're growing a modern, non-GE, not-from-Monsanto hybrid, I can still get, say, the sd-1 gene from your rice. What if I don't want that gene?
Only industry types are pushing back against that fact because the world "contamination"
Industry types and those of us who know enough about agriculture to know what the word means.
If people are planting non-Monsanto crops and Monsanto seed pollinates their crop then the Monsanto trans-gene will be in the pollinated crop and therefore the non-Monsanto crop is contaminated with the Monsanto trans-gene. This is a fact.
Mandatory labeling of food as non-vegan, non-Kosher, or Haram is also not favorable to industry, nor is labeling if something is produced via embryo rescue, mutagenesis, induced polyploidy, somaclonal variation, or any other plant improvement method.
If people are planting non-Monsanto crops and Monsanto seed pollinates their crop then the Monsanto trans-gene will be in the pollinated crop and therefore the non-Monsanto crop is contaminated with the Monsanto trans-gene. This is a fact.
But it does. If you think patents are unique to genetic engineering I suggest you pick up a wholesale catalog and see how many plants have royalty fees, their existence brought about by the protection of plant patents.
Its good that Monsanto found problems with their product in the labs and hid them from the public? What about all the fertility problems with animal tests that were swept under the rug? You cheer for this?
I'm saying that never happened. Yes, there have been lawsuits. The notion they were over simple cross pollination is an internet myth.
The assumption that the motivation for genetic engineering is because of patents does a dis-service to many who spend their lives in the field. It's like claiming software exists because of patents. Its laughable. Farmers have been developing and saving their seed for replanting the next crop for over 2000 years
Ant there's a reason we say the rise of hybrid seed in the last century. You think that even involves genetic engineering? Read up on the history of breeding.
Its good that Monsanto found problems with their product in the labs and hid them from the public? What about all the fertility problems with animal tests that were swept under the rug? You cheer for this?
GMOs cause fertility problems like vaccines cause autism. There a few studies associated with that. They all fall into one of three categories: very poorly done, never published, or good studies that are completely misrepresented by anti-GE groups (like the time they went around telling people that livestock fed GE feed went sterile, while conveniently neglecting to mention that the feed was contaminated with sterility causing mold...such honest people).
they are fighting tooth and nail to stop any effort to label products that have a trans-gene from a frigging bacterium inserted in them.
What do you mean, Monsanto does label their seed. It is the next group in the supply chain, those who process the food, who do not label. And if they don't want to, why should they?
The fact that you can take a gene from one life form, insert it into another life form and patent the result, and sue others when your genetic combination contaminates their property is totally ludicrous.
If that ever happened, it would be. That's just an internet myth though. There have been a handful of lawsuits (17 per year on average IIRC) but in all those cases in was more than just cross pollination involved. And please, contamination is when you get contaminants. Pollen is not pollution.
Lets hope the "You can't patent nature" rule sticks
You must really like Red Delicious apples. A lot of people prefer other varieties like HoneyCrisp, but since you don't want patents on life, you must be opposed to all things developed as a result of those patents. People who work with plant improvement, including genetic engineering, deserve to make a living too. Patents help them do this, and have been in play for years after pushing from old time breeders like Luther Burbank.
There's a big difference between patenting something you found and patenting something you made. Ignoring the difference is just disingenuous.
And contamination? If I grow open pollinated crop variety A, and someone else grows variety B, the pollen of variety B, although it will cross with mine and thus cause me damage if I wish to maintain my variety, is not 'contamination.'
That's an interesting take on it. How exactly do they do that? Most (not all) of the criticism I've seen boils down to either a conspiracy, or anti-science nonsense, like from anti-vaccine or anti-genetic engineering groups (and speaking of which, corporations aside, I hope that concept isn't the source of the disagreement about 'green development'). I happen to know someone who has been around the world doing a lot of work in his field in developing countries. I'll have to see what he thinks.
or trying to get a monopoly on fighting HIV in Africa.
Who is trying to do that?
'Cause a culture capable of interstellar travel couldn't eliminate muscle weakness or fix nerve damage.
They could. Jake was going to get taken care of when he got back. If you remember, it was just a matter of cost. He couldn't afford it on his pension.
(a legal requirement in most of the civilised world)
I hope you're not trying to imply that a government legally mandating something like that, even if it is for one's own good and absolutely idiotic to not do it, constitutes a civilized act. Also, I don't know how it is in the rest of the US, but in my state, Pennsylvania, it is illegal to drive or ride a car without a seatbelt, though strangely you don't have to wear a helmet on a motorcycle (and I'm not saying that should be legally required either, just that our law is nice and inconsistent).
yea what could possibly go wrong?
I don't know, maybe cancer?
These plants aren't actually genetically engineered. They were bred with a traditional breeding technique, specifically, mutant breeding...basically, taking the plants (in this case the seeds) and treating them with some sort of mutagen and seeing if any useful mutants come out. Apparently they tried to use genetic engineering, but since there are multiple pathways that make caffeine in coffee, they couldn't really do it successfully. I guess in theory they could, but between shutting down all the pathways, working with coffee (which I guess is hard to work with), and the idiotic levels of over regulation on genetically engineered crops, they couldn't make it work with GE. I think I once heard of someone trying to use genetic engineering to regulate flowering in coffee before, which is pretty cool. Because the beans on a tree may be at different stages of ripening, this prevents coffee from being mechanically harvested, so this might make coffee cheaper if production can be mechanized.
I doubt there will be cross pollination problems. Like most tree crops, coffee is not grown from seed, it is asexually reproduced in cultivation. So even if there were cross pollination (and there will be) it won't make the caffeine free genes spread.
If I recall correctly (I really should start keeping an orderly list of sources) that has been investigated. When they develop GE lines, they obviously want to breed the trait into the best hybrid lines, so it can be hard to separate that if you're looking at the whole of agriculture (as opposed to comparing a GE and isogenic non-GE line in a controlled study). In developed countries, this is actually rather small (though still present and meaningful), only something like 4%. Of course, that is because we spray pesticides in developed countries, so making something resistant to those insects obviously isn't going to increase the yield by much. Of course, raising yield in that case really wasn't even the point. It is pretty nice to avoid having to spray so much. In developing countries the story is different. There they aren't spraying as much because they can't afford as much. The yield gains there are quite sizable.
Also, the crops are made to be tolerant of herbicides, not pesticides. The main one, glyphosate, is no longer patented. The patent expired a while ago. Anyone can produce it now. It isn't a coincidence that both those crops and that herbicide were developed by the same company, no, but I don't see anything exceptionally wrong with the company doing that. No one was locked in, since the herbicide doesn't persist in the soil very long it could still be used with a rotation of non-GE crops, meaning the farmers were free to change seed vendors after a season if the so choose. Its just that doing so would mean they would have to go back to harder, more costly (both to them and the environment) weed control methods, so the herbicide tolerant varieties remain popular. If a company sells a superior producing that the product is often used.
Do you not see the irony of complaining about the terminator genes then one sentence later complaining about containment?
First, most farmers don't save seed anyway. That's how it has been since hybrid seed, which loses genetic stability in the F2 generation, became widespread. The terminator traits would prevent people who don't want those genes from getting them though, but so many people protested the technology that it was shelved, so now they protest genes spreading. Facepalm. Yes, genes spread. All genes do this. Why is it that no one complains about every other gene spreading? If a land race has been cross pollinated (or as some say, contaminated) and now has transgenes it was by a hybrid variety. In other words, it is now only half the old heirloom variety and it now has tons of genes from the modern variety. Singling out the transgene there doesn't make much sense. Anyone who grows open pollinated plants knows that if an OP line is hybridized with anything, another line, a hybrid, or a GE hybrid, it has lost its genetic uniqueness as an OP line and its genetic stability and ability to have its seed saved from generation to generation as that particular variety..
Sure you save some spraying costs but does that make it worth it?
Yes. Proven benefits outweigh vague, unknown, and undescribed drawbacks.
I'd post a link to a paper saying otherwise, but I've read so many I wouldn't know where to start. Tthink about it, how in the world is a beneficial gene supposed to make a plant yield less? Yield is a complex feature which is a function of soil nutrition, insect & pathogen attack, climate, water, ect. It would be quite interesting if you could explain how reducing insect attack or improving nutrient acquisition actually decreased yield. You might be thinking of the report Failure to Yield. You should read it. It is probably the most famous of the papers used by anti-GE proponents to argue that point. Too bad it was based on data showing an increase in yield.