Plenty of breeders have bred the same exact resistance to Round-up as Monsanto. Turns out, SURPRISE, selective breeding is a pretty good way of developing gene lines with specific traits. Know what happens? Monsanto sues them tohave the cultivars destroyed. BECAUSE IT HAS A PATENT ON THE GENE.
All of this appears to be complete horseshit. Unless you have some sources to back it up, of course.
Could you link to that ruling? Because I remember reading the ruling and I don't remember that sentence or anything quite like it. Google results only produce links to activist web sites that also don't actually quote from the ruling.
Also, Percy Schmeiser was the defendant, not the judge. And his fields were full of Roundup Ready crops because he intentionally put them there, not because of bad luck.
I've never quite understood this argument. On the one hand, people rail against the use of glyphosate. Then they turn around and point out that evolution is eventually going to produce glyphosate-resistant weeds and glyphosate will become less useful. First, that's going to be true for any weed control method. Second, why are they worried about the day when "super weeds" make us stop using glyphosate and move on to something else when what they really want is the elimination of glyphosate?
They're generally not arguing, "use glyphosate judiciously to slow the creation of resistant weeds," like we are with antibiotics. They're generally arguing, "Glyphosate turned me into a newt! It should all go away! Also, glyphosate creates glyphosate resistant superweeds!"
But you can't tell me that spraying our food with not just a little bit of poison but a TON of poison is not absorbed by the food.
What is poison, though? If you're a dog, onions and chocolate are on the list of things that are poison, but not so much if you're a human. If you're a caterpillar, Bt toxin is on the list, but not so much if you're a human. If you're an organism that produces EPSP enzymes, glyphosate is a deadly poison, but not so much if you're a human.
Also, nobody seems to be curious about the pesticides that Bt and glyphosate replaced. A lot of those are seriously nasty, and we're better off with more modern methods that use more benign chemicals.
It's the companies who "own" the super-rice when it becomes mixed up with non-GMO rice and tell you you have to destroy your crop and buy only their super-rice.
1) When has this ever happened?
2) If this is actually a real problem, do you think there might be a way to deal with the problem short of completely banning a tremendously promising technology?
That article describes a bunch of people who have not been sued by Monsanto asking for preemptive relief in court because they're worried that Monsanto might sue them. That's them being afraid that Monsanto will sue them over accidental cross-pollination, not Monsanto actually doing it. The problem is that people have turned a theoretical concern into "Monsanto actually did this!" They haven't. They've filed a relatively small number of lawsuits against obvious offenders, and they donate the money they get in settlements to charity because they know that actually doing what people accuse them of would cause a huge (and well-deserved) shitstorm.
If it really was just about labeling things GMO/non-GMO for people to make real informed decisions, that would be fine. But the real goal is to encourage people to make uninformed decisions based on fear. Here's how it will really go:
Greenpeace: "If these GMOs are safe, why do you oppose mandatory government labeling?"
The Public: "Good point!"
Monsanto: "OK, fine. Labels it is. We'll stop opposing it."
Greenpeace: "If these GMOs are safe, why does the government mandate labels on them!!??!"
The Public: "Holy shit, good point!"
We're still trying to convince much of the public that vaccines don't cause autism. For the same reason, I wouldn't be a big fan of mandatory labels on vaccines that say something like, "Contains preservatives," or "Contains traces of virus." It's technically true, but it doesn't provide any useful information to the consumer. It's just a cudgel for crazy activists to swing around to cause more confusion.
The fear is that they will make it impossible for anyone to compete with their patented crops. It's really very little to do with GMO foods themselves.
I'm trying to understand exactly how Monsanto is supposed to achieve that. There are other seed vendors selling GMO and non-GMO products that farmers can buy any time they want. If farmers decide that the GMO product isn't worth the money, wouldn't they just start buying different seed from a different source? As it is, it certainly looks like the GMO seeds are worth the premium. Nobody is being forced to use any products they don't want to use.
My question isn't really, "Could this cause genetic damage?" so much as, "Is there a reason to believe this particular thing is more likely to cause genetic damage than any number of other things?" That's where I'm getting hung up. We don't do 100 year studies on newly bred hybrids or plants produced via induced mutation. We don't do 100 year studies on new types of plastic, medications, floor coverings, artificial sweeteners, or anything else. Should we be doing 100 year studies on everything new we create on the off chance that they produce slow-moving problems, or is there some specific thing about transgenic plants that warrants it?
OK, that's a different question, though. If we have a grand problem with plant IP, reseeding agreements, music copyright, software license agreements, etc., that's not the same as an argument that farmers who intentionally take seed that they're not legally entitled to are somehow victims. The usual implication is that these farmers just have no way of avoiding being sued into the ground by Monsanto, and that argument is nonsense. All they have to do to avoid that outcome is not fill their fields with Monsanto's IP without paying a licensing fee.
I think there's a good argument to be made for IP protection of GMO plants, but there's a lot of wiggle room and valid reasoning in both directions.
I'm still trying to figure out what your claim is. Schmeiser planted his fields with intentionally selected IP protected soybeans, got sued for it, and lost. He's not a victim here who just magically had a field full of Monsanto's soybeans through no fault of his own. If he hadn't done that, he wouldn't have been sued. This was clearly a test case and it didn't work out well for him.
Monsanto voluntarily agreed not to produce terminator seeds in the 90's because there was a shit-flinging fit over the idea, not because it didn't work. It's too bad, because if GMO seeds had that feature, nobody would have to worry about the possibility of IP protection lawsuits or an unwanted GMO escape.
The nightmare scenario of our precious wild corn and soybean populations being devastated could be avoided.
For the record, Stephanie Seneff pretty much appears to be bugfuck insane. She has somehow made a career lately by plotting exponentially growing things against other exponentially growing things and confidently proclaiming that one causes the other. Normally that would be hilarious, but she has a PhD in electrical engineering, so I'd expect her to be better at applied math.
Well, DuPont is seriously fucking evil, and always has been.
I'm willing to stipulate that most, if not all, big chemical companies often do very evil things. The problem is that the OP's solution to that is the equivalent of saying, "No more chemicals." That would definitely take care of the problem, but it seems like a more carefully thought-out solution would be better.
And GMO is really a euphemism for Monsanto. They're the *only* meaningful player in this industry right now.
1) No, they're not really.
2) Any broad GMO bans that we enact in order to take out our rage on Monsanto will guarantee that any cool new "good" companies with useful products never appear.
We're at the beginning of a potentially huge boom in a new technology. Squelching it because we really hate the guys who currently occupy a big slice of that market is just cutting off our nose to spite our face.
I'd like to hear some details about this. What are the cross-pollination rates between this year's crop and a previous year's crop that has been removed and replaced? What plants are doing this and what's the mechanism?
Monsanto has actually brought more than one lawsuit, but I don't know of any where the farmer wasn't obviously trying to use unlicensed plants (rather than being the victim of unlucky cross pollination). The number of suits is pretty small, and as far as I'm aware, Monsanto hasn't lost a case, which is a pretty good indicator that they're bringing suits only in egregious cases.
Anybody who has an actual case of something like what the GP suggested should post it. Those court records should be public. Let's actually look at what happened and decide which side was being unreasonable.
OK, for the sake of argument, citrus is citrus. What about moving a gene from peppers into tomatoes to resist a bacterial infection? Close enough, or crime against the universe?
I'm all for science but deregulating GMO and allowing greedy corporations to do anything they want without any oversight because GMO is a supposedly such a safe technology is not something I'm prepared to do.
I don't think you're going to hear a lot of support for totally deregulationg GMOs (at least, not from anybody except corporate PR firms). Most of the people complaining here are just against banning GMOs simply because they're GMOs. That's a ridiculous thing to do.
No, there's no guarantee that any GMO will be safe. I'm sure that it's possible to design a tomato that produces botulism toxin if you want to. But that doesn't mean that GMOs are unsafe by definition. A transgenic plant is just a new type of plant that needs to be tested and examined before we put it into the food supply, just like we would with any of the crazy new hybrids and mutants we've produced over the last century. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you graph any disease that has increased over the past generation or so, you'll find an excellent correlation between it and the consumption of organic produce.
People who are capable of thinking beyond tomorrow care. While maybe nothing concrete has been show bad about GM foods, you'd have to be pretty short sighted to not understand the likely long term health risks, and risks to the food chain when GM crops make it impossible to grow anything else.
The likely long term health risks? Given that you basically conceded we don't have concrete data showing anything bad, how are you assessing the probability and coming to the conclusion that health risks are likely? Is there some obvious mechanism for producing health problems that's specific to transgenics?
Personally, I'd like to know whether my food was grown near power lines. Voluntary labeling is not enough. Mandatory labeling is a must. Anybody who disagrees hates free choice.
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All of this appears to be complete horseshit. Unless you have some sources to back it up, of course.
Could you link to that ruling? Because I remember reading the ruling and I don't remember that sentence or anything quite like it. Google results only produce links to activist web sites that also don't actually quote from the ruling.
Also, Percy Schmeiser was the defendant, not the judge. And his fields were full of Roundup Ready crops because he intentionally put them there, not because of bad luck.
I've never quite understood this argument. On the one hand, people rail against the use of glyphosate. Then they turn around and point out that evolution is eventually going to produce glyphosate-resistant weeds and glyphosate will become less useful. First, that's going to be true for any weed control method. Second, why are they worried about the day when "super weeds" make us stop using glyphosate and move on to something else when what they really want is the elimination of glyphosate?
They're generally not arguing, "use glyphosate judiciously to slow the creation of resistant weeds," like we are with antibiotics. They're generally arguing, "Glyphosate turned me into a newt! It should all go away! Also, glyphosate creates glyphosate resistant superweeds!"
What is poison, though? If you're a dog, onions and chocolate are on the list of things that are poison, but not so much if you're a human. If you're a caterpillar, Bt toxin is on the list, but not so much if you're a human. If you're an organism that produces EPSP enzymes, glyphosate is a deadly poison, but not so much if you're a human.
Also, nobody seems to be curious about the pesticides that Bt and glyphosate replaced. A lot of those are seriously nasty, and we're better off with more modern methods that use more benign chemicals.
1) When has this ever happened?
2) If this is actually a real problem, do you think there might be a way to deal with the problem short of completely banning a tremendously promising technology?
That article describes a bunch of people who have not been sued by Monsanto asking for preemptive relief in court because they're worried that Monsanto might sue them. That's them being afraid that Monsanto will sue them over accidental cross-pollination, not Monsanto actually doing it. The problem is that people have turned a theoretical concern into "Monsanto actually did this!" They haven't. They've filed a relatively small number of lawsuits against obvious offenders, and they donate the money they get in settlements to charity because they know that actually doing what people accuse them of would cause a huge (and well-deserved) shitstorm.
If it really was just about labeling things GMO/non-GMO for people to make real informed decisions, that would be fine. But the real goal is to encourage people to make uninformed decisions based on fear. Here's how it will really go:
Greenpeace: "If these GMOs are safe, why do you oppose mandatory government labeling?"
The Public: "Good point!"
Monsanto: "OK, fine. Labels it is. We'll stop opposing it."
Greenpeace: "If these GMOs are safe, why does the government mandate labels on them!!??!"
The Public: "Holy shit, good point!"
We're still trying to convince much of the public that vaccines don't cause autism. For the same reason, I wouldn't be a big fan of mandatory labels on vaccines that say something like, "Contains preservatives," or "Contains traces of virus." It's technically true, but it doesn't provide any useful information to the consumer. It's just a cudgel for crazy activists to swing around to cause more confusion.
I'm trying to understand exactly how Monsanto is supposed to achieve that. There are other seed vendors selling GMO and non-GMO products that farmers can buy any time they want. If farmers decide that the GMO product isn't worth the money, wouldn't they just start buying different seed from a different source? As it is, it certainly looks like the GMO seeds are worth the premium. Nobody is being forced to use any products they don't want to use.
My question isn't really, "Could this cause genetic damage?" so much as, "Is there a reason to believe this particular thing is more likely to cause genetic damage than any number of other things?" That's where I'm getting hung up. We don't do 100 year studies on newly bred hybrids or plants produced via induced mutation. We don't do 100 year studies on new types of plastic, medications, floor coverings, artificial sweeteners, or anything else. Should we be doing 100 year studies on everything new we create on the off chance that they produce slow-moving problems, or is there some specific thing about transgenic plants that warrants it?
OK, that's a different question, though. If we have a grand problem with plant IP, reseeding agreements, music copyright, software license agreements, etc., that's not the same as an argument that farmers who intentionally take seed that they're not legally entitled to are somehow victims. The usual implication is that these farmers just have no way of avoiding being sued into the ground by Monsanto, and that argument is nonsense. All they have to do to avoid that outcome is not fill their fields with Monsanto's IP without paying a licensing fee.
I think there's a good argument to be made for IP protection of GMO plants, but there's a lot of wiggle room and valid reasoning in both directions.
HTH.
I'm still trying to figure out what your claim is. Schmeiser planted his fields with intentionally selected IP protected soybeans, got sued for it, and lost. He's not a victim here who just magically had a field full of Monsanto's soybeans through no fault of his own. If he hadn't done that, he wouldn't have been sued. This was clearly a test case and it didn't work out well for him.
Monsanto voluntarily agreed not to produce terminator seeds in the 90's because there was a shit-flinging fit over the idea, not because it didn't work. It's too bad, because if GMO seeds had that feature, nobody would have to worry about the possibility of IP protection lawsuits or an unwanted GMO escape.
The nightmare scenario of our precious wild corn and soybean populations being devastated could be avoided.
For the record, Stephanie Seneff pretty much appears to be bugfuck insane. She has somehow made a career lately by plotting exponentially growing things against other exponentially growing things and confidently proclaiming that one causes the other. Normally that would be hilarious, but she has a PhD in electrical engineering, so I'd expect her to be better at applied math.
I'm willing to stipulate that most, if not all, big chemical companies often do very evil things. The problem is that the OP's solution to that is the equivalent of saying, "No more chemicals." That would definitely take care of the problem, but it seems like a more carefully thought-out solution would be better.
1) No, they're not really.
2) Any broad GMO bans that we enact in order to take out our rage on Monsanto will guarantee that any cool new "good" companies with useful products never appear.
We're at the beginning of a potentially huge boom in a new technology. Squelching it because we really hate the guys who currently occupy a big slice of that market is just cutting off our nose to spite our face.
I'd like to hear some details about this. What are the cross-pollination rates between this year's crop and a previous year's crop that has been removed and replaced? What plants are doing this and what's the mechanism?
Questioning safety is awesome. Trying to ban stuff without evidence that it's dangerous, not so much.
Monsanto has actually brought more than one lawsuit, but I don't know of any where the farmer wasn't obviously trying to use unlicensed plants (rather than being the victim of unlucky cross pollination). The number of suits is pretty small, and as far as I'm aware, Monsanto hasn't lost a case, which is a pretty good indicator that they're bringing suits only in egregious cases.
Anybody who has an actual case of something like what the GP suggested should post it. Those court records should be public. Let's actually look at what happened and decide which side was being unreasonable.
What mechanism are you proposing for "genetic damage" to happen? Is it something we should worry about with other products?
OK, for the sake of argument, citrus is citrus. What about moving a gene from peppers into tomatoes to resist a bacterial infection? Close enough, or crime against the universe?
I don't think you're going to hear a lot of support for totally deregulationg GMOs (at least, not from anybody except corporate PR firms). Most of the people complaining here are just against banning GMOs simply because they're GMOs. That's a ridiculous thing to do.
No, there's no guarantee that any GMO will be safe. I'm sure that it's possible to design a tomato that produces botulism toxin if you want to. But that doesn't mean that GMOs are unsafe by definition. A transgenic plant is just a new type of plant that needs to be tested and examined before we put it into the food supply, just like we would with any of the crazy new hybrids and mutants we've produced over the last century. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you graph any disease that has increased over the past generation or so, you'll find an excellent correlation between it and the consumption of organic produce.
What conclusions should we draw from that?
The likely long term health risks? Given that you basically conceded we don't have concrete data showing anything bad, how are you assessing the probability and coming to the conclusion that health risks are likely? Is there some obvious mechanism for producing health problems that's specific to transgenics?
Personally, I'd like to know whether my food was grown near power lines. Voluntary labeling is not enough. Mandatory labeling is a must. Anybody who disagrees hates free choice.