Comments

  1. Gorogh, Lounging Peacromancer says

    Amusing (or disconcerting, no matter how serious you’re feeling right now) – if, of course, US-centric.

  2. malta says

    I’m pretty sure organic agriculture could feed the world… provided people ate less meat. Speaking just for the US, at the moment our largest crop is grass (as in lawns, not weed), and the second largest is corn. However, only about 3% of that corn is for direct human consumption. Around a quarter goes to corn ethanol and the rest feeds livestock.

    Using corn to feed livestock is terribly inefficient in terms of producing calories for people, so even with reduced yields from organic agriculture, using that corn cropland for other crops would more than account for the reduction in yield. (Which, as far as I can tell is more like 25%, not 50%.)

    “In particular, organic agriculture delivers just 5 percent less yield in rain-watered legume crops, such as alfalfa or beans, and in perennial crops, such as fruit trees. But when it comes to major cereal crops, such as corn or wheat, and vegetables, such as broccoli, conventional methods delivered more than 25 percent more yield.” – Scientific American

    And, of course, in much of the world subsistence farmers are already using organic methods for lack of funds to purchase conventional fertilizers or pesticides. So yeah, I’m pretty sure that food insecurity in the world has a lot more to do with global income inequality and price-distorting subsidies in wealthy countries than with conventional vs organic agriculture methods.

  3. Menyambal says

    That’s a good description of a cause of famines, but the rider that is called Famine is a lot more like a capitalist. The others are great.

  4. says

    …aaaand once again the pro-GMO people claim GMO food is “good for people” but cite no evidence. If they are pressed, history suggests, they will use examples which aren’t actually being grown in large amounts or commercially, and hand-wave away the dangerous high-resource-use monoculture stuff that represents the majority actual use of GMOs in practice. (“GMOs being developed by the University of Somewhere Obscure might be used to provide free ice cream for orphans and reverse global warming! They’re halfway to having a first-round test! So we should all be totally okay with GMO crops which require more water and fertilizers than the non-GMO crops they replace! And everyone who knows about the Irish Potato Famine or the Gros Michel banana shut up!”) There must be something psychologically similar between GMOs and nuclear power, because the advocates seem to have the same issues.

    Bonus points for dissing organic farming at the same time. Because of course non-organic farming is totally sustainable, right? We’re going to be able to feed an ever-growing population even if the ecology collapses, right? We have contingency plans for global warming? Right? Right? Please tell me you anti-organic people have been thinking about this stuff.

  5. Siobhan says

    Hey, The Vicar

    What if I told you
    everything that’s edible to human beings is,
    by definition,
    organic?

    *shades*

    Oh, unless you meant something other than “molecule wot has carbon in it.”

  6. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re vicar:
    nota bene, the scare quotes around “organic” in the description of the Famine Horseman. Actual organic farming is quite healthful and useful, but claiming a non-food as “organic” is basically the definition of famine.
    GMO’s used for our monoculture corn crop is only the initial use of the technology. It is being used to address poor nutrition regions in the third world. And proving to be uite effective there also.

  7. Holms says

    I don’t see GMO monoculture doing any more harm than non-GMO monoculture; most likely substantially less, given the fact that there are some strains that cut down on the need for crop spraying, or permit the spraying of a less harmful substance. What I see instead is a GMO detractor doing his demonising thing without pointing to a shred of data.

  8. ck, the Irate Lump says

    Siobhan wrote:

    What if I told you
    everything that’s edible to human beings is,
    by definition,
    organic?

    Except salt. Maybe water if you stretch the definition of edible a bit.

  9. says

    …aaaand once again the pro-GMO people claim GMO food is “good for people” but cite no evidence

    There is no food you eat regularly that is not GMO. The evidence you’re looking for is on your plate.

  10. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    …aaaand once again the pro-GMO people claim GMO food is “good for people” but cite no evidence. I

    And once again, a know-nothing makes an unsubstantiated claim about food. All GMO organisms contain the full genome found in “organic” food, plus a couple of other genes for hardiness. Show otherwise with solid scientific data. The only difference between GMO corn starch and “organic” corn starch is the label and price.
    That is the point scientists like PZ and myself make time and time again.

  11. snodorum says

    @7

    GM crops need to be adopted as part of an integrated pest management system. I agree that there are some examples that have led to lazy management decisions (e.g. over-reliance of glyphosate for broad spectrum weed control in RoundUp Ready crops). But a counter example would be Bt crops have allowed for reduced insecticide applications. And before you mention monocultures, Bt crops have an EPA mandated refuge, meaning that growers using Bt crops must allocate a portion of their land to non-Bt corn/cotton. This reduces selection pressure and is the major reason why we haven’t seen Bt resistance develop in corn borer as we have seen with glyphosate resistance in a number of weeds (horsetail, waterhemp, palmer amaranth).

    So if you are frustrated with poor management decisions, then we are in agreement. If you are frustrated with the implementation of GMOs, we sort of agree. But if you are outright opposed to GMO technologies, I believe you are mistaken.

    The USDA organic label is a commendable effort, and there are a lot of sustainable organic growers. I am not “anti-organic”, but I see some of its limitations. Organic production requires increased tillage for weed control, which burns more fuel and leads to increased moisture loss/erosion. I don’t care if it’s labeled organic or if it’s conventional, I support sustainable agriculture. As consumers we can’t know too much about the production systems by looking at the product on the shelf, so the USDA organic label can be a good indicator of a minimum threshold. But as a researcher, I want to encourage sustainable practices using all the tools available, including GMOs.

  12. Jake Harban says

    There is no food you eat regularly that is not GMO. The evidence you’re looking for is on your plate.

    Don’t be ridiculous. Right now, I’m eating non-genetically modified genetically modified jungle fowl wrapped in a tortilla made from non-genetically modified genetically modified teosinte grass and slathered with sour cream made from the milk of a non-genetically modified genetically modified auroch.

  14. Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y says

    What if I told you
    everything that’s edible to human beings is,
    by definition,
    organic?

    *shades*

    Oh, unless you meant something other than “molecule wot has carbon in it.”

    It’s almost like appropriating a word that already has a commonly understood meaning as a label for something that is tangentially related but distinct and far more specific is a gratuitous and inexhaustible source of avoidable misunderstanding….

  16. Amphiox says

    Most of the problems that critics of GMOs trumpet on are not actually problems of GMOs per se, but problems with capitalism.

  17. Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y says

    There must be something psychologically similar between GMOs and nuclear power, because the advocates seem to have the same issues.

    Having their reasonable concerns about implementation and control of externalities drowned out by the frantic caterwauling of useful idiots convinced it’s BLACK MAGIC and the industry drones who focus exclusively on the unreasonable criticisms?

  18. wzrd1 says

    What problems are there with capitalism, Amphiox?
    From my observation, capitalism has no real problems, once one has thrown a proper monkey wrench into its fundamental lack of regulation. ;)
    That’s something Libertarians have yet to learn, they ignore history and trust everyone to be rational and ignore the tendency for humans to be selfish and short sighted.

  19. Nick Gotts says

    Oh, unless you meant something other than “molecule wot has carbon in it.”- Siobhan@5

    Words can actually have more than one meaning? Who knew?

    There is no food you eat regularly that is not GMO. The evidence you’re looking for is on your plate. – Marcus Ranum@9

    If the biotechnologies developed over the last few decades are really no different from how food crops have developed over the past 10,000 years, what is the point of applying them? If they are, then this hackneyed trope is dishonest.

    Show otherwise with solid scientific data. – Nerd of Redhead@10

    The trouble is, almost all the scientific data there is on GMO safety has been produced by the corporations who profit for them, or people closely associated with them. Probably, there are no serious safety problems, and that’s certainly not my main reservation – it is precisely that they are being so heavily pushed by agribusiness megacorps – and if you believe those corporations have the general interest at heart, can I interest you in buying Tower Bridge?

  20. wzrd1 says

    Why, Nick has a point! My blood pressure and thyroid medications are heavily pushed by the companies that make them.
    That 200/100 blood pressure and pulse of 128 is perfectly OK and I can dispose of those things, as those companies don’t have my heart at heart or something about a bridge.
    Oh wait, my abdominal aorta already is enlarged at one spot by 2.2 cm, maybe they do have my general best interest at heart with those drugs.

  21. applehead says

    #12,

    It’s always amusing (or highly disconcerting) how the Sooper-Scientific, Sooper-Rational STEMlord brigade conflates breeding – a set of techniques known and honed for thousands of years – with genetic manipulation – a set of techniques barely 40 years old.

    Because we all know the Sumerians crossbred tomatoes with jellyfish to extend the shelf life of tasteless, tastably unhealthy greenhouse water tomatoes from the Netherlands, right?

  22. Jake Harban says

    If the biotechnologies developed over the last few decades are really no different from how food crops have developed over the past 10,000 years, what is the point of applying them?

    If solar panels produce electricity that’s really no different from what you get by burning coal, why bother switching to solar?

    Probably, there are no serious safety problems, and that’s certainly not my main reservation – it is precisely that they are being so heavily pushed by agribusiness megacorps – and if you believe those corporations have the general interest at heart, can I interest you in buying Tower Bridge?

    Probably, there are no serious safety problems, and that’s certainly not my main reservation – it is precisely that vaccines are being so heavily pushed by pharmaceutical megacorps – and if you believe those corporations have the general interest at heart, can I interest you in buying Tower Bridge?

  23. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    So we should all be totally okay with GMO crops which require more water and fertilizers than the non-GMO crops they replace!

    I’m not a GMOlogist, but I was under the impression that the situation was the inverse of this? That they (or at least some) required less water, and less fertilizer use? Have I picked up faulty information somewhere?

  24. Jake Harban says

    It’s always amusing (or highly disconcerting) how the Sooper-Scientific, Sooper-Rational STEMlord brigade conflates breeding – a set of techniques known and honed for thousands of years – with genetic manipulation – a set of techniques barely 40 years old.

    Breeding is genetic manipulation. Come on, how can you read Pharyngula, of all blogs, and not know about meiosis, recombination, mutation, and selection, both natural and artificial?

    We have been using deliberate genetic manipulation on our crops for 10,000 years. In the last 40 years, we gained the tools to do this more efficiently and more precisely. That’s a good thing.

    Because we all know the Sumerians crossbred tomatoes with jellyfish to extend the shelf life of tasteless, tastably unhealthy greenhouse water tomatoes from the Netherlands, right?

    No. In fact, the Sumerians did not have the ability to readily travel to the Netherlands at all. Presumably, you find it objectionable for rational people to conflate driving, flying, and walking into the general category of “travel?”

    Speaking of, if a jellyfish has a gene that’s desirable in tomatoes and genetic manipulation allows you to create a variety of tomatoes with that gene faster than breeding tomatoes until the gene arises by chance, then surely that’s an argument in favor of the superiority of genetic manipulation.

  25. Nick Gotts says

    Azkyroth@14,
    The “appropriation” of words to express new meanings is a basic feature of language. The word “organic” long precedes its use in either agriculture or chemistry: “Late Middle English: via Latin from Greek organikos ‘relating to an organ or instrument’.

    It’s interesting that two of the anti-organic-agriculture or pro-GMO points made here turn entirely on semantic quibbles. Why would that be, do you think?

  26. dianne says

    Breeding is not the only “traditional” method by which we obtain new foods. Exposing plants (and animals?) to radiation or mutagenic chemicals and seeing if you get interesting offspring is a technique that has been used for at least decades and is responsible for producing some of the food you probably eat. It’s not clear to me why GMO techniques, which are essentially targeted mutation rather than random mutation, should be in any particular way worse. Apart from the fact that you don’t get the serendipity effect as much.

    Organic foods, at least in the US are…problematic. Ever notice how “organic produce” you find in the supermarket is lovely and virtually never contains any signs of having been gnawed on by insects? That’s because they have, in fact, been sprayed with pesticides. Certain older (and more dangerous) pesticides can be used on organic produce in the US, for example, copper sulfate. I tend to shy away from organic foods because I want to be exposed to clever modern pesticides that inhibit enzymes I don’t have, not non-specific older ones. I do make an exception for organic produce that has clearly been gnawed upon by insects because it probably is truly organic.

    The organic farming industry is a big business and should be trusted as far as any other big business, that is, not at all.

  27. dianne says

    tastably unhealthy

    How can something be tastably unhealthy? Apart, I suppose, from being obviously, by smell and taste, rotting, but I don’t think that’s what the poster meant. Supermarket tomatoes are notably taste free, but I don’t see any way that that lack of flavor can be taken to automatically mean that they’re unhealthy. Lettuce is pretty taste free too and it’s healthy. Also, supermarket tomatoes or Netherlands greenhouse tomatoes are a pre-GMO product, produced by natural breeding or irradiation.

  28. Nick Gotts says

    Presumably, you find it objectionable for rational people to conflate driving, flying, and walking into the general category of “travel?” – Jake Harban@24

    I certainly find it objectionable if they do not recognise the important differences between them – for example, with respect to greenhouse gas emissions.

  29. Nick Gotts says

    Jake Harban@22,

    If solar panels produce electricity that’s really no different from what you get by burning coal, why bother switching to solar?

    My objection, of course, was to the pretence that there is no significant difference between modern biotechnology and older techniques. The debate ought to hinge on the possible advantages and disadvantages of the new techniques, and who benefits from them, not semantic quibbles.

    Probably, there are no serious safety problems, and that’s certainly not my main reservation – it is precisely that vaccines are being so heavily pushed by pharmaceutical megacorps – and if you believe those corporations have the general interest at heart, can I interest you in buying Tower Bridge?

    Yes, medical research should be a public sector endeavour, not subject to commercial decisions about what is going to be most profitable. Are you really naive enough to think that pharmaceutical megacorps prioritise maximising public health?

  30. anat says

    dianne, just to add to your #26: plants grown from seeds that had been exposed to radiation for mutagenesis purposes can be labeled ‘organic’ if grown using ‘organic’ methods. IOW eating food labeled ‘organic’ does not protect (generic) you from eating recently genetically modified plant matter.

  31. dianne says

    Are you really naive enough to think that pharmaceutical megacorps prioritise maximising public health?

    I’m not the person you asked, but for myself…no. I in no way trust pharma firms to be ethical or promote public health. That’s why I want the FDA and similar organizations looking over their shoulders and insisting that they get it right.

    Conversely, I am not naive enough to think that agricultural megacorps prioritize maximizing public health, no, not even if they call their products “organic” and advertise them as good for you. They need the same oversight.

  32. Nick Gotts says

    Further to #29, vaccines are not, in fact, big earners for pharmaceutical companies, and the number of companies making them is in decline for that reason:

    During the past fifty years, the number of pharmaceutical companies making vaccines has decreased dramatically, and those that still make vaccines have reduced resources to make new ones. Pharmaceutical companies are gradually abandoning vaccines because the research, development, testing, and manufacture of vaccines are expensive and because the market to sell vaccines is much smaller than the market for other drug products.

    But hey, why let mere facts get in the way of a nice rhetorical device?

  33. dianne says

    @anat: I don’t see any reason why a product can’t be both explicitly GMO and organic, when it comes to that. It might even be easier, depending on the specific alteration that was made.

  34. Nick Gotts says

    Conversely, I am not naive enough to think that agricultural megacorps prioritize maximizing public health, no, not even if they call their products “organic” and advertise them as good for you. They need the same oversight. -dianne@31

    I agree completely. Have I said anything whatever that would suggest otherwise?

  35. dianne says

    Nick Gotts@34: No, but given that “big pharma can’t be trusted” is a bit of a stereotype at this point and there is an implicit claim often made by people promoting naturopathic medicine that this means that they (the naturopaths) CAN be trusted, I think it’s worth saying overtly. Organic farmers are big businesspeople who are protecting their business in the same ways that pharma firms are.

  36. Holms says

    #19 Nick Gotts
    Words can actually have more than one meaning? Who knew?
    …
    #25
    The “appropriation” of words to express new meanings is a basic feature of language. The word “organic” long precedes its use in either agriculture or chemistry: “Late Middle English: via Latin from Greek organikos ‘relating to an organ or instrument’.

    It’s interesting that two of the anti-organic-agriculture or pro-GMO points made here turn entirely on semantic quibbles. Why would that be, do you think?

    Save your sarcasm. You are correct to note that there is a semantic word game here, but the people at fault for this contextual blurring of meanings are not the pro-GMO people here, but rather the people that coined the term ‘organic food’ that you are defending. They are the ones that deliberately muddied the issue with their choice of wording; remember, if one category of food is dubbed ‘organic,’ what does that suggest about the other? The obvious implication is that it is ‘not organic,’ or say… ‘artificial.’

    It should surprise no one that the anti-GMO crowd overlaps pretty heavily with the ‘organic foods don’t contain chemicals‘ crowd, another example of language being used to muddy an issue.

    Nick Gotts #19
    If the biotechnologies developed over the last few decades are really no different from how food crops have developed over the past 10,000 years, what is the point of applying them? If they are, then this hackneyed trope is dishonest.

    Say rather that your interpretation of what Marcus meant is inaccurate… or possibly, dishonest. He plainly (to my eye at least) did not mean that they are the same in terms of effectiveness, but rather that GM food and “non” GM food both actually heavily involve genetic modification.

    _________________________________________

    applehead #21
    It’s always amusing (or highly disconcerting) how the Sooper-Scientific, Sooper-Rational STEMlord brigade conflates breeding – a set of techniques known and honed for thousands of years – with genetic manipulation – a set of techniques barely 40 years old.

    You describe selective breeding as “a set of techniques known and honed for thousands of years,” and you contrast this with “barely 40 years old” as if to suggest the older method is better purely for being older. But you are forgetting (or omitting?) the fact that no one really knew what was going on when two strains were being crossed, that there was no understanding of the underlying mechanism of genetics, heritability and such.

    You forget (or omit?) that smashing two whole genomes together and hoping the resultant organism happens to be useful is an incredibly crude form of the modern method. The technological approach involves the addition of individual genes / regulatory regions to an extant organism, where every addition is meticulously documented using evidence based investigation… i.e. science. Either way we still have a mixing of genetic information, but this modern method refines the modification process by drastically improving the precision.

    Because we all know the Sumerians crossbred tomatoes with jellyfish to extend the shelf life of tasteless, tastably unhealthy greenhouse water tomatoes from the Netherlands, right?

    But I see you are just being asinine. Never mind.

  37. Nick Gotts says

    You are correct to note that there is a semantic word game here, but the people at fault for this contextual blurring of meanings are not the pro-GMO people here, but rather the people that coined the term ‘organic food’ that you are defending. They are the ones that deliberately muddied the issue with their choice of wording; remember, if one category of food is dubbed ‘organic,’ what does that suggest about the other? – Holms@36

    I’ll use sarcasm when I think appropriate, thank you Mr. Smuggins. The use of “organic” to apply to a particular type of farming dates back to the 1940s, well before the advent of GMOs, and neither you nor anyone else has produced any evidence whatever that this was done with deceptive intent.

  38. Nick Gotts says

    Holms@36,
    As regards Marcus Ranum’s hackneyed sneer, by the same token of course all life is genetically modified, as mutations without any human intervention whatever are also genetic modification. Which would make the term completely useless. So maybe we should “gentic modification” and “GMOs” to refer to the specific techniques and organisms for which these terms were coined, and discuss substantive issues rather than semantic quibbles.

  39. says

    @Nick Gotts #38
    One substantive issue has been adressed multiple times in this topic alone already.
    The issue, that the old approach to genetic modification, breeding, has been mostly random and contained a lot of unpredictable and unpredicted results. Selecting for one trait only can lead, and has led, to substantial negative side effects on other traits. Those tasteless tomatoes people complain? Old method, selective breeding for looks and shelf life only. And the wonderfull gift of poisonous potatoes that are best for chips.

    The new approach, direct genetic modification, is more targeted, confined and thoroughly tested for whether the results match the predictions.

  40. astro says

    in the US food industry, “organic” is a regulated term. you can’t label food organic unless it meets those criteria. we can debate what should or shouldn’t qualify, and that’s a good thing. the debate gets us to a better direction for adopting practices which minimize hazardous substances in food.

    the main problem with GMOs is the introduction of new species into an environment that has not had the opportunity to adapt. they have the potential to become invasive species, or worse. the thing that bugs me personally the most about GMOs is how much time and effort monsanto, dupont, and others expend actively suppressing research into the potential direct and collateral effects of GMOs on the environment.

    another problem with GMOs is that they are patented, which means that farmers don’t own the seeds they originally buy, and also don’t own the seeds they grow after planting and harvesting. monsanto essentially owns every single plant in existence with the roundup ready gene, whether someone bought the seeds from them or not. that sounds more like a recipe for famine to me.

  41. Gorogh, Lounging Peacromancer says

    Incidentally, Steven Novella just yesterday made a post about GMOs which addresses some of the common misconceptions (and lies) about them (including, e.g., the capitalism angle). It has some additional links, too.

  42. Anri says

    astro @ 40:

    the main problem with GMOs is the introduction of new species into an environment that has not had the opportunity to adapt. they have the potential to become invasive species, or worse. the thing that bugs me personally the most about GMOs is how much time and effort monsanto, dupont, and others expend actively suppressing research into the potential direct and collateral effects of GMOs on the environment.

    In what way does conventional mutagenic breeding prepare the environment for the products produced?

    another problem with GMOs is that they are patented, which means that farmers don’t own the seeds they originally buy, and also don’t own the seeds they grow after planting and harvesting. monsanto essentially owns every single plant in existence with the roundup ready gene, whether someone bought the seeds from them or not. that sounds more like a recipe for famine to me.

    You do know that saving seed from a harvest has not been a common industrial agricultural technique for rather a number of decades now, right? This regardless of the GMO status of the crop.
    Also, if you’re unhappy with companies holding on to their patents for useful crop techniques, you’re more than free to crank out a million-dollar team of scientists and lab equipment, spend multiple years producing a germ line, spend multiple years proving it out in the face of media hysteria and give it away when it’s marketable. Might be a but much to expect everyone else to, though.

  43. dianne says

    another problem with GMOs is that they are patented

    Are other proprietary seeds not patented? For example, if DuPont or Monsanto came up with, say, a tomato that didn’t rot by exposing seeds to radiation, could they not patent that tomato the way they can one that is made by intentional, directed gene insertion or deletion? That seems unlikely, but I don’t actually know. If they are patented, what makes the GMO patent different?

  44. dianne says

    in the US food industry, “organic” is a regulated term. you can’t label food organic unless it meets those criteria.

    Assuming the laws are enforced–a dubious assumption when discussing big business in the US–the labeling allows use of a number of older and more toxic herbicides and pesticides on crops labelled organic. Does this not seem to you to be even a little bit disingenuous? Do people who buy organic produce really expect that the label organic means that this food was sprayed with only more toxic, less carefully engineered herbicides?

  45. Jackson says

    @dianne, 43

    Are other proprietary seeds not patented? For example, if DuPont or Monsanto came up with, say, a tomato that didn’t rot by exposing seeds to radiation, could they not patent that tomato the way they can one that is made by intentional, directed gene insertion or deletion? That seems unlikely, but I don’t actually know. If they are patented, what makes the GMO patent different?

    New traits discovered and introduced to crop varieties through methods other than transgenic recombination are indeed patentable. Using chemical or radiation mutagenesis, and other conventional breeding methods are still used by large ag companies today and are patented. You have been able to patent plant traits in the US since the 1930s.

  46. dianne says

    @Jackson, so then what’s different about GMOs being patentable and why should it be more concerning? (Yeah, I know you didn’t make the original claim, just trying to follow it up and see where it goes.)

    The one issue I could see happening is that GMOs could be made with an automatically enforcing patent, that is, they could be made such that the offspring are sterile. Then again, isn’t that similar to seedless watermelons, etc? Still not seeing a distinct problem of GMOs, just some old problems of big ag.

  47. Jackson says

    @dianne, 46

    There isn’t a difference, as far as I can tell. I think it is the case where people using the “GMOs are patented by evil megacorp X” as an argument against GMOs are simply unaware that the IP protection provided to GMOs is also provided to non-GMOs.

    It might be good to also note that patents for plant traits expire after 20 years, so the first generation of commercial GMOs are no longer under IP protection.

    I have no problem with GURT (genetic use restriction technology, also referred to as terminator seeds). If any farmer wants to save and replant seeds from a previous years harvest, all they have to do is use any of the hundreds of thousands of seed varieties available to them that are not under patent. Any new trait developed and patented by MegaCorp decreases the number of varieties available to farmers by exactly zero.

  48. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    @dianne, 46

    so then what’s different about GMOs being patentable and why should it be more concerning?

    Well, those other ones aren’t spooky, spooky <crack of thunder>frankenfoods</crack of thunder>?

    The one issue I could see happening is that GMOs could be made with an automatically enforcing patent, that is, they could be made such that the offspring are sterile. Then again, isn’t that similar to seedless watermelons, etc? Still not seeing a distinct problem of GMOs, just some old problems of big ag.

    Given that one of the other complaints is their being invasive species, surely sterile crops would be a good solution for that?

  49. says

    Nick Gotts#38:
    As regards Marcus Ranum’s hackneyed sneer

    There are a couple people here trying to point out to you that you’re making silly mouth-noises. Put down the shovel.

    It’s completely irrelevant if the DNA in my soybeans comes from a squid, or from controlled breeding. The relevant question is whether or not the produce that comes out the other side is edible and why. So, if you have something like mangoes, which are related to poison ivy, and you were able to breed them selectively to be less likely to produce an allergic response, how is that any different from if you fiddled with their DNA in a lab and produced a mango that was hypoallergenic? The mangoes wouldn’t care. And neither would anyone with half a clue. And if someone went into a lab and took DNA from two different bean/pea plants and crossed them, and called the results “peanuts” that would be OK, too. And nobody would care. What do you think plant crossing is? And why do you think it’s magically OK because it happens under dirtier than lab conditions?

    If you want to complain about “hackneyed sneers” then you probably shouldn’t have thrown out the bit about DNA from a flounder winding up in your cabbage, or whatever it was. Who gives a shit? I don’t care if my lettuce has flounder DNA in it, as long as it’s crisp and nutritious! Why should I? It’s not like it’s going to sap my precious bodily fluids, purity of essence, or whatever.

    Meanwhile you have things like golden rice, which are modified to provide necessary nutrients, and which are being protested against by non-GMO fanatics, so that people who need the nutrients can’t get them. It’s not quite as stupid as the anti-vaxxers – it’s worse, actually.

    The world would be in a state of fucked without high yield wheat, corn, and rice, right now. Vast numbers of people depend on them to eat. Now, tell me which of those was developed in a lab using controlled breeding, which was developed using cross-breeding, and which was developed by smashing DNA about. Then tell me why anyone who wants to eat gives a shit.

  50. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    The debate ought to hinge on the possible advantages and disadvantages of the new techniques, and who benefits from them, not semantic quibbles.

    Why is this even an argument? You have a problem with capitalism?
    Maybe you need to explain how you would run the world, and explain how feasible it is.
    It is always a better argument to explain what you are working toward than just carping about what you don’t like.

  51. astro says

    anri@42,

    GMOs are a sharper shift than cross-breeding, representing a sudden influx of a new organism whose impacts on the local environment are unknown. you also have limited diversity within the GMO population, controlled at the source (the patent-holder), which hinders adaptation into local environments.

    the two worst places to determine whether an organism has a negative impact, or whether that organism is subject to being suddenly wiped out (e.g., blight) after widespread reliance, are (1) the lab and (2) the world at large.

  52. dianne says

    GMOs are a sharper shift than cross-breeding, representing a sudden influx of a new organism whose impacts on the local environment are unknown.

    I’m not sure what you mean by this. If, for example, a new type of corn were introduced to a region, why would it make any difference whether the corn were developed using GMO techniques or traditional mutagenic techniques? If anything, the limited and controlled changes made by intentional genetic modification strikes me as less likely to lead to problems. Also, a properly made GMO product could contain a “kill switch”. For example, one could put in a tetracycline regulated element that upregulated apoptosis. The species gets out of control? Spray it with tetracycline and you’re done. Can’t do that with traditionally bred or mutated organisms if they start interacting with the local environment in unfortunate ways.

    As far as the risk of reliance, that’s an issue with any monoculture crop. The potato famine happened without any GMOs being involved, for example. However, there could be an issue with things like salt resistant plants. If the increasing population of the world only has enough to eat because of, say, salt resistant strains and those strains are in peril from anything from a plant virus to a political attack, there could be famine. The easiest solution, at least for plant viruses, is to have a number of plants that are capable of growing in the desired environment. Then if, say, a virus attacks your salt resistant rice you just plant wheat this year instead. Political attack, I’m less sure of how to deal with.

  53. Siobhan says

    It’s interesting that two of the anti-organic-agriculture or pro-GMO points made here turn entirely on semantic quibbles. Why would that be, do you think?

    Because two of the pro-GMO points were made by people who recognize that you’ve already made up your mind? If I want an exercise in futility, I’ll go dig a ditch with a bendy straw.

  54. Holms says

    #37 Nick Gotts
    I’ll use sarcasm when I think appropriate, thank you Mr. Smuggins.

    Okay, but then that makes your complaints abous Marcus Ranum’s ‘sneering’ a bit precious.

    The use of “organic” to apply to a particular type of farming dates back to the 1940s, well before the advent of GMOs, and neither you nor anyone else has produced any evidence whatever that this was done with deceptive intent.

    Cool. It remains that it is an excellent example of a common tactic.

    #38 Nick Gotts
    As regards Marcus Ranum’s hackneyed sneer, by the same token of course all life is genetically modified, as mutations without any human intervention whatever are also genetic modification. Which would make the term completely useless.

    This makes me wonder if you are being deliberately obtuse. Marcus was pointing out that the ‘GM free’ foods are in fact very heavily genetically modified by humans. Not evolution. Because of all the selective breeding.

  55. Holms says

    GMOs are a sharper shift than cross-breeding, representing a sudden influx of a new organism whose impacts on the local environment are unknown.

    New organism?? Modern GM techniques involve individual genes, and only after copius study (often in collaboration with non-profit groups such as universities). Selective breeding on the other hand involves mixing two entire genomes together and hoping something useful comes out. How is it better to mix entire genomes together, as opposed to one gene at a time?

  56. says

    The “waaa! It’s a monoculture!” Argument doesn’t hold water, either. Because if there’s something that comes along specifically tuned to eat the monoculture, there will be surviving examples – thanks evolution! And those survival traits can be amplified in a new version of the affected food-source. Sure, it would suck, but we still have wine after phyloxera and we still have potatoes after the great potato famines, etc. (btw the main cause of the potato famine die-off was English landowners’ response to the crisis, which would have been vastly less damaging had they not treated Irish tenant farmers as rent to be farmed and used starvation as a way of renegotiating rent and adjusting land values!) The danger of monoculture is a non-danger unless it’s amplified at a political level. The anti-GMO advocates are actually making that threat worse, not better. The way to survive a strain-specific blight is to get better at rolling out new strains and producing blight-resistant strains faster. So if my corn crop is dying – yes – give me corn with flounder genes or whatever: as long as it resists the blight and grows big fat ears of yummy starchy stuff that makes good tamales.

  57. says

    Welp… looks like this comments thread just inspired my next blog topic: GMOs and Capitalism.

    For the record (though this is for anyone who doesn’t know me; if you follow me on social media, then you already know this), I’m a huge fan of GM technology, while I’m not a huge fan of the way the US does Capitalism. And also, Kavin Senapathy amongst others helped me to understand why labeling GM foods is rather useless.

  58. says

    @astro

    …which means that farmers don’t own the seeds they originally buy, and also don’t own the seeds they grow after planting and harvesting…

    Quite often the highest yield produce F1 hybrids, because the are genetically homogenous while comming from genetically heterogenous parent populations. They are produced by completely “traditional” methods. Seeds of these hybrids must be produced in strictly controlled conditions.

    In subsequent generations F2 etc. the positives become more diluted as the seeds in the population become increasingly heterogenous through matching and mixing of the present alelles and thus provide less reliable (and lower and of poorer quality) yealds.

    Any farmer who plants F1 hybrids therefore would be an idiot if they tried to save seeds.

    In fact, most farmers buy seeds. Not because of Monsanto or big ag conspiracy. But for purely practical reasons.

  59. says

    The whole “buy seeds” thing is so mich BS.

    Ok so you’re gonna plant 60 acres of corn. Do you:
    A) buy enough seed corn for 60 acres
    B) take corn from last year’s crop

    Well, it sure is a whole lot more convenient to open a nice clean bag of seed corn into the hopper of your corn drill, and just Plant That Shit. Otherwise you’ve got to have stored last year’s corn away from the rats and mold, then screened it to make sure you’re not going to try to feed a rock through your corn drill. Ever try to get a rock out of one of those? You gotta shut down the tractor, climb under the drill, and try to get the thing out with a steel rod and a hammer. But more to the point – you plant your corn from last year’s crop and 5% of it doesn’t germinate because you didn’t store it perfectly. Or worse – want to talk about monoculture? Who gives a shit about monoculture if your seed corn doesn’t germinate because it had a fungus infection and half the seed is dead in the bag?

    There are probably a few farmers that reseed from their previous harvest. But they’re crazies or amateurs. Farmers buy seed because it’s easier and better and rational farmers have no interest in adding extra work to work that is already backbreaking or soul-destroyingly difficult. Farmers don’t buy seed from Monsanto because they are forced to, they do it because it is easy and good. They aren’t going to be penny-wise and pound foolish and risk getting 20 acres worth of yield out of 60 acres of land and going out of business because of the fuel cost of bringing in a shit harvest.

  60. says

    which means that farmers don’t own the seeds they originally buy

    The farmers don’t give a shit about that. They just want the seeds to germinate. They have enough to worry about and are probably completely unimpressed with anti-GMO weenies telling them that they should care. I’m sure you can always find a farmer who’ll complain that they wish they could play less for their seed. Of course they wish that.

    You know who else has farmers over a barrel?! “Big mecha” does. Its like nobody wants to farm by hand anymore!! You gotta have machines and shit! Or you can’t bring in the big crops!

    Farmers don’t give a shit about that, either.

    Sure you can search around and find some moonbeam who’s gonna say they’re a farmer but if you look at what the profitable and successful farmers are doing, well, they aren’t fucking Amish and they absolutely love roundup-ready crops. Btw, being able to clear a field with roundup sprayed with light equipment saves a whole lot of time and fuel over having to plow it and turn it and having to deal with weeds.

  61. unclefrogy says

    Assuming the laws are enforced–a dubious assumption when discussing big business in the US–

    the relevant part in any discussion is that. There is ample evidence to support such suspicion so I would say that the distrust of GMO agriculture I would include aqua culture here as well is completely understandable. It is not so much that I think GMO’s are bad theoretically as much as I do not really trust how they are being implemented, there seems to be a conflict of interest here between what may be good for the environment and people long term and the profit for those developing and marketing the products including those both selling the seeds and the farmers selling the produce of the seeds.
    Yes I know the farmers should be concerned with the long term productivity and health of their farms and the environment but past experience would indicate that that is not always the case, . Some times what was thought of as a good idea turned out to be a disaster.
    In resent history farmers have been sued in court and lost for patent infringement so that does happen right here in the good old USA.
    Yes there may be many many varieties of a given crop plant in existence that is only one part of the farmers equation there is actual availability, who is growing that variety for seed production , and what is the price of it.
    There are many factors that go into what a farmer decides to do to make a profit because that is what he needs to do.
    things do not happen in the field in the same way they do in the lab
    uncle frogy

  62. jacksprocket says

    “only after copius study (often in collaboration with non-profit groups such as universities). ”

    Pardon my cynical response. Universities may be non- profit (sometimes) but they are certainly avid for funding. And that raises the question of what the research, copious of otherwise, is into. The question most often asked may possibly be, are our arses covered?

    To be sure, GMO seeds aren’t going to kill us (until the ISIS GMO research program takes off), but to return to the cartoon, where people are hungry in the world, it’s seldom (or never) because hippy dippy weeny greenies won’t let them use GMO seeds, and often (or always) because it’s in the interests of international commerce to let them starve, or there’s no money to be made from filling their stomachs. And corporations advocating GMOs aren’t doing it because they are crusading against world hunger. They are crusading for corporation profit, and a sure way to do this is to gain a de- facto monopoly. If you concentrate on the biological aspects of GMO, you haven’t a hope of understanding why people oppose it.

  63. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    @jacksprocket, 62

    If you concentrate on the biological aspects of GMO, you haven’t a hope of understanding why people oppose it.

    If you’re simply opposing GMOs because capitalism is anti-humanistic filth… I don’t even know where to go with that. Why are you wasting time on technology that could feed the world if not for the capitalist disregard of humanity? The Luddites had a valid point, a genuine cause for anger, but smashing power looms was not the solution to their problem. We cannot destroy capitalism by destroying tools whose value exists irrespective of its dominion. Concentrating on the social, political, ethical aspects of GMO, I haven’t a hope of understanding why people oppose it. Because it makes no sense.

  64. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    And corporations advocating GMOs aren’t doing it because they are crusading against world hunger. They are crusading for corporation profit, and a sure way to do this is to gain a de- facto monopoly.

    Monopoly on what? Soybeans? Or a certain brand of soybean that is herbicide resistant, giving the FARMER less costs (and more profit for them) for the same yield. Nobody has to buy the GMO soybeans. Any farmer can stick to the old methods, and seeds are still available.

  65. says

    Marcus @ 60:

    The farmers don’t give a shit about that.

    Yes they do. They give a big, huge shit about that. There’s a hell of a lot of resentment over having to pay for seed and ending up locked into an agreement which seriously inhibits the way they want to farm. It’s one of the reasons for the silage trap still going strong.

    Farmers don’t give a shit about that, either.

    Yes they do. The equipment needed to farm and profit anymore creates massive fucking debt, and more and more, farmers simply can’t ever climb out from under that debt.

    Signed,
    lives in farm country and knows a fucktonne of farmers.

  66. Jackson says

    There’s a hell of a lot of resentment over having to pay for seed and ending up locked into an agreement which seriously inhibits the way they want to farm.

    Can you give any specifics about what you mean here? Farmers aren’t just “ending up” in agreements to not replant. They sign the agreements before they get and plant the seed, and they are fully aware about not being allowed to replant patented seed. Are you only referring to replanting when you say they are inhibited by use agreements, or are you including agreements making farmers plant refuge areas for Bt crops when they don’t want to?

  67. jacksprocket says

    “Why are you wasting time on technology that could feed the world if not for the capitalist disregard of humanity?”

    GMO can not and will not solve any food problems because the problem isn’t biological, it’s economic and social. It’s naive and blinkered to look at technical fixes when the problem isn’t technical. Don’t take it from me, take it from the UN World Food Programme:
    https://www.wfp.org/hunger/causes

    But of course the UN is an international commie conspiracy against US entreprenooers.

  68. Jackson says

    GMO can not and will not solve any food problems because the problem isn’t biological, it’s economic and social.

    Let’s take the example of a small cassava farmer in rural Nigeria. The bulk of their and their family’s calories come from cassava, and they are all iron and zinc deficient. They are also at high risk of having their field wiped out due to white flies transmitting brown streak disease to their crop, causing them to go hungry. Do you think that this farmer having access to cassava that is virus resistant and biofortified with iron and zinc would help with this problem? Or would eating foods higher in the nutrients you are deficient in not work because of capitalism?

  69. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    @jacksprocket, 67

    GMO can not and will not solve any food problems because the problem isn’t biological, it’s economic and social. It’s naive and blinkered to look at technical fixes when the problem isn’t technical.

    It’s naive and blinkered to assume that the problem is only one thing. And utterly absurd to rail against technical fixes because there are also economic and social problems that need fixes.
    (Quick show of e-hands, people – does a single person here, pro- or anti-GMO deny the existence of problems in distribution, infrastructure, and basic will that are in need of tackling? Anyone?)

    But of course the UN is an international commie conspiracy against US entreprenooers.

    If only. We might actually have a chance of a decent world in our lifetimes if that were the case.
    Oh wait, sorry, I’m the capitalist in this situation, aren’t I? I mean… uh… go smoke a monkey, hippy!
    Yeah!
    …that’s the sort of thing those arseholes come out with, right?

  70. Jake Harban says

    I certainly find it objectionable if they do not recognise the important differences between them – for example, with respect to greenhouse gas emissions.

    But presumably, you do not believe driving and flying should be banned?

    Perhaps I should have compared driving an ordinary gas-powered car with driving an electric car that uses a solar panel to recharge itself. Conflating the two into the general category of “driving” sure is objectionable, huh?

    My objection, of course, was to the pretence that there is no significant difference between modern biotechnology and older techniques. The debate ought to hinge on the possible advantages and disadvantages of the new techniques, and who benefits from them, not semantic quibbles.

    That’d be great, but it’s a bit tricky for the debate to hinge on the advantages of the new techniques when one side starts with the unquestionable assumption that the new techniques are bad by definition and must be banned.

    “GMO” is itself a semantic quibble— all crops and livestock are genetically modified, so “GMO” relies on the assumption that certain kinds of modifications don’t count because of reasons.

    Yes, medical research should be a public sector endeavour, not subject to commercial decisions about what is going to be most profitable. Are you really naive enough to think that pharmaceutical megacorps prioritise maximising public health?

    False dichotomy. You implied that anything produced by a megacorp is bad. That this premise is false does not imply that anything produced by a megacorp is good.

    When something that benefits the public is also profitable, a megacorp will do it.

    Further to #29, vaccines are not, in fact, big earners for pharmaceutical companies, and the number of companies making them is in decline for that reason.

    But hey, why let mere facts get in the way of a nice rhetorical device?

    Then feel free to substitute the medicine of your choice. I originally used vaccines because: “A large corporation makes a profit doing it, therefore it is evil!” is the same argument anti-vaxxers use, and the anti-GMO and anti-vaxxer crowd are similar enough to have appeared side by side on the original poster.

    However, plenty of other medicines (which are more profitable) work just as well in this example, so your semantic quibble is irrelevant.

    It’s interesting that two of the anti-organic-agriculture or pro-GMO points made here turn entirely on semantic quibbles. Why would that be, do you think?

    Those aren’t arguments as such; they’re just snarky dismissals. Organic/anti-GMO nuts deliberately use misleading language, so we pretend to be misled in humorous fashion.

    This is a blog about biology catering to an audience which is at least generally scientifically literate. Snarkily dismissing creationists, anti-GMO nuts, and that guy who thought we could breed super-intelligent people is just what we do.

  71. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    …hold on.
    @jacksprocket. 67 again:

    “Why are you wasting time on technology that could feed the world if not for the capitalist disregard of humanity?”
    GMO can not and will not solve any food problems because the problem isn’t biological, it’s economic and social. It’s naive and blinkered to look at technical fixes when the problem isn’t technical.

    How the hell do you quote me indirectly pointing to the economic and social issues that are mostly based in the capitalist disregard for humanity, and then act as if I’m unaware of the economic and social issues and interested only in technical solutions?
    I want to see technical solutions for the problem of food production, because there are limitations on what the available farming land on our planet is capable of producing, and while, yes, that limit is currently above the amount needed to feed everyone, it will not always be so. I also want to see that capitalist disregard for humanity eradicated, because the ability to feed everyone counts for jack shit if the will isn’t there.

  72. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    The bulk of their and their family’s calories come from cassava, and they are all iron and zinc deficient.

    Cassava also contains a cyanoglucoside, linamarin, which requires long boiling time to safely remove. Removing it would be beneficial, as less boiling time would be needed for safe food consumption, hence less greenhouse gas emissions.

  73. jacksprocket says

    “How the hell do you quote me .. and then act as if I’m unaware of the economic and social issues and interested only in technical solutions?”

    “If you’re simply opposing GMOs because capitalism is anti-humanistic filth… I don’t even know where to go with that.”

    Have cake. Eat it.

  74. says

    Caine@#65
    Yes they do. They give a big, huge shit about that. There’s a hell of a lot of resentment over having to pay for seed and ending up locked into an agreement which seriously inhibits the way they want to farm

    Like I said – you’ll never have trouble finding a farmer willing to complain about the cost of seed. But nobody that’s seriously farming is reseeding from their haul; germination rates are lower and the risk of losing an entire crop is too high. So yes they give a big huge shit about costs and they’re going to point to anything they can to complain about it but they’re going to plant the seeds that give the best yield for the cost.

    I let the farmer up the street do 100 acres of my land in corn. There are farmers all over my area and none of them seed from their own crop. So I’ll have to see your “lives in farm country and knows a fucktonne of farmers” and raise you 100+ acres under cultivation.

    Seriously, tell me how many of those farmers around you aren’t using roundup-ready seed? Sure, the seed is more expensive but the entire lifecycle of no till is cheaper and crops better. Farmers will complain. That’s farming.

    I have my share of issues with capitalism, rentier landownership (I do not charge land usage for the guy who farms my land: he keeps the soil limed and mows my cattle pasturage) I totally understand that farmers get screwed all the time. But telling them not to use GMO/no till seed is screwing them even worse. Plus, no till causes less runoff damage by a long shot. And it’s easier on your equipment, which is a huge issue.

    Farming is not a simple problem on a single axis where you can point and say “farmers are complaining, therefore (simple solution)” from outside. If you know lots of farmers you know there’s always something to complain about. A lot of those complaints equate to complaints against capitalism, not GMO. If you offered roundup ready seed at a cheaper price they’d cheer you for several minutes until they started complaining about predatory lending from the big ag equipment companies. The problem isn’t GMO its that there are a lot of parasites that eat into farmers’ profits.

  75. says

    GMO can not and will not solve any food problems

    All the people who currently subsist on high yield rice and wheat would probably disagree with that.

  76. bryanfeir says

    I let the farmer up the street do 100 acres of my land in corn. There are farmers all over my area and none of them seed from their own crop.

    From my understanding (take that for what it’s worth), even non-GMO modern corn is such a hybrid that it pretty much can’t be used to seed from its own crop reliably. Too many genes with bad recessive possibilities similar to the sickle-cell gene: great if you have one copy of them, and death if you have two copies. You want to produce seed stock, you pretty much have to have dedicated farms for at least two different germ-lines and then cross-breed them for the seeds.

    It can be even worse for apples: pretty much all modern apple cultivars can’t be bred at all, and are replicated by cuttings instead.

  77. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Non-GMO corn is still being grown. A lot a products made from corn starch are used in the Pharma industry, and the place I worked for made chemicals from that starch that was used in that industry. The corn starch was processed to other chemicals before we saw it. But the quality departments for those Pharma companies wanted to see a non-GMO certificate, even though we were further purifying the material. And they were willing to pay a premium.
    We scientists there had to laugh at the certificate. There was no way to absolutely verify that no GMO corn was grown within wind-borne pollen range of the non-GMO corn, no way to verify that the harvesting equipment and trucks carrying the corn to the initial processor was not previously used for GMO corn, or that once at the processor no cross-contamination occurred during transfer.

  78. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    All the people who currently subsist on high yield rice and wheat would probably disagree with that.

    Definitely, example of Norman Borlaug and dwarf wheat.

    In 1944 Borlaug, trained as a plant pathologist, left the U.S. for Mexico to fight stem rust, a fungus that infects wheat, at the invitation of the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. He and his colleagues spent the next decade crossing thousands of strains of wheat from across the globe, ultimately developing a high-yielding, disease resistant variety. Unfortunately, it couldn’t stand, heavy with grain.
    So Borlaug crossed it again with Japanese dwarf wheat to produce a so-called semidwarf wheat, both shorter (and therefore not prone to tipping over with all that extra grain at the tip) as well as disease-resistant and amenable to fertilization. Where the variety was planted, yields soared.
    First Mexico, where he did the work, became self-sufficient in grain (in what was dubbed the “Quiet Wheat Revolution”). Then India and Pakistan, where yields doubled. Paired with similar strains developed for rice and other cereals, a “Green Revolution” was evident in the fields of Asia and helped stave off apocalyptic famine predictions.
    “There are no miracles in agricultural production,” Borlaug said, but as a result of this increase in food production, millions of lives were saved and Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

    Emphasis mine.

  79. Kreator says

    GMOs will solve world hunger = the Singularity will solve all social issues, let’s just wait for mind uploading! (Yes, I know the views expressed in here are way more nuanced than that, but I just couldn’t resist making the comparison.)

  81. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    “How the hell do you quote me .. and then act as if I’m unaware of the economic and social issues and interested only in technical solutions?”
    “If you’re simply opposing GMOs because capitalism is anti-humanistic filth… I don’t even know where to go with that.”
    Have cake. Eat it.

    This isn’t a case of my attempting to have my cake and eat it. It’s you being incapable of separating two concepts because they interact with one another on some level.
    The Haber process has literal blood on its metaphorical hands. Is it having my cake and eating it to oppose the slaughter of WWI while not wanting billions of people to starve today?
    Genetic modification and capitalism are not the same thing. I oppose capitalism because it leads directly to pain and misery around the world. I do not oppose genetic modification because it does not. The fact that GMOs are packaged and sold by capitalists is no more to the point than that synthetic ammonia was used to create weapons of war, or that pesticides have been used to commit genocide.
    Capitalism is a cancer that is killing humanity. Genetic modification is a tool.

  82. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    @chigau

    So, we’re all in agreement on War, Pestilence and Death?

    Oh, no, vaccines totally cause Autism. :P
    *leaps out of the path of a flying pan*

  83. Vivec says

    See, I figured that famine was representing affluent hipsters who are all into organic superfoods and being environmentally friendly, when their food hipsterism leads to environmentally devastating cash cropping and driving up the prices beyond the price range of local farmers.

  84. snodorum says

    @75 (Marcus Ranum), @78, Nerd of Redhead

    Yes, artificial selection has “genetically modified” the crops for thousands of years, but no one using the term “GMO” is referring to the cultivated crops that have been artificially selected over ~10,000 years.

    Saying “all crops are GMO” is a failure to distinguish the process of creating a transgenic crop from conventional breeding. Because it is different, and we all know it. With GM crops, DNA can be introduced beyond the previously accessible gene pools, even across kingdoms (!). Or viral DNA can be introduced for gene silencing. It’s pretty awesome. And it is different.

    It’s dishonest and distracting to intentionally confound GMO crops (i.e. transgenic/cisgenic crops) with conventionally bred materials. It is different from conventional breeding (and mutagenesis). It is a novel technology. And most importantly, it’s demonstrated to be safe. It reflects poorly on proponents of biotechnology when we refuse to genuinely acknowledge the concerns of others.

  85. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Because it is different, and we all know it.

    Nope. YOU LIE.

  86. says

    From the link @67:

    … making more resistant seed types available can bring big improvements.

    The WFP does indeed recognise the need for a technical solution to food problems.

  87. says

    GMOs will solve world hunger

    GMOs are currently solving world hunger.

    If you took GMOs out of food production loads of people would die.

  89. numerobis says

    I remember in my youth the smoke from the farmers burning their fields and turning them over to be just raw dirt all winter long. Doesn’t happen much anymore, because roundup-ready crops enabled no-till agriculture to be high-yield. Before GMOs, burning and tilling were the method of choice — at least in southeast NB — to keep the weeds down.

    No-till means more soil carbon which is good for both fertilization and for carbon intensity, and it retains soil moisture better which is usually good for irrigation (not always: if your soil is too wet to start with, you don’t want to improve its moisture retention!)

  90. says

    Snowdorum@#84:
    It’s dishonest and distracting to intentionally confound GMO crops (i.e. transgenic/cisgenic crops) with conventionally bred materials.

    I have been referring to roundup ready crops. Anyone who is doing no till agriculture is using GMO.

    You can bend over backwards and try to say that oh that’s not GMO but that’s bullshit. And roundup ready GMO crops have been hugely productive since the 70s and everyone who’s screaming “no GMO” probably has depended on GMO since their childhood. The GMO train has left the station; the remaining issues worth arguing about are cost/benefit on the seed and fuel and equipment cost.

  93. unclefrogy says

    from where I sit the adamantly anti-GMO people are just about the same as the devout pro-GMO people there is no one simple complete answer to this or any of the other problems of this type. It seems to me that even a superficial look at how will we feed all the people that does not address the population growth that is eating all this food is not facing reality. We have to live where theory meets reality and take into consideration our proclivity to occasionally fail to follow through with due care.
    uncle frogy

  94. bryanfeir says

    Or viral DNA can be introduced for gene silencing.

    Isn’t that one of those things that has been happening naturally for millions of years anyway? Endogenous Retro-Virus, anybody? Again, it’s not new, it’s not different, it’s just that we can do specific targeting rather than waiting for random luck.

  95. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Almost all food crop modifications is using genes already out in the environment.
    There are genes being used that are truly manufactured, but they are normal confined to bacterial plasmids and used in the Pharma industry for “biologics”. Needless to say, these organisms under tight control. The bacteria grow in normal media to multiply, then the broth is changed and a new broth that also contains the cofactor to turn on the genes is infused. The bacteria start making the proteins like insulin, Tumor Necrosis Factor Inhibitors (arthritis and various other immune system problems), various known cancers with treatable modifications, and vaccines.

  96. numerobis says

    Marcus@90: vast fields of monoculture are also a problem, independent of GMO or not. They’re terrible for wildlife, and more susceptible to disease outbreaks (and you lose more when that happens).

    But you can’t as easily mechanize a field of corn-and-beans. I wonder how long until robotics improves that problem.

  97. Jake Harban says

    Saying “all crops are GMO” is a failure to distinguish the process of creating a transgenic crop from conventional breeding. Because it is different, and we all know it.

    The process is different. The end result is the same. Once it’s on your plate, it doesn’t matter how it got there. Moreover, the term “genetically modified organism” is misleading specifically because it implies something false; that these organisms were subjected to genetic modification in a way that others were not.

    Suppose I were to start a massive panic about “electric fields.” What’s an electric field? Well, when solar panels are used to generate electric current, that current creates an electric field which causes considerable damage to people nearby. If your house receives solar power, there are dangerous electric fields everywhere! In order to protect yourself, demand that laws be passed to mandate non-EF power plants and giving you the right to receive only non-EF power from your local utility.

    Obviously, the panic would be absurd. The health claims are completely unsubstantiated by evidence. It would, in fact, be physically impossible for them to occur, as electric current does not vary based on what sort of fuel was used to create it.

    Of course, if you were to claim that the process of generating electricity from a solar panel differs from the process of generating it by burning coal, then you would be correct. However, (a) the distinction is irrelevant, (b) making it is likely to exacerbate the needless panic, and (c) objecting to the scientifically meaningless term “electric field” as used by the panic proponents and/or insisting on the correct usage of the term is legitimate— neither a semantic quibble nor a fallacious argument.

  99. jacksprocket says

    “…when their food hipsterism leads to environmentally devastating cash cropping and driving up the prices beyond the price range of local farmers.”

    Then why does the panel mention “GMO is good for everyone” when that’s irrelevant to hipsterogenic cash cropping? Land and water taken out of use for growing staples for local consumption by the cash crops flown to European supermarkets is equally taken out of use for GMO staples for local consumption.

    “Capitalism is a cancer that is killing humanity. Genetic modification is a tool.”

    But as things stand it’s not a useful tool in alleviating hunger. Produce a GMO cassava that will grow without water, doesn’t cost anything up front and can still be grown by the farmer when she becomes a refugee from community violence or war, or when corporations take over her land, and you’ll be scratching at the real problem. Oh, and it doesn’t need fertilizer or pesticides, because she hasn’t got the capital for those either.

  100. militantagnostic says

    Marcus Ranum

    I don’t care if my lettuce has flounder DNA in it, as long as it’s crisp and nutritious! Why should I? It’s not like it’s going to sap my precious bodily fluids, purity of essence, or whatever.

    Have you ever seen a Communist eat a leaf of GFO lettuce?

  101. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Produce a GMO cassava that will grow without water, doesn’t cost anything up front and can still be grown by the farmer when she becomes a refugee from community violence or war, or when corporations take over her land, and you’ll be scratching at the real problem.

    Argument ad absurdum. You are being absurd. Try again with some realistic.

  102. Jake Harban says

    Actually, argument ad absurdum is the legitimate tactic of demonstrating that a position must be false because an absurd conclusion logically follows from it.

    This is more like all or nothing thinking— either genetically engineered crops will completely solve world hunger, or they have no benefit whatsoever.

  103. snodorum says

    All the people who currently subsist on high yield rice and wheat would probably disagree with that.
    …
    I have been referring to roundup ready crops. Anyone who is doing no till agriculture is using GMO.
    …
    I meant 90’s not 70’s

    @75,90,92 Marcus Ramun

    I was mistaken. I thought you (and Nerd of Redhead) were But you have to forgive my mistake, because there is no RoundUp Ready rice or wheat. In fact there is no commercially available genetically modified rice or wheat at all. Of course, I am using “genetically modified” in the strict sense to mean “genetically engineered”.

    And yeah you are right. RoundUp ready has been around for decades, and it has greatly simplified weed control. Again, you are right that use of herbicides has allowed for reduced tillage. However, you are mistaken that anyone doing no till is using GMO crops. There are plenty of herbicides that work on non-GMO crops based on selectivity. For example, you can spray an full rate of an ACCase inhibitor on your soybeans and not worry, because that mode of action only hits grasses. Also, there have are alternatives to tilling like mulching, shielded/directed sprayers, flame removal, air blast, and even hand weeding (which seems crazy, but is necessary in some high value, perennial crops).

    Isn’t that one of those things that has been happening naturally for millions of years anyway? Endogenous Retro-Virus, anybody? Again, it’s not new, it’s not different, it’s just that we can do specific targeting rather than waiting for random luck.

    @94bryanfeir

    I agree. As a phenomenon, it is not new for a host to carry viral genomes. But it is unique that a viral sequence would be inserted in a agrobacterium mediated event, right? Agrobacterium regularly inserts plasmids into hosts (causing crown galls), so that is technically a naturally occurring event too. But is it fair to equate these events with the intentional introduction of functional genes into the genome? I don’t think so. These transgenic technologies are a unique utilization of existing biological phenomena.

    So maybe it’s not new, per se. But the unique set of circumstances surrounding this genetic manipulation does justify a distinction. That’s why I think it’s misleading to call all crops genetically modified.

  104. snodorum says

    Sorry, I made an editing typo when addressing Marcus Ramun in @103. It should read:

    I was mistaken. I thought you (and Nerd of Redhead) were talking about the Green Revolution. But you have to…

  105. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    But is it fair to equate these events with the intentional introduction of functional genes into the genome? I don’t think so.

    Yep. Intention doesn’t matter, results do. Horizontal gene transfer occurs in plants. You can’t trace every gene to archaic wheat, rice, corn, barley, etc. They picked up beneficial traits, and humans amplified them. Same as with what you consider GMO, from the scientific, not denialist, perspective. All living organisms are genetically modified. How doesn’t matter as much as that they are. Which is why scientists have trouble with your definitions.

  106. Amphiox says

    But is it fair to equate these events with the intentional introduction of functional genes into the genome? I don’t think so. These transgenic technologies are a unique utilization of existing biological phenomena.

    Plowing fields is a unique utilization of existing metallurgical phenomena.

    Selective breeding is an unique utilization of existing hereditary phenomena.

    Sewing clothing is an unique utilization of existing thermodynamic phenomena.

    FARMING ITSELF is an unique utilization of existing botanical phenomena.

    ALL human technologies are intentional unique utilization of existing phenomena. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, special about GMO technology in this context.

  107. snodorum says

    @105

    You can mislead others by equating the two terms all you want. But everywhere you see GMO, you should be smart enough and charitable enough to understand that the individual is referring to transgenic/cisgenic crops via genetic engineering.

  108. Amphiox says

    But it is unique that a viral sequence would be inserted in a agrobacterium mediated event, right?

    This is also not true. Viral sequences can be inserted in natural horizontal gene transfer events mediated by bacteria. The bacteria merely needs to have been infected by the virus in the past, and have some viral genes transferred to it, that it can then transfer to something else.

    And viral genes getting transferred into bacterial genomes is a fairly common occurrence.

  109. snodorum says

    Holy cow. Y’all are disappointing. I’m going to excuse myself.

    Be well, everyone.

  110. Amphiox says

    But everywhere you see GMO, you should be smart enough and charitable enough to understand that the individual is referring to transgenic/cisgenic crops via genetic engineering.

    What Nerd is saying that whenever an individual is doing this, he or she is referring to a distinction that has no biological validity.

  111. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    But everywhere you see GMO, you should be smart enough and charitable enough to understand that the individual is referring to transgenic/cisgenic crops via genetic engineering.

    Fine, show me the physical evidence, like a statistically unnatural nucleotide, that says this modification is man made, not natural. DNA is DNA.

  112. Amphiox says

    Because it is different, and we all know it. With GM crops, DNA can be introduced beyond the previously accessible gene pools, even across kingdoms (!).

    No, it is not different. There is no such thing as “DNA beyond the previously accessible gene pools”. Thanks to horizontal gene transfer, the entire biosphere is a single gene pool. There are no absolute barriers, just differences in the frequency of gene transfer events between different parts of the pool. It doesn’t happen often (for an arbitrary definition of “often”) but DNA transfers across kingdoms all the time. In fact, DNA transfer readily across whole domains (bacteria to archea to eukarya and vice versa). In fact the mechanisms of natural horizontal gene transfer are completely blind and don’t care one whit about the definitional distinctions between domains and kingdoms and orders and families and genera and species – those are all human inventions.

    Round-up (glycophosphate) targets a receptor known as EPSPS. There are versions of EPSPS in both plants and bacteria, and some of the bacterial EPSPS versions are resistant to glycophosphate. There is nothing in nature that would prevent a horizontal gene transfer event from transferring the resistant bacterial gene into a plant. If instead of doing the transfer directly, plant breeders had discovered a strain of corn where this particular horizontal gene transfer, and then selectively bred that strain, the end result would be functional INDISTINGUISHABLE biologically from round-up ready corn as it exists today.

    Furthermore, the differences between the resistant bacterial EPSPS gene and the plant version are relatively minor. There is similarly nothing in nature that would prevent a plant EPSPS gene from becoming resistant to glycophosphate by random mutation of its own EPSPS gene, and nothing to prevent that mutation from producing a EPSPS sequence functionally indistinguishable, if not outright identical, to the bacterial EPSPS gene. If instead of doing the direct gene transfer, plant scientists had simply exposed corn plants experimentally to glycophosphate until a resistance conferring mutation occurred, and then selectively bred that mutant, the end result with similarly be functionally and biologically indistinguishable from round-up ready corn as it exists today.

  113. consciousness razor says

    Amphiox:

    What Nerd is saying that whenever an individual is doing this, he or she is referring to a distinction that has no biological validity.

    Why should anyone have cared about that specific distinction? Aren’t there plenty of others to talk about?

    This is a real gem right here, from Jake Harban:

    The process is different. The end result is the same. Once it’s on your plate, it doesn’t matter how it got there.

    This means that you only care about whether the “results” on your plate are the same (or close enough to the same). Why? The “process” has other effects than what appears on your plate. With different physical processes, you do in fact get different results. Some results may be similar, but others must be different, or else we had no business discerning between the “two” physical processes to begin with. So it does matter how it got there, your assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.

    Why choose to focus on that particular sort of effect instead of any of the others? What makes you think you can safely assume the rest is irrelevant? If you don’t believe something like that, what do believe this argument is supposed to be good for?

  114. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Why? The “process” has other effects than what appears on your plate.

    What are those effects? No answer, you don’t know, and aren’t looking for the data. The non-GMO folks never mention what those effects really are. Just that they must be bad without evidence.

  115. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Keep in mind I did mention above in #95 some real GMO, truly man-made peptides, that if released, might have effects in the environment. Want your arthritis pain to be diminished???? Maybe this will biological help. (I see these commercials all the time on certain channels targeted at seniors.)

  116. wzrd1 says

    @Nerd of Redhead, which is more cool? The e. coli that produces insulin or the goat whose nipples spin spider silk?
    Personally, I’m for the e. coli, at least that’s saving human lives. :)

  117. says

    http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1970/borlaug-lecture.html

    Norman Borlaug’s nobel prize acceptance speech is pretty good. And rather pointed:

    The green revolution has an entirely different meaning to most people in the affluent nations of the privileged world than to those in the developing nations of the forgotten world. In the affluent, industrialized nations giant surpluses of wheat, maize, and sorghum are commonplace; cattle, swine, and poultry are fed and fattened on cereal grains; meat, milk, eggs, fruits, and vegetables are within the economic reach of most of the population; well-balanced diets are more or less automatically achieved, and cereal products constitute only a modest portion of the “daily bread”. Consequently, most of the people in such societies have difficulty in comprehending and appreciating the vital significance of providing high-yielding strains of wheat, rice, maize, sorghum, and millet for the people of the developing nations. Understandably then, the majority of the urbanites in the industrialized nations have forgotten the significance of the words they learned as youngsters, “Give us this day our daily bread”. They know that food comes from the supermarket, but only a few see beyond to the necessary investments, the toil, struggle, and frustrations on the farms and ranches that provide their daily bread. Since the urbanites have lost their contact with the soil, they take food for granted and fail to appreciate the tremendous efficiency of their farmers and ranchers, who, although constituting only five percent of the labor force in a country such as the United States, produce more than enough food for their nation

    By “urbanites” I believe Borlaug meant “hipsters who shop at whole foods”

  118. says

    In fact there is no commercially available genetically modified rice or wheat at all.

    Your ignorance license is hereby revoked.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice

    Golden rice is a variety of rice (Oryza sativa) produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the edible parts of rice.[1] It is intended to produce a fortified food to be grown and consumed in areas with a shortage of dietary vitamin A,[2] a deficiency which is estimated to kill 670,000 children under the age of 5 each year.[3]

    Why do you hate third world kids so much, or are you just an ignorant hipster who stopped by for a wank on your way to Whole Foods?

  120. says

    However, you are mistaken that anyone doing no till is using GMO crops.

    Wtf are you smoking?! I had 60 acres of roundup ready corn right outside my motherfucking window and have for the last umpty years. Do you think corn was magically roundup ready? No: it was genetically altered to be roundup ready.

    I didnt say that all no till is GMO. But there is loads of GMO no till and if you’re eating no till corn for sure it’s GMO. If you’re drinking corn syrup sweetener in your yummy smoothie it’s GMO. If you’ve eaten no till soybeans (most soybeans since 1996 or so) its GMO.

    Guess what?!?! Its soybeans.

    Even if the stems and leaves were made with fucking manatee DNA if the coding that makes the plant produce soybeans makes soybeans that are indistinguishable from other soybeans, you’re eating soybeans. You can call it a flounderbean plant if you like as long as its producing soybeans they’re going to affect your body just like any other soybean.

  121. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    @Nerd of Redhead, which is more cool? The e. coli that produces insulin or the goat whose nipples spin spider silk?

    No doubt, the e. coli that produces human insulin is more important to humans, and avoids the species antigen attacks, but as a scientist, I dig the spider silk in the goat’s milk. A much bigger feat.

  122. says

    Numerobis@#96:
    vast fields of monoculture are also a problem, independent of GMO or not. They’re terrible for wildlife, and more susceptible to disease outbreaks (and you lose more when that happens).

    Monoculture is terrible for wildlife how?

    And monocultures are emphatically NOT more susceptible to disease outbreaks. Especially not if the monoculture is resistant to existing diseases and blights! In that case your crop is much less likely to fail than if you went back to an heirloom strain. Which strains, btw, still exist. In the event that a particular mutation of a disease wiped out a particular monoculture of other disease-resistant crop then – yeah, its just like the Irish potato blight that drove my starving ancestors across the water to America. But with disease-resistant monocultures that’s vastly less likely to happen.

    Basically you appear to be saying “monoculture is baaaaaad!” But don’t understand how diseases impact monocultures, or pretty much anything about the history of phyloxera or the potato blights or the current banana crop and cocoa bean blights. Bananas are a good example: first off they’re an accidental monoculture (which has evolved) and the response to banana blight will be nice big GMO blight resistant bananas. Or: no fucking bananas. Your choice. PS: whole foods will still be selling bananas, guess if they’ll be GMO.

  123. wzrd1 says

    Nerd of Redhead, I’ll be truly impressed when those goat nipples are modified into spinnerets. :)
    More seriously, there is a chance for some useful biotechnologies to come out of that as well. Artificial tendons alone would be a great boon to humanity.

  124. says

    Ps – the reason there is, for example, a banana monoculture is because there’s a particular strain (i forget which) that is especially yummy yet durable. So that’s what everyone grows because that’s what everyone buys. Now there is a blight. You have 2 choices:
    1) go back to an heirloom strain (except, oops, it dies of the blight TOO)
    2) GMO some banana and continue to have yummy bananas

    The end result is you wind up again with a monoculture – a monoculture of bananas that don’t die and are yummy. Now, aside from the ideology that “waaaa! Monoculture is BAD!” Can you explain what is a bad thing about continuing to have lots of yummy bananas instead of having a very few insanely expensive and blotchy bananas?

  126. wzrd1 says

    Why not a bit of both, Marcus? I really love those small red bananas on occasion. :)
    Not a justification for diversification, but a suggestion of widening selections overall, within reason.
    That said, the rest of the time, I go for what sells and isn’t blighted, splotchy and halfway rotten. :)

  127. wzrd1 says

    Don’t you first have to cure that pork first, to find out if it tastes like bacon?
    Or at least smoke it and salt it for uncured bacon? :)

    Otherwise, it’d taste like regular pork roast.

  128. consciousness razor says

    Nerd:

    What are those effects? No answer, you don’t know, and aren’t looking for the data. The non-GMO folks never mention what those effects really are. Just that they must be bad without evidence.

    There’s abundant evidence that there are other effects, and if there weren’t we’d have to rethink some basic fucking physics which you probably take for granted every day. Call it good or bad or neutral later if you want, but denying the fact that there are other effects is pointless bullshit.

    It’s like claiming a dynamite bomb and a nuclear bomb are the same (or similar), because the end result of blowing stuff up is the same (or similar), therefore other effects beyond successfully blowing up that particular stuff (1) don’t matter or (2) don’t exist. That kind of “reasoning” makes no fucking sense. I’m not generally opposed to GMOs, because in certain cases it seems the benefits outweigh whatever harms there may be — in case it helps you somehow to know something about my position instead of assuming it on the basis of no evidence — but I don’t need to take any sort of position about any of that to recognize arguments like this simply don’t work to establish anything useful about the facts. They’re only “good” for trying to win a pissing match of a “debate.”

  129. says

    BTW – watch all the hipsters attitude toward GMO change when some hero produces a roundup ready version of marijuana or coca. If you do the latter there are some people in central america who will make you very rich (or very dead depending on your negotiating skills)

  130. wzrd1 says

    Well, to be a bit pedantic about explosives and their usage and as one who is quite proficient at explosive demolitions, including the usage of atomic demolition munitions, there are two primary areas of interest in their uses.
    Brisance, aka “shattering” power, heat for cutting and void creation and finally overpressure effects upon structures.
    Both are essentially the same in final effects, just scaled upward massively for nuclear demolition.
    But, to operate a controlled building implosion, the conventional explosive would be far more effective, as it could controllably cut what would otherwise be uncontrollable in effects in an atomic demolition. That’s just an effect of scale really, due to the much larger and more potent thermal pulse from the nuclear device.

  132. snodorum says

    @122 Marcus
    It was a misunderstanding. I see now that the way I phrased it frees you from your original statement.

    I have been referring to roundup ready crops. Anyone who is doing no till agriculture is using GMO.
    @90 Marcus Ranum

    But there are people who practice no-till without using GMO. Then I gave some examples of how that is achieved. My phrasing wasn’t the best. So I can see how it confused you.

    I’m not trying to get you with every slip up you’ve made. It’s not productive. You were decades off in your first guess about the release of roundup ready technology. You were wrong when you (apparently) suggested that rice and wheat are roundup ready. I just look past that and try to the best form of your argument.

  133. snodorum says

    I don’t know how I have been slipped into the category of hipster who rejects GMOs and shops at whole foods. I fully support the implementation of this technology and have never suggested that it is unsafe for consumption. I have stated that genetic engineering is an interesting tool that can be implemented in an integrated pest management system. It can achieve a lot of cool things beyond what is possible through conventional breeding alone.

    The one fundamental disagreement that we have is that I believe it is unfortunate to just say all crops are genetically modified in response to someone that has misgivings about GMOs. You miss an opportunity to inform and educate someone about the technology. And it is very likely that the person will walk away and believe you were being dishonest. It is better to highlight these differences and assure the public that they are completely safe. Rather than pretend like they don’t exist.

    Now I patiently await for one of you to respond with something as prophetic as “DNA is DNA”.

  134. says

    You were decades off in your first guess about the release of roundup ready technology.

    No I was typing on an iPhone instead of my usual keyboard and mistyped. Which is why I immediately posted a correction, since it was a significant error.

    I believe it is unfortunate to just say all crops are genetically modified in response to someone that has misgivings about GMOs.
    But do go on…

    I didn’t say that. I said that if you’re eating food you’re eating GMOs. Have you eaten a soy product since the mid 1990s? If so, how did you like your GMO? Because roundup ready soybeans are super popular and no till is the predominant way of growing soy. And you and nobody else can tell the difference between a roundup ready grown soybean and any other. Because. Its. A. Soybean.

    As to the more general claim that GMO includes controlled breeding and crossbreeding – well, that is a problem for someone who wants to say that GMO is somehow something magically different from a cross like a peanut. I’m not defending that claim because it appears to me that GMO is a vague term that is just fnord fnord fnord. Is Borlaug’s high yield wheat GMO? Not my problem. I think the term GMO is not a useful description. It’s like asking whether your oil change was performed using an oil filter wrench, or just a screwdriver. There are a lot of techniques for genetic engineering an organism; the interesting question is whether your soybean plant produces soybeans or not. Sure, if your soybean plant produces toxic soybeans, we want to know about that.

    There are traditionally bred versions of broccoli that produce insecticides – they have been bred selectively to make stronger and higher concentrations of insecticides. Is that OK because it was done using selective breeding instead of another mechanism for genetic modification? I think it’s reasonable in this context to point out that old ways of geneengineering are not a whole lot different from new ways; they are just slower. Sure if you selectively breed a toxic soybean it’s not “GMO” but it’s still toxic. The only question that matters to the person eating the soybean is whether it’s yummy or not.

    I’m not going to say something as stupid as “DNA is DNA” (I’ll leave the dumb strawmen for you, OK?) but I will say “a soybean is a fucking soybean” and if you want to tell me a selectively bred soybean or a GMO soybean is toxic then that ought to be pretty easy to demonstrate. Arguing about how we got the soybean is cost/benefit but if it’s a fucking soybean I don’t care if it was assembled by a nano molecular replicator or if it grew on a GMO soybean plant or a selectively bred soybean plant.

  135. Holms says

    You can mislead others by equating the two terms all you want. But everywhere you see GMO, you should be smart enough and charitable enough to understand that the individual is referring to transgenic/cisgenic crops via genetic engineering.

    Yes, but that there is a problem in and of itself – terming one type of genetic modification GM implies that the other types of genetic modification are not genetic modification, even though of course they are. The transgenic work that occurs in a lab is no more artificial than the hybridisation and selective breeding methods used by e.g. Borlaug, and thus should not be demonised.

    Yes I’m aware that you are aware that different does not necessarily mean bad (when referring to the different methods of genetic modification), but surely you will not attempt to deny that GM – the laboratory kind – is being unfairly demonised? Frankenfoods! Artificial! Playing at being God! Even though these apply just as well to the life-saving Green Revolution. The term GM (to refer to only that one subset of genetic modification), and in fact a large amount of the debate about genetic modification in general, contains a large component of fearmongering based on this dishonest comparison.

  136. says

    Is Borlaug’s high yield wheat and rice “GMO”?
    Can anyone tell me, officially?

    I suspect that it’s not considered “GMO” because everyone’s been eating it for ages and nobody has gotten sick from it so it can’t be GMO because GMOs are baaaaaaaad. Borlaug’s wheat and rice can’t be GMO because they’ve saved hundreds of millions of people from starvation and it’d be churlish to call it GMO.

  137. Holms says

    And also because it occurred long enough ago that anti-GM was not yet a thing, and because it predates the modern scaremongering and demonstrably saved lives, it gets grandfathered in as non-GM.

  138. Amphiox says

    The one fundamental disagreement that we have is that I believe it is unfortunate to just say all crops are genetically modified in response to someone that has misgivings about GMOs. You miss an opportunity to inform and educate someone about the technology.

    The very first thing that anyone who needs to be educated about GMO technology needs to be informed about is that all crops are genetically modified, and that the specific crops singled out as “GMO” are not special or different in any way from any other crop. All that is different about them is the technique by which they were genetically modified, but the techniques that humans have been using to genetically modify their crops have been changing continuously throughout human history, and the techniques now used for those crops deemed “GMO” are merely part of that ongoing continuum of continuous development of newer and more efficient techniques, and not qualitatively different from older techniques in any way shape or form.

  139. Amphiox says

    For example, among those older (developed earlier, as they are still in use) techniques is exposure of seeds to radiation and mutagenic agents, to increase the mutation rates, so that mutations useful to selective breeders may be found more quickly. The mutations that do arise are not infrequently de novo, and have never existed before in nature, and in that sense, even more “alien” than the gene splicing used in so-called “GMO” crops.

  140. wzrd1 says

    I want by corn for my home garden. Alas, many GM produce products are commercial only and the few that aren’t are not stocked in most seed stores, thanks to the anti-GMO crowd. After all, would you sell seeds that got entire fields torched?
    I would, but many wouldn’t. But then, I have a bowling ball with quite a reach. ;)

  141. dianne says

    Oh, no, vaccines totally cause Autism. :P

    I know you’re kidding, but…so what if they did? Then they’d be increasing the risk of a single non-fatal disease in return for preventing a number of potentially fatal diseases. Why is that not still a win?

  142. Vivec says

    “GMO” gets applied in the same haphazard arbitrary was as “chemicals” does. When people say chemicals, they’re usually referring to those spooky polysyllabic words on the food package, which must be evil because they’re hard to say!

    Just the other day, I saw a milk commercial that was trying to say that cow milk was healthier than almond milk because it’s just made of “milk” rather than spooky words like “lecithin.”

    Ignoring that lecithin is naturally found in cow’s milk, this also buys into that whole misuse of the term chemical, when literally everything is actually made up of chemical compounds.

  143. Matrim says

    @141

    That’s one of the little mentioned really insidious bits of ableist fuckshittery. They’re basically saying “I’d rather my child be dead than run the risk of being one of those awful invalids.” Incidentally, fuck each and every one of those bigoted shitstains individually.

  144. Dunc says

    Ps – the reason there is, for example, a banana monoculture is because there’s a particular strain (i forget which) that is especially yummy yet durable.

    I have to challenge the claim that Cavendish bananas are “especially yummy”. They’re pretty bland compared to the other varieties of sweet banana I’ve tried. They’re high yielding, they ripen uniformly, and they travel very well, but in the flavour stakes, they’re really not that great.

  145. Amphiox says

    “GMO” gets applied in the same haphazard arbitrary was as “chemicals” does. When people say chemicals, they’re usually referring to those spooky polysyllabic words on the food package, which must be evil because they’re hard to say!

    Like dihydrogen monoxide?

    Or any number of sites suggested “chemical free” cleaning concoctions, which for the most part are based on either sodium bicarbonate or acetic acid as their primary active agents….