Two things go together in the public mind: GMOs and Monsanto. I haven’t been a major crusader for GMOs, but whenever I’ve mentioned them (and my positive views toward them), I get emails accusing me of being a shill for Monsanto…but I detest the greedy corporate giant. If I were giving talks on GMOs, there’d be lots of disavowals of Monsanto, and I’d be begging people to not confuse the two.
Kavin Senapathy has been much more active on the GMO front, and she also wrestled with this problem. Now she explains all the ugly contradictions of dealing with Monsanto.
Everything I’d written and said in support of GMOs was factually correct, but my approach had been all wrong. It’s impossible to have a constructive conversation about GMOs without acknowledging that underlying the unscientific claims made by many GMO opponents is a legitimate desire for trustworthy behavior from the companies that dominate the agricultural marketplace.
For instance, I had dismissed the Non-GMO Project’s ever-present butterfly labels as an annoying tactic based on pseudoscience. But the label’s popularity showed that something in the Non-GMO Project’s narrative was resonating with the North American marketplace: The labels play to people’s desire for transparency, to their underlying lack of trust in the food system, and to their desire to have some say in the way our food is grown and made.
Yes! Every organism is genetically unique (almost) and has undergone some modifications — that we’ve moved from trial-and-error reliance on chance variation to directed modifications does not make the technique “bad”. What is bad, though, is the domination of agriculture by corporations that aren’t shy about using unethical skullduggery to maintain that position.
Senapathy is right. What needs to be done first is isolate capitalist villain Monsanto, hold them accountable for their behavior, and then, I think, GMOs will become a non-issue, as they should be.
Meet Mary Mangan—the biologist who crashes anti-GMO events and debunks junk science on Twitter
I dunno. Non-Monsanto GMO projects like virus-resistant papayas and golden rice have also suffered from resistance.
If you really want to be disturbed about your food supply chain, look up who actually owns Monsanto now. And what else they produce.
N.B. As an undergraduate, I spent an awful lot of time in the Monsanto Chemistry Building. So none of this is news to me.
And…?
“GMO” = “Monsanto’s bad” is a common refrain; or to put it more simply, it’s common to conflate the bad things Monsanto’s done (not all involving GMOs) with GMOs in general. That’s not the only conflation / issue but it is a common and powerful one.
If it were a purely scientific question, there’d be no doubt whether GMOs were good or not. Unfortunately, when companies like Monsanto can patent genes and control what farmers can do with their land, it’s not that clear-cut.
Monsanto is the sole reason why I’m not enthusiastic about GMOs. I mean, staple foods with more vitamins in them would be amazing. And I’d be absolutely thrilled if somebody could make apricots and grapes that were winterhardy enough to survive in the cold place where I happen to live. But no, instead we keep on getting gene patents and Monsanto abusing everybody.
Monsanto’s largely just a convenient bogeyman serving to rationalize some people’s distrust of GMOs. Sure, their business practices are apparently a bit shady/predatory in some, maybe many, cases, but without the underlying current of anti-GMO hysteria, all you have is a case of a corporation with dubious business ethics doing things.
If you were to “isolate [the] capitalist villain[y of] Monsanto”, the GMO opponents would just invent a whole new reason why GMOs are evil. Look at all of the moving of goalposts that happens with vaccines, for example. First, all vaccines are bad because of Thimerosal, despite all scientific studies proving no harm. OK, we’ve removed the Thimerosal. Then the objection is that they don’t know what, but something in vaccines is causing the change in autism rates. Hey, here’s Japan, who removed vaccines entirely for a few years because of that concern, and saw no change in autism rates. Now vaccines are evil because of undefined toxic chemicals, among other bogus reasons. And all of their other reasons of course, despite being thoroughly debunked by all scientific studies to look for such links. I doubt GMOs will face an easier path to acceptance.
I have always had the view that people have just as much right to know if their food contains GMOs as they do to know whether it’s Kosher or Halal. I personally think it will be impossible to provide food security for a growing population without GMOs, so in that sense I am strongly pro-GMO. But I have never understood those who think it is pseudoscience to expect accurate labeling. (And that’s not a straw man; I have had this argument before.)
If a particular trait will change a consumer’s minds on whether to eat a food, they have a right to see it disclosed. It is up to the food industry to do the marketing and change public attitudes if they think disclosure will harm their sales. Occasionally, GMO has been presented as a consumer-positive in the past (flavr savr tomatoes). The results may not have been good so far, but it is up to industry to do the heavy-lifting here. I am really tired of non-disclosure being used to sidestep effective marketing, which they’d do if they didn’t think it was cheaper to lobby congress so they don’t have to.
In light of the law suits against Monsanto regarding their herbicide Roundup, I imagine Bayer’s shareholders are cursing the day someone came up with the idea of buying that company.
My opinion about GMOs is that if humanity is to have any chance of surviving the coming climate apocalypse (and I am honestly on the fence about whether that is a good thing or not) it will have to rely on the development of heat-, drought- and salt-resistant crops. I don’t see that happen without direct genetic engineering. Time limitations alone will necessitate that.
Well yes. I’ve commented on this a few times here before. The issue for people who are thoughtful about this is not that there’s something icky about the concept of GMOs per se. It’s what actually existing GMOs are almost exclusively all about. They are a scheme that ties farmers to a manufacturer’s seeds, and pesticides. It creates a dependency that the farmers can’t escape. It makes integrated pest management, intercropping, and other environmentally desirable farming techniques impossible. Once weeds develop glyphosate resistance — which they do — the whole system collapses. Farmers in this situation are turning to dicamba, which is an environmental disaster.
If glyphosate creates a risk of cancer for humans I agree it’s very slight. But it is toxic to aquatic organisms, including fish larvae. As important, Roundup does not consist of glypohosate and water. It is available actually in various formulations, but they all contain what Monsanto is allowed to call “inert” ingredients which it doesn’t have to disclose or test for toxicity. These are surfactants, which are highly toxic to aquatic organisms and for which there is evidence that they have a synergistic carcinogenic effect with glyphosate. (A common one is nonoxynol-9, which is a popular spermicide, BTW.)
It’s one thing to use glyphosate occasionally to control a noxious weed infestation. If I had knotweed on my property I’d be out there with a tanker of the stuff. But sterilizing 400 acres with it every spring is another matter. And that’s the entire purpose of all current large scale commercial uses of GMOs. So as far as I’m concerned there’s a conversation about this that we ought to have.
@michaelumilik I completely agree that GMOs will be a necessity for survival. I think a lot of people aren’t even aware of how much the current population load depends on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
It still galls me that the “anti-GMO” forces are the bad guys here. Look, for most of my goddam life, since 1981 anyway, it has been drummed into my head about how “market solutions” are best. Well, I see a market solution to this problem. Let highly profitable industries spend money to convince their freaking customers to purchase GMO products happily. Don’t whine about hippies ruining it for everyone or whatever it is they want to whine about. There is no intrinsic impediment to selling a product. They just think it would be cheaper for them to slip it in when the consumer isn’t looking. That is not how the all high and mighty magic marketplace is supposed to work? Remember? Perfect information? Rational choices? That crap.
Is this analogous to anti-vaxxers? Well, vaccination campaigns aren’t quite like food sales, because vaccines don’t provide an obvious measurable utility (you only know if you get sick, and you might freeload on the vaccinated population). In that case, better marketing might still be a good start. Convince people of stuff, don’t just complain that they’re stupid. It’s a “marketplace of ideas”, right you f–kers?
#7 @ HidariMak:
Don’t forget that vaccines are made from murdered baby parts, and that makes Baby Jesus cry. So religious exemption!
Well, they refused relieve the board, an action so far almost unheard of in German corporate history. Though, of course they’re not angry about shady practises and killing the environment, but because they lost money.
I love the promise of GMO but hate the current and expected results. There seems little awareness or concern that while we tinker with organisms we affect ecosystems. And this blindness is motivated by the need to turn a profit as large as and as soon as possible with stupid gene tricks.
I do not know what to think about golden rice. I have heard too many contradictory claims and have not been sufficiently motivated to wade into the chaos to form an opinion. I do feel some sympathy for the scientists, whom I believe had humanitarian concerns, for getting criticized both for the version that would spread freely and the version that had sterile seeds. Those do seem the only options.
@11 Thank the hypothetical concept of “positive externalities” that developed in law and in economics starting about a century ago. The problem with the concept is that it is purposefully blind to both “catastrophic adverse excursion” and “socially efficient risk avoider without regard to preexisting capital state” — game-theory and operations analysis concepts that were beginning to be developed right at the time of the Chicago-school antitrust counterrevolution of the late 1960s/early 1970s.
At a policy level, the real problem is that “positive externalities” are very much like doing quantum-level analysis of real fluids based on the ideal gas law. Yes, the ideal gas law holds when all of its assumptions match the real system being studied. The part that gets left out of both the discussions and economic literature: Nobody has ever defined, let alone observed, a system in which the ideal gas law holds and the system is not in an equilibrium state (a market in which transactions are occurring is by definition not in an equilibrium state). It’s sort of like hypothesizing a system in which the second law of thermodynamics can be safely ignored… and then pretending that the hypothetical system is the actual one we’re faced with. (Absolute refutation: The experimentally validated endowment effect.)
In short, a lot of this is bad science, and bad scientific reasoning, being deployed by people who don’t grok the science in the first place, but clothe their discussions in scientific-sounding terms. If it’s got math, people’s eyes glaze over and they never look for the boundary conditions… even when smacked in the face with them, as in the purported J-curve that assumed a 100% voluntary, costless compliance rate with tax systems (among other problems).
This post and the comments on it are a perfect illustration of how the pro-GMO crowd loves to talk about science and how if you aren’t in favor of GMOs you’re a disgusting luddite and has absolutely no grasp of how GMOs are being deployed in the real world. The only thing missing — so far, at least — is an implicit claim that artificial selection creates GMOs, which is the most common (but not by any means the only) pro-GMO dishonesty.
The two main real anti-GMO arguments are:
Deployment of GMOs has been ludicrously careless in ways which cause unsafe contamination. Pro-GMO arguers like to talk about “what if there’s a corn blight, we’ll never get corn back without gene modification” but there could just as easily be a corn blight which attacks only GM corn (in fact, from one perspective it’s more likely — natural genes may have evolved to specifically evade some blight of which we know nothing, and which the GM version is incapable of withstanding). Since modified genes have been found to have contaminated all the known wild corn in the world, even the stuff way out in the mountains away from any farmers growing GM versions, we will be screwed. (And before any of you supposedly “pro-science” pro-GMO arguers say “well, that’s just one species” — corn was supposed to be the safest possible crop for preventing spread of modified genes, because of the heaviness of corn pollen. This was the easy-mode proof-of-concept, and your side still failed catastrophically. “Pro-science” people were supposed to show that GMOs could be used without contaminating the environment, and with every possible advantage you still failed. Why would any sane person trust any of you, ever again?)
Yes, sure, there are academics studying how to make “better” organisms through the application of gene editing. But that’s irrelevant if none of their results make it to market, and they almost uniformly won’t, or won’t without Monsanto-style additions. (And Monsanto isn’t the only evil GMO producer, they’re just an easy shorthand because they are by far the largest.) Supposedly “pro-science” people arguing that GMOs will save us if only we could get rid of Monsanto is directly equivalent to big-L Libertarians arguing that the “free market” will save us if only we could get rid of all the ways the market isn’t “really” free — your vision is a utopian one which almost certainly is actually impossible but in any event cannot be realized in the real world. Pretending that it’s the anti-GMO side that’s holding us back is sheerest hypocrisy.
And no, the anti-GMO argument is not like the anti-vax argument, it’s like the anti-nuclear-power argument: the side which claims to be pro-science has been proved to be full of naive liars, who hand-wave away their long history of disasters and the horrible implications of the applications of their “science”, over and over and over again since the whole enterprise became possible.
a major problem with GMOs is that corporations like monsanto use their power to suppress investigation or research into the impacts of GMOs on the environment. one of the big environmental problems with GMOs is the time scale of changes – something radically different can be injected into a large environment (or multiple environments) practically instantaneously.
@ 12 ridana
F** the religious exemption
That is my life or my child’s life you are endangering. At last report even the USA is not allowing human sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl so there are limits to religious freedoms.
Heck, even the Catholic Church encourages vaccinations. IIRC they are not happy with the basis of some of the vaccinations but says it is a minor issue compared to mass deaths and disabilities that would result without vaccinations.
I agree with Cervantes and The Vicar, but go further. PZ is wrong about GM being just an improvement on relying on “chance variation”. Natural selection (and the kind of selection that people breeding crops and farm animals do) works on whole organisms with integrated gene systems. Adding individual genes from very different organisms to crop species that could never have received them naturally seems to me a lottery. I am concerned both about the massive use of herbicides that GM crops are designed for (I think the jury is still out on glyphosphate and lymphoma, and as a lymphoma suffering farmer I am at least curious) and about the potential devastation of ecologies as genes for herbicide resistance, and genes for the production of insecticides, spread into native species. And yes, Vicar, I oppose nuclear power as well.
PaulBC @8:
Simply labeling products as containing GMOs or their by-products tells me nothing useful. If the labeling does not include information about the nature of the modification I can’t make any judgment of it.
@anat It may not tell you anything, but if you are a consumer who intends to avoid consuming anything with any GMOs, it gives you very useful information.
What part of consumer choice is such a mystery to anti-labelers? The point is that there are a large number of consumers who want some kind of labeling. Polls show this consistently. They’re paying for the product, so they have the right to have some information, even if it’s inadequate. They have a right to choose even if you think their choice is an ignorant one.
Today, consumers do get a certain amount of labeling, either non-GMO or “contains some genetically modified…” but it took a long time to reach that point. To be honest, I doubt there is much impact. Are there many people who would eat Flamin’ Hot Cheetos but hesitate when they read it contains some GMO ingredients? (Not me.)
I hate how this issue is so often cast as science vs. pseudoscience when it is primarily a matter of consumer choice.
@11 PaulBC
What you were told (though they may not have been very clear about it) was that “free market” solutions are best. You seem to be confusing these “free markets” with “economically efficient markets,” which are a very different thing (though both are market systems).
Perfect information (or at least very good information) is an important component of “economically efficient markets,” as are other things such minimizing externalities (e.g., making companies pay the cost of their pollution).
“Free markets,” on the other hand, as the term is usually used, are concerned with allowing individual freedom to those with sufficient power to exercise it. If someone wants to prevent information flow to profit from the ignorance of customers, they must be allowed to do this. If someone can lobby the government to make taxpayers cover part of the cost of what they’re doing (such as polluting the environment), they must be allowed to do so. You can see this extending even to bailing out companies that have lost money (corporate welfare): if someone has the power to convince the government to do this, they must be given the freedom to do so.
You, of course, as a participant in such as free market are free to spend as much of your own money as you like to buy your own lobbyists to try to oppose what Monsanto is doing.
All markets are simply social constructs (there’s no such thing as a “natural” market, unless you consider “no laws whatsoever” to be a “market”) and each has its own explicit and implict goals which often differ vastly between different types of markets. As we see in the “free market” vs. “economically efficient market” example above, “free markets” are directly opposed to maximizing economic efficience in many cases, preferring to that the maintainence of existing power structures. So when you introduce ideas such as changing the rules to encourage perfect information distribution or even a move towards that, especially if it’s likely to change existing power structures, you’re throwing a bomb at the “free market.”
@16
I suggest that this is both misreading Our Gracious Host’s position (in fact, most of what you said is consistent with what he said) and missing the point of the discussion. I see no “pro-engineered-genes-for-every-purpose” rhetoric here — the straw man against which @16 argues. Indeed, I see the discusssion (and Our Gracious Host’s initial post) as opposed to precisely the same thing: Misdeployment of modified organisms. There isn’t any disagreement at all on the propriety (or lack thereof) of immediate-profit-motivated misdeployment, especially when linked to other products of that same profit center. (And that’s why there was no action against the Bayer board: The rest of the company is doing just fine.)
And one last note:
<SARCASM> Go ahead. Ask a research-oriented veterinarian who cares for AKC-standard German Shepherds about “direct gene modification” versus “natural selection,” and the probabilities of harm from each when “deployed” only after multigenerational testing, and the use of one in correcting errors in the other. Or a specialist in tropical diseases. Or… oh, never mind. Just don’t try to understand how any modern chicken (including so-called “heritage” breeds) relates to their ancestors from even as recently as the seventeenth century. Even if you can figure out which part of the chicken is the “nuggets.” (And don’t get me started on fish fingers.) </SARCASM>
If only it were just about Monsanto. They make a convenient villain I guess, but it’s hard to see how neutralizing them would solve much.
Try to forget for a moment that you ever heard that some random people out there were concerned about genetic modification (for good reasons or bad ones). And just pretend for a moment that Monsanto is gone too. What we’re still talking about is a large-scale and top-down approach to agriculture, which depends very generally on widespread and heavy use of herbicides and monocultures. To start with, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we know very little about how this affects ecosystems and human health. I want to say we know “almost nothing,” and that doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. Anyway, that’s a huge, gaping hole in this entire plan; and again, it’s the kind of approach that doesn’t have much going for it unless it were widely adopted, so you are putting a lot on the table. You can imagine a hypothetical use of GMOs in which everything works out extraordinarily well, but that is at best a dream until we know how risky this actually is and decide whether it’s worth it. How do we figure that out? I don’t know if we can even begin to answer that question.
It also introduces a variety of economic and legal issues (patents, for instance) which can be particularly bad for small- or medium-scale farmers as well consumers. Large industrialized farms come with their own problems, and moving things in that direction is generally a bad idea. Maybe some of those issues can be addressed adequately (if we don’t allow genetic patents, say), so maybe it isn’t totally hopeless.
But what’s definitely not helpful is trying to accuse random people of being misinformed about genetics or evolution or what have you. They very well may be misinformed, because believe it or not, most people aren’t scientists of any kind; but at best such accusations just avoid the issues many people are actually raising. And it ought to be obvious that biologists, geneticists, etc., are not the only kinds of experts we should be listening to.
So, that’s all with or without Monsanto. Suppose you were worried about poverty or economic inequality, and somebody tried to tell you it would all be alright somehow, if only we got rid of Walmart. They could show you tons of bad shit Walmart does, no doubt about it, and it may be one of the biggest single targets anybody could point to. (These days, maybe that honor belongs to Apple; it’s just an example.)
However, even though that person may be making valid points which aren’t completely irrelevant, you should still think they seem pretty ignorant (or is acting that way) about the subject, if they’d ever seriously claim something like that (i.e., pinning it all on Walmart). You should have in the back of your mind tons of other things like our broken education and criminal justice systems, rampant racism and sexism, etc., which all contribute to inequality in various interacting ways.
It’s verging on glibertarian levels of absurdity to think that the systems that we’ve set up just have this one (rather obvious) flaw, and otherwise the whole thing’s running smoothly. If you “generously” concede this little fly in ointment is a problem, so you can keep on believing more or less what you always have, that just is glibertarian levels of absurdity. It’s saying that the problem isn’t Christianity itself, but the individual Christians who merely aren’t “Christian” enough to do it right. And to me, although I’m definitely no expert on any of this stuff, that doesn’t seem remotely like the kind of situation we’re actually in.
As one of those pro-GMO and pro-modern agriculture readers of the blog:
I like reading comments about GMOs that I disagree with (most of the posters here), but aren’t wild conspiratorial non-sense. (voidhawk@4, Andreas@5)
I get frustrated reading the comments that repeat long debunked falsehoods. (cervantes@10)
And I love reading the wild conspiratorial non-sense. (The Vicar@16)
You have your answer right here in the comments, PZ. I keep seeing the same commenters repeating the same misinformation despite several people (myself included) providing direct links to the compelling evidence against on several previous occasions — and these are generally pro-science people!
@24 consciousness razor
So you’re saying that GMOs are a relatively small part of the problem here, if they’re even part of the problem at all, and we should avoid focusing on those and instead look at the overall system?
I’ve been considering and reconsidering my response, literally all day and deep into the morning hours.
I’m far from a fan of Monsanto business and licensing practices, but am practical in that, we need to feed an ever increasing number of people on this planet and don’t get me started on US food waste.
I’m also loathing of the anti-GMO bullshit on rye, calling itself a Reuben sandwich crowd. “Alien genes are bad” is bullshit, their hint is that somehow, we’ll absorb DNA from the “alien gene food” and incorporate it and my typical response is, “The last time you ate a celery, how much of you turned into a fucking celery, moron?”.
A diplomat, I am not.
If I eat bug parts in my food (we all do, there are FDA allowances for all manner of pollutants in our food, at innocuous levels and frankly, insects and bug remains are a protein addition), I don’t become a bug or an insect. I don’t become a crustacean when I enjoy shrimp, crabs or the occasional lobster (personally, I prefer crabs and shrimp over lobsters).
I had some wonderful artichokes with dinner, oddly, didn’t turn into a thistle.
So, you can imagine my incessant irritation when I go into the stupidmarket and find a GMO-free part of an aisle that has GMO-free peanut butter (hint: There are no GM peanuts at all) and all manner of pandering bullshit, which I avoid like the plague on principle.
I’d avoid the entire brand at a corporate level, but I’d starve.
But, I’m tempted to convince a market to put lead weights on the shelf with the GMO-free aisle contents, also labeled GMO-free. Alas, I’m more worried that far too many assholes would buy and eat the lead weights.
RoundUp, that’s a problem that’s going to self-resolve, due to nature and well, evolution, as plants that are heavily selected against manage a mutation or ten, as is already happening.
For, whenever you invent a better mousetrap, somehow, a superior mouse gets introduced or more often, the much smarter rat. Something I do have some experience with, due to a vacant building near an apartment we rented some generations ago. SEPTA was revamping long overdue rail work, start to finish, new rails and bed, so jackhammering, digging, new concrete, new rails and thermite welding the rails. The rats in the vacant building moved to our building, initially chased by the noise coming in that direction of travel. Mice joined them.
Heard and even saw the outline of the rat once on the ceiling grid that I had to install, due to a shitbag landlord, who learned a lesson about not repairing and encouraging me to repair, due to cost…
Shitbag landlord proclaimed he managed rat free properties and even ignored photographic evidence, so I engaged upon a campaign against a single rat. It knew what poison was (provided by the borough), it knew what a trap was and threw mice that were missing much of their heads onto the trap (I’m deadly serious, it hunted mice, just to get the bait on the trap), it created a pathway on glue traps of mice, missing parts of their heads or dorsal necks, helpfully signing the project with droppings. Damned thing was the Einstein of rats!
I made a few deadfall traps, it avoided them and the bait. Made a spike trap, it figured that out. Made an electrical trap, it figured that out.
Likely, it got my scent and figured out to avoid my “gifts”, save for a singular ceiling tile fragment, loaded with peanut butter bait. That, out of desperation, as the damned thing followed my wife room to room and was digging furiously in our newborn baby’s room.
It went for the baited tile fragment on the light grid and I shot it twice, as the first round left it flopping around in agony.
Broke its tail to fit it into a shoebox, let it stew for a couple of days, then presented it to the shitbag landlord.
True story, build a better rat trap, Einstein the rat comes along.
When we moved to our home in Philly, we had a mouse issue every fall. Eventually found that they were entering via the clothes drier vent and fixed that. But, before that, after actually catching on now long lost video, now long lost, of the mice taking a free joyride on the crossbar of the trap, I used the ceiling tile fragment and peanut butter bait trick and shot them with a BB pistol, then dog the BB’s from the back door.
I’d have been just as happy if they just moved out voluntarily.*
As Aristotle said, horror vacui. Partially correct, nature embraces a vacuum in an insufficiently protected gravity well that possesses an atmosphere, where an atmosphere and biosphere is present, entirely accurate.
*For the record, glue traps for mice, inhumane in the extreme! Used them once, never again.
I notice jackson@25 and chrislawson@26 don’t actually identify any specific nonsense or errors, let alone refute them.
Yes. As I’ve pointed out on many occasions when you’ve posted an anti-anti-GMO rant in the past, you can’t judge whether a specific technology is good, bad or indifferent without considering who is using it, how, and for what purpose.
But it’s absurd to bring this down to one “capitalist villain”, even one as big as Bayer-Monsanto. The entire socio-techno-ecosystem needs to be considered – in this case, the global agriculture-food-fibre system, or even the entire capitalist world-system.
Of course there is a lot of ignorant nonsense put out by anti-GMO groups. But there’s also a lot of ignorant nonsense put out by GMO-boosters*. About “golden rice” for example – a neat piece of branding aimed at changing GMO’s image problem, but at this stage, nothing more – and probably never anything more, since it’s a proposed solution (contrary to what many of its fanbois think, it’s still not actually being grown for food – or wasn’t at the end of 2018 – and its development schedule was not affected by the trashing of fields in the Philippines) to a problem which already has one: fortifying basic foodstuffs with vitamin A (or even better, tackling the poverty that leads to restricted diets). It’s also not non-profit (if a farmer earns more than $10,000/year from it, royalties must be paid), nor free of involvement from agribusiness corporations.
More broadly, GMOs are not going to “solve the world food problem”. At present, there’s enough food for everyone, people go short because they are too poor to buy what is available. Demand is projected to increase considerably, but much of this is due to increased consumption of meat and dairy products rather than population growth; as with energy, the “demand side” of the supply-demand balance is hugely neglected. On the supply side, small-scale farmers still grow the majority of the world’s food (and often use land more efficiently than agribusiness, which is “efficient” in terms of reducing labour costs or to put it another way, putting people out of work), and what they chiefly need are secure land tenure, and boring things like access to water, credit, storage facilities and markets, not “sexy” hitech whizzbangs like GMOs.
*And attempts at diverting the argument into semantics: “All our food is GMOs, because all domesticated species are different from their wild progenitors, fnah, fnah, fnah”.
Two tactics effectively limit the spread of science denialism
@the vicar
Snort. Recently watched a few videos on “nuclear disasters” and all it told me is that we have the same problem with that as we do with anti-GMO – the people apposing them have no freaking clue what they are talking about. For example – three mile island was a case of three out of 4 engineers on duty at the time being “Navy engineers”, who didn’t comprehend what made a 1,000+ megawatt reactor more dangerous than a like 20 megawatts one, and why you had to handle emergencies differently, combined with a crap control board, which didn’t a) correctly show certain things, and b) scattered alarms around all over the damn place, so that you couldn’t tell what alarms where important, and finally, an attached printed that literally took 8 hours to inform them that a critical loss of water in the reactor core had taken place, because the connection was too freaking slow to bloody keep up with the thousands of messages being generated. They did exactly what they thought was the correct things, given the information available.
Chernobal was partly design, and partly stupidity (someone’s head was going to roll if they didn’t preform their “test” on time, so they powered up the reactor anyway, without a proper cool down, or any clue what the F would happen under those conditions). And Fukashima… sigh.. that one is a bigger concern, since it happened because they lost all ability to pump in cooling water.
The irony in all of this is – its only a problem because we are building 1,000+ megawatt reactors, instead of smaller, more local ones, it seems to me, which don’t have the same vulnerabilities, and cool down fast if something goes wrong. But, yeah, that is just my opinion…
The point being, no one that thinks the people involved are all liars have a damn clue what the science behind the failures where, or if they could be avoided, they are just reacting to the “story” given about “who was at fault”, when it should be, “What was at fault.”
Same with GMO. Recently had someone commenting about the impossible burger and its GMO content. Its a freaking gene, adding in Heme to some yeast, so it actually tastes like meat. They where freaked out over it and what “health dangers” it might have. My take on it was that it was a bit like arguing that adding mustard to a hot dog, if everyone in the world only ate them with ketchup, was somehow going to poison people. Its absurd.
Yes, and that was intentional. I didn’t think a full fisking would be either interesting or useful. These anti-GMO arguments aren’t any different than what was offered in all the other comment threads on GMOs, and my responses also wouldn’t be any different.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2017/12/23/non-gmo-is-a-marketing-scam-nothing-more/
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/03/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-gmo/
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/05/09/ban-corn-its-a-gmo/
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/08/25/crusaders-against-gmos/
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/03/17/common-sense-about-gm-crops/
I mean, do I really need to explain why GMOs don’t create an unescapable dependency on any particular seed company or weed control method? Really?
Calling GMO good or bad is nonsensical. Genetic modification is a technique for changing the qualities of a plant or animal. It is no more innately good or bad than any other technique used in science or engineering or any other field. Saying a product is “GMO” does not give any of the critical information, i.e. what was modified, what are the consequences, what testing was done or is needed to demonstrate safety, etc.
Not to mention that “traditional” food modification consists of basically exposing the plant or animal to a mutagen (radiation, chemical DNA damaging agents) and seeing what happens. Sometimes a beneficial mutation arises. I fail to see how picking your modification in advance and making it deliberately could be more dangerous.
I see a lot of defenses here for the safety of GMOs, and some snide remarks about the ignorance of consumers (who for some reason are supposed to know whether or not GM peanuts exist instead of having readily available food labeling). But it misses the central point (quoted by PZ):
“The labels play to people’s desire for transparency, to their underlying lack of trust in the food system, and to their desire to have some say in the way our food is grown and made.”
Many consumers don’t trust the food distribution system. Whose job is it to gain this trust? I would say it’s the job of very profitable industries who want to sell products, and not a cadre of Internet volunteers. I did see, after a little searching, that Monsanto has done some outreach. I don’t watch TV and might have missed it for that reason.
But I suspect the real answer is that agribusiness figures they just have to sell to farmers, who are primarily interested in crop yield (which is fine). They do not market to end consumers. They generally do not promote this technology as improving lives. If they’re not going to do this, and they have an obvious stake, I’m sure not going to lift a finger.
BTW, nuclear power isn’t such a bad analogy. Nuclear plants were mostly built at a time of public acceptance. Now that they have a bad reputation, there is relatively little push to build more of them. But power companies also realized that it was more profitable to build less controversial gas-powered plants. We are not in crisis due to an underpowered grid (though they tried to gin one up in California in 2000-2001). If we were, nuclear power might look more appealing.
The day that there is sufficient profit motive, we will see effective outreach from the nuclear industry. Likewise for GMOs. Neither of these technologies are sufficient wins for companies to bother with outreach. Why should this be my concern?
Replying to myself “Neither of these technologies are sufficient wins for companies to bother with outreach.” Of course, Monsanto is already running a profitable business with GMOs. But the point is that they have figured out how to do an end run around public trust in their food sources. That is a major issue, and more to the point than the actual impact of GMO corn. It stinks of paternalism.
Jackson @32: I’d be interested to see your (or any other GMO booster’s) response to the rest of KG‘s #29.
PaulBC@35
In your first comment you mentioned kosher and halal labeling as a good model for labeling GMOs. I agree with this, but I would also mention that this is the current status quo of the GMO labeling regime.
I agree with you that people should be able to avoid eating GMOs for any reason, even if those reasons aren’t rational. With the current labeling structure I find it exceptionally easy to avoid eating GMOs if I wanted to.
Sure.
I think I agree with this.
I mostly agree with this too. My thoughts on the semantic argument: When people say GMO, they don’t mean literally anything that has had their genes changed over time, they mean something whose parental line had their genome altered by some form of in-vitro recombination. So in that sense it is incorrect to say that “everything is a GMO.” In many conversations about GMOs, some people object to “having the genes messed with” or “GMOs are unnatural.” In those situations I think it is appropriate to mention that all food crops are unnatural and have had their genes messed with.
A lot to unpack here.
This is an example of a general viewpoint that I find myself strongly disagreeing with often with progressives and anti-capitalists. Golden rice is bad, no matter how many people it will end up helping, because a corporation is in some way benefiting.
I take the view that the goodness of Golden Rice will depend on how many people it helps, regardless of how it affects any particular corporation.
Golden rice has recently been deregulated in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Bangladesh. I think the first commercial plantings are in the ground in Bangladesh, but I can ask around if you want confirmation.
I think combining the ideas that we should increase the time and resources needed to deregulate GMO crops (up form the decades that golden rice has been in production), and criticizing Golden Rice for not getting to market fast enough is an example of starting with an anti-GMO position, and creating post-hoc rationalizations to justify the existing position.
I think solving the problem of VAD is an important problem to solve. Part of the solution is, as KG mentions, fortifying basic food stuffs and giving out periodic mega doses of betacarotene. But these things already exist and have not solved the problem. Part of the reason why is penetrance; people who need it aren’t getting it. Golden rice is an attempt to compliment these already existing programs to get better penetrance.
GMOs and solving worldwide poverty are not at odds. I think they complement each other. If KG can solve worldwide poverty as a solution to VAD, then I wish them well, and it will make golden rice obsolete. I will rejoice.
I agree, but GMOs can be part of the solutions to specific problems. For example, I work for a non-profit developing GMOs. We have one trait to provide virus resistance in Cassava, and another to biofortify Cassava with iron and zinc. These traits will not lead to utopia and the elimination of all hunger everywhere. I also think that is a stupid standard for whether any particular GMO is good or not.
I agree that those things are important. GMOs do not detract from any of those things, and they solve other important problems in agriculture that are not those things, like viruses killing off entire fields of subsistence farmers’ crops, and alleviating anemia in children and pregnant women in sub-saharan Africa.
Curt Sampson:
No, I was not saying anything like that. I also didn’t write only those two sentences you decided to quote and misinterpret. I was referring to Monsanto when I said “they make a convenient villain,” not to GMOs. There’s no point in conflating them.
I will say that we have many different problems to deal with at the same time. That’s so obvious it should go without saying, and it doesn’t help the case at all for GMOs. But there it is.
~~~~~~
I also want to know how people respond to the points KG raised about our food supply. If GMOs are meant to increase the amount of food so there will enough to feed people who lack it, as several people in this thread have claimed, then I’d like to know why they think this is a serious way to address a genuine problem. (In short, try making the non-bullshit version of that argument, if that’s possible.) Maybe it would be worth the risks to our health and environment, maybe we would just have to accept that we need to pay some rather serious costs, if we lacked food and there were no better ways to address that problem.
But it doesn’t seem to be the case that people are starving due to an overall lack of food. Instead, what seems to be going on is that many don’t like the (“communist”) idea that we should share food to those who need it. In other words, this basically boils down to a lot of waste, excess, and belligerence. If you could convince yourself that it’s a good idea to have more of that, then sure, all you would need to do is simply more of the same, so that everybody can be just as wasteful and excessive and belligerent (as Americans, let’s say).
However, if what this amounts to is a fake solution to a fake problem, while also risking a lot more on the side, that definitely shouldn’t count as a selling point for GMOs. It’s just bullshit, and I was hoping for non-bullshit.
@Jackson
I’ll accept that tentatively, but we spent decades getting there. I also believe that we would not have voluntarily non-GMO labeling without people advocating for it.
On the other side, I was pretty excited when I first saw labeling of snack products that do contain genetically engineered ingredients. That was in 2016. “Produced with Genetic Engineering” and then “GLUTEN-FREE” below that (ha ha). (And yes, it was corn-based and therefore obviously gluten-free, but maybe some people don’t know that; there’s plenty I don’t know either.) Did it harm sales of Cheetos? I doubt it. So why was there so much resistance to mandatory labeling for years before some states required it?
I really did have arguments with people (on Panda’s Thumb) about this. One view was that the end consumer rarely knows what goes into all the steps of the products they use, and is just being ignorant if they think they have a right to. Of course, we can’t label everything, but we have a right as a democratic society to demand labeling of things people care about. Another canard was, well, do you want to label things “Made only by white people”? Isn’t that the same? No it’s not, because that kind of labeling violates anti-discrimination protections, but disclosing other parts of the production process does not.
I feel that there is a misunderstanding, particularly among science-minded people, of how advocacy works. You fight for that which is in your interest. If you fight for the “logical” and “neutral” you lose to the people on the other side who aren’t such idiots and will fight tooth and nail for what they believe in.
FWIW, I have always liked the idea of golden rice, and if malnutrition can be reduced using synergies with profitable multinational corporations, that’s great. Color me skeptical, though, until the rice is out there, until people are convinced to incorporate into their traditional diets, and until there are studies to back up a significant reduction in vitamin A deficiency.
The following is my understanding, not advocating it as correct, only describing it:
anti-GMO is essentially splash damage from essentially anti-Monsanto. Monsanto developed GMO corn to resist the Roundup herbicide. They then used their patent to claim ownership of every stalk of corn grown from GMO stock. Their rigorous enforcement of that claim seems patently absurd.
Recently the health risk of Roundup has become the morst significant issue.
GMO in general has been developed elsewhere to produce more productive and more nutrient rice, etc.
Which is why I focus on Monsanto and not the generic use of GMO. GMO vegetables are perfectly safe, in general. The only risk is the GMO corn which have been grown with Roundup and the risk is not being fully cleaned of that herbicide.
done
Monsanto is EVIL, GMO is not.
thank you for reading
@41:
left out that Roundup is also Monsanto.
which is why I call Monsanto evil. They developed Roundup with good intentions, refusing to recognize the unexpected carcinogenic nature of the product.
typo: morst instead of most
@29, @33:
Item 33 points out the absurdity of 29: The term “GMO” is already a semantic bit of propaganda that misrepresents what it is, in much the same way as “organic food” does.* Using the ordinary meanings of “genetically,” “modified,” and “organism” is mechanism-independent. Only when following Humpty-Dumpty’s imprecation that a word means exactly what the speaker means, nothing more and nothing less, does one reach the glorious conclusion that “GMO” means only germ-plasm-based insertion of individual genes not ordinarily present in that species/breed for others. This is the same dodge as “organic food” being grown only from “natural” sources, given the startlingly inorganic processes involved from those natural sources (such as nitrogen fixation — the “original” “doesn’t meet the definition of organic as we mean it” process).
In short, precisely because “GMO” is itself incapable of definition, the entire argument is semantic nonsense.
As a chemist, I resent the misappropriation of the more-than-a-century-and-a-half-old name of a branch of chemistry for marketing purposes by a bunch of white landowners who were trying to get a premium price for their crops. Except for the salt and (technically) the water, I have an entirely organic diet no matter how the food was produced.
@Jackson On the subject of labeling, I had begun to think I really was fighting a straw man here, but to refresh my memory, I find this anti-labeling editorial as recently as 2013 in Scientific American, a source I’d normally expected to be measured and reasonable. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/labels-for-gmo-foods-are-a-bad-idea/?redirect=1
Unless things have changed a lot in six years, this does appear to be the default “science” position, namely that labeling is bad because it intensifies misconceptions about food.
Oh who will step in to correct these misconceptions? Oh where could the money come from for such a massive education campaign? No, no, it just can’t be done. The public is recalcitrant. They will never understand what to do with this information, so it’s best they don’t see it at all.
I am merely making the suggestion that those who stand to profit from the putative boon of genetic engineering ought to spend some of their own money on this sort of education. I don’t think this should be a radical viewpoint, but it seems to fail in a sort of DMZ between those who are uncomfortable with corporate marketing and profit-making occurring at all, and those who are just irritated at the idea that the public should have a say in the matter of what they buy and consume.
PaulBC@44
I don’t have a whole lot to say about labeling, because I just don’t care that much. In general I think federally mandated labels are bad because it’s a pain in the ass to separate and track and verify supply lines for commodities. It’s super easy for people to utilize currently available voluntary labels, so I don’t end up putting much thought or emotional energy into the labeling debate.
I feel mostly the same about the current controversy of labeling of soy or nut milks as milk. Call it milk or bean juice or dirty nut water, I think they are all yummy and don’t really care.
@Jackson
It’s entirely possible I have too much faith in the free market (despite being a liberal who always loathed Ronald Reagan and had the ineffectual satisfaction of casting the first vote of my life against his second term).
My belief is that if genetic engineering is ever as beneficial as its supporters claim, then public opinion will sort itself out as it becomes an indispensable boon*. I do care about this from the education angle because I think the ones who stand to profit most from a knowledgable public have completely dropped the ball on preparing the marketplace. My feelings on Monsanto aren’t that intense one way or the other, but I won’t be shedding a tear over any failed product launches.
If you look at public sentiment towards computer technology, it has clearly undergone a shift since the view in WarGames (1983) that computer networks were primarily for launching nuclear missiles to today when everyone and their grandmother is shared cat videos (not to suggest the suspicion has gone away entirely, and there are genuine privacy concerns).
*The key counterexample being vaccination, but in this case you get into a “tragedy of the commons” scenario that need not be the case if genetic engineering can produce direct, observable value to end consumers.
To my knowledge, in Washington state an initiative to require GMO labeling failed, and thus the way to avoid GMO-foods is to buy ‘organic’ ones. Which I find ridiculous, because it should be possible to grow GMOs using ‘organic’ methods. And of course, the way growing methods are classified as ‘organic’ or conventional is not based on rational ideas. So basically food labeling sucks the way it is done.
@46 PaulBC
I don’t think you understand the “free market” as the term is used today (as created by first the 1970s-80s right-wing and then the neoliberal communities). To extend the explanation I gave above, the way it works in this case is that a) genetic engineering does not have to be an indespensible boon to everyone, just to the company making money off it, and b) regardless of its overal “boon” value to society, if it’s cheaper and easier for the owners to succeed by suppressing information about it, that is the action that the “free market” will reward. The free market is not designed encourage better information flow.
It sounds to me as if you want something different: an economically efficient market. Part of the explicit design of the neoliberal/conservative “free market” is suppressing economic efficiency in certain areas. This is clear just from listening to its proponents, who go on and on about how many kinds of government interference are awful and must be removed, but then absolutely insist that even more massive government interference in certain parts of the market, intellectual property law, is absoutely necessary for the market to function.
…they’re still used to attack democracy, but in more subtle ways.
And it’s not just Putin, either; the NSA’s ability to monitor people today would be a wet dream for the East German Stasi.
Really, it feels like you’re uncriticially accepting “this ____ is a good thing for all of society” messages put forward by those reasonably high-up in the power structures of society. I’m not saying you should go all conspiracy theory or anything like that, but a closer and more critical look at what these particular structures such as “the free market” and “social networking” are and how they are used by those holding power would do you some good.
(Pick well the things you look at, of course, since there are certainly bad and misleading ideas that are not being used to support particular power structures, beyond perhaps attracting some more viewers to certain television shows. The anti-vax movement would be an example.)