Argentina May Have Figured Out How to Get GMOs Right | Hacker News Reader

Argentina May Have Figured Out How to Get GMOs Right

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34 pointsfisherjeff17 comments

Many people believe GMOs are dangerous to human health, environmentally destructive, and a tool for multinational corporations like Monsanto to control the global food supply.

Many people believe that vaccines cause autism, too.

The answer is better education, not pandering to the crowds.

There are some legitimate reasons to be concerned, though. GMOs aren't inherently dangerous to human health or inherently environmentally destructive. But they do let producers do things faster and more extreme than they could do via conventional breeding techniques.

They've used those conventional techniques to reduce crop diversity, and select for things like uniform time to grow and uniform size/shape to make mechanical processing easy, over selecting for things like nutrition and flavor.

Is there any good reason to believe that the increased power GMO techniques give them won't be used to go even farther in those directions?

With great power comes great responsibility. I'm skeptical that the big food companies are responsible enough for GMO, and with government food regulation more determined by industry lobbying than by actual science I have little faith that the government will do anything to make sure GMO techniques are only used for good.

My thoughts exactly. I am saddened that some of the most passionate among the left seem to have unhinged their politics from science. We're supposed to be the rational counterbalance to the idiocy of the far right, not the ones who help tip the boat over.

It's not so clear cut as it seems that anti-GMO needs to be anti-scientific. For instance the agroindustry wanted GMOs to simply be treated the same as the non-modified Organisms, without any additional analysis. This would make it legal to add genes for the production of toxins and it would be still seen as the same thing (This is exactly what is happening with the commonly transplanted BT-gene, just that the toxin is harmless for humans).

Then - this is what the article is about - there are concerns of how the technology is used. Most genetically engineered plants today are either just glyphosate tolerant or carry the BT-gene, while the industry claims that gene modification reduces the need for pesticides.

The issue in the US is that GMO === Monsanto. And Monsanto is very clearly a company that does not care about the long term implications of its science (you think they'd sit on data like Exxon did with climate change data? I do, 100%). I fear Monsanto, so in the US I fear GMO. Remove hard core capitalism from our food supply science and I'll be less scared of it.

Completely agree. I wish it was easier to support GMOs in the US, but because of Monsanto, everyone just equates GMOs with Monsanto's business practices. And now it seems like the whole idea of GMOs is ruined in the US because of it.

Fearing GMOs because you don't like Monsanto'spractices is like fearing computers in the 1990s because you don't like Microsoft's practices.

Not to mention, Monsanto is the biggest GMO -- or, really, seed, regardless of GMO status -- company everywhere, they aren't restricted to the US.

And there are plenty of non-Monsanto US companies doing GM and non-GM crop work, including companies working on the same kind of environmental tolerance traits that the Argentine firm, Bioceres, was discussed in the article as working on (one of those US companies, Arcadia Biosciences, actually has a joint venture, Verdeca, with Bioceres.)

> Fearing GMOs because you don't like Monsanto's practices is like fearing computers in the 1990s because you don't like Microsoft's practices.

I disagree. I can live without a computer. I can't live without food.

I'm aware that there are other companies doing GMO work in the US, and that Monsanto is a global cancer. But the US is their place of greatest power and influence.

How many members of the EPA & FDA are former employees of Arcadia and Bioceres, and how much lobbyist money have they put into those pockets? You think Monsanto will let anyone try to succeed in "their" space without a brutal fight?

> How many members of the EPA & FDA are former employees of Arcadia and Bioceres, and how much lobbyist money have they put into those pockets?

So the problem isn't "hardcore capitalism", it's a state so big that lobbying it is more effective/easier than competing in the market.

> How many members of the EPA & FDA are former employees of Arcadia and Bioceres

This line of thinking is so odd to me. Shouldn't we want people in regulatory bodies to have an insider's understanding of an industry?

Granted, I don't know a lot about GMOs, and I'm not really agaisnt them, but one issue that I can think of is that when you breed food to create larger varieties, the larger versions are less nutritional pound for pound than their smaller cousins - and without realizing it the could decrease people's nutrion in exchange for efficiency. So I think we ought to be at least a little wary of changing things because there will probably be unintended side effects.

That said, I do support the use of GMOs.

Have all South American countries been forced into patent agreements with the United States? Is patent enforcement in Argentina taken to the same absurd extremes as it is here?

That's the real issue with GMOs. Monsanto has not been kind to farmers that happen to plant near GM crops and get their genes through pollination rather then by licensing seeds.

> Is patent enforcement in Argentina taken to the same absurd extremes as it is here?

It depends on the sector of the economy and if there's enough money on the table. Monsanto often sues farmers who do what you say.

But in other sectors of the economy, some people could say there's almost no patent enforcement (same for trademark). That's one of the most frequent requests|demands our politicians receive from the US Embassy.

I think the key in these GMOs is that the M is to address inorganic environmental challenges --so that they produce more under challenging conditions rather than addressing organic environmental challenges (like pests --which require dousing artificial chemicals --to which many people are allergic).

In the end, though, ironically, GMOs have the potential of being more environmentally friendly than the alternatively produced (traditional) hybrids. It's too bad they got a bad rap from the Monsanto shenanigans.

Today, he says, the costs of doing field trials of GM crops [...] are prohibitive for almost anyone who’s not Monsanto or Syngenta. “The big multinationals can do these studies, but the public institutions or national businesses in developing countries can’t,” Herrera-Estrella says. That leaves some of the most useful GM applications—and the ones that’d help poor farmers, like disease resistance and drought tolerance—in limbo. They aren’t profitable enough for multinationals; they’re too expensive for everyone else.

I've never been a big proponent of GMOs, and if we're going to allow them at all, I'd like to see really thorough field trials to demonstrate their impact on the ecosystem, but this quote makes a really good point. If tests are too expensive, only the biggest companies with the most profit-driven crops can get approval, and that's the exact opposite of what I want. I'd rather see golden rice and this sunflower-soy, than Bt, Roundup-Ready and Terminator crops.

GMO = genetically modified crops

organisms, not crops. There are gmo animals and bacteria as well.

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