But to the farmer, GMO yields are significantly higher, and can be the difference between making a profit or a loss. It also means less use of pesticides, and safer pesticides, among other possible advantages like disease resistance. On a world scale, we produce more food with less land, which is definitely good. And especially important for the third world.
The future of GMOs also has a lot of potential. We could engineer plants with many times greater photosynthesis, or the ability to grow in salted land, to not be damaged by frost, etc.
I stand by what I said. You cannot simultaneously have GMOs that are a significant improvement overall without them negating the "minority" argument, and ones small enough to be undermined by a vocal minority shouldn't matter.
"many times greater photosynthesis, or the ability to grow in salted land, to not be damaged by frost"
If any of those were a real problem, then production would be a greater percent of the final cost. If changing those doesn't really change the final product price, then they're not important.
And again, the real issue is with third world countries, where the price of food can mean life or death. These countries depend on the first world to innovate in things like GMOs. If we stop doing that, because people won't buy them, we hurt the world's poor disproportionately.
One has only to look at the new exemptions for vaccinations to see that this clearly isn't true, and has modern-day repercussions.
Anyone who is familiar with kashrut knows that only vegetarian foods (with a few exceptions) are reliably kosher, because it takes very little to make them kosher, just paying for an inspection and certification to say that there aren't any animal products. But if you want kosher meat, kosher cheese, kosher wine, or kosher cooked food, it's significantly more difficult to find that.
Why?
Because those impose real costs on the producers that force them to change their practices. If you want kosher meat, that excludes pork and animals have to be treated differently. If you want kosher cheese, it can't have rennet (an animal protein), which most cheese does. If you want kosher wine, it needs to be processed in a specific way. And if you want kosher cooked food, not only does the restaurant have to follow all of those rules but they also can't serve milk and meat together. Suddenly, it becomes a lot less common to find kosher food if you actually care about it and aren't just cherrypicking an example for a book.
If you want a real lesson from kosher food, it's that companies will adopt all sorts of certifications and make any number of promises as long as they don't have to significantly change what they're doing. But if you ask them to do something that would really cost them money, then they are much less likely.
>Second, the cost structure matters quite a bit. It happens in our first example that making lemonade compliant with Kosher laws doesn’t change the price by much, not enough to justify inventories. But if the manufacturing of Kosher lemonade cost substantially more, then the rule will be weakened in some nonlinear proportion to the difference in costs. If it cost ten times as much to make Kosher food, then the minority rule will not apply, except perhaps in some very rich neighborhoods.
Their principle is the direct opposite of the US. If there is just the slightest risk that something is dangerous they forbid it.
In the US they only forbid things if there is overwhelmingly evidence that points towards it being dangerous.
If the government just outright mandates how food has to be produced, then no one has a choice, and of course that won't work. That's a different situation entirely.
Anyway your generalization is overly broad. The US also is restrictive of new things. Especially in e.g. the medical world. See all the startups running into trouble with the FDA. But also things like drones were banned commercially until recently. Even GMOs did have to get FDA approval, so your statement is simply wrong. You can't just go out and make your own GMOs and sell them.
I think it's just a general trend, that richer countries become more conservative, and more afraid of new things (and able to afford such policies.) Many technologies we take for granted would never be legally viable if they were invented today. Early automakers would have been sued out of existence for all the traffic accidents they caused.
Or, speaking of GMOs, traditional crop breeding literally involves letting the crops randomly mutate in unknown ways (sometimes artificially through irradiation!) No way that would have been approved by modern regulators.
I was going to use Thalidomide as another counterexample, but I don't know how things are in Europe compared to the 60's.
Not if they are a measurably better product the won't. If GMOs can offer food that is significantly tastier and/or significantly cheaper then they will do just fine. I'm not a big fan of GMOs per se. but offer me something I actually want and I'll happily buy your product
The big kicker is the effect this battle have in the third world, where GMOs hold the potential of a much larger impact (see eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice ).
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with manufacturers selectively labeling their supply chain methods. There is a problem with forcing them all to, when there is no evidence to support it. Even with nutritional labels, consumers have a right to know what is in the good for making decisions based on health reasons.