We can feed the world many times over with existing tech, we just can't distribute it. How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that?
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/global-econ...
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/global-econ...
1) You can't patent seeds unless you have modified them genetically. Occurrences of nature are not patentable. No GMO, no associated business practice.
2) Some of the modifications (I'm looking at you Monsanto roundup ready) allow plants to be tolerant of increased quantities of herbicide. This is obviously not something you want to encourage on a global industrial scale. Like you said, we have the food, we don't have the distribution.
3) That said, there is absolutely no inherent danger of genetic modification. We do it all the time, it's well controlled for effectively getting a specific modification. Calling GMO "frankenfoods" or implying there is some inherent health risk to GMO food (outside specific problematic modifications) is just bullshit.
A "good" modification would require:
No patents
No suing farmers that grow your seed without a license/purchase
No boosted tolerance to plant poison
No convenient requirement that "improvements" rely on additional product that the company sells (eg roundup)
Edit: formatting
People won't buy such things for a long time anyway, and that it doesn't occur in nature doesn't matter. Hell, give it a million year and it might start occuring in nature by itself, because why not? Nature does what nature does, it already mixed up a lot of stuff in a weird way (except we don't call them "weird", just "natural").
Few other things that "never happen naturally" - clothes on human beings. Bricks. Steel. Airplanes. Colorful paint on canvas. Should we discourage them all, because they're not "natural"?
Compare this with nuclear weapons - humans have in a few decated managed to engineer something way more dangerous than millions of years of "natural" permutations/combinations of atoms.
This is 100% False. There is essentially no risk of accidentally transferring a bacterial protein to a plant. The molecular machinery involved in transfection is complex and fragile. The transfer process is gated and specific. Even if there was a transfer of the wrong gene the result would be a dead organism, not a super-organism.
Eukaryotes do not tolerate random prokaryotic genes in their genome in place of a functioning gene. The introduced gene has to be specifically designed/selected to be compatible with the target organism.
Whoever is telling you this is doing the exact fear mongering these Nobel laureates are advising against.
It is so much the opposite of easy to do what you describe that it is essentially impossible.
GMOs should certainly be regulated for safety and transparency, which is part of the job of the FDA in the United States.
Dekhn's statement in the comment about the allergenicity was this:
A gene from Brazil Nuts that coded for a protein high in methionine was cloned into soy plants; soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects.
An important missing part of that ...in subjects with an allergy to brazil nuts. In otherwords they found some allergic reaction to the brazil nut protein in people allergic to brazil nuts. It did not create an unknown or novel allergen (although allergenicity should be a standard test for GMO food products).
For 8/9 subjects it was not the primary allergen (and for one it was the allergen that causes a dangerous reaction). Regardless an allergen is present and it is good that it was identified. The paper concludes with this:
"It is prudent to assess the allergenicity of proteins in transgenic foods if those proteins have been derived from sources that are commonly allergenic. The use of currently available animal models alone to predict allergenicity in humans does not produce accurate results. Techniques such as radioallergosorbent tests, SDS-PAGE with immunoblotting, and skin-prick testing can identify IgE-binding proteins that are probable allergens in transgenic foods derived from sources known to be allergenic. This strategy will not be useful in assessing the allergenicity of transgenic foods in which the allergenicity of the source of donor genetic material is unknown. Most current applications in the field of plant biotechnology fall into the latter category."
There is no doubt (in my mind) that GMO needs to be regulated and reported. If there is any protein from an allergic source that source needs to be listed on the food product specifically as "contains material from X" -- in this case X = brazil nuts.
The fact that the source donor material could be unknown (proprietary secret) is completely unacceptable. The FDA should have full regulatory control over GMO and they should be treated with a scrutiny closer to drugs rather than food. There should be absolutely no "proprietary secrets" regarding the source material or process used to make the modifications. There should be complete transparency and rigorous testing for allergic potential.
Maybe increased regulatory control is all that GMO doomsayers are after, but I think the hyperbole hurts their argument when there are sound scientific arguments for increased transparency and regulation.
tl;dr: This is a legitimate concern that should be included in a regulatory framework that supports safety and transparency.
There is still a small chance that someone who did not know they were allergic to Brazil Nuts but already consumes soy products could be impacted by the new product. However I am not sure how to mitigate that and still have GMO food products. From a consumer perspective they could be introduced to allergens that are now present in their "new" existing diet. I would sympathize with a consumer who said "hey I did not change anything and now I am impacted." So in this case labelling would be insufficient. Perhaps the answer is to say that "known allergenic introductions" are not allowed for GMO food.
Many benefits and concerns lie ahead. In such cases, for their sake, the consumer needs access to valuable information.
Please consider that the vast majority of scientists who work in this area disagree with your logic - that is what the entire NYT piece is about.
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/05/40419855...
What we know is what has happened in "nature", and while we can try to extrapolate from that, we really have no clue as to what is possible.
Even though you grossly exaggerate how genes work with regards to resistance/danger, the possibility of phenotypes that could lead to negative effects in human consumers is just as real by "natural" means.
I don't really think your comparison with nuclear weapons works though; for one, there is no such thing as a "natural" nuclear weapon - not to mention that a "natural" (objective) concept of "weapon" (irrespective of any subject making/wielding/using/thinking about/whatever) would have to exist if we were to compare apples to apples.
The idea behind my comparison is simply, that we can engineer things much more dangerous than nature can, that would never appear in nature by themselves.
But, generally, that's what we do. With brains, we can do in a few months what would take natural selection millions of years to "discover". Doing that, using our brains, seems kind of like the whole point of being a human.
The Nobel Laureates are not talking about the business-practice of certain companies, but rather about fear-mongering about G.M.O.s themselves, e.g. appeals to nature as basis for "health concerns", etc.
Which means protecting the IP of GMOs, aka. sterilizing / privatizing / patenting seeds, and usually selling additional chemical products related to the GMOs, as in RoundUp resistant seeds, with their own set of problems when deployed on a massive scale.
The Laureates are effectively saying: "GMOs are OK to eat. This scientific / statistical fact has no direct link to how they are developed and sold in practice and what consequences that will have on society, the economy, and the environment. That's a different problem. Stop bashing GMOs."
They are not only missing the point: they are behaving in a very irresponsible way.
It's actually the opposite. It's them who advocate responsible and reasonable behaviour.
Discouraging GMOs because of "current situation" is the same thing anti-nuclear proponents do with nuclear energy. They'll scare you with Chernobyl and Fukushima in order to discourage all work on nuclear energy, no matter how safe, no matter how different from the things that caused (few, very scope-limited) disasters.
Bashing GMO and genetic engineering in general just because some companies behave somewhat irresponsibly only makes it harder for responsible people to enter this market. Not to mention the very idea that bullshiting people is good for them is kind of stretched.
But I think would be solvable via regulation, not to mention that this is a different discussion entirely.
I don't think they are necessarily behaving in an irresponsible way, though. They are evaluating G.M.O.s with regard to health, safety, nutrition, poverty/famine and so on - not with regards to social and economical consequences (which I think would fall more within the purview of policy and regulation).
Ultimately, this issue is highly politicized, and the debate (including the comments here on HN) is often fraught with personal opinion.
(Probably iPhones aren't, but almost surely some other products are.)
I see it more like someone saying (to stick with your example): "Don't buy iPhones - they'll kill you!", and scientists answering "But they're totally safe, they won't kill you."
Meanwhile, they may be products of child-labour (or whatever other horrible circumstance we may imagine), but that's a different issue from what we are discussing.
Anyway, we're getting off track here:P
GMO is a very vague term, we can engineer plants to make them toxic in which case no, eating GMO would not be OK. We are also most probably able to engineer interesting new kinds of crop that would have a very positive impact on humanity and our natural resource consumption.
There are several issues here that are not addressed by these Nobel Laureates which makes their letter dangerous and irresponsible:
- as of now, Monsanto and co. are engineering their seeds so that it's impossible to keep part of the harvest and use it to grow the next one (as peoples have done for thousands of years), essentially forcing farmers to come back next year and buy new seeds. This is a very efficient way to keep farmers poor and under control. It is also very unethical, but of course the optimal choice economically speaking...
- Monsanto is also engineering seeds to resist RoundUp in order to shove said RoundUp down the throats of farmers. At this point I don't think I need to debate the negative impact of roundup on human beings and nature, it's known well enough. The main point though is that it's important to remember that the goal of these companies is to maximize profit, not benefit the world. Pushing RoundUp like this is a good example: there is no incentive for them to improve the resistance of seeds to diseases as it would bring down sales of their main product.
- GMO is not all good or all bad, but it is complex and a powerful tool, thus requiring caution and thorough TESTING. Testing that GMO lobbies are not exactly diligent to run.
- Speaking of lobbying, most of the problems mentioned in this thread could be solved with a better regulation as they're due to bad actors. they're not intrinsic to GMO. But Monsanto being a very powerful lobby, I'm personally not too confident about the outcome.
> Monsanto and co. are engineering their seeds so that it's impossible to keep part of the harvest and use it to grow the next one
Are you referring to hybrid crops? While it is true that we wouldn't want to save such seed, they are not necessarily lumped under the GMO umbrella. The whole patent debate doesn't affect us with such crops because we wouldn't consider saving the seeds in the first place, GMO or not, patent or not.
On my farm, non-hybrid wheat is one crop we might save, but there are no GMO varieties of wheat on the market to begin with so again it is a complete non-issue. That said, rarely do we have the cleaning and treating equipment necessary to reuse the seed on the farm, so by the time you contract out that work, it's easier to just buy new seed from a dealer anyway.
> Monsanto is also engineering seeds to resist RoundUp in order to shove said RoundUp down the throats of farmers.
What do you mean by shove? We willing use glyphosate (not necessary Roundup™ since it is off patent and anyone can produce it) even on our non-roundup ready crops, just as farmers have done since the 1970s when glyphosate was invented. What Roundup Ready crops do allow is the use of only glyphosate, as opposed to a crazy cocktail of chemicals necessary on the non-RR crops, reducing input and application costs.
I will also add that Roundup Ready 1 is also off patent now. Anyone can use the technology that was invented by Monsanto that spearheaded this whole GMO debate in the first place.
> there is no incentive for them to improve the resistance of seeds to diseases as it would bring down sales of their main product.
Well, ultimately, we buy what works.
If, hypothetically, someone creates a viable seed that is immune to pests by itself, negating the need to apply any chemicals at all, we'd be quite willing to pay more for it. That would be a huge cost savings. Chemical applicators alone can run into half a million dollars pretty quickly, let alone the product being applied and labour costs. There are many companies (and governments) working on GMOs – it's not just Monsanto. There is a lot of incentive to come up with such a seed to become a more dominant player in the game.
Seed production has been a separate specialty for well over 100 years. No large-scale farmer "keeps part of the harvest and uses it to grow the next one", and the small-scale "organic" (or whatever) farmers who do do that don't buy commercial seeds in the first place.
Why is that a bad thing? Would you rather they invested the billion of dollars on marketing?
The world is no utopia, and as long as money / economic gain is the utmost priority for most of humanity and its corporations, allowing widespread use of patented G.M.O.s will only cause more damage in the long run.
Imagine a whole countries population being dependent upon a companies patented seeds. Now add some secret courts implemented via trade agreements so the country is effectively unable to just "use" these seeds without paying up incredible amounts of money and suddenly you got yourself a situation where the country might end up under effective control by the company.
Yes there's probably still a way out of this dilemma, but with the right/wrong people coming to power through the course of action, you might quickly end up with nationalist government for which the most easy solution is out is a war.
Let's try not to end up as the Century of the GMO Wars.
Food surplus means nothing if it can't be distributed reliably. It matters nothing if you can spread food nice and even in 2017 if we get famines in 2018. Transporting and trading food makes it vulnerable to problems in transport and economics. So nothing beats locally grown high yield nutritious crops. And GMO can improve yields and nutritional values.
Golden Rice comes to mind: https://en.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.
That's exactly what happens with sterile GMOs if you throw away all your non-GMO seeds then can't pay next year's GMO licencing costs.
Patent laws are completely different set of problems. They don't necessarily need to have anything to do with GMO as process.
It means that you can tolerate greater levels of waste. In a world where logistics are imperfect, there will always be some waste.
Also, if you have greater yield for a given input of labor, more people can go work in a factory make latex gloves or some huge number of life-saving products.
The bulk of seed grain is produced by specialized seed companies who hybridize Cool Variety #1 with Cool Variety #2 and sell the resulting seed which produces Cool Variety #3. The problem is that if you plant Cool Variety #3 seeds, only a minority of them will be Cool Variety #3. This is a real problem.
If you kept growing the seeds for many generations, ruthlessly weeding out anything that didn't exhibit CV #3 traits, you'd eventually get something close to a pure CV #3 strain, but most farmers don't want to do that.
Let's say that CV #1 is resistant to "gray-green rot" (made up names here), while CV #2 is resistant to "early leaf blight". CV #3 is resistant to both, thanks to having one GGR-resistant gene from CV #1 and one ELB-resistant gene from CV #2.
But what happens if you grow CV #3 seeds? The kicker is that genes (usually) come in pairs. You'll get 25% offspring that are resistant to both (what you want), 25% resistant to GGR (but not ELB) 25% resistant to ELB (but not GGR), and 25% resistant to neither. If both GGR and ELB kill the plant, congratulations! You've managed to reduce your crop yield by 75%.
That is why most modern farmers do not save seeds.
> How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that?
The patent on the first generation of Roundup-Ready soybeans expired last year. A third party immediately produced a generic version of Roundup-Ready soybeans and sold it for half the price of the Monsanto seeds, with no restriction on seed saving. Madness! A company created something new, obtained a patent, and enjoyed a limited monopoly until their patent expired and the free market used the now-public information to undercut them. This is an example of the system working.
Regarding your greater point -- the claim that we are producing many times more food than we need -- the important question isn't how much food we're "wasting" but how much food waste is avoidable, given the constraints we want to live under.
The difficulty in food distribution -- as the article you linked pointed out -- isn't just a matter of warlords hording food or rich westerners cramming their maws with too much food[1]. The larger problem is that food is an organic product (as in, literally, not philosophically) produced in messy conditions with a limited shelf-life. Some food produced will be of substandard quality; some food produced will spoil before reaching a consumer. Agriculture is a leaky pipeline between the farmer and the hungry consumer, and most of the leaks that are left are difficult to plug, or shouldn't be plugged. Consumers shouldn't eat spoiled or fouled food, so if you can't prevent the food from being fouled or spoiling you should let it fall out of the system.
What all this means is that we need to be producing some multiple of the amount of food people consume to actually get that amount to them. We should try to improve distribution as well, of course, but the returns there will be as diminishing as they are everywhere else. By 2050 we'd like 60%-85% more food to be reaching end consumers than is now, to both keep up with population growth and to feed those who are hungry now. Some of that will almost certainly come from improvements in distribution, some of it will probably come from shifting diets away from meat and other inefficient crops, but we'll also need to ultimately produce more food per acre than we are now.
[1]: I found this sentence in the article particularly offensive:
> "And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum."
There may be someone out there eating 6-7 times some minimum (1500 calories?), but that is a weird abnormality and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As someone who is mildly overweight, my calorie surplus is about 50-100 calories, about 2% extra, which adds about 5 pounds per year. That is the typical overfed westerner. Adding in the extra calories to support my extra body weight amounts to about 10% more calories than would need at my ideal weight. If 30% of the world consumed 10% fewer calories, it would indeed have a measurable impact on the global food supply, but it is a bit of a red herring.