People seem to fall apart when GMO food is mentioned but vaccines, medical procedures, drugs any science at all they agree with except GMO. Very useful things I'm not slagging on them in case I'm not being clear. People are weird.
-GMO, at least as is commercialized now, imply a reduction in genetic variation.
-GMO technology could be a good thing, but, some people find worrisome, that global supply of food it's in the hands of a few corporations. You have to recognize that this is an historical change of global proportions in a fundamental issue. Surely it pays to feel some mistrust.
-Some people, and I have not found convinced evidence of the opposite, thinks that GMO is being promoted because profit, not because humanity needs it. After all, the places where there is hungry is, in general, because development and politic issues, not because production problems; and in the places where there is not hungry, in general, a lot of food finish in the trash.
Ding ding ding! Monsanto isn't exactly Evil corp. and after doing some research, they don't quite deserve the terrible reputation they have. That said, I am still wary of a large multi-national corporation that seems to hire a large number of prominent US ex-politicians.
The cognitive dissonance it creates in people, especially those in LA, makes me chuckle. They'll only eat organic, gluten-free foods and use "all natural" toothpaste, cleaning products, etc. for fear of cancer. Meanwhile, on that jog during rush hour, they're breathing in possibly the worst air pollution in the US and living in this smog will definitely takes years off of your life.
>Some people, and I have not found convinced evidence of the opposite, thinks that GMO is being promoted because profit, not because humanity needs it.
Unless humanity instantaneously ends the Anthropocene era and stops spewing out greenhouse gases, wheat, corn, rice and sorghum (which account for half of the calories consumed by humanity) face a very uncertain future by the pressures of climate change.
Also, a large % of farmers practice crop monoculture, which is unsustainable. For example, edible bananas are the result of a genetic accident in nature that created the seedless fruit we enjoy today. Virtually all the bananas sold across the Western world belong to the so-called Cavendish subgroup of the species and are genetically nearly identical. These bananas are sterile and dependent on propagation via cloning, This lack of diversity makes them extremely susceptible. The vast worldwide monoculture of genetically identical plants leaves the Cavendish intensely vulnerable to disease outbreaks.
Since we are making America Great Again, it seems like the US just said fuck it, climate change is happening so that we can bring back manual labor jobs from 3rd world countries. If the worst happens and we live in a Mad MAx-esque dystopia, I'm assembling a war band to assault the global seed vault.Does anyone know what kind of fortifications it has? Norweigans?
Thats why many of them live on the land instead ... and smoke all the time to make up for lack of smog ;)
Wait until there is less food, and they will think differently.
Do you think people living in arid conditions said no to GMO crops that increased their yield by whatever-hundred % it was? Did they buggery!
GMO just affects how the first plant(s) of a variety are obtained; in the case of GMO, you shoot a gene gun (or use some other technique) to modify one or more starting seeds. In non-GMO crop development, you simply observe an interesting individual (or cross some number of existing varieties and look for interesting individuals among the offspring). A math teacher of mine once found an exceptionally fuzzy soybean plant he thought might be insect resistant.
What happens next is what affects the genetic diversity of the crop.
So you have one special plant. How do you turn that into a field?
Well, you breed it and hope its offspring are also special. Some plants are self-fertilizing; you may do that, to try to avoid introducing non-special genes into the germ-line. You may also use the pollen from your special plant to pollinate a large number of other plants and hope at least some of their offspring are special. In the case of GMO, you might use your gene gun to shoot the same modification into a reasonably diverse set of initial seeds.
Your goal as a seed breeder - GMO or non-GMO - is to get the genes that produce the characteristics of the variety you are trying to produce (flavor or size or color of the fruit; speed of growth; hardiness or resistance) as uniformly as you can into a breeding population of plants, so that all of the offspring of all of the plants can reasonably be expected to express the traits.
There will necessarily be a weak point there: if a new virus attacks the gene that is needed to make your new corn variety super-delicious, all the plants will inherently be susceptible to that disease, regardless of how that gene got there. This sort of susceptibility isn't too troubling, however, because it's always there: corn shares a great number of genes with other corn; that's what makes it corn and not wheat or beans.
What will vary is how much diversity will be in the rest of the plant's genome. There could be very little, if you simply breed your exemplar starting plant against it self, and then its children against themselves, over and over until you have enough seeds to plant a field. There could be a lot, if you can find or produce a number of unrelated exemplars or you first breed your exemplars against a more diverse gene pool.
This second sort of a lack of genetic diversity is more troubling, but it isn't a product of genetic engineering: it's a result of going through a population bottleneck in the recent past; this can happen to non-GMO varieties just as easily.
One aspect that isn't getting discussed much here is trade. With CETA set to pass at some point in the not too distant future, Europe will have easier access to Canadian agricultural products. Of course, there will be an impact on prices though.
And last but no least: I have no idea how most product should become cheaper that way, as canadian supermarkets are mostly more expensive than european. You wont get a litre of milk in Vancouver for 47 cent, nor good bread or eggs for the prices offered around here. Bananas and other import products are cheaper, but that is not the market Canada targets, I assume. The prices would go up if it wasn't all that much subsedized, something that might actually happen under CETA.
If you buy the organic apple because you believe it's healthier than you're doing so without evidence and effectively asserting that such evidence exists. If we're to assume (and I think this is the proper assumption) that you don't have proper knowledge about the health effects, then the default choice where you're not positing that there is any evidence would to simply purchase the cheaper apple. In that case you're saying (I don't know) and taking that factor out of the equation, which leaves either price or lifestyle, which I mentioned above.
I used to believe that GMOs were bad and organic was the way to go. I thought I had to stand up to big agriculture and buy local. I still mostly try to buy local for environmental reasons (and others), but I no longer factor "organic" into the decision. You can get "organic" just about anything these days whether or not it's actually "organic", and often times it's worse for the environment.
- Monoclonal cultures are highly suceptible to diseases like this one - there is a much higher pesticide usage associated with GMO fields around the world (for what reason whatsoever) - people have been sued because their crops contained genes from GMO companies
I am not really against GMO (I studied biotechnology) but I can understand why people have massive problems with them. And if Monsanto says that they want to monopolize food production around the world, I will oppose them, even if they do sometimes good things. It is not GMO that is the problem, its monopoles and big corporations that are associated with that and thats what people fear and rightfully fear.
This is because most GMO crops are designed to withstand more pesticides rather than bettering the crop on its own. It's a kind of printer and cartridge sales model. In Monsanto's case they want you to buy their crops and then use more Roundup. In this way they sell seeds and afterwards they sell more pesticide for those seeds.
It's not totally a one-way street and things are complicated in many situations, but the common public perception "GMO == pouring lots of pesticides" is clearly wrong.
You can't just compare "pounds of *cide" and call it a day. It is very important how much of which pesticides and herbicides are being applied, and what the properties of those are (how long they take to break down, whether they migrate to the water table, how toxic they are to different animals).
Nope:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bethhoffman/2013/07/02/gmo-crops...
FTA:
Overall pesticide use decreased only in the first few years GE crops were used (42 percent between 1998 and 2001) and has since then risen by 26 percent from 2001 to 2010.
By 2011 there were also three times as many herbicide-resistant weeds found in farmer's fields as there were in 2001.
Now, I think the GMO scare out there borders on mindless hysteria. But pesticide and herbicide resistant crops are just... bad.
>Organic food is just for rich countries who can afford to produce food inefficiently in order to feel good about themselves.
The organic label is bullshit and has no consistent meaning. However, there is a difference between the farmer who grows for maximum yield and the artisan who tries to maximize taste.
I think many people confuse the label organic with higher quality foods, hybrids, and heirlooms or more generally quality.
Actually, yes, they did.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2560613/pdf/111...
>> Dr Jorgen Schlundt, Coordinator for the Food Safety Programme at the World Health Organization, commented: ‘‘Before genetically modified rice can be widely introduced, scientific evidence will need to be provided to assure that the rice is safe and nutritionally adequate, does not pose unacceptable risks to the environment, and will provide the human health benefits suggested.’’ He added: ‘‘WHO, along with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the jointly sponsored FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius Commission are developing the methods and criteria to be used for the international assessment and management of genetically modified foods, including requirements for the labelling of such foods and their products. WHO is studying possible human health hazards from the release of genetically modified organisms into the environment and, as a first step, the WHO Regional Office for Europe has organized a seminar on this topic for September 2000.’’
This pressure meant that some of the patent restrictions and licensing were reduced - the 30 companies holding over 70 patents on golden rice said they'd allow free licensing for farmers earning less than $10,000; and they'd allow farmers to keep seed for replanting.