And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster, since GMOs don't yet have same track record as pre-industrial agriculture. OTOH, industrial agriculture has been pretty awful, so maybe GMOs are a step up from THAT...
That's a non-sequitur, and you're adding the loss stats in with waste.
> And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster...
Once it's a black swan, it's already discounted, the term itself means the thing is unlikely.
I think the subject deserves more study, but we have people dying of hunger right now, and that's plainly more compelling than "something really bad might happen, we have no idea what, why or how likely it is."
This is especially true if they only need a few years of GMOs to break bad cycles with conventional agriculture (such as eating next years seeds because they have no food now).
For well over half a century we have understood that most famines are a result of entitlement failures, not lack of food availability.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_famines#Failure_of...
That "something really bad" might be localized ecological collapse, which I find pretty compelling, too.
If you can come up with a technology or logistical process to make a significant change to that without causing famine, you've got a company with billions in revenue.
For example there are very few distributors for grain: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-big-five...
The systems we have in place are meant to protect that near monopoly as much as they are to distribute food. On top of that, countries give loans to poor countries in exchange for 2 promises: 1) that they use the money to buy grain from the country lending the money 2) they don't grow grain themselves. In that way, we actively undermine world agriculture.
If your massive improvement disrupts these players, I think you're going to be in for a very rough time of it. Things like GMO further solidify the near monopolies, by restricting where you can buy seed, etc. This is one of the reasons you see a big political push for them.
* To understand why, watch the movie Grave of the Fireflies. Or watch Indy Neidel on youtube talk about the "turnip winter"
Yes, selective breeding is far less controlled and predictable as to unintended changes; people think of it as safer because of the way it used to be done which operates over longer time scales, which, aside from not actually providing any kind of safety, neglects the fact that modern methods allow selective breeding to operate over much shorter time scales.
That said, I don't really have an opinion on GMOs. I'm fine with you partaking first, though. :-)
Yes, selective breeding (both artificial and natural selection) create fundamentally new organisms.
"Not necessarily" but sometimes.
So do many non-GMO engineered crops where the trait that is the focus of optimization isn't yield, since a “yield problem” is deteemined by comparison to mainstream crops which are engineered for yield traits.
> That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled
That's even more true of selective breeding, whether by traditional or more rapid modern means, so that's not a problem with GMOs compared to any real alternative, it's a problem of all existing methods compared to a hypothetical state where we have both perfect modelling to predict phenotypical effects of genetic changes and perfect ability to make arbitrary, error-free edits to genetic code. And even then we are stuck with the fact that some traits at inherently in conflict.
A very first-world thing to be able to say when rejecting GMOs and other things that can improve crop yields for the less fortunate citizens of the world.
Most of the food is still farmed by poor small scale farmers, which are often more efficient than large-scale farmers.
Except the BT gene is exactly the opposite of a pesticide-heavy monoculture. The point is to make spraying unnecessary. Do you usually just invert the reality of things that clash with your preferred narrative?
>Most of the food is still farmed by poor small scale farmers, which are often more efficient than large-scale farmers.
Curious about this claim, I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_productivity#Sour...:
Some sources of agricultural productivity are:
-Mechanization
-High yield varieties, which were the basis of the Green revolution
-Fertilizers: Primary plant nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium[5][6] and secondary nutrients such as sulfur, zinc, copper, manganese, calcium, magnesium and molybdenum on deficient soil
-Education in management and entrepreneurial techniques to decrease fixed and variable costs and optimise manpower
-Liming of acid soils to raise pH and to provide calcium and magnesium
-Irrigation
-Herbicides
-Genetic engineering
-Pesticides
-Increased plant density
-Animal feed made more digestible by processing
-Keeping animals indoors in cold weather
Some quotes from a UN report:
Smallholders manage over 80 per cent of the world’s estimated 500 million small farms and provide over 80 per cent of the food consumed in a large part of the developing world.
Moreover, multiple studies have found that smallholdings are relatively more productive per hectare than large-scale plantations (Feder 1985; Barrett 1993; Banerjee, Gertler and Ghatak 1998; Rosset 1999; Borras, Kay and Akram-Lodhi 2007) and are also more resource-efficient (Altieri and Koohafkan 2008).
https://www.ifad.org/documents/10180/666cac24-14b6-43c2-876d...