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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Countries that eschew genetic modification of foodstocks will see famine in the next century. Traditional breeding techniques to introduce favorable traits simply do not work fast enough to keep up with changing ecological conditions in a changing climate. It's often too costly to waste acreage screening for favorable phenotypes after making a cross between two species in effort to couple favorable phenotypes from both (this is the traditional method to develop new cultivars, most of what we plant today are hybrids). Genetic modification is a shortcut that ultimately saves the farmer time, money, water, and land to achieve the same end result of an elite cultivar.

What happens after with licensing and other legal issues is a fault of policymakers rather than any fault of this inherent lifesaving technology.

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I am not convinced this is actually true. GMOs in practice tend to be the introduction of a foreign gene into an organism. Breeding is different; you shuffle ~1 million small effect size variants around and see if you can get a combination that has a bigger effect size. This sounds inefficient, but done right it can have spectacular effects (i.e the green revolution).

I also don’t think we have pushed the limits of breeding yet. It is only in the last decade that genotyping tech has become cheap enough to employ it for a breeding program. Combine that big data analysis with breeding and I bet you can produce some spectacular results within 1 or 2 generations.

I think the massive advantages of shuffling a million variants 1000 times is why GMOs are transgenics and not modifications of the existing genome. Traditional breeding is just so much better at this.

On paper, you are absolutely right. But we don't live in theoretical world, rather in one where corporations like Monsanto will use any technology available to extract as much profit from everybody as possible.

Even if it means doing highly amoral stuff and tightly coupling crops enhanced for mass, immunity to pests and diseases with things like inability to breed, so farmers have to keep buying their seeds.

Its not hard to see why everybody has issues with this - not many want to be slaves with the very thing that our lives depend on to company thats extremely greedy from the start. GMs without those traits, having just weaknesses adressed might be much better sell for poor countries.

Rich countries like Europe will react when its time to react, no need to freak out now when as you describe serious issues will be present in next century. Crops can be changed pretty fast if there is strong enough motivation and one has enough cash.

Can't the Indian government promote it's own agricultural companies and ban Monsanto products? That would allow Indian GM crops without worrying about some other country's corporation making Indian farmers dependent. Prohibiting GM foods sounds like handicapping countries if the concern is merely becoming dependent on other countries.

Doable, sure. But that is precisely how one gets labeled an "authoritarian regime" by Western capitalists.

Not authoritarian, but it does tend to run up against free trade agreements where offshore products and companies need to be given equivalent treatment.

However, I don't think India has many FTAs, and probably few of them include agricultural products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bilateral_free-trade_a...

If not authoritarian, do you have any counterexamples of "authoritarian" countries that do have a FTA with Washington?

I think there are a lot of misconceptions about GM crops, most people think they are modified to be resist/repel vast types of insects/pests and what not, this is in average not the case and very complex to implement, what they are really engineered for is simply to be very resistant to specific pesticides, very easy to control/predict as you have to target only the few chemicals that you spray. Unfortunately we all know what this means... tenfold increase of pesticides and faster destruction of the environment. Not to say that there aren't GM modifications in that direction, but it's not the norm.

I agree in general that GM is mostly a shortcut to a similar selective breeding that humans have been doing since pre-history, and banning it altogether is short sighted and reactionary. That said I think there is space for debate over which phenotypes are bred into our food, and how some phenotypes enable drastic changes in how our food is harvested and processed. For example, the use of glyphostate as an essential component in weed control and harvesting of wheat is enabled by transferring phenotypes from very different organisms that would be impossible using natural breeding techniques. And note that this and similar modifications are now IP owned by the people who did it, and they have a vested interest in getting everyone to use it (by force if necessary) irregardless of the obvious looming health questions that arise.

> Countries that eschew genetic modification of foodstocks will see famine in the next century

Even if we were to agree that GM crops help with that (which is debatable), I don't see how there'd be any "famine" seeing that they can change policy anytime in the future if they see problematic trends, and do the same thing they do with drugs - ignore US patents and start making their own GM seeds.

Note as well that I'm not against genetic engineering per se, and I do not believe the consumption of most GM foods is harmful to one's health. But the way GE is currently done, the problems of monoculture and security of the food supply are very, very real, for the same reason why we only have the shitty varieties of bananas now - the better kind got wiped out by disease.

It doesn't have to be this way. There's nothing preventing Big Agriculture from introducing more diverse seed varieties. It's just less profitable than making monocultures that can be wiped out by a single strain of a single disease.

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