Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe
dw.de
dw.de
Monsanto is predatory to the point of absurdity, and that is where opposition to GMO comes from. They throw lawyers at you until you comply with their demands, and then you pay a tithe to them. It's a modern form of feudalism that centers around abusing the legislative and justice systems.
It's a very old problem, with parallels with Unix (as I understand it you could duplicate the install media after purchase for free; it wasn't until later AT&T would realize the value of what they were sitting on and try to control distribution of SysV to extract capital from it).
While open-source programmers like myself don't mind volunteering time and code, there is not a comparable contingent of "open-source geneticists" that I'm aware of. That means someone has to pay the piper if they want the GM seeds. If you concentrate the cost in the first batch of seeds you make them prohibitively expensive, which would lead to a gray market of fellow farmers selling their excess seeds at much cheaper cost.
So I don't see buying seeds yearly as a tithe, as much as a requirement of the overall business model given the reality of the large capital investment required. Am I missing a superior alternative?
I agree that buying seeds yearly seems pretty practical to me too, but alternatives are imaginable.
But I wonder why that wouldn't work in Europe... it seems Germany, France, even Hungary and other EU nations could combine to beat Monsanto at their own game... of course, U.S. farmers would then just use those seeds if they ended up being really good and so the EU would have subsidized the U.S.'s development on that. As long as that's acceptable to the EU that could certainly work though.
> ...among those [Europeans] who know what GMOs are, 59 percent of surveyed citizens believe they are unhealthy, with only 22 percent believing they are not.
> In its history, the European Union has only approved two genetically modified organisms for cultivation: Monsanto’s MON810 maize, in 1998 (which was renewed in 2009), and BASF’s Amflora potatoes, in 2010.
It would be nice to correlate this with the percentage of people who are considering dihydrogen monoxide to be unhealthy.
1. GMO is famous for making crop that produce herbicide or other sort of toxin, terminator seeds, or stuff that resist to things that you would not like to be sprayed on your food. Bad PR. "Technically cool" food is not a selling point in Europe.
2. Recently the industry has proven that they will fraud on actual existing regulation with the meat crisis in Europe and nobody has forgotten the other various food crisis from the 2 last decades. There is a massive distrust of the food industry, and the GMO has as much potential for good than for bad.
1) The IP system and the companies who exploit it to essentially disrupt agriculture (licences to grow seeds, cannot replant, must buy seeds annually, aggressive lobbying, regulatory capture). This is upsetting to the agricultural status quo (political and economical) in Europe (their farm subsidies would essentially be funnelled to foreign corporations). There is also the use of courts to abuse the IP system, where farmers who unknowingly grow patented seeds (pollen drift or seed stock contamination) get sued, instead of the other way around (farmers should be able to sue--and win against--GMO companies for contaminating their farm with unwanted plants).
2) The issue of eating the produce of GMO plants. On the health side, many (industry-funded) studies show no effect (surprise, surprise), watchdog groups say the industry covers up any bad results, while some independent long-term studies are starting to uncover problems (though results and methods are controversial). Then there is labeling and the fundamental right of people to know what they buy and ingest.
3) Huge but not mentioned yet: the environmental impact of the large (and growing) herbicide applications required by GMO crops (the glycophosphate-resistant varieties, but ther are other herbicides and pesticides involved). Again, this is a multifaceted impact: water runoff and groundwater contamination, impact on the polinators and other sub-ecosystems, evolution of resistent "super-weeds," escalation to other herbicides such as derivatives of Agent Orange. The fact that Monsanto sells the herbicides as well further muddies the problem (it is biased towards not seeing any environmental impacts). The problem is that environmental impacts take years to build up, become significant, and be pinpointed through studies--and by then it's too late.
The reason it's rational is this: were GMOs to be found to be unhealthy, it would be a continuation of a well-established pattern. Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy.
- Trans-fats (hydrogenated oils) are basically artery plaque in the form of fake butter or shortening.
- Nearly all additives such as MSG and artificial sweeteners are either unhealthy or suspect.
- Bleaching and other treatments to improve shelf life denude food of its nutrients. Re-enrichment only replaces macronutrients, leaving micronutrients and minerals unaccounted for.
- Preservatives enhance shelf life and reduce the likelihood of food-borne illness, but many are themselves suspect and many have been taken off the market.
- Nitrites are possible carcinogen.
- Google: brominated oil, arsenic poultry.
... and so on. The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients, namely iodine and vitamins C and D. But we're talking two successes out of dozens of failed experiments.
In every case, the "experts" told people it was safe or even good for you before the experts proceeded to change their minds. Margarine in particular is illustrative. It was recommended as a health food.
As a result, people have become rightly ultra-conservative about food, viewing any modification to food as guilty until proven innocent. "GMO is safe" means "we haven't figured out how GMO kills you, yet."
- Preservatives -- it's hard to know what you're referring to without you being more specific. Something being "suspect" is basically a comment about human paranoia, not actual health effects.
- Nitrites -- again, weak evidence that they may be carcinogens in some circumstances. Nothing epidemiological as far as I can tell. The alternative (botulism or other contamination) is far worse.
Herein lies the problem. Science is a method, not a dogma or a series of religious pronouncements. Trans-fat and even cigarettes were once considered healthy according to the science of the day.
As far as suspicion of new food items goes, there's a scientific argument to be made there too. Human beings are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution that has optimized us to metabolize certain nutrients in certain ratios. In a healthy individual, this diet is likely to be optimal since evolution has been optimizing for it in a feedback loop for thousands of generations. Any deviation from this diet is likely to be neutral to suboptimal, and anything not present in this diet likewise.
Don't get me wrong... far worse than anything I mentioned in my original post above is the way we eat: tons of simple carbs and sugars. Drinking soda and eating empty calories is likely a lot worse for you than GMOs would ever be likely to be.
I do know a bit about genetics too, and I personally think that GMOs are probably safe in most cases. The only legitimate health issue I'm aware of is the possibility of allergies. I was talking more about the social context of opposition to them, and pointing out that it's based on reasonable extrapolations of a trend.
People have also cherry picked this or that. I'll concede MSG. That's not the point. So far nobody's cherry picked margarine because there is now very strong evidence for the unhealthiness of trans fats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#Health_risks
For a generation doctors told people to replace butter with margarine. Got to avoid those unhealthy saturated fats!
Butter, it turns out, may actually be good for you: http://quantifiedself.com/2011/01/results-of-the-buttermind-...
What inductive inference are people supposed to draw from this pattern? Or are they just supposed to mindlessly trust in people with credentials next to their names?
It's a problem that goes way beyond medical science, too. Every time the president of the United States stands up and lies the country into war, every time a well-respected economist claims housing prices will always go up or a market pundit calls out that "this bubble is different," every time it is said that "no modern reactor can have an accident like Chernobyl" (this was the refrain prior to Fukushima), people lose a bit of their respect for the social mechanisms our society uses to identify and credential expertise.
This is the cause for the increasing mistrust of expertise. The quacks and fanatics and pseudoscientists are simply exploiting it. They didn't cause it. The claimants of expertise in our culture destroy their own credibility quite well, and when that happens people inductively extend that loss of credibility to entire categories of expertise and even to the concept of expertise itself.
You first need to demonstrate that food changes have been overall bad before we can even accept your core point, let alone respond to it.
I've tried to point out the perception-of-expertise problem before in threads like this, and skeptics always get angry and defensive and dismissive.
MSG is fine. GMOs are fine. There is no housing bubble. That's what the experts say.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10...
How many people do you know whose financial well-being was destroyed by the housing bubble?
Bernanke graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, among other accolades. You don't get more credentialed expertise than that. What conclusion are people supposed to draw here?
I'm simply pointing out the obvious one, and the one that many people do in fact draw: expertise is bullshit. I don't personally believe that -- I think the reality is far more nuanced -- but I can see how someone could draw that conclusion and I am not convinced that doing so makes them an idiot.
All the hype about how GMO will end hunger and nutritional deficiencies and such is part of the problem. I'd say at this point breathless hype is seen as a contrarian indicator.
I believe he suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect and his completely unsourced post should create a huge red flag in any readers mind.
I'm not going to go point by point as the average HNer should be able to research for themselves, but I will respond to this gem that generated the largest facepalm:
> Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy ... The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients,
This is such a shockingly misguided statement that it hurts to read it. This is why I believe he suffers from illusory superiority, because I think his utter inexperience with agrology is leading him to think that he actually understands this field and can speak with expertise on it.
For a counter-point that "all innovation has been bad", one should only have to look at Norman Borlaug, known colloquially as "the man who saved a billion lives" and "the father of the green revolution". Norman Borlaug was Nobel laureate and agrologist whose research changed agriculture around the world and is credited with preventing billions from starvation.
The innovations of the past century directly allowed nations to increase wheat and rice yields by 2-10X, saving more than one nation from mass famine. I certainly would not label that "unbeneficial" or "unhealthy".
And this is just the elephant in the room in terms of examples, believe me when I say you could write books on the subject of the benefits of agricultural development of the past century. Entire schools are devoted to this study.
I personally am not particularly afraid of GMO foods. I was pointing out the sociological and political reasons for opposition to them. Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food.
Every time you say something is good then reverse yourself, you lose credibility. At some point people actually start taking your pronouncements as a contrarian indicator. "Oh, the experts say GMO foods are great... they must be on Monsanto's payroll and they're probably worse for you than cigarettes."
Bad cherry picking used only to promote your own point. What about the enormous amount of good advice that has changed our lifestyles over the past century? Do you even know how people lived 100 years ago, how they ate?
What you should say is "some health experts have a habit of not always promoting scientifically sound advice, and many times promoting ideas that fly contrary to evidence. Fortunately as more evidence is gathered, those 'experts' are discredited and a better understanding of nutrition is the result".
When you don't cherry pick, you can find sources like:
The Harvard School of Public Health's Nutrition source. By any metric, "health experts promoting ideas". http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/
Can you take issue with these health experts providing advice? Anything they recommend that you think is grossly wrong? Because this is scientifically validated nutrition advice from health experts, the very thing you're trying to discredit by screaming "trans fats and cigarettes" as if those complex cases invalidate an entire scientific field of study.
Honestly, you're trying to smear the name of "experts" in general, without separating "health experts" (medical doctors, nutritionists, idiot laypeople who label themselves naturopaths, etc) from scientists. I feel like you're trying to find a way to ignore the entire science of nutrition because you got burned listening to a fad or because big tobacco ran roughshod over science six decades ago.
Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm doing. High-profile failures affect the perception of expertise, even across disciplines. The Harvard that credentialed the economists who said there was no housing bubble is the same Harvard that credentials the scientists who say GMO food is safe. The medical science that big tobacco ran roughshod over six decades ago hasn't changed substantially either-- the institutions and how those institutions are financed and run is largely the same.
People are simply not going to nod their heads to experts anymore. It's over, not just because of high-profile failures but because of the Internet. On the net anyone can appear as an expert. Anyone can look like they know what they're talking about.
How is science going to adapt to that? What I'd like to see is a solution to both problems: a more transparent, open, and engaging scientific process that both reduces the likelihood of major errors and frauds and more deeply engages the public.
You know... I have an apology I'd like to make. I'd like to apologize to all those marketing and sales people I slandered over my years as an engineer.
They were so irrational, said such ridiculous and inane things, made absurd and hyperbolic claims and chastised me for pointing out how unreasonable they were, insisted on framing things through awkward metaphors that bore little resemblance to underlying realities...
What they were trying to do was bang me over the head and get me to understand how actual human beings make decisions. They were trying to get me to pull my head out of technical realities (cough my ass cough) for a second and look instead at how things are perceived by people who are not experts.
Cause that's what I'm doing here. I am intentionally being hyperbolic and playing devils' advocate just a little because I want people to grasp why science and industry are mistrusted by so many in the general public. Most importantly, I want people to grasp that the people reaching these conclusions are not idiots. They're relying on methods of inductive reasoning that function on average very well in limited-knowledge scenarios. Evolution invented these methods of reasoning to keep us alive in situations where we have incomplete knowledge and are required to make important decisions.
I might draw different conclusions, but that's because I have a BS in biology and have created transgenic organisms in the lab before. That puts me in a tiny minority, probably less than a tiny fraction of 1% of the population.
I can either look at the rest 99.99% of humanity and the fact that the majority of them are suspicious of GMO food and say -- as most scientifically-minded skeptics do -- "man, those people are idiots." Now I've insulted them, which makes them even less likely to listen to me. Or I can say "hmm... why would so many otherwise intelligent people be afraid of something that is not likely to really be harmful to them?"
For me I just want choice (at the super-market). Choice to not choose GMO, until there is more than enough evidence and discussion around the topic. Maybe you feel there is enough evidence, but I want more. I do not want said firm to 'force' me into eating their product just yet. This is my due diligence on the one life I live.
The subject is conservatism. A conservative is not someone who rejects all of a thing, but someone who is skeptical and suspicious of new things.
As a result of many past issues with novel food products, people have become increasingly conservative about food. That doesn't mean that they reject all industrial or scientific agriculture, but they're likely to be suspicious of things that haven't been around for more than one or two generations. They're quick to reject novel changes in the food supply and very slow to accept them.
Along with having been burned in the past, I can think of another reason why this might be rational. The cost function is weighted heavily on the conservative side. It feels like something that could be modeled well with game theory.
The cost of food conservatism is likely a small increase in the amount of money paid for food. This is a very small cost for most first-worlders, where food is so available that obesity is a health crisis. The benefit is that the risks, if any, are well-known and are known to be tiny.
The cost of food liberalism, by contrast, is an unknown chance of getting cancer, heart disease, diabetes, allergic reactions and inflammatory disorders, etc. The unknown chance is probably very small, but many of those health effects have astronomically high costs that possibly include death or permanent disability. But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food.
The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies on unlikely events such as floods or tornadoes. Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance -- otherwise how would it be that the insurance company could make money? But you'd rather trade the risk of losing everything you own and having no recourse for a small amount of money that you're not going to miss.
This is a very basic math error. If you multiply two unknown quantities, you can not assume anything about the result, even if one of them is very big. So basically what you're saying is "we have no idea if it's dangerous or not, and there's absolutely no evidence on any danger present, but if it were, you could DIE!!! so PANIC!!!" This would be an extremely irrational and stupid behavior.
>>> But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food.
The problem is that it is very fragile. If the anti-science idiots ever prevail, the whole food abundance we have now could very well collapse pretty quickly - without science, malthusian scenarios are very real, and the people who predicted massive hunger by 2000s could very well be right if science did not intervene. If the idiots ever succeed in their war on science, first world would be in no way insulated from the disastrous effects of their victory. The whole abundance is the direct effect of what you call "food liberalism" and it is the only thing maintaining it.
>>> The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies
Not at all. Insurance companies have very accurate actuarial and statistical data, which they use in very accurate and specific ways to issue insurance. They never base their decisions on "multiply two unknown numbers, make assumptions on the result, panic". Your decision on buying the insurance may very well be irrational, but the insurance market itself is very rational.
>>> Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance
It is not true, since you can not be better "statistically" - the fact that it didn't happen to 100000 people would not improve your situation if it happens to you. The whole function of insurance is to make statistics work for you, without it statistics would be just a useless trivia - just as the fact that if Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average income of the bar visitors jumps - is useless for anybody in the bar, because they get no money from it. Insurance is the way to get you some money from statistics.
If there is an alternative organic I buy it.
This is good enough for me and I also buy a lot from my local organic farmer.
I don't have to go to the extremes you mention, at all.
When I walk into a super market I just want choice.
Do I choose 100% non gmo? Most likely not, but I will if I had a choice.
Again, you might want to not associate that extremism with simple rational choice.
I suppose I can understand Europe's arch-conservatism regarding food products after the thalidomide disaster, but I would certainly prefer to see actual evidence of harm from genetically-modified food, or even a plausible explanation of why a given GM food could cause injury and not just FUD FUD FUD.
But that doesn't matter. The reason we're careful about GMO technology is that there is a reasonable mechanism whereby harm may be the result.
We thus require careful testing and good quality science before allowing these technologies.
Unfortunately, politicians are often in the chain of "people granting permission", and many of them are stupid and ignorant and not interested in science.
You ask for a plausible mechanism for harm, but you also mention thalidomide. Thalidomide is a great example of unknown unknowns - we didn't know that chirality was important, and it was only after many birth defects that we found out.
So maybe there's something we don't know with GMOs, and we don't know that we don't know it so we can't reassure ourselves about it. We can do as much as we can to rule out those unknowns, and to reassure ourselves about the knowns.
250,000 farmers sold. 144 total suits.
144/250000 = 0.0576%
The absurdity here lies in your claim.
The reality is that Monsanto sues farmers when they take Roundup-Ready crops, plant them, and then use Roundup on those crops. You can't do that innocently; if you spray Roundup on non-Monsanto crops, you kill the crop.
If there's a case where Monsanto sued a farmer simply for having Roundup-Ready seeds or plants on their farms, I haven't seen it, and I've (a) looked and (b) asked around a lot.
If you just mean that patent enforcement is inherently scummy and antagonistic, well, I have no snappy response for that. Although again note that the problem with software patents is that you can implement some obvious piece of functionality and get sued by someone with a ridiculous patent. Like I said, nobody accidentally uses the whole Roundup system on a farm.
http://www.damemagazine.com/2013/04/03/monsanto-six-truths-a...
But the Monsanto stuff is a highly technical issue, and neither Michael Pollan nor Eric Schlosser appear to have much expertise in them. There is a lot of GMO FUD. I would not assume that none of it leaked into the movie.
(ASU because it's across the street from my house)
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/f/food-inc-script...
Several people in the farm industry are interviewed. Their statements are not questioned or further investigated by the filmmakers.
Well then finally we can all agree that Monsanto is detrimental to the development of GMOs. No one is claiming that Monsanto is "waiting for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields", so that might explain why you can't find any evidence of it.
What people do have a problem with, is a patent troll and a litigious one at that. That's what Monsanto is and there are plenty of cases to prove it:
http://www.nature.com/news/monsanto-may-lose-gm-soya-royalti...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Schmeiser#Schmeiser_v._Mo...
(Others have pointed out that no, Monsanto does not control the whole industry. But they are by far the dominant player.)
Overuse of Antibiotics, Pesticides, Herbicides and Fungicides are the stuff that create our allergies and poison bees too. Birds eat those poisoned bees, I really don't know how far this goes down the rabbit hole, but I'm worried.
While this is obvious hyperbole, I agree with your general sentiment. In fact, GMOs, perhaps more-so than any other modern technology, have an unprecedented potential to save billions of lives. Golden Rice alone could save the lives of one million children every year.
As a biochem major, GMOs are something I'm passionate about, and it really aggravates me when I see armchair scientists (read: people who watched a youtube video) decrying them as dangerous and calling for their banning. I would say these people are partially to blame for the regulatory nightmare that Golden Rice advocates are facing, meanwhile one million children go blind and die terrible deaths each year from vitamin A deficiency.
Potential, yes; but not with massive financial interests behind it. In a world where shiploads of wheat are held back in order to game the wheat market, things need to change before GMOs can cure 3rd world hunger.
I've read that GMOs have to be bought anew for every season because the harvested crops can't be used as seeds. Is that actually true?
"Today, hybrid seed production is predominant in agriculture and home gardening, and is one of the main contributing factors to the dramatic rise in agricultural output during the last half of the 20th century. In the US, the commercial market was launched in the 1920s, with the first hybrid maize. All of the hybrid seeds planted by the farmer will be the same hybrid while the seeds from the hybrids planted will not consistently have the desired characteristics. This is why hybrid seed is constantly repurchased by growers for each planting season." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed
This is not necessarily true in every case. pvnick mentioned Golden Rice. The Co-inventor of the genetically engineered, vitamin-A-rich strain of rice Potrykus has spearheaded an effort to have golden rice distributed for free to poor farmers. This required several companies which had intellectual property rights to the results of Beyer's research to license it for free. In fact, Monsanto was one of the first companies to grant free licenses. If the substinence farmer doesn't make more than $10,000 per year, he is freed from paying any royalities. The farmers are even permitted to keep and replant the seeds.
This is in the specific case of Golden Rice. Maybe somebody can jump in and tell a horrific Monsanto story.
Of course, even GM crops can not protect from all causes of crop failure. But blaming them on every cause of failure is wrong.
It's analogous to US students getting into a pickle by accepting large student loans and then finding no jobs in their field. But if they don't take the risk they may lose to those who took the risk. They'd almost all be better off if the student loans weren't available.
http://grist.org/news/supreme-court-hands-a-big-win-to-monsa...
[1] http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/why-does-monsanto-su...
Yes it means you get to pay more (in some cases a lot more) for your bread. It also means that farmers make more money and enable them to sell their wheat _now_ when they need the money and not after they have been foreclosed and it puts a price floor on the market for wheat, insuring that the crops we need to prevent starvation will not rot on the fields.
I'm from France and we have to take a course on that at one point in university.
IIRC Monsanto launched several products without testing them and was later forced to stop selling them since they were tested dangerous for health. Seeing that they weren't really testing their products and using biased studies sometimes, Europe just decided to make a lot of laws about testing before using GMOs.
IMO a technology as important as GMOs should never be in the hands of a private company motivated by money and share holders. It should be in the hands of an international association (like the UN).
The fact is that we don't know what GMOs can do to you. They might be safe, they might not be. It has to be different in every single case, since in every single case, you're talking about different combinations of DNA. Can that possibly be dangerous in a particular case? It sure can. Both directly and indirectly.
Once completely organic chicken breast becomes as unattainably expensive as beluga cavier I think you'll find nobody gives a shit how the cheap stuff is produced.
Even if GM produced a plant that was truly superior and healthier in every way, there's no good way to trust it. There are too many instances of "oops, what we thought was good for you is actually bad for you" or "oops, we thought we could improve nature but we made it worse" to trust GMO, at least for the next fifty years or so. The plant that seems truly superior and healthier might end up killing enough insects or otherwise affecting them such to be worse all things considered.
Im modern mind "evolution" has became synonymous to "natural" in the quality of "it has no nasty science in it so it has to be good". In fact, neither "natural" nor "evolution" has nothing good in it - nature is impersonal, immoral and unimaginably cruel, viewed from our point of view. And if the science can do something to correct it - it is great.
For example, sweeter apples we enjoy now appeared in the last couple of centuries, and the US varieties in the last century alone, before that apples were mainly used to make cider or applejack. A couple of hundreds of years is nothing for the evolution.
Search for: "Pests are adapting to genetically modified crops in unexpected ways, researchers have discovered. The findings underscore the importance of closely monitoring and countering pest resistance to biotech crops." That sounds like another "oops, we did it again" in the making to me.
>>> What you support is a matter of what seems trustworthy.
This is exactly the problem - the support becomes political and relies not on what is actually better but on whose lobbyists are better and whose PR campaign is more successful. This venerable tradition started a long time ago, with Edison's shenanigans[1] to give him edge over the competitors. The story of DDT is another example - while the scientific basis for the book that destroyed the DDT - Silent Spring - remain shaky[2] and the ban ended up costing millions of lives of malaria victims, it is still considered an example of how science is going to doom us all. Another example is the continuing PR battle between sugar lobby and corn lobby. Initially, corn lobby was winning - that's why HFCS is called "high fructose" - because once fructose was good and glucose was bad, so the marketing term emphasized the good part, even though some varieties of HFCS have less fructose than table sugar, and commonly used one has only very slightly more [3]. Due to this and as the effect of the insanely high sugar tariffs, US industry switched from sugar to HFCS. Now the tide has turned and HFCS is becoming the bane of our age. And now the corn lobby wants to go back to "corn sugar", but so far they weren't allowed to. Corn guys though did another number in "biofuels", so even if they lose the HFCS thing, they have other victories in their belt.
This is all to say "what seems trustworthy" is a very poor guide, since most information you'd see in popular press is probably worthless. And decisions made by politicians are probably based on random factors having nothing to do with actual merits of proposed solutions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents [2] http://reason.com/archives/2002/06/12/silent-spring-at-40 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup#Produc...
GMOs can have a staggering amount of benefits to this world. But to say that they are safe across the board is extremely dishonest. We simply can't see all the long-term consequences of the new forms of life that we ingest. With enough knowledge, we can theoretically do whatever we want with DNA, including make cells in apples produce prions that eventually cause Alzheimer's. And we can do so accidentally.
I wouldn't be surprised if there'd be much less opposition to it. If you're opposed to labeling now, it looks like you're trying to cover something up or sneak something past the public.
I just realized... maybe the problem isn't that the Monsanto PR machine is deceiving everyone about GMO food. Maybe the problem is that Monsanto sucks at PR, bad. They certainly suck at modern PR. The kind of PR-firm tactics that they use to try to explain themselves to the public come off as smarmy and disingenuous to anyone under 40.
Rule #1 of modern PR: if you assume that your audience are idiots, they will realize this instantly and assume that you are a lying sack of you-know-what. I know I can smell a talking-down-to-me PR flack writeup a mile away, and stuff like that makes me feel like I'm eight years old and my gym teacher is telling me this is what people do when they love each other.
That's why I think this story is great news for the general population. It will hopefully push Monsanto to change its lobbying practices. It should, in my opinion, take some years to really educate (not propagandize) the people instead of spending the millions on a couple of political lobbies. It would have a longer lasting effect. And if they're not willing to educate the people because their product really is a health hazard, so be it!
People don't need to become experts on any particular food innovation to have a very good chance of serving their best interests in opposing it. The people have been continuously misled about health risks.
If GMO saves a million children it will next need to save ten million children, and then a hundred million and so on, until it fails and then there will be greater suffering. Culture and religion are the root cause of the problem; it's better addressed from that angle.
Are you advocating population control by starving off the poor?
There is plenty of factual basis to the claim that we're borrowing against our future to feed the current population.
We never observed the thing that were predicted above, despite the claim that it always happens. We didn't even observe the "fall" you claim to be happening right now. No evidence for it exists except for repeated claims of impending doom, usually accompanied by sermons to repent and sacrifice to whatever favorite pseudo-deity the would be prophet happens to believe in. I have nothing against faith, but this particular faith wouldn't be my choice.
> Instead I think we're just stupid that way.
That's culture and religion. Both could change to promote smarter sustainability.
The data suggests that it is hyperbole to say that Monsanto owns the market, but judging by the CR4 and HHI - standard economics measures for concentration of market power - it's fair to say that the GMO market is very concentrated, and that Monsanto leads the pack by a significant margin.
No matter how you look at it, the Americas are a huge agricultural laboratory, and we're the guinea pigs.
Monsanto should disseminate knowledge about the science behind its products. Their current effort(http://www.monsanto.com/products/Pages/monsanto-science-and-...) is too shallow and simple. Give me hard data, not PR stuff.
Actually, I think we're at the stage where people know a lot of new terms, but don't really understand the concepts behind them. Like genes.
Greater population density, greater decentralization of agricultural production, greater variety and cultural attachment to regional culinary preferences, greater (dare I say it) social concern.
Purely on the basis of these base environmental factors, GM monocultures in Europe were never a winning proposition.
It's kind of like a hobo who is next to death trying to sell you some health pills while insisting that his poor health is not caused by the health pills he has been taking all the time.