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I really think there'd be less opposition to GMOs were it not for the fact that this one company -- a firm with a history of somewhat scummy and antagonistic behavior -- didn't control the entire industry.

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That antagonistic behavior being what? I ask because there's a commonly-held belief about Monsanto that they, in effect, wait for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields and then sue the farmers who manage those fields for royalties.

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.

I thought there was pretty much a whole movie (Food Inc) documenting that very thing (i.e. cross contamination). Please don't try and say that the hatred going towards Monsanto isn't deserved because it most assuredly is.

http://www.damemagazine.com/2013/04/03/monsanto-six-truths-a...

Link to it. There are lots of movies saying lots of things. I'll make you a documentary implying how ASU eats babies if you want me to. That doesn't make it correct.

(ASU because it's across the street from my house)

Here's a transcript

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.

http://www.arte.tv/de/1930194.html

Now now, Food Inc is most definitely not a reliable source of information on much of anything. The whole thing was pure biased crap, the authors having a pre-decided conclusion and just using all sorts of unscientific scare tactics to persuade their audience to their way of thinking.

There are a lot of things I like about Food Inc. I can geek out a bit on seasonal and local food. I have a local butcher I work with for most of the protein we cook and he sources his product from a small set of farms within driving distance of here. I have ethical problems with battery farming, both because of animal cruelty issues but more importantly for pragmatic reasons like environmental externalities and antibiotic abuse. I cook, a lot. I'm very sympathetic to Food Inc's viewpoint.

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.

Thanks for being the voice of reason around here.

>If you just mean that patent enforcement is inherently scummy and antagonistic, well, I have no snappy response for that.

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...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#India

What people are concerned about is basically "embrace, extend, extinguish" business practices applied to agriculture, with the result being a consolidation of ownership of the means of seed production into the hands of a small oligopoly of companies with interlocking patent agreements.

(Others have pointed out that no, Monsanto does not control the whole industry. But they are by far the dominant player.)

That sounds bad. Is it what's happening in practice? I'd like to learn more about this. I certainly don't want to be knee-jerk in the opposite direction (that Monsanto is totally O.K.).

However, sueing a farmer, because he grows plants shows how Monsanto sickens our society.

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.

I think I just explained how that is not in fact what Monsanto does.

>didn't control the entire industry

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.

>unprecedented potential to save billions of lives

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?

> Potential, yes; but not with massive financial interests behind it.

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.

Yes, they're patented and copying them is a violation of the "user agreement".

http://grist.org/news/supreme-court-hands-a-big-win-to-monsa...

Yes [1]. But for good reason. It is similar to pharmaceutical companies. They invest millions into inventing products. They should be entitled to a monopoly on the product for some period of time in order to re-coup their investment.

[1] http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/why-does-monsanto-su...

True. See "The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops" at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-genoc...

This article commits journalistic fraud - it attributes the fact that crops failed due to pests (which can happen to any crop, GM or not) solely to the fact that the crops were GM, and making a false impression that suicides were caused not by crop failures but by the fact that the crops were GM. They imply that "after" means "because", and that's the fraud.

Of course, even GM crops can not protect from all causes of crop failure. But blaming them on every cause of failure is wrong.

The whole thing is complicated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_suicides_in_India) and the Daily Mail has a history of being an awful source.

I agree, it is complicated. That's why it is shameful for Daily Mail to take a complicated story and rewrite it as a single-cause case against GM.

The story confirms that the seeds must be purchased anew with each season.

The way I read the article, it's mainly pricing of the GM product that led indirectly to their despair. They could've handled the crop failure with the cheaper non-GM seeds.

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.

I seem to recall seeing claims that GM cotton was more susceptible to certain pests, especially if you didn't spray it with the pesticide produced by the manufacturer of the seeds.

That shiploads are held back is actually a _great_ thing, maybe one of the best things capitalism does.

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 agree that it's good for the sellers (farmers). But how is artificial scarcity and rising prices good against hunger? The argument about rotting crops is a bit weak, AFAIK crops can be stored quite well if kept dry.

Buying new seeds every season began with hybrid crops in the 1920s.

"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

But at least you still have the option of accepting the mixed results of replanting hybrid seeds.

api's comment in this thread sums up the rationale behind the public's opposition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5800001

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.

>>> If GMO saves a million children it will next need to save ten million children

Are you advocating population control by starving off the poor?

I think genwin's point is that we humans behave very stupidly whenever we find an innovation that allows for exponentially more of anything. We behave as if that massive growth will continue forever, and it never does, and usually leads to a crash worse than the solution. So if a new invention allows us to feed all 7 billion of us comfortably, instead of just feeding 7 billion of us comfortably we'll instead create 10 billion, 20 billion, 100 billion of us, up to whatever point the innovation no longer feeds us all comfortably, and then it crashes, and then instead of a billion people dying off we now have 90 billion people dying off. Where I think genwin is wrong is in blaming culture or religion. Instead I think we're just stupid that way.

Yep.

> Instead I think we're just stupid that way.

That's culture and religion. Both could change to promote smarter sustainability.

But that's not what studying population shows us: when people have economic opportunities, education, and choices, they choose to have fewer children. So much so that we end up with the "problem" of the birth rate dropping below what's needed for replacement. It doesn't appear that population growth will ever reach the point that we'll have a problem producing enough food to feed everyone.

Education is the key to amending the culture and religion that is the root cause of the problem.

I do not see factual basis for this claim - how Green revolution led to a crash that is worse than the solution? How modern medicine led to a crash? So far all malthusian prophecies had been reliably wrong. You can claim that sometime in the future it may happen that they still will be true - I can not really disprove that. But you can not say "it never does" - because so far it actually always did.

See how long you can keep borrowing money. Pay off each credit card with a new credit card. You don't need to witness the crash to know that the future is bleak.

There is plenty of factual basis to the claim that we're borrowing against our future to feed the current population.

To "know" the future is bleak you have to be a prophet, since knowledge of the future is not available to mere humans, only assumptions about what might happen in the future. However, the fact that you claim something always happens and yet it never happened makes the claim a bit doubtful.

Yes, we can't know that something bad will happen when we jump off a cliff. If during the fall someone claims that something bad always happens at the bottom and yet it hasn't happened, the claim is doubtful.

We assume this always happens it because we observed many things falling off many cliffs. Though if you had a parachute concealed on you, our assumption about what would happen if you jump off a cliff would be proven wrong.

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.

Actually there is plenty of evidence of societies suffering greatly when they exceeded their resources, including modern ones like during the Rwandan genocide. We can also observe the current global fall, in terms of fast declining ocean fish stocks, fast depleting aquifers, and tons of other measurements. The book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is a layman's introduction, with references to extensive scientific evidence in its appendix. The relevance of the evidence is always debatable but to say there is none or that such failure hasn't been observed, or even that a fall cannot now be seen in progress, is false.

I am not saying society failure never happened. I am saying society failure because of improved conditions of life so far never happened - Green revolution did not actually led to something worse than widespread starvation. Like Rwandan genocide, most of current failures are designed, not just happening due to overpopulation - they are consequence of man-made evil designs, not development of society.

No, I'm advocating not making the problem worse while ignoring its root cause.

It's not the choice here. Monsanto can not reform Indian or Chinese society into something else. The choice here is either we have better crops and people do not starve, or we do not have them and people starve. You say "people do not starve" is a bad choice. To me it looks like advocating starving off people as the means for population control.

No, the choice here is either we have better crops and people starve, or we do not have them and less people starve. brent_noorda explains above.

In this scenario "less people" is achieved by starving them off, so you're basically saying "we will starve people off and then there would be less people to starve, so it's actually a good thing". Seems to be like an extremely cynical piece of mental gymnastics.

Nobody needs to starve when the root cause is focused on. You're basically saying "we will starve people off in the future, but save less people today, so it's actually a good thing". Of the two of us, I'm the one advocating that less people starve.

"When the root cause is focused on" is an extremely vague and non-practical phrase. You can always say "since we have people starving, root cause is not fixed, so we should leave them starving and not help them until it is". What is your method for making "less people"? We have population of 7 billion and growing, Green revolution technology can enable us to feed them. If you deny it, then what you propose to do with those people, where they are supposed to go?

The issue that I have is that Monsanto and other food companies fight very hard against GMO labeling. That's a big red flag to me.

Such a label does indicate danger to the uninformed masses, even if it's unfounded. I would say it falls under free speech. Let the market forces dictate the risks vs benefits.

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.

If only "market forces" worked like that...

Monsanto rightfully believes that if GMO products are labeled, and there is one single instance of a GMO product killing a person (even from some kind of rare allergy), then the market will fall since GMOs will be able to be avoided by consumers.

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.

What would have happened had GMO food been introduced with labels in the beginning that indicated that it was GMO, how it was modified, and the benefits?

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.

GMO labeling is as stupid as California prop 65 labeling, only more harmful. Every commercial food we eat is "genetically modified", it's how we manage to survive and feed 7 billion people - since the dawn of civilization, men found organisms useful to them and "genetically modified" them to be more useful. Trying to scare people off some methods of doing this would only lead to less productive agriculture and raising food costs - which would do little for the golden billion but have them spend a little more on food and little less on iphone apps, but would be very harmful for those that still live on the edge.

Plant hybridization (or whatever the ancient method is called) is significantly different than modifying the genome of a plant to embed a pesticide. The former is much more in tune with natural evolution.

It's not in tune with the evolution at all - the evolution does not make plants useful to humans, it makes the plants survive. Evolution would not produce fruits, vegetables or berries we love to enjoy - they would be wasteful and useless in natural conditions. The plants we use are genetically modified, and btw many plants produce pesticides naturally - such as Chrysanthemum or Nicotiana plants. It's just easier and faster to genetically modify plants on genomic level than by selection, where it could take generations to produce needed genomic change.

You want the change to take a long time so that humans can evolve with it. Yes plant hybridization (e.g. to make fruit sweeter) is not as fast or easy which is why it's more in tune with evolution. Some things that genetic modification can do are impossible with the ancient methods.

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.

Evolution takes much longer time than selection. And human evolution does not function like it did since humans have medicine and society, which means if you can't eat grains, for example, you don't die and take your genes out of gene pool - you just take some medicine and eat something else and live happily and procreate. So evolution has nothing to contribute with regard to organisms modified by human selection - it's both too fast and evolution doesn't have a chance to do its cruel business.

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.

Yes from our point of view, where human death is always bad and future consequences are largely ignored. From a macro point of view nature achieves what is perhaps the best possible outcome. Man has a spotty track record of improving or correcting it. We made some improvements that still seem better over the last century, like vaccines. And we've made many big mistakes, like DDT. What you support is a matter of what seems trustworthy.

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.

Science is not perfect. It's the best we have. Yes, pests are adapting and we don't have silver bullet. The solution is, however, not to say "well, science didn't work out, let's try to go back to the caves" - the solution is to keep working.

>>> 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...

The problem is not with the product per se, but with the uneducated populace they force it unto. I never saw a Monsanto infomercial, but I'm pretty sure I eat their product every day. No wonder people are unwilling to give them their confidence.

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!

I think most people who are anti-GMO really just want to know what they are eating. They just want to see a label on it if it has GMOs in it.

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.

I think the danger here is that Monsanto is a private company and is doing shady stuff.

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).

http://www.arte.tv/fr/le-monde-selon-monsanto-de-marie-moniq...

They don't control the entire industry. Way to give in to blatant propaganda.

No kidding. How about Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, Pioneer, Dow Agro? There are many players in agriculture, it's a huge industry.

http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/ifprid...

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.

More big players than the mobile OS industry: http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/625294/reveal...

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