Inside Monsanto, America's Third-Most-Hated Company
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Thirty years later, they are vilified by very similar ideologues.
There is more than enough food in the world. Starvation happens because of infrastructure and economics, not insufficient yields. Norman Borlaug's green revolution would have happened with or without GMOs.
My main criticism of GMOs isn't the genetic alterations themselves, but the way they enable excessive pesticide use, IP law abuses, and monoculture.
That's true now, but it won't be true when we add another billion or so people. That's only 15 years from now!
You clearly know nothing at all about GMOs, because if you did you'd be cheering on the fact that GMOs use less pesticide and herbicide than organic crops do, and the ones used are less toxic than the organic equivalents.
And monocultures have nothing to do with GMOs.
Why would you spend time typing up such nonsense?
Norman Borlaug's green revolution did happen without GMOs - it was all about breeding (e.g for shorter stems) and intensification of nutrient inputs.
While food distribution is a major problem, it's simply not true that food supply is not also a problem. It is entirely unfeasible for all the food in the world to be efficiently distributed to everyone who needs food from the places it is currently grown in the time we have available before peak population. Food supply is a limiting factor. Enabling people to grow more food close to where they live will save lives. This is why we (plant geneticists) continue trying to raise yields.
Try telling a starving family in (Indonesia|Tanzania|Bangladesh) that the problem isn't their pathetic rice crop yield, it's that Americans are throwing away cheeseburgers. We can feed a lot of those people with better agricultural technology.
> My main criticism of GMOs isn't the genetic alterations themselves, but the way they enable excessive pesticide use, IP law abuses, and monoculture.
GMOs don't enable any of those things. Monoculture is a route to efficient food production - it was around long before GMOs. We have it because it was the path of least resistance to massive scale food production.
Total amount of pesticides might be increased in some cases with GMOs (though in many it is reduced), but the important thing is that current GMOs enable us to use much, much less harmful pesticides. Glyphosate is probably the safest herbicide the world has ever seen. Some of the alternatives are just terrifyingly harmful.
IP law is certainly used by some seed companies, but I'd argue it's generally not abused to anywhere near the level it is by tech companies. If you read the court documents from Monsanto cases they are almost always reasonable and subsequently misrepresented by activists.
Where do you get those numbers from? Anecdotally in my experience, organic crop yields are well under half of those from conventional crops. Often organic crops are left in the field to rot because there's so little there that it'd cost more to harvest the field than could be gained selling the crop.
In our area, organic cropland is typically left fallow 1 year in 3 to control weeds, so there's an automatic 33% yield loss before any other factors.
Actually, in Norman Borlaugh's time, also his plant breeding methods (crossbreeding etc.) and the resulting crop cultivars were considered "unnatural" by some [1].
Also, when the potato was brought to Europe centuries ago, people were first very suspicious: "Even peasants refused to eat from a plant that produced ugly, misshapen tubers and that had come from a heathen civilization. Some felt that the potato plant's resemblance to plants in the nightshade family hinted that it was the creation of witches or devils." [2]
[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/jul/18/he-saved-a-b...
There is still a huge sentiment against GMOs, everyone think they are harmful to health here in France. I don't know how long it will take for the mentality to change.
About as long as it takes for people to stop believing in homeopathy and other snake oil.
Worse yet, even if there were some as-yet unknown health risk, it would have to be a plague-level threat to counterbalance the benefits to food production. That added food production can save millions of lives.
"Invoking the risk of "famine" as an alternative to GMOs is a deceitful strategy, no different from urging people to play Russian roulette in order to get out of poverty. While hunger is a serious threat to human welfare, as long as the threat remains localized, it falls under risk management and not the PP [precautionary principle]." [1]
[1] "The Precautionary Principle," a paper coauthored by Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame. Link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/... Also referenced elsewhere in these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985787
As a side note, I've always been a bit of a technophile, so eating genetically modified food seems really cool, and I can't wait until they perfect lab-grown meat.
Which says a lot about the media you read.
Would you care to elaborate?
> Which says a lot about the media you read.
Apparently he only reads scientifically valid media, and not tinfoilhat publications.
(But unfortunately it is true, at least here in Europe, that even respectable media easily echoes totally unscientific falce claims about GMOs occasionally.)
If we had scientists with as big an audience as these celebrities, I think we'd stand a chance of having a logical discussion but instead these ideas spread like wild-fire without any critical thought involved. Very sad :(
Any experience farmers or biogeneticists care to comment?
"Even before biotech seeds came on the market, corn farmers tended not to save seeds, since store-bought hybrids delivered higher yields, but the technology agreement farmers sign when buying Monsanto’s biotech seeds forbids them from doing it."
So if I read this correctly, the only difference from pre-GMO days and now is that the common practice of buying new seeds every year is in a contract rather than just "common behaviour".
Additionally, the previous most productive system of farming (and still very popular) was to use first-generation hybrids (the offspring of breeding two different strains together). Due to a phenomenon known as hybrid vigour, first-generation hybrids often have more desirable growth characteristics (like higher yield, bigger seeds, etc.). However, the effect only lasts one generation. Try to plant the second generation seeds and you'll get relatively pathetic plants. But the hybrid breeding process is incredibly complex and hard to do at scale, so it's worth paying a seed company to do it, even if that means buying the seed every year.
The license protection for GMOs serves a similar purpose: developing GM lines is really, really hard and expensive. If Monsanto and other producers couldn't sell the seeds each year the technology simply wouldn't happen - the licenses allow them to profit despite the massive R&D cost.
Everyone throws their seed away ever year, because genetic monocultures have a 30% lower yeild than bought-in fresh genetic material.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vigor#In_plants
(The exception is rice, which can be bred time and time again)
Excessive pesticides, monocultures, over-intensive factory farms, fossil-fuel-based fertilizers. Those things worry me far more than GMOs, and they're far lower on everyone's priority-list.
About that, would you like it better if it was nuclear power based?
Ammonia production requires basically heat and electricity, there shouldn't be a problem. But producing urea should be harder.
The paid product takes more inputs from the farmer (crops, planting information, etc) and gives recommendations based on crop, weather, soil, and hydrology models specific to those crops, land, and planting. More details here: http://www.climate.com/products/climate-pro/
"The latest version of our precautionary principle, with application to GMOs, refined thanks to more fallacies in arguments countering it. For discussion before we move to the final version."
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/...
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"What people miss is that the modification of crops impacts everyone and exports the error from the local to the global.
I do not wish to pay —or have my descendants pay — for errors by executives of Monsanto.
We should exert the precautionary principle there —our non-naive version — simply because we would discover errors after considerable damage."
http://blog.longnow.org/02013/07/08/the-artangel-longplayer-...
P.S. I've already found several, almost verbatim, examples of the given fallacies right here in these comments.
"Taleb's hatred for orange juice is an example of a wider disdain for the modern diet. He reveals his personal food rules, and very fascinating they are: no liquids that have not existed for at least one thousand years (i.e. wine, water and coffee only), no fruit not present in the ancient Mediterranean (no pineapples, pawpaws or other exotica)"
http://www.zoefcunningham.com/blog/antifragile-5-things-nass...
So I think we can write off Taleb's fears as totally nuts.
In other words, is it impossible to grow enough food without using GMOs?
But you can't. For example, organic farming uses much more pesticide and herbicide than the same GMO crops do. There is a persistent myth that organic doesn't use herbicides and pesticides but it is not in any way true and never has been. But +1 to the marketing department for implanting that persistent idea in the mind of the general public.
GMO cultivars usually do not contain new, man-made chemical compounds.
For example, Golden Rice contain beta carotene (occurs naturally in e.g. carrots).
The virus resistant Hawaiian Rainbow Papaya contains a protein from the virus' capsid, effective "vaccinating" the plants, resulting in virus resistance.
Bt Cotton contains a chemical from Bacillus thuringiensis, a common bacterium in soils, that is harmful to pest insects.
New, man-made chemicals aren't intrinsically bad. But based on past experience, we are right to be cautious because we can't always anticipate their effects, the effects can take a long time to become apparent and they can be impossible to eliminate (like with PCBs).
Of course not. We waste drastic amounts of food every year thanks to spoilage. We feed food to other forms of food - how much food does it take to raise a cow to maturity? We turn food into fuel for cars at utterly dire efficiency.
Starvation happens because of economics, warfare, ongoing experiments with centrally-planned governments (freaking give it up, Kim Jong), things like that. Not small percentile increments in efficiency.
Genetic engineering is a toolkit to solve a vast array of problems we face, and it's available right now. With a 1% increase in yield, we can feed 1% more people. 1% of 7 billion is 70 million.
Starvation happens because we're not making enough small percentile increments in efficiency.
Well, we don't need it in the sense that we could all pay more for food that is grown in less efficient ways, just as we don't really need cars to get to work when we can all ride bikes. We don't really need cheap food because we can all afford the more expensive stuff that comes from less efficient farming methods. So you're right - it's not really needed. But it has great utility.
Moving our focus away from rich westerners for a moment, there is a clearer case of 'need' when you consider areas prone to drought or poor people who can't afford the higher quantities of fertiliser, herbicide and pesticides that are needed to grow non-GMO crops. Or at least that would be true if GMO crops were more widespread and western activists had not done such a good job of telling the poor of Africa and India that they are toxic horrors to be avoided at all costs.
Completely synthetic foods and food processing have a mediocre track record, and in many cases have caused actual harm (e.g. trans fats) for a long time before that harm was uncovered. Even in cases where there is no active harm, heavily processed foods very often have lower nutritional content than their less processed "whole" cousins. Take wheat for instance. We bleach it, denuding it of its nutritional value, and then try to add back the missing nutrients. Why?
Obviously that's apples and oranges -- GMO foods don't do the same thing that food processing, oil hydrogenation, etc. do... they're totally different technologies. But for the average person who doesn't deeply understand these issues, it's easy to look at the poor track record of "better living through chemistry" and be skeptical.
The general perception is that anything that "messes with" food is either reducing its nutritional content or adding something harmful.
Another reason for skepticism about GMOs stems from the poor track record of medical studies on the relative benefit or harm of various nutrients and foods. Take saturated fats for example, which were demonized for decades. Instead people were encouraged to eat trans fats like margarine, which turned out to be worse for you. Now apparently saturated fats are not too bad in moderation, or something. I don't know. That will probably be reversed next month, then reversed again, then reversed again, and each time the media will trumpet the news. Each big new finding about nutrition seems to contradict previous findings, leading to a general view among many people that nutritional science has no idea what it's talking about.
We can't even figure out after decades of study whether or not fat is bad for you and you're telling me we're absolutely 100% sure GMOs are safe...? Get the picture?
Finally, I think there's a problem of institutional trust. I've asked some organic hippie type friends before if they'd be more open to GMOs if they were made by non-profits working toward the public interest, if they were open source, and if all results of all studies were completely public. I've mostly gotten nods to that. People don't trust closed for-profit companies not to hide negative results, engage in research study "payola," push things to market that have known problems, etc.
The trust issue is huge. Any time this comes up around here I tend to post and bring it up, and for the most part nobody gets it.
People are afraid of GMO foods and parents are not vaccinating their children because the Bush administration lied about Iraq (to give one example). For some reason that is just flatly obvious to me. Why does nobody else see this?
There are some cases, like Golden Rice, where it's relatively easy to be 100% sure of the safety. In Golden Rice, the rice is engineered to produce beta carotene, and because there is lots of beta carotene e.g. in carrots, we can be sure that beta carotene is safe to eat.
See "The world according to Monsanto", it's quite edifying (http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-monsan...).
Also, its not a pesticide (pesticides kill pests) but a herbicide (herbicides kill weeds).