Make Way For "Mutant" Crops As GM Foods Face Opposition 194
A user writes "The concerns, legitimate or otherwise, about genetically modified foods such as Monsanto's Round-up Ready soy-beans, may be causing unintended consequences: Monsanto's rivals such as BASF are selling 'naturally' mutated seeds where extreme exposure to ultra-violet is used to increase the rate of mutations in seeds, a process called mutagenesis. These seeds end up with many of the same properties, such as herbicide resistance, as GM seeds, but inevitably end up with other, uncontrolled, mutations too. The National Academy of Sciences warns that there's a much higher risk of unintentionally creating seeds that have active health risks through mutagenesis than by other means, including relatively controlled genetic engineering, presumably because of the blind indiscriminate nature of mutations caused by the process. But because mutagenesis is effectively an acceleration of the natural system of evolution, it's very difficult to regulate."
Hail to the uninformed (Score:5, Informative)
Is this a joke article? Please.
We've been using random mutagenesis for over 25 years now to improve seeds, and guess what, we improved our technology over time. Not only is the secondary mutation mitigated via thorough back-crossing, but these days technology moved that only the gene of interest is actually changed. Read some recent patents by Monsanto or Keygene for a clue. This article is fear mongering bullshit that would have had truth in it if it was written in 1975.
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Well, there is another weird undercurrent here. OK, you can treat plants with mutagens, we get that. You get mutants. (MUTANTS!). Then they sell the irradiated seeds? Just that? Who does the selection (that's the hard part)? Who decides what is a better product - the shinier fruit or the ones are walking down the field?
Either you're right and this is some weird joke or their is something very much missing in TFA.
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I guess they'll do it in the exact same way as you'd do it when you test any other row crop: Some work at a single plant level is made to figure out which plants have any value at all, then you bulk up the seed, plant a bunch of those survivors in a few dozen locations, along with some commercial plants that you use as a control. Then you compare yields, resistance to disease, or whatever else you feel like looking at.
If you really want to add some tech, you can do a genetic analysis of the plants early on
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Sounds like a lot of work for an individual farmer. If they're that into things, they could have done this a long time a go by setting up a research station. No need to spend big bucks to expose things to mutagens. Something's missing. Perhaps I need more coffee (a known mutagen, BTW).
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Who does the selection (that's the hard part)?
Breeders. That's an actual job title at many seed companies.
Who decides what is a better product - the shinier fruit or the ones are walking down the field?
Usually they pick a particular trait that they would like to develop, preferably one that's easy to test for. They measure plants in the field, measure their output, scan the resulting product with near-infrared spectroscopy or nuclear magnetic resonance scans to find composition, and even look at genetic markers. Then they ship the seed for the next generation to be planted somewhere warm to shorten the generation time. Monsanto and Syngenta have
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You can't just irradiate seeds and call it good. At the least you have to grow a generation or two to make sure they're viable and see if any have any desirable new traits. Then, you will likely need to cross the mutants with existing lines to get rid of the undesirable mutations while selecting for the desired trait. Then, finally, you can plant a small seed crop to expand your seed supply and better nail down germination rates.
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The only desirable trait they're looking for is one that will make a quick profit. They've got lawyers and corporate sovereignty to protect them from any downside, so bombs away!
And since the end users. the ones who will eat these products, are not the customers of Monstanto, etc, they don't really give a fuck if any of us want these "desirable traits".
Re: Hail to the uninformed (Score:2)
Do you seriously think that the people that work at Monsanto are so nefarious that they would have to study and control the food they eat to be sure it didn't have that intentionally bad stuff they engineered into it? Or might they actually and sincerely believe they're making a better food product?
Re:Hail to the uninformed (Score:5, Informative)
Monsanto lies. A *lot*.
Despite the occasional nutjob giving a bad name to other protesters, Monsanto has been responsible for massive dioxin poisoning, the creation and misuse of Agent Orange in Vietnam, abusive oversales of fertilizers leading to Sahara desert expansion as the crop growth was unsustainable, ruiined watersheds, and left the ground bare for desert expansion, and have generally sold agricultural tools and products for maximum short term profit. Monsanto's safety research can no more be trusted than that of cigarette companies saying their wares are "scientifically proven safe". They've been caught lying far too
Oh, and we've been using "random mutagenesis" to improve crops for more like 25,000 if some of the very early paleontoligical research is correct about pre-historic farming. The dangers of this arise from typical Monsanto approaches: excessive speed of deployment, aggression of sales, and poor safety checks. The chances of even modest Monsanto *loves* their high yield monocultures: they make real profit for Monsanto, customers get locked into the single product line, and then are fiscally devastated if Monsanto raises prices and they can't compete. Targeted mutagenesis *will not help* with this, because the high yield crop line will come to dominate the market place, *again*, and be vulnerable to a specific rot, *again*. Look into the history of bananas, and the current corn blights decimating Monsanto's highest price GMO corn crop.
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customers get locked into the single product line, and then are fiscally devastated if Monsanto raises prices and they can't compete.
Uh, how does this work exactly? If someone buys corn seed from Monsanto this year, they can't switch to another seed provider next year? It could be you're just ranting.
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What other seed provider would this be and where will you go when they all do the same thing? I don't think you have the slightest clue how this works, do you?
Wow talk about ignorant. Let's see, off the top of my head I can name co-op, croplan, masters choice, pioneer, pride, horizon, and I know that I'm scratching the very top of the barrel, there's 40 or 50 more.
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What other seed provider would this be and where will you go when they all do the same thing? I don't think you have the slightest clue how this works, do you?
You're clearly not a farmer. And asking "where will you go when they all do the same thing" is just baseless fear-mongering. My local Wendy's closed and now it's a McDonalds. "Oh noes! Where will I go when they all do the same thing! Gah! It's the end of Wendy's!"
Amishland Seeds
Annapolis Valley
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
Burpee Seeds
Heritage Seed Company (Nova Scotia, Canada)
Diane’s Flower Seeds
Ed Hume Seeds
Fedco
Garden City Seeds
Heirlooms Evermore Seeds
Heirloom Seeds
Heirloom Organics
Horizon Herbs
Irish-E
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If you don't want to be sued, you'd better grow something unrelated for a year of 4 first. Otherwise the contamination from the monsanto seed will make it look like you're a seed pirate. They're as bad as the RIAA.
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Re:Hail to the uninformed (Score:5, Insightful)
In what universe can you called suing farmers for cross-contamination and then locking farmers into having to buy seeds from Monsanto an ethical or sustainable business practice?
People see smoke all around and then start asking for evidence of the fire.
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In what universe can you called suing farmers for cross-contamination and then locking farmers into having to buy seeds from Monsanto an ethical or sustainable business practice?
In what universe has Monsanto ever sued a farmer for cross-contamination that wasn't intentional fraud on the part of the farmer? If you can come up with a single example, the lawyers at the OSGATA would like to have a word with you, because they sure as hell couldn't find any.
http://www.osgata.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/OSGATA-v-Monsanto-MTD-Decision.pdf
MOD parent UP Re:Hail to the uninformed (Score:3)
Yes, one farmer deliberately selected only Monsanto seed that blew onto his land and grew exclusively that, but that's the only time anyone ever got sued. If Monsanto ever sued someone for true accidental contamination it would be cutting their own throat.
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Yes, I willingly violate "user agreements " in my world. 99% of them are void as they contradict the actual law. ... I don't copy what I buy, but all other rights are mine!
When I "buy" something, I assume I have all rights to "use" it. Copyright is about copying
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Re:Hail to the uninformed (Score:4, Informative)
I'd like proof that they lie.
http://www.monsanto.com/products/Pages/roundup-pro-concentrate.aspx [monsanto.com]
The active ingredient, glyphosate, has favorable environmental characteristics such as low volatility and binds tightly to soil.
http://www.cdms.net/LDat/mp8CC006.pdf [cdms.net]
Dissipation Soil field :Half life 2-174days
That's some range there. But I guess since it "binds tightly to soil", it will not leach into ground water. Oh wait, it does. Maybe it just washes out and does not "bind tightly to soil" as claimed, which explains that massive, massive range.
Monsanto lies to make money. Their ROE lifetime is 20 years, and damn the rest because patents expire.
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/08/monsantos-roundup-herbicide-soil-damage [motherjones.com]
hmm, so maybe not that good for stuff in the soil....
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Monsanto marketed Agent Orange to the military. The military used it as indicated.
He also never claimed that corn supplies are decimated, just that the rot is decimating a particular Monsanto GMO variety.
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It's All Here - For Those Who Can See [youtube.com]
Thanks, Herr Goethe!
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If that's true, it only reinforces that the article makes a good point that its no different to genetic engineering. In fact, then it really is genetic engineering using a different technique and should be regulated the same way.
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Yeah i know, therefor it said OVER 25 years....
You fools! (Score:2)
The seed mutations and GM modifications are not necessarily the big deal. The big deal is that the plants have been given improved resistance to herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides, as well as the ability to make their own. So the farmer uses more and nastier chemicals on ther plants, and you wind up eating more nasty chemicals. Then you mutate into brain-dead closed-minded idiots. Oh, wait, too late. Haven't you seen the studies of lab rats, etc who have been feed gmo corn? They look horrible.
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So the farmer uses more and nastier chemicals on ther plants, and you wind up eating more nasty chemicals.
Traits like the Roundup Ready one actually reduce the use of herbicides and let farmers use safer herbicides. I can go into more detail if you want.
Haven't you seen the studies of lab rats, etc who have been feed gmo corn? They look horrible.
Of course they do, they start with rats that have been bred to be susceptible to tumors - most of them will look horrible on any diet.
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Re:Hail to the uninformed (Score:4, Insightful)
2. The article is about how the techology is being used as an end-run around bans and other restrictions on GM foods.
4. You're criticizing attacks on alternatives to GM foods, that are being introduced because of a nonsensical fear mongering campaign against GM foods, where those alternatives are objectively not as inherently safe as GM foods, as "fear mongering bullshit". Really? Seriously?
Trying to separate GM food from the use of this technology is also a joke. The logical conclusion of the wide use of GM food is that you won't be able to grow anything without Monsanto. That is their business model. We also have no idea what the long-term effects would be of this level of trust in a handful of powerful companies nor what kind of crops we would get with this unfettered. You're faced with a future situation where even growing anything in your back garden could cease to be a viable alternative. People can call it scare mongering all they like, but we won't know until we're in that situation and if and when we are it will be too late. Allowing companies to control natural food production is inherently dangerous and unethical.
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http://www.osgata.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/OSGATA-v-Monsanto-MTD-Decision.pdf [osgata.org] "defendants reiterated that it is not their policy to exercise their patent rights against farmers whose fields inadvertently contain trace amounts of patented seeds or traits. In particular, the reply letter referenced plaintiffs’ claim that they do not have any intention of using any transgenic seed and noted that, “[t]aking [that] representation as true, any fear of suit or other a
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Read some recent patents by Monsanto or Keygene for a clue.
Is this a joke?
Re:Hail to the uninformed (Score:4, Insightful)
Bingo. That right there is the point of articles like this. It isn't fear mongering, it is putting things into context. As it says in TFA:
The academy has warned that regulating genetically modified crops while giving a pass to mutant products isn’t scientifically justified.
I certainty don't fear mutagenic crops. Lots of good has come from it (seedless citrus anyone?) but it is hugely inconsistent to attack GE crops while these get a free pass. Then again, since the anti-GMO movement is basically the creationism of agriculture, they aren't in touch with science much anyway, so this issue is just par for the course.
Articles like this are sort of like talking about plant pesticides. Anti-GMO people love to cry up and down about GE crops producing their own insecticides, but strangely never give the background biology required to put that into context (for example, that being that all plants make toxins, such as solanine, psoralens, falcarinol, oxalic acid,and maysin that naturally occur in potatoes/tomatoes, celery, carrots, rhubarb, and corn, respectively). Articles like this give context that otherwise people might not get.
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Should include this [nap.edu] as something that highlights the various likelihoods of unintended effects associated with crop improvement methods. Mutagenesis is at the top. Cisgenic GMOs (GMOs with genes from the same or closely related species) are toward the bottom. Note that the anti-GE movement tends to oppose them too, like these potatoes [biofortified.org] that were destroyed.
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The real risk (Score:5, Insightful)
is letting one corporation get a choke-hold on the world's food supply.
Re:The real risk (Score:5, Informative)
is letting one corporation get a choke-hold on the world's food supply.
"Roundup" herbicide is already off patent. The "Roundup-Ready" gene that infers resistance goes off patent in 2015. Most BT corn patents have been invalidated.
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"Roundup" herbicide is already off patent. The "Roundup-Ready" gene that infers resistance goes off patent in 2015. Most BT corn patents have been invalidated.
Local soil builders have been complaining of Aluminum in readily available soil stocks. Monsanto happens to have a patent on genes for Aluminum uptake resistance. Not sure where Al's coming from.
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It's the third most common element in Earth's crust. Mostly bound up in forms that are not bio-available but not always.
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But because of irrational fear of GMOs, people are still going to die of malnutrition that could be prevented by growing and eating Golden Rice.
Not all transgenic crops are the same. It matters what genes you add or remove. You could identify that remove the genes that make the stuff that people are allergic to in peanuts and remove them.
That's not the same as adding pesticides to the genome. Those are toxic to other organisms at low levels and could potentially become toxic to at least some people at som
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First off, who has a monopoly? Is it Monsanto, Syngenta, Pioneer Hi-Bred, BASF, Dow Agrosciences, Bayer Cropsciences, Vilmorin? I don't see anyone forced to choose. Second, the reason only one GE crop (the transgenic papaya ringspot virus resistant papaya developed by the University of Hawai'i) is not produced by a large corporation is because of the extremely, excessively high levels of regulation on GE crops. You think that UH could get the Rainbow papaya through the regulatory hurdles today? I doubt
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"are you suggesting that mom and shops will be able to adequately supply the worlds 7 billion and growing population?"
I would suggest that:
1) we don't really need to grow past 7 billion people. I can think of no problem facing humanity today which lessens as population increases.
2) There are down-sides to industrial-scale monoculture such that it's not clear to many of us that that is "the right direction."
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Monsanto owns the patent on this technique, but has promised not to use it.
Uh huh. Yer right. It isn't necessary to continue reading after that one.
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Monsanto owns the patent on this technique, but has promised not to use it.
Uh huh. Yer right. It isn't necessary to continue reading after that one.
What? You think they're secretly using it, and nobody noticed?
"There is also at least a chance (Score:3)
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...that one of the "other, uncontrolled, mutations" turns out to be a cure for something." From the Roundup-resistant strawman.
My bet is on cure for hunger. Though, solving the problem of not enough money flowing from the poor to the rich might accidentally happen, too.
Monsanto Generated FUD (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds like an add for Monsanto and FUD against their competitors. Notice how Monsanto's brand name is mentioned, but not those of their competitor's products brand names.
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I disagree. GM was also mentioned, but they didn't talk about their cars!
Errrrmm (Score:4, Insightful)
If this is so "natural", they won't be patenting the result.... RIGHT????
every 5 years (Score:4, Interesting)
They are both GM, mutagenesis and transgenesis (Score:2, Informative)
The concerns, legitimate or otherwise, about genetically modified foods such as Monsanto's Round-up Ready soy-beans, may be causing unintended consequences
This is all wrong and mistaken.
The concerns are legitimate. Look into "gliadin" if you do not already know. That was a product of 1976 mutagenesis experiments. People who eat it consume an additional 400 calories every day. It's popular with the food industry and it is why many people are fat.
The unintended consequences are the result of lax anti-GM regulations. Mutagenesis is Genetic Modification (GM). The problem is not that the "backlash" against transgenic Cauliflower Mosaic Virus vectors
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Re:They are both GM, mutagenesis and transgenesis (Score:4, Funny)
How DARE you insult His Noodliness so! He is Perfect!
You will be riven through his Colander of Might and reduced to bare semolina!
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#3. that glyphosphate (Roundup) is legal
Glyphosate is one of the safest herbicides. Your other options are tillage, which destroys the soil, or harsher herbicides. Got a better way to control weeds? Let me know, and don't say putting them. Who's going to pull weeds in the 96 million acres of just corn, and that's just in the US? You?
#4. that glyphosphate-resistant crops are made via Cauliflower Mosaic Virus transgenic infection is legal.
You're confusing the promoter region with the genetic transformation method. In other words, you are very fuzzy on this topic.
#5. that any person who speaks English would write one word in favor of the hubris of Man and the obscure mutation of nature.
Eaten a seedless orange lately? Thank mutation breeding.
You sound like an X-Men vill
yum! (Score:2)
Deadly mutagenesis! Happens naturally all the time. See any number of stories of fungi becoming deadly for no apparent reason.
We use it ourselves, as others have noted.
Actually, "deadly" is just code for a failure of your microbiome to process the organics. If you have crappy microflora, don't blame the UV. Blame your diet. If you have flexible, powerful microbes, you're going to be fine.
Translated: Eat well or die, Earthling scum! (Sorry, channelling my inner Sontaran.)
Monsanto belivers riddle me this (Score:2)
I have two questions for the crowd here and elsewhere who asserts GMOs are safe and haters are just paranoid fools.
1. When you go to the store and buy roundup to kill grass/weeds at your local home depot the label warns of danger of getting any on your skin suggesting you should immediately wash any off.
The only reason to modify crops to be resistant to roundup is so they can be sprayed by accident and not die. However if you do this there is no longer any incentive to keep crops from not being sprayed arb
Re:Monsanto belivers riddle me this (Score:4, Interesting)
> However if you do this there is no longer any incentive to keep crops from not being sprayed arbitrarily to save time/money.
That would be true if RoundUp was free. It isn't. Spraying with RoundUp is expensive both in terms of labor and cost of materials, so there definitely is an incentive to minimize its use.
There is also the issue of relative toxicity. RoundUp is the least toxic herbicide to mammals known. Other large scale farming practices require use of much more toxic practices.
NIH Tox comments re: Glyphosate:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10854122 [nih.gov]
Also please note - RoundUp is a trade name for an off-patent herbicide. The generic name is glyphosate, and most of the production of glyphosate is done by Chinese generic manufacturers.
> How the hell can you just blanket assume all GMOs are safe all strains regardless of the details of each strain and regardless of studies produced before the introduction of subsequent strains?
Nobody says all GMOs are safe. Heck, all sorts of natural plants are dangerous under various circumstances. Look up Castor beans. Also please note pretty much any artifact of technology is unsafe under some circumstance or another. If we insisted on complete safety for everything before adopting it we'd have banned fire due to its obvious dangers and still be living in unheated caves eating our food raw.
Life is a matter of balancing risks. Do the well-established science on the GMO plant you plan to introduce and you will get a good idea of whether or not you can tolerate the risk.
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That would be true if RoundUp was free. It isn't. Spraying with RoundUp is expensive both in terms of labor and cost of materials, so there definitely is an incentive to minimize its use.
Whether roundup is free is not at issue. The issue is the cost difference in relation to additional time needed to do a suitable job missing spraying crops with roundup had crop not been "roundup ready"?
What after all is the market incentive for roundup ready crops if not reduction of labor cost?
There is also the issue of relative toxicity. RoundUp is the least toxic herbicide to mammals known. Other large scale farming practices require use of much more toxic practices.
The issue I raised is limited to the real world implication of crops that can now tolerate more roundup than they could in the past thanks to genetic manipulation. I do not wish to compare other solutions unless
Radiation resistance (Score:2)
What those crops will evolve is a mostly useless trait: radiation resistance.
WTF (Score:4, Interesting)
GM isn't precise (Score:3)
They talk about genetic "engineering" as if it's a precise technical operation. But my understanding is that the kind of "engineering" done is to get a plasmid with some gene and blast it randomly at the plant. Don't know how it will land, don't know where, don't know how it will be expressed. So you then grow lots of plants with this randomly inserted genetic sequence and test whether any of the plants end up having the behavior you desire and no apparent behaviors that you don't want.
"Engineering" always seemed a deliberately misleading word.
That said, I totally buy what the article said from the NAS, that the health risks from blasting genes are low, and the health risks from UV radiation to create random mutations is low.
The article didn't at all address the environmental risks of over farming due to non-enhanced crops vs the environmental risks of irradiated vs gene-inserted crops. And didn't mention any economic risks with monopolies or IP ownership of seeds themselves.
Addressing solely "health" risks at point of consumption is also deliberately misleading.
Health concern and IP (Score:3)
While I am happy to side with people concerned with health concerns about GM, the biggest issue for me is that those people claim to enforce IP rights on what feeds humanity.
There is also the dissemination problem. Experimenting GM in outdoor fields is not responsible research, since nobody know what will happen with dissemination
So here we are. (Score:3)
It is critical that humans not consume mutated or otherwise genetically modified plants. These might be harmful
It is likewise critical that absolutely no mutant or modified plant meke it into the food chain or breed with natural unmodified - and therefore safe foods.
Therefore we hereby declare that no further modications of foodstuffs are allowed, either through artificial or Pseudo natural means, and all foodstuffs must be extensively tested to ensure that no mutations, modifications or evolvements take place.
All foodstuffs must be genome mapped as soon as possible, and then declared as the standard.
The importance of this testing and the results ares of such importance that any food that does not conform to the standard genome mapping must be immediately destroyed.
We must rid the world of the scourge of modified food of any sort. Only then will the human race be safe from any non-standard food.
We have formed an army to ensure compliance and the safety of the human race - the Eradicorps.
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If history is a guide then it could evolve into a sentient animal that invents the internet and posts uninformed comments based on 1950s horror movies.
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Hey, let's mutate the shit out of our food. What could possibly go wrong?
Sounds a fuck load better than: Let's purposefully graft pesticide producing genes into our food...
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The organic industry was ALWAYS marketed as naturalness, not "better" (whatever that means).
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'Naturalness', whatever that means too. We've been doing selective breeding on all of our foods for millennia, so I don't consider organic foods to be particularly natural either. Traditional, I'll give them that, but natural? You have to be kidding me.
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"Natural" is nasty, brutish and short. Not to mention one hell of lot smaller population density than we have there.
Hmm.. Maybe you're on to something.
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The organic industry was ALWAYS marketed as naturalness, not "better" (whatever that means).
You must not live in Canada or have visited the EU in the last 5 years or so. They've marketed it as "better" and "healthier" for you, not sure if they still do in the EU, but in Canada they got fined for it.
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The whole anti-GMO "movement" is funded in large part by the organic food industry. Finding themselves unable to win the race for consumer's hard-earned money by being better than their competition, the organic food industry is trying to win by tripping the other runners.
No: it has been found that the yield of GMO crops is not better then that of classical crops [motherjones.com]. Unfortunately, the original article is behind a pay wall [nature.com].
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No, from the very papers you referenced, it has been found that *a single* GMO crop didn't have higher yields than classical crops. You can't extrapolate that to others.
Your generalization is like saying the inline assembler optimizations one programmer performed didn't speed up a program, so inline assembler optimizations can't speed up programs. Which is clearly BS.
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You can't extrapolate that to others.
Of course, he can. And he does. Sure he does it to support an agenda. But cherry picking science is how the anarchists manage to convince everyone that they are on the side of reason. Don't bother arguing actual scientific method with anyone against-GM-crops, pro-AGW, against-fraking, etc. They are not out to establish scientific facts. They are out to justify their own ineptness.
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So the question is, if a GMO does not provide better yields than a traditional crop, why do farmers purchase them? They are certainly more expensive than the alternatives. With something like Soybeans, you'd be hard pressed to find many field that have non-gmo soybeans in the US.
So if your conclusions hold, either the farmers are complete idiots, or are being controlled by the illuminati.
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So the question is, if a GMO does not provide better yields than a traditional crop, why do farmers purchase them?
Just in case this wasn't rhetorical, it's to reduce input costs. Take the Bt trait - if the corn/cotton makes its own pesticide, you don't have to buy it separately and drag several tons of diesel-powered equipment around in circles to spray it.
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For the same reason as GMOs in the USA do: the farmers are being convinced that it is beneficial.
I see you've chosen "controlled by the Illuminati" - good luck with that.
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it has been found that the yield of GMO crops is not better then that of classical crops
And why would it be better? The purpose of most GMOs is to lower input costs - fewer herbicides and pesticides, no need to till, etc.
That's like ignoring fuel efficiency when comparing cars - "Same top speed, so it's not any better!".
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I'm not sure why you're being modded flamebait, it's true. Look, for example, who was funding Prop 37 [kcet.org]. People out there know they can make money by creating and playing off fears, and that's exactly what the organic movement does. They want people to look at food and wonder if feeding it to their kids will make them sick, so that they'll pay extra for their 'better' and 'safe' foods. There's also organizations like Greenpeace who sell fear for donation money; why do you think Golden Rice, which could sa
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If it's science you want, here's some for you Precautionary principle [wikipedia.org].
That isn't science, it's a general policy position.
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Then who selects for the 'right' crops? Do you infest the field with the herbicide that you want your crop to be resistant to and hope for the best? If you get crap yields, you might get hungry / broke pretty fast. These sorts of breeding programs don't necessarily work in a season or two.
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Then who selects for the 'right' crops?
People with the job title "Breeder".
Do you infest the field with the herbicide that you want your crop to be resistant to and hope for the best?
Pretty much.
If you get crap yields, you might get hungry / broke pretty fast.
*facepalm*
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let natural selection take care of you.
I hope you realise the irony in that statement.
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Its not your food. You didn't want to eat GM crops anyway.
While I'm eating hearty, you can go out and pick through the leftovers of organic crops for whatever the bugs didn't eat.
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"Killing our population"
(Looks around). Well, they certainly aren't doing a very good job of it, are they?
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We have been artificially selecting seeds for over 12,000 years now, whether we do it by genetically modifying them or chemical or some other process, the results will be the same - we will discard the selections that produce unwanted results.
We've been genetically engineering foods for thousands of years (grapes, tomatoes, ...) through the process of grafting.