We are seeing that still today: plenty of irrational opposition to GMOs. Eventually years from now they'll replace the old stuff, and people will wonder what all the fuss was about.
Irrational? The problem isn't replacing "engineered via slow selection" corn vs "efficiently GMO'ed corn".
The problem is replacing over 300 unique varieties of corn, and over 40,000 unique varieties of rice with 3 or 4 patented, flavourless, often less nutritious varieties.
Stop pretending all opponents of GMO food are scientifically illiterate new-age types. I owe my life to GMO (cancer immune therapy)... hell, I am GMO. But there is nothing inherently good about progress. Nuclear technology can be used to provide clean, cheap energy to entire cities... or it can be used to eradicate an entire town in a matter of seconds and bring decades of unimaginable human suffering.
Using GMO to help third world countries grow foods they otherwise couldn't? Great. But that's not the full story, is it.
Where is the great progress in getting the same bland, flavourless, overly-sweet two or three varieties of rice, corn, and potatoes in every friggen store? Is driving Indian farmers to suicide and suing small farmers who accidentally grow your crop because the wind blew progress?
Is destroying thousands of years of man-driven biodiversity progress?
Coming from a country where real vegetables are sold, it's depressing. Everything tastes the same in North America. Every salad, every sauce. Same shit.
People don't oppose Monsanto because they hate science, they oppose monsanto because it's the Enola Gay of GMO.
Your comment is a pretty accurate depiction of the irrational opposition to GMOs.
Monocultures have been an agricultural practice since the 1800s, long before GMOs and Monsanto. It's for sure a risky practice, but even if you removed Monsanto or even GMO technology from the agricultural industry, you would still have farmers monocropping hybrids.
It seems you're more upset at what agriculture has become under capitalism and economies of scale, because the majority of consumers select for food based on lowest price, and not flavor or variety like you prefer.
Because monocultures have been around for over a century, opposing them is irrational? That doesn't make sense. If your goal is to increase biodiversity, it would (at least on the surface of it) seem entirely rational to boycott GMO products. Would you care to elaborate why this is not the case?
>[Monoculture's] for sure a risky practice, but even if you removed Monsanto or even GMO technology from the agricultural industry, you would still have farmers monocropping hybrids.
> It seems you're more upset at what agriculture has become under capitalism and economies of scale
And even then, it has to be pointed out that it is specifically the economy of scale that is irking the grandparent, not capitalism. The USSR was certainly not capitalist, but its vast centrally planned agriculture was optimized towards efficiency, not towards feel-good/organic qualities, and exhibited all the problems (except perhaps GMOs because they were not developed at the time) that people who rail against contemporary capitalism tend to complain about.
You're right that monocultures are a dangerous way of producing food, but I almost never see that criticism made in forums for non-technical audiences. The popular discourse is absolutely focused on GMOs-as-carcinogen.
Also, I've never entirely understood all the venom directed specifically toward Monsanto. There are a handful of other companies doing basically the same thing. Where's the hate for Cargill?
Cargill and ADM are just as bad. Monsanto gets most of the public vitriol for its vile lawsuits against small farmers for unwillingly growing their genetically modified shit. Kind of like having someone who infected your computer with malware then suing you for patent infringement.
My guess would be that Monsanto has show itself to be a overly litigious, generally "evil" corporation. While it does not pertain to GMO crops, look at what they did in Anniston, AL. The effects are still quite visible even today.
Disclaimer: I live in Anniston
>"...suing small farmers who accidentally grow your crop..."
The Wikipedia page seems to paint a much different picture regarding Monsanto's legal cases. Everything that I'm reading seems to indicate willful infringement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases
"...Monsanto has stated it will not 'exercise its patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seed or traits are present in farmer's fields as a result of inadvertent means.' The Federal Circuit found that this assurance is binding on Monsanto, so that farmers who do not harvest more than a trace amount of Monsanto's patented crops 'lack an essential element of standing' to challenge Monsanto's patents."
...
"The court record shows, however, that it was not just a few seeds from a passing truck, but that Mr Schmeiser was growing a crop of 95–98% pure Roundup Ready plants, a commercial level of purity far higher than one would expect from inadvertent or accidental presence. The judge could not account for how a few wayward seeds or pollen grains could come to dominate hundreds of acres without Mr Schmeiser’s active participation, saying ‘...none of the suggested sources could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality evident from the results of tests on Schmeiser’s crop’" – in other words, the original presence of Monsanto seed on his land in 1997 was indeed inadvertent, but the crop in 1998 was entirely purposeful."
That's not to say that they haven't pulled any jerk moves: "In 2002, Monsanto mistakenly sued Gary Rinehart of Eagleville, Missouri for patent violation. Rinehart was not a farmer or seed dealer, but sharecropped land with his brother and nephew, who were violating the patent. Monsanto dropped the lawsuit against him when it discovered the mistake. It did not apologize for the mistake or offer to pay Rinehart's attorney fees."
If it's patent law that we find outrageous, then we should be directing our rage at patent law.
Edit: I hadn't heard of the Indian farmer suicide problem before reading your comment, but to lay it at the feet of Monsanto ignores many other potential contributing factors: "Activists and scholars have offered a number of conflicting reasons for farmer suicides, such as monsoon failure, high debt burdens, government policies, public mental health, personal issues and family problems."
> The problem is replacing over 300 unique varieties of corn, and over 40,000 unique varieties of rice with 3 or 4 patented, flavourless, often less nutritious varieties.
Huh? If monoculture is the concern, should the solution be encouraging more varieties of GMO? I mean, creating more varieties of corn with genetic modification seems so easy.
>The difference between teosinte and maize is about 5 genes. We've been genetically modifying corn for nearly 10,000 years, but we've just done so really inefficiently.
Given that the food industry has a long history of using whatever crap they can find if they can get away with it, and producing all kinds of addictive or harmful monstrosities if they can help them make a bigger buck (not very unlike the tobacco industry making their cigarettes more addictive with all kinds of crap), yeah, I'm suspicious. Very suspicious.
If it weren't for laws and regulations, they'd be adding lead in children's milk if it was cheaper to produce.
Which is why we (thankfully) have the FDA to help weigh in on the situation in the U.S.:
>Credible evidence has demonstrated that foods from the [genetically engineered] plant varieties marketed to date are as safe as comparable, non-GE foods.
"...Monsanto originally sold the soybeans to farmers under a limited use license that prohibited the farmer-buyer from using the seeds for more than a single season or from saving any seed produced from the crop for replanting..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
Global farming should not depend on patented seeds that can be made scarce as an economic strategy. It is, at least, extremely risky from an economic point of view. But it gets worse from a legal point of view.
I'm all for developing new ways of farming. But if patents are so bad for software, they can be worse if we allow to patent gens.
Seed licensing is an agricultural practice that was adopted before GMO technology was available, and isn't unique to it either.
I'm all for a healthy skepticism of technology, but layman critics of GMOs routinely confuse standard industry practices (such as licensing and monocultures) with the GMO technology itself.
irrational is fairly dismissive of the great swathes of perfectly rational suspicion. We have a terrible track record at introducing entire animals into eco systems. And the argument about eventually they will replace the old stuff is amusing because once something is gone and you wait a generation then by defintion you cannot remember what the fuss was about. When your plants no longer seed themselves and have small amounts of genetic variation itl just be a memory that this is only beneficial to a small group of people.
The question is, do we really have that much more actionable data about recently (geologically/evolutionarily speaking) domesticated plant and animal food sources than we do about even more recently introduced GMO food sources?
It's not like most food staples are really more "natural" or "wild" than GMO food courses.
Yes it is more natural than GMOs. GMOs take genes from another creature, and inject it into the plant. We take known poison producers and inject them into our food because those poisons are helpful in combating some pest.
The actionable data for traditional food (even that which is selectively bred) is that the majority of the population is fine with it. They've been fine with it for hundreds to thousands of years.
Now if the question is would I have eaten a tomato when it was brought back from the New World? Maybe. I would said, especially since I wouldn't have any other point of reference, "Others have eaten it. They're ok. And it's one of God's creations."
With GMOs, I have to ask the questions, "Do I think this is food? Do I think this is safe because I know that CEOs are rushing out things they know are bad for me." So we have evidence that GMOs are bad [0]. We know that CEOs put a low premium on safety and following the law [1]. Given that as a context, is it really irrational to pause and say, "Scientifically, do I trust this stuff? Should we require more research to see how hybridized plant-imals work?" I don't think so.
> The actionable data for traditional food (even that which is selectively bred) is that the majority of the population is fine with it.
That seems like a pretty fallacious argument, unless your end goal for food is merely that "the population is fine with it." Human history is full of death and disease due to malnutrition. It's not exactly a solved problem, and "the way it's always been" is almost certainly not the best we can achieve.
Organic farming is a scientific field of study. It can meet the demands of the present population as well as future growth [0]. It is a viable option against GMO. Rather than having the scorched earth policy of GMO, organic seeks to balance an ecosystem to reduce the impacts of weeds and pests. It's not just smelly, hairy hippies dancing around a tomato while smoking a joint.
Many of the modern farming techniques that have caused famine are a result of people importing ideas, without first checking to see they would work with in the context of the local ecology. GMOs often do this. We tell African farmers to grown mid-west corn because that's what we know. We want to grow wheat in Saudi Arabia because we eat white bread.
There are other products indigenous to those localities that could support that population when paired with modern water management and soil improvement processes. One such technology is hydroponics. The proper system can use the limited water resources in a semi-arid landscape to produce stable food supplies. Weed management reduces the impact of this further. You can use elevated gardening to improve vine plant yields.
Holding up GMOs are the only source of life for the population around the globe is fallacious prima facie. Time honored agriculture, plus modern takes on improvement of the support system can provide the same outcome without the need to introduce animal/plant hybrids. As a result, the risk of introducing a carcinogenic into an otherwise safe plant is limited to environmental factors like careless fuel storage rather than the agent being the food itself.
True? There isn't much point to this statement. Many people will be dead within a few decades presuming that few is any number between 3 - 6. That doesn't mean I or they shouldn't plan on achieving a comfortable life between now and dead.
I'm not patently opposed to GMOs, but without reasonable disclosure on what's been spliced into your food and limitations on patentability of these organisms we could be heading into a disaster zone.
Today corn is corn. What if in the future it's more fish than corn? What if you can't grow it without a license from the "manufacturer"? What if it cross-breeds with traditional corn and you can't even grow that because of patent implications?
The difference between teosinte and maize is about 5 genes. We've been genetically modifying corn for nearly 10,000 years, but we've just done so really inefficiently. If you want to eat raw, non-GMO corn, here's what's for dinner:
(Patents expire after 17 years, anyway; it's likely that 17 years after the first teosinte plants were cross-bred to make maize, the breeder had a complete monopoly on them anyway.)
> We've been genetically modifying corn for nearly 10,000 years, but we've just done so really inefficiently.
We've also been doing it massively distributed which means it can adapt and change independent of a single/couple organizations. Yes, it's inefficient but that's also somewhat of a feature in that we don't have a single point of failure.
If the history of both tech and biotech is any indication, GMOs will be massively distributed on timescales much shorter than 10,000 years. Patents last for 17 years, and if drugs like penicillin or acetaminophen are any indication, generic competition springs up almost as soon as the patent is expired.
It's pretty unlikely that the original development of agriculture was decentralized. In fact, we have pretty good evidence that it was intensely centralized in a few places, and that tribes that had this technology then outcompeted, conquered, and killed all the hunter/gatherer bands that resisted using it.
>The difference between teosinte and maize is about 5 genes. We've been genetically modifying corn for nearly 10,000 years, but we've just done so really inefficiently.
I'm all for inefficiency when too much efficiency can cause a problem.
Decentralization is inherently inefficient because redundancy is inefficient. Sometimes inefficient is not really a problem because you have bigger priorities, like genetic diversity and avoiding a single point of failure.
And primitive peoples managed to breed corn from teosinte in a few hundred years -- roughly from 9,000 ya to 8,700 ya for the teosinte to modern maize forms.
I'm looking for sources on early 18th and 19th century maize farming and cultivars, haven't turned up any yet.
If you realise that all three major grains on which humans are overwhelmingly dependent, maize, rice, and wheat, did not exist only ~10,000 years ago, the power of simple selective breeding becomes apparent.
Look to dogs, horses, cattle, hogs, sheep, and poultry for similar trends in selective breeding over only a few thousand years, though in many cases a few centuries.
We've been traveling from point A to point B for more than 10,000 years, but we've just done so really inefficiently compared to planes and automobiles. People have a right to be wary of newer technologies; more powerful generally means more dangerous.
Yes, for a lot of people it's not GMOs which are the issue but the way companies that use GMOs behave.
As a consumer I want to the right to patronize companies that don't purchase seeds from these companies, however under the current state of things there's no way to distinguish which produce/companies these are.
That's because many see domesticated crops as a different thing than GMO crops... and of course, use the assumed bad behavior of one company, as a detriment to the science behind crop enhancement.
The problem with the "teetering" moment is these things have a way of sneaking up on you. Exponential growth in GMO crops would push this from an "in fifty years" thing to "in ten years" which is basically tomorrow.
I also doubt Monsanto and other big GMO organizations are going to give away anything ever unless they're forced to. Their answer to everything is "sue me" because they know they'll bury you.
I'm basically proposing a principle that could be cast into law. Plant a crop with IP attached to it, then you better clean up after yourself. Monsanto would probably lobby against such a law, but so what, screw them and pass it anyway.
I'm pretty sanguine about the teetering. Among other things, companies like Monsanto (and thus their competitors) like to do things like maintain big seed banks. So do academics and hobbyists.
There is also rational opposition to GMOs, or at least to aspects of how they are used. It is disingenuous but surprisingly common for people to pretend otherwise.
> There is also rational opposition to GMOs, or at least to aspects of how they are used.
No, there is rational opposition to certain aspects of the use of particular crops, some of which happen to be GMOs. Since, to the extent that opposition is rational, it has nothing to do with the mechanism by which the traits that are problematically exploited were generated, it is completely irrational to generalize that rational opposition to "GMOs", or even attach it to GMOs.
That is at best an oversimplification. You cannot so easily separate the trait selection mechanism from the industrial practice and economics made possible by it in a meaningful way. It's not just particular crops, after all, it's also particular techniques. Sure you can object to the blanket label "GMOs" being insufficiently precise - but that's not terribly interesting.
Personally, I don't find "All GMOs are bad" and "All GMO resistance is irrational" stances to be very distinguishable in their intellectual laziness. Your mileage may vary.
Even if we assume that GMOs have no downsides and they solve world hunger. The problem is actually far simpler than you might think: Solving world hunger is impossible by increasing supply since demand will rise accordingly. The only solution is to decrease demand especially for meat since most plants are fed to animals. If we didn't "refine" our plants into meat then we could have instead fed the entire world population already without GMO. World hunger is largely a political problem and often it's solved by simply freeing up the markets and allowing global trade.
The disadvantages include things such as vendor lock-in into expensive proprietary seeds that you can only obtain from a single supplier with compulsory proprietary herbicide/pesticide and you might become a target of lawsuits because cross pollination cannot be prevented.
If GMOs are actually safe, then why goes the government need to pass laws making planting non-GMO crops illegal? (C.f. Order 81 in the Iraq constitution, written by the U.S. government.) The whole argument that GMOs are inherently safe doesn't even make sense; it's like saying all drugs are safe or all food is safe. It's just corporate propaganda that's marketed to the ignorant pro-science crowd. I can't believe that people here consistently fall for it, given that it's basically on the same level as what Idiocracy is making fun of with Brawndo.
My opposition is to the corporate entities behind GMOs. There is no way that I will trust any part of my food supply to corporate entities that can trivially raise an army of attorneys and specialists to silence even legitimate critics with valid evidence through legal, regulatory, political, and professional channels. The same entities that push for a carb-laden diet when there is plenty of evidence for decades it is actively harmful advice, are now behind the push for GMOs; I won't trust their offerings based upon what they are actively already doing today.
> The same entities that push for a carb-laden diet when there is plenty of evidence for decades it is actively harmful advice, are now behind the push for GMOs
No, they aren't. First of all, because there is no "push for GMOs". There are a number of companies, small and large, investing in various crop technologies (and usually the same firms do both GMO and non-GMO work), and those that actually have products are selling -- and thus, "pushing for" -- those products, whether GMO or otherwise. But there is no generalized "push for GMOs".
Also, many big agribusiness firms are cooperating the propaganda against GMOs, and actively promoting non-GMO and Organic products. If you aren't going to trust agricultural megabusinesses, that really restricts your food options, but it weighs on both sides of the GMO issue.
California's list of known carcinogens includes just about anything, even if the dose needed to cause cancer is far larger than the dose needed to kill you in some other way.
With reference to other stuff that gets sprayed on crops glyphosate is amazingly safe. (Herbicide is a significant cause of death by suicide world wide, and glyphosate reduces that because it's safer than others). If you're spraying it on crops you want to be careful.
But if you're just eating the crops: you're not going to get cancer from glyphosate.
To the downvoters: You likely don't understand how out of control the California list of known carcinogens is. I recently went to a Fry's Electronics store, and on the path to registers were non-ironic signs reading "All items on this aisle may contain substances known to the State of California to cause Cancer, or Birth Defects, or other Reproductive Harm."
It has been pointed out that if in the State of California one were to sell the coins handed back as change after the sale, they too would require legally require a safety warning about the cancer risk. My favorite warning is that of Dharma Trading Post, a silk importer:
"To conform to state laws, our labels make everything sound
like a deadly poison, even simple things like sawdust and
seaweed. The law says you have to warn everyone about
everything, regardless of how obvious, stupid or remote the
possibility. Anyway, we are now labeled to the "max". Please
don't hold it against us."
There are many reasons why you can legitimately be afraid of glyphosate. It's presence on California's list of chemicals requiring a Prop 65 warning should not be one of them.
Since it was added in 2015, it was disproven that glyphosate alone causes cancer. The original study used glyphosate with GBFs, the latter of which are likely to cause cancer.
And plenty of it rational. I am against having my nation's food security tied to a monopolist. I am against monocrops which single blight could eradicate with a single supplier of seeds.
Monopolies should be handled like any other: by anti-trust authorities. Banning a specific type of technology is a poor substitute.
Bananas are a monoculture due to the way they are propagated: they've been this way for over a century (and a single blight is currently wiping out the Cavendish variety that is ubiquitous in the USA).
What you are asking for is to make a system of polyculture profitable: this is a worthwhile endeavor but an entirely different challenge than fighting the use of gene splicing techniques.
