The moral panic would be immense. No way it’s happening.
The reality is, again, unless you’re going to avoid things like hexaploid wheat…
“Moral panic” means “consumers might choose not to buy.” I can live with that. I have no problem with genetically mutated food being labeled as such and allowing consumers to be educated and make choices. Hungry people will eat it if it comes to that.
People saw the pink slime video and they still go to McDonald’s. I think “moral panic” is overstating things.
It’s not about the health issues though, that was just one of the ‘bogey men’ that got popular attention.
It’s about food security, it’s about maintaining a healthy natural biodiversity (important for bees), it’s about not letting that biodiversity become contaminated by GM( for one thing the GM company will sue your arse, it happened), it’s about not allowing a few large corporations control of the food supply (sorry you can’t afford our seeds this year, good luck with your starvation thing).
That’s what being anti-GM is really all about. After global warming, i think it could become the number two threat to humanity, probably.
Wow, that is quite long, but a very worthwhile read. He didn’t spare himself from taking quite a bit of the blame, and some of his conclusions are really interesting. Here is one that speaks directly to Zak’s point:
And, thanks to supposedly environmental campaigns spread from affluent countries, we are perilously close to this position now. Biotechnology has not been stopped, but it has been made prohibitively expensive to all but the very biggest corporations.
It now costs tens of millions to get a crop through the regulatory systems in different countries. In fact the latest figures I’ve just seen from CropLife suggest it costs $139 million to move from discovering a new crop trait to full commercialisation, so open-source or public sector biotech really does not stand a chance.
There is a depressing irony here that the anti-biotech campaigners complain about GM crops only being marketed by big corporations when this is a situation they have done more than anyone to help bring about.
The only proven problem with GM and bees so far is hoorays managing to get the EU to class pollen as an ingredient of Honey, i.e. added by the beekeeper.
Thankfully common sense managed to prevail and that ruling was overturned.
Bees are cause celebre at the moment and every “environmental” campaign under the sun is trying to link their agenda into the perceived problems faced by bees whether it’s GM, pesticides, Phone masts, power lines, WiFi, you name it, they’re all trying it on.
The number one problem faced by honeybees right now is Varroa, keep that under control and they’ll pretty much sort themselves out.
No, it really is pretty much the same thing as being an anti-vaccination whacko or a climate-change denier.
Yes. It’s a comforting one for people who aren’t starving to death or worried about how they’re going to eat. That is, the spoiled and the rich.
See the saga surrounding golden rice for more of this luddite nonsense.
I eat raw honey because I think it is better than boiled honey and I think in general honey is quite healthy. I also eat the two tacos for $0.99 at Jack-in-the-Box sometimes. Not everyone who wants to know what he’s eating is a fanatic. I just want to be informed before I buy.
This song isn’t about you, Mick.
It’s about environmental groups curbing the development of ways to feed the world’s exponentially growing population for ridiculous reasons.
No, it means that there is an attempt to create a taboo.
People saw the pink slime video and they still go to McDonald’s. I think “moral panic” is overstating things.
Not when people have and work very hard to keep food expensive based on those laws.
Yes, it may well be, in terms of moral panics. The anti-GM movement, that is. It’s undermining food security, and preventing solutions for problems being developed.
triggercut - Exactly. All moral panics.
I don’t get how labeling food in the developed countries makes it impossible to sell it in the starving countries.
Well there is a whole ‘denial’ aspect to this as well. I’m completely convinced the science of GM can do some really useful things in terms of helping develop useful crops, and i’m also completely convinced that scientists, no matter how well meaning and serious in their efforts, have no idea on how their technology will end up being used, because they are not of the same mind set that is funding their efforts, so they can’t see outside their narrow viewpoint.
We can point to history and other examples all we want, but as soon as you try to step up and say ‘maybe we should hold on a second, there are some real concerns here’, you get labeled a looney or some such, which makes it impossible to have a debate.
Our natural (as in completely free) environment to be able to grow what food we want, when we want (only determined by natures natural cycle and environment itself) is one last bastion against global corporate control, and once those corporations are allowed control of our ability to grow food we will be in a very bad place. It’s just the nature of the beast, and if you think current market manipulation of food prices is already a bad thing, you won’t have seen anything yet compared to what full GM control of food production will bring.
Now you can cover this in all kind of semantics, ‘but the global food chain is already controlled by corporations, how do you think supermarkets get their food from africa’ etc, but all this is honestly missing the point entirely, or even less honestly creating noise to muddle the debate (as is done by climate change deniers).
The bottom line is the further down the path of GM (all trademarked and patented and with lawyers in the wing) control of food supply you go, the further you move to self enslavement, quite literally as he who controls the food supply will control the world.
This is my number one objection to GM. And it is enough all by itself. I grow a bunch of my own food, i know what i’m talking about in this simple example as i use my own seeds from one crop to the next, to breed the local features i find most useful. With GM i loose control of that, and in fact i have to buy new seed each season from the GM supplier. Master and Slave.
That’s the real whole point of GM, much to the chagrin/disbelief of the GM scientists and proponents. That’s all GM really is, control of our ability to grow food, it’s extremely dangerous.
Again, it’s a moral panic, which is an attempt to establish a taboo.
When you can’t even do the research, when supermarkets will get bad PR for daring to stock the foods, it means there’s no way to getting them developed in many cases.
Zak - Er…no. There are a lot of seed patents aside from GM ones. In fact, a LOT of organic seeds are patented. So your scenario already exists. The low-yield stuff you grown yourself simply isn’t what interests the agricorps…
Go read up on Golden Rice. It’s a genetically modified grain that adds beta carotene to rice (regular milled “white” rice does not contain it.) It was developed by two European scientists/geneticists to help combat hunger and malnutrition in children from third world countries.
Thanks to vigorous opposition by environmentalist groups like Greenpeace and misguided doctors who misapprehend what it is supposed to do (it won’t cure vitamin A deficiency for instance, but it will help prevent it), golden rice remains largely undistributed to the populations who could use it the most, a situation that’s persisted for over a decade now.
Zak just repeated a bunch of arguments that were cited by lynas as specific examples of green urban myths, which are not founded in scientific fact.
maybe they are not ‘scientific fact’ yet because in the uk and europe in particular we have put up a big enough fight to stop the experiment that would prove the fact?
To put it another way, by the time the ‘scientific fact’ could be proven, if suddenly we allowed full control of our food supply via GM and the few Biotech companies that will most likely control it, it would already be too late to do anything about it.
If you don’t think those biotech GM companies are not already illegally seeding their crops where they shouldn’t (when they can get away with it) and have sued farmers that suddenly found their own crops containing the GM patent crop (this has happened in the usa already), or that there has not been any examples of where a GM switch has proven problematic and interfered in a local populations ability to feed itself without becoming dependent on the GM crop monopoly issue (this has happened in south america with Maize), then i don’t know what kind of reality you live in Timex? All that kind of info is available if you care to look.
How about this. If the whole total aim of GM is to be altruistic, to ‘Feed the starving’, then why isn’t it a free option? Why doesn’t the first world use it pool of resources to make it free for those area’s of the world where the food crisis is most critical, and i don’t mean for just a short term, few seasons free seeding that effects the ability to grow non GM crops thereafter.
Surely if GM people were really concerned about all that, our governments would not be allowing private companies to control and enforce patents on GM crops? If you like that is a signature of the true nature of GM, as in my post above. Control is what it really is about, control of our ability to grow food freely as nature intended. Yes the science can provide the benefits that will be useful, it’s the politics of GM that is the biggest problem though. It is already being used by evil people to do evil things.
That’s rather Dawn Falcon esque. It really feels like having been proven wrong on the science you’re retreating to some conspiracy theory which even if true wouldn’t justify your position.
I assume you are claiming GM crop proliferation would allow corporations to extract ever increasing rents after achieving a monopoly on the ability to grow food crops? (It’s really not clear from your ramblings).
Even if for the sake of argument I accept this claim, there are straightforward ways to fix the problems you cite (ranging from the public-sector research solution to heavy regulation of the licensing regime to prevent corporations gaining monopoly power over the ability to grow food). Given the proven ability of the GM lobby to get legislation passed why not do that, rather than the current murderous Luddite policy. (And banning a technology that could increase crop yields and has no measurable public health disadvantage in sub-saharan Africa is murderous - no lesser adjective adequately describes it).
It’s worth noting that anti-GM campaigners have attacked royalty-free and public sector research projects with equal zeal to commercial ones.
As with many other topics, Zak’s arguments and the hyperbole with which he supports them makes me more, not less, sympathetic to the opposing view.
By reputation, Monsanto has been, in my experience, only one step behind Enron on the political left in the United States.
So far as I know, much of the anger stems from court decisions that apparently allow Monsanto to sue farmers growing their GE crops without authorization, even though those crops are wind-pollinated and may appear in fields without the owners’ knowledge.
I’m sure those rulings all go back to some case in which an escaped animal owned by one person gets into somebody else’s hog pen or paddock, though I’d assume common sense would dictate that the escaped animal’s owner was entitled only to repatriation of the animal itself.
Oh yes, they’re assholes - but that’s an asshole problem, not a GM problem.
Not that this matters, but there is no such thing as natural grains anymore.
This is corn in its “natural state”
And this is the precursor to wheat
Mankind has been selectively adapting and evolving our food groups for thousands (and possibly tens of thousands) of years. I’m not saying wariness or skepticism of giant multinationals isn’t healthy but keep in mind that there are hardly any “natural” food staples, all have been domesticated and perpetuated and modified almost to the point of being unrecognizable from their natural origin.