When has that ever stopped clear cutting before?
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1st. Ad hominem argument. You can’t rebut the fact that after 20 years golden rice’s only practical application is as a PR tool for the industry. Never mind the other well taken points on that page.
2nd. Not sure who is arguing for guerrilla destruction of test sites as a way to rectify inadequate testing. Straw man much?
GM producers routinely refuse their patented products to be tested independently. That’s a problem.
“unintended consequences” of glyphosate resistant crops. That’s cute. Superweeds are a feature, not a bug, since glyphosate is out of patent, or coming out. Any minimally competent agronomist knew that this would happen, and it did, according to plan. Now the next generation of 2,4-D hitting, and it will be massively overused, as was (and still is) glyphosate.
Human health consequences of eating conventional and GMO crops, other than pesticide residue, is not a huge problem and have been reasonably well studied. It’s the lack of responsibility and enforcement for damages and costs by the patent holders that continues to be a big problem. _See, the bentgrass issue, and for example, the BT corn that cost exporters millions when it contaminated their supply.
Agribusiness gets their way, often to the detriment of others, and the commons. Aggressively forcing whatever GMO scheme big ag comes up with on us is only part of the problem. But it has unique elements that are uniquely harmful in some cases. Stop crying about knee-jerk opposition and banning all GMOs as if that is what I were about.
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There are so many problems with the first half of this video. Maybe the second half has some redeeming qualities but I don’t have time to argue with the insanity of genetically synthetic food. It’s a pig in a poke.
Checking a source for credibility is not ad hominem, its good sense.
If part of the reason Golden Rice has gone nowhere after 24 years is down to political opposition then I don’t need to rebut that it hasn’t gone anywhere. And didn’t try to. Its in need of actual real world testing and roll out before we can see how practical or effective it is. Activists and anti-GMO politics are blocking that. Or at least working to. Golden Rice is intended to be distributed for free in the developing world. Regardless of who’s involved its rather hard to get rich off free things. More over the budget for the project is lower overall that most of the organizations opposing it. And Golden Rice is just the most prominent example. Nearly every similar project is facing similar problems. Like the many disease resistant varietals being developed, certain forms of perennial wheat, thousands of projects opposed out of hand because they’re GMOs. Not because they have anything to do with, or effect on, the structure of our food and farming policy. If what you are concerned about is fixing farming methods. There’s an awful lot of opposition to quality attempts to do just that because “Monsanto” and “frankenfood”. Naturalistic scaremongering marketed as anti-corporate brick throwing.
Besides the point. The weeds themselves are evidence of how easy it would be to develop that product conventionally. And all the problems with it would still remain. Would you, or Greenpeace still oppose it if it was conventionally developed? Cause there are shit tons of conventional varietals and industrial farming practices that are just as problematic. And we never seem to hear about those. Hell the central problem there isn’t even glyphosate over use. Its vast monocultural operations to grow not food. These are cash crops destined for industrial processing. Though some of its animal feed.
So again. How are any of these issues unique to or driven by GMOs? How does countering GMOs specifically, and because they are GMOs effect change to any of this?
I see you are unfamiliar with the concept of a rhetorical device.
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In the early 20th century, the Chestnut blight punched a massive hole in the ecology of eastern North America. In order to bring back the American chestnut, they’ve been trying to cross-breed it with resistant Asian chestnuts, then edge it back to close to the original Chestnut while keeping the resistance. Slow, tricky, and maybe not quite the original.
Or, take a pure American chestnut, pop in the resistant gene, done. Hopefully.
Whichever way they go, airborne pollen will spread genes around.
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Drugs are kind of a different issue than food though. The idea behind prescription drugs is that you take them to alleviate an existing problem, so the question isn’t “is this drug completely safe?” so much as “does the data suggest that the benefits of taking this drug will outweigh the risks?”
That said, I don’t consider myself anti-GMO but I do have reservations regarding things like intellectual property laws and biodiversity. “Are GMOs good or bad” is certainly a gross oversimplification of a complex topic.
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We really can not say that GMO’s are “safe to eat”, because some GMO’s may be biologically-active compounds that have not been pharmacologically and biologically tested because they are classified as foods, not drugs. Sure, we know they are nutritionally identical to their non GMO equivalents, but these foodstuffs may have multiple genetically active modifiers. And some of these components HAVE been shown to survive the gut and get into the bloodstream intact.
What is their distribution, cell penetration, biological/genetic activity? Are any of these affected by the host’s immune function, other drugs? We do not have the first clue.
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Or maybe it’s a natural extension of the ability to modify genetic code without every credulous person who reads Natural News or The Food Babe (which is all of them) freaking out about “FrankenFood”? Unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “genetically synthetic food”. It seems like a really loaded phrase, so I’m sorry if you didn’t intend that.
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Not so different, I’d say. The existing problem is, “We will not have enough food to feed everyone in a couple decades,” the risks being pretty obvious if we don’t figure it out. And as was pointed out in another comment, even conventional seeds can be patented. The issue is more about the patent system than GMOs in particular. And the biodiversity issue is something I don’t feel qualified even commenting on. But I agree that, even though I like presentations that manage to broach the breadth of complex topics like this with even a little bit of coherence, this is not something that an internet video handles very well. Which is why I get annoyed with people that get all knee-jerk about GMOs, as if they fully understand the topic.
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Like the video said, I think the most legit criticism to GMOs is certain applications as well as distrust of large corporations. But that shouldn’t brand GMOs bad. Man has been in a constant struggle with mother nature since we began farming ~10,000 years ago.
Kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, corn, and other foods were not made by nature or God, but man. EVERYTHING we eat has been fine tuned by man, albeit with less than precise means. Still, it is why we have an excess of food despite an ever growing population. The first green revolution was the reason Soylent Green never happened.
So some of the concerns are valid with SOME GMOs, such as the examples highlighted, but overall a lot of the criticism is that some genetic change they will make will some how make us sick or something. It isn’t like the food we grow today doesn’t have arsenic and other poisons in it naturally, but IMHO it is a lot of unsubstantiated fear. I mean NO ONE in the lab is working on making FOOD that is going to poison people in the short or long term.
In all honestly a lot of people have turned GMOs into some sort of conspiracy, which is ridiculous. They did make a good primer on how to debunk most conspiracy theories 
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I think we’ve hit peak hyperbole.
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So, the pesticide-resistant bentgrass/weed issue seems pretty troubling, and not something I’d really heard before. But most of the rest of your pushback to the pro-GMO video has nothing to do with the actual GMO themselves - unless I’m mistaken? It seems that your issues are mostly related to economic, legal, and political issues…and not really the organism itself. This is not to undercut the problems surrounding the industry that you point out, only to figure out what it really is that we actually have a problem with. Monsanto or the ear of corn itself.
IMO this is the crux of the issue, monoculture in general and not food (which I’m stealing from you thx!)
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One of the key problems is that current law and regulation puts the burden of keeping unwanted GMOs out of your land on you. This turns trespass and nuisance law on its head. Fixing that would prevent and remedy a lot of what is wrong with growing these crops. There are a few state laws proposed that would help to fix this. But the agri-giant patent holders are firmly against, and have a lot of political influence.
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Not the first clue? Sounds like at least some study has been done to identify these “genetically active modifiers” that survive the gut intact. Care to provide some of that info, btw? My (admittedly rudimentary) research into the topic has indicated that not much if anything that could cause a problem survives digestion. And we’re pretty good at knowing how anything that makes it into the bloodstream interacts with our bodies. I mean, I would think that any effect large enough to affect the results of the many, many studies that have been done would have shown up by now, but hey, I guess anything’s possible?
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Almonds are the best one. Every health nut sipping on their organic almond milk…
Which would not be available without extensive human intervention because the dominant form of almond is also known as cyanide. *†
No, breeding isn’t quite GMO, but realistically, it’s still venturing into the unknown every time a trait is bred in or out without fully knowing what it was there for in the first place.
But, no. We can’t know how 60, 100, 1000 years from now how GMOs will affect us any more than the early almond, wheat and kale breeders knew. They took a chance. It didn’t kill them, so they kept going. If anything, we have more data than they did.
That said, I am in favour of labels. People then should be able to decide for themselves ** whether or not they want to eat it. I am well aware that in our uneven distribution future that will mean poor people’s options will be GMO or nothing, but realistically, right now there’s only “or nothing.” Should we work on decreasing our inefficient distribution systems? Yes. Should we have more compassion for people? Absolutely. No, the poor and desperate shouldn’t be our lab rats, but I also haven’t seen much more than handwringing from the anti- side with a dash of patronizing “it’s for your own good” thrown in.
*Slight hyperbole, but not too much.
† Not to mention how much of an ecological burden almond farming is.
** Whether on a national or individual level. The richer nations do have a bad habit of dumping food they wouldn’t eat into poorer nations and calling it charity. Again, see above about what we should do better. But people shouldn’t be denied the chance if they want it.
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Not sure the actual percentages but I do know that almonds and pistachios are two of the biggest water hogs in Cali…
You’re right, GMO isn’t breeding. It is more precise, which is why the second part of your statement is a none issue. If one is adding a trait to make something redder or larger, it is because we KNOW what that trait does. The old method would be mashing two strains together sexually and seeing what happens. Genetics allows precise manipulation. The old method left MORE up to chance, where two unknown recessive traits might pop up, or one has a trait that turns a different trait of the other on or off. And never mind the fact that natural mutations can and do all sorts of weird things (some helpful, some harmful).
Example is the Belgian Blue that I have seen people claim is GMOs run amok. But it is actually a NATURAL mutation first documented in 1808.
In your example of Almonds, there is nothing wrong with growing almonds or eating them. You’re right the biggest issue is their rather high amount of resources to grow them (which maybe isn’t a great idea in areas where those resources aren’t abundant.) But that isn’t a GMO issue. In fact, GMO could help in the future, creating plants that require less water and maybe have less natural cyanide.
Honestly, that will be the long term success of GMOs, getting more with less. And maybe making a Red Delicious apple that isn’t a lie.
I am not worried at all about GMO foods affecting us physically in the future. You seem pretty level headed, maybe you can articulate what, exactly, is the fear of GMOs causing your or I personal harm from consumption over a life time? Honestly, for the average person their red meat or sugar consumption is more likely to be a life shortener. They do test these things to make sure nothing is dangerous. I can’t imagine what, exactly, they are afraid of. Some new protein the body can’t digest properly? In most cases the actual produce is identical chemically. I don’t see any inherent risk than traditional breeding methods and mutations.
On one hand I am ok with clear labeling, but on the other hand there is so much misinformation, I honestly don’t think it would DO anything other than cause some people not to buy it because they heard GMOs are bad. This is similar to “Common Core”. Anything labeled as CC is “bad”, even though nearly every time in my experience, the person doesn’t know what Common Core actually is.
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I’m cool with GMOs as long as their development was overseen by Shinto priests and accompanied by Tuvan throat singing in order to maintain a spiritual lineage to the original crop.
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I actually think you and I are closer than it appears. Part of what I was trying to say is that the only reason we have that 1,000+ year data is because we’ve allowed the food to be eaten for thousands of years. It’s not like cultivars spring into being with test results attached. So the argument that we don’t have the data is disingenuous. We _can’t _ get that data until we run the experiment.
Frankly, I am less concerned about heavily regulated GMOs than I am some of the regular foodstuffs available on grocery shelves everywhere. Contamination is likely to kill more than a GMO (and quicker, too).
