Facts and fear about genetically modified food in Hawaii

boing
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Okay, I don’t trust GMOs, but fine- Let’s assume that after extensive multigenerational testing, we find that all GMO food products are absolutely completely safe for human consumption with no side effects.

The cons still outweigh the pros by a long shot.

  1. They encourage monoculture. I can’t really find any realistic scenario where monoculture can be considered a good thing.

  2. This technology and the related patents are largely in the hands of corporations that are known to use the law as a weapon, buy and sell senators, commit various financial crimes, and generally behave like, well, multinational corporations. At least one of them has actually stated a goal of monopolizing the world’s food suppy. There is no universe in which that is in any way okay.

  3. Most of the GMO crops are designed to sell more pesticide and weed killer. I’m all for using that sort of thing when necessary, but we’re already using it the way we use antibiotics in livestock: Using more is not a good strategy.

  4. Finally, and this is a big one- this is a technology which can reproduce and spread without our help. We’re not talking about engineering some e-coli to produce chemical X in a vat in a lab- The entire point of this technology is to release it into the wild. I know that “it only takes one errant seed” sounds alarmist, but we have clear, verifiable case histories here: We know exactly what happens when one snakehead fish or one emerald ash borer or one tiny bit of milfoil or kudzu gets loose in the wild.

Yes, yes, I know that they have the potential to “feed the world”. You know what else has the potential to feed the world? Not being dipshits with what we already have. When we throw out something like half the food we produce, the problem isn’t producing more food.

The problem isn’t that people don’t have food, it’s that they can’t afford food. This is a software problem, not a hardware problem. If we stopped being the kind of assholes who destroy ecosystems and strip mine any country with a weak government and an exploitable resource, we wouldn’t need superfoods to take up the slack.

So, I don’t have complete confidence in the safety of GMOs, but really, that’s the least of my reasons to be against them.

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Nuclear is another issue more nuanced than “those who opposite it are crazy.”

Nuclear power generation has a lot of potential to be environmentally helpful – if it’s the right kind of technology being built. It can be an incredibly inefficient waste if not.

Old-style nuclear power plants built and operated with weak regulations, backroom deals, payoffs under the table, and a corporate culture where paying a fee is cheaper than doing something right in the first place? Let’s not have that.

Just as with GMOs, I think 90% of the problem is our current form of capitalism/corporatism, not the technology itself.

GMOs and nuclear power fail as a comparison at the level of “do we actually need it?” Clean energy, absolutely we need it. Higher crop yields? First-world countries don’t need them. Areas of the world where people are starving do need intelligent solutions of some kind – but I am not convinced that GMOs will help solve those problems. I am convinced GMOs are supposed to make someone a buttload of money.

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I see your point. There are two main things I think about it. In another post you mention labels allowing one to make an informed purchase. But the problem I have is too often consumers aren’t really informed. Marketing and propaganda influence a lot of people who make decisions based on biases instead of researching and weighing the actual data. If there were some sort of real, measurable difference between GMO and non-GMO I would be for mandatory labeling. But at this point the only thing I think labeling would do is lead to discrimination.

You point out labeling of electric cord as an example, saying it’s not stopping people from buying them. But I think that situation is different. First off, lead is a documented hazard. Second, nothing is NEW with the cords, they are the same as they always have been, so for people to continue to use an item that hasn’t ever hurt them, despite a warning, doesn’t require one to over come any hyped up fears. Third, pretty much every cord has this label. If it were sooo dangerous, they would have outlawed it, and in many cases finding a cord without a warning isn’t an option.

There are several things that may be viewed as undesirable in products that aren’t explicitly labeled. For example your food is allow X amount of insect parts in it. I don’t see the need to label this, as most foods have some, all of them are allowed some, and they aren’t harmful or show any effect to the end user.

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Who do you think is helping feed the world? First world nations. Remember not long ago people thought we would all be eating Soylent Green at this point in history.

[quote=“crashproof, post:82, topic:18599, full:true”]I am convinced GMOs are supposed to make someone a buttload of money.
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Rawr - making money bad! If farmers didn’t see an advantage to growing GMO foods, they wouldn’t spend the extra money for them. No one is making them buy it. There are plenty of non-GMO seeds out there.

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A couple responses to your complaints, point by point:

  1. All discussions of GMOs must include a criticism of GMOs as failing to socially engineer according to the critics personal taste. GMOs are not social engineeringing tools.
  2. Economic criticism in no way unique to GMOs.
  3. Red herring to conflate GFMOs and livestock antibiotics.
  4. It was activists who prevented the sale of “terminator” technology to prevent contamination, even though these techniques are used in conventional plant breeding. And the Sterile Pollen Apocalypse never happened.
  5. If GMOs aren’t the real problem, why are you so focused on the one thing you say isn’t the real problem? Why not go work on the real problem? I totally agree that the real problems include things like habitat loss, but Greenpeace wants people to focus on GMOs. The world has suffered huge irreversible losses while activists focus on the GMOs, which you just said aren’t the real problem. Instead of complaining GMOs aren;t the real problem anyway, why aren’t you telling people “Hey, maybe we should be focusing on the real problems!”
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We still throw food away. We still have government subsidies for not growing particular food crops. We still invent additional uses for corn and soy to keep growing it profitable. I don’t really buy the “feed the world” thing.

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I think GMO != GMO.

People like to simplify data when its confusing, even when it means loss of data.

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You continue to argue illogically and dishonestly. You also are using ad hominem rhetoric - attacking me as a person because you don’t like the opinions I hold - but I’m only going to attack your invalid arguments, so some of your comments will remain unanswered.

Nothing in your own definition says that shills are paid, so there is no need to demonstrate pay into order to satisfy your cite. This is what I mean by illogical argument… I have shilled for bands and performance artists for absolutely no pay on several occasions, simply because I liked them and enjoyed doing it.

I strongly disagree. Anti-labeling is anti-science, not a minor point of public policy. Persons wishing to do science without the sponsorship of corrupt governments or corporations with vested interests (either pro- or anti-GMO) cannot afford the costs of large-scale, long-term population surveys when the survey participants have no way of knowing if they are ingesting GMO products or not.

Anti-labeling is also anti-fair market - preventing consumers from learning things that buyers have clearly demonstrated they want to know. This flies in the face of basic market economics; hundreds of years before Adam Smith people already knew that “you shouldn’t buy a pig in a poke”, because that behavior encourages and rewards the sale of cats as piglets. Admittedly market economics is a public policy issue, but it’s a very important one that should not be discarded simply because labeling might decrease sales. Government does not exist to protect corporate sales, it exists to serve the people governed so arguments that say people might fear labeling are inherently invalid since only corporate sales (maybe) would be harmed.

It’s often been pointed out that Ockham’s razor says the most likely reason that GMO advocates wish to prevent low-cost third-party science is that they are afraid of what it would reveal. They have less confidence in their product than I do - I agree that genetic modification is merely a technique, which can just as easily be used well or poorly, so I am not afraid of GMOs. I am only afraid of the people who insist that their profit margins are vastly more important than freely sharing information with the people who are providing the money that creates those profits - and people who say hiding facts and lying about provenances are somehow a reasonable practice when there is simply no evidence whatsoever that this is the case, and plenty of evidence that mandated labeling is a social good, that helps create fair marketplaces and educated citizens.

If the things that GMO advocates say about GMOs are true, then within a single generation they could create a trusted and valued label that would sell product for them. All they have to do is be proud enough of their creations to practice simple honesty, and stop trying to hide data. They have nothing to fear from labeling unless everything they are saying is lies.

@Ygret, don’t let them drag you down. When they do the ad hominem thing it’s because they’ve failed to refute your argument - they try to “win” emotionally because they can’t conceptualize debate as a learning process; it’s a war to them, and they see themselves as the “good guys”.

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o_0 the US is the top ag exporter in the world, with something like $42 Billion a year. Where do you think that all goes?

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I might not call the comparison of GMO skeptics to climate change deniers ignorant. I would call it “fundamentalist”. Science fundamentalism is going to get us into trouble as long as science is as corrupted by profit-seeking as it is currently.

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Most U.S. corn and soybean exports go to four countries: China, Japan, Mexico and South Korea.

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And? They gotta eat too.

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  1. I literally have no idea what you are trying to say here or what it has to do with my first point. Do you actually know what monoculture is? These GMO crops are deliberately designed for it.

  2. It is also in no way separate from them. Your argument here seems to be “everyone else is doing it too”.

  3. It is a very accurate comparison. We pump our livestock full of antibiotics to prevent infection, which results in unwanted side effects and infections which are immune to the antibiotics. We dump chemicals on our crops to prevent pests, which results in unwanted side effects and pests that are immune to those chemicals. We are already overusing pesticides and herbicides, and it is contaminating groundwater, killing off native species, and creating resistant pests: The solution is not to use more of the same chemicals.

  4. Again, these are living organisms being released into the wild. Mutation is a fact of life. This isn’t a cloned sheep where we have a single specimen in a cage without a mate- Wheat is sown 40 seeds per square foot, which comes to 1,742,400 seeds to an acre, and Monsanto is talking about a worldwide market of 300 million acres for their Roundup Ready product alone. We are literally talking over 500 trillion seeds per year being polinated (successfully or not) by whatever’s floating on the breeze. If these terminator seeds work as advertised 99.9999999999% of the time, it still makes for 500 fertile seeds being planted each year. There is no such thing as a 0% failure rate, and again, we’re talking about self-replicating organisms.

  5. I am. The nonprofit I helped found is doing some real work on it, teaching sustainable farming and providing for the homeless. Right now, we are arguing over technology which is designed to make the real problem worse, not better. I am telling people we should be focusing on the causes of world hunger instead of devoting more effort to developing technologies to aid the companies and practices which are causing the problem in the first place.

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I thought hdb’s point was that blindly believing in propaganda because it shouts “science” is no different than blindly believing in propaganda that shouts “God’s will”?

Science requires exactly what you said - the ability to conduct experiments - and many GMO advocates (including, unsurprisingly, some giant corporations with problematic ethical records) are openly in favor of limiting access to data and limiting the ability of scientists to publish results. They claim they are dispassionately scientific… just like climate change deniers do… but GMO advocates actually act to prevent research, discourage independent scholarship, and discredit anyone who disagrees with them… again, just like climate change deniers.

Hmmm… I wonder if there’s any overlap between pro-GMO entities and climate change deniers, in real life. What’s S. Fred Singer’s position on GMO? Oh my… look at that, LOL! That’s really funny! A few minutes of googling finds no shortage of professional climate change deniers who are hardcore GMO advocates! Bwahahahahahaha! Try it yourself, don’t take my word for it! This is fscking hilarious!

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  1. Monoculture is the result of the industrial revolution and the development of mechanized tractors, combines, harvesters, threshers, and the creation of a supply chain based on railroads and barges. Monoculture agriculture was in full swing by the 1920’s, and it was widely documented and criticized at that time, especially for ignoring basic concepts like contour plowing. If you don’t like monoculture, then ban the use of mechanized harvesters. GMOs have nothing to do with it.
  2. Banning GMOs will not magically diminish the power of corporations.
  3. That’s a business practice. Banning GMOs will not prevent pesticide companies from selling pesticides.
  4. The dangers of mutations in GMOs is hardly unique to GMOs. Any of the many varieties of toxic plants that we tamed for use as crops could become toxic again tomorrow. By that reasoning we could ban pretty much all foods (which are loaded with natural carcinogens and toxins anyway).
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Just wanted to point out that everywhere we’ve cared to look, horizontal gene transfer seems to be pretty common particularly in plants. Plants have absorbed various bacteria and virus genomes over millions of years. And in cases where a plant that parasitizes other plants are analyzed, there has been lots of gene transfer between the parasite and host. I’m not aware of any mammalian genes showing up in plants, but we’ll see. Quite a bit of this has been found in the last decade, not that you’d ever know from reading the 25 year old stuff out of Greenpeace.

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And it has no bearing to this discussion, and even undermines your point, because waving something off as just sped-up nature is a standard trick to make the unsafe look safe. Climate has changed a lot over millions of years, so a large change in a century will be fine. Tons of oil has seeped into the gulf over the centuries only to be eaten by bacteria, so surely a giant spill all at once will be taken care of. And so on.

So yes, there has been a fair amount of horizontal gene transfer over millions of years and the world has adapted, and no, it doesn’t speak to the safety in rolling out lots of newly-modified plants on an industrial scale. What’s strange is that this case is different: there is evidence that does speak to the safety of that, at least with something close to the current level of caution.

So why do people feel the need to bring out the obviously-specious it’s-all-so-natural argument again and again? It’s really off-putting.

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Everything you eat is a naturally occurring GMO, like it or not.

It also undermines your point, because if something is happening everywhere all the time, it’s not uniquely dangerous. [quote=“chenille, post:97, topic:18599”]
So why do people feel the need to bring out the obviously-specious-it’s-all-so-natural argument again and again? It’s really off-putting.
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Really? How many anti-GMO activists are aware of this? You seem to imply that they know so much evolutionary biology that they are jaded and weary from the nattering of mere scientists.

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My point was that happening a lot over the Earth’s history is not actually the same as happening all the time, and pretending so is both plainly dishonest and oddly needless. So I don’t care how many anti- or pro-GMO activists know about it; what they should worry about is evidence that introducing such plants much faster than one individual every few million years is safe for us.

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Well I figured we had a mutual understanding that we weren’t going to bicker over the abiotic first couple billion years of earth’s history.

I would also suggest that it is all of nature combined that is moving “much faster” than some people in a lab.