GMO foods a good thing or bad?

Right. Pomelos and oranges were familiar individually, but completely separate organisms. They were combined to create a new organism - a grapefruit This was done at random through hybridization. The resulting hybrid has characteristics of both.

Likewise, Bt bacteria and corn were familiar individually, but completely separate organisms. They were combined to create a new organism - Bt corn. This was done intentionally through genetic engineering. The resulting organism has characteristics of both.

True of both hybridization and genetic engineering.

Nor do we have any reason to be more wary of a genetically engineered plant transferring its new code to viruses.

However, both hybrids and GMO's are quite capable of transferring their new code to similar species.

 

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We're not at "hundreds of centuries" yet, we started breeding at best 10 centuries ago. As I stated before, I do believe that breeding and artificial selection is a very bad thing also, but it's nowhere near what GMOs are in danger of doing in an instant. In another life without the GMO threat I might be campaigning against artificial selection, but it's a bit pointless given the threats GMOs pose. Also, there is no reason for the GMO to be 98% similar, they can splice the genes whichever way they want. The host plant repeatedly rejects this virus being planted into it and then out of like 200 attempts it becomes infected with it. In the future the "technology" is only going to get better.

I don't know what you're latching onto hybridization all of a sudden for. Very few plants can hybridize with each other, afaik they are then sterile. It's a rare process, and I'm sure occurs in nature regularly also. As a matter of fact, I do in fact avoid grapefruit and pineapple since they are hybridized (and I used to like grapefruit) and therefore not as natural. That's hardly the same as inserting insect DNA into an orange. "herrr all DNA is the same ATCG and so it's all the same herrr". An apple and orange aren't going to be brought together through "hybridization" tomorrow and outbreed all apples and oranges out there, but a similar scenario is very likely to occur with many species under GMOs except possibly all the apples will be just spread with GMO material similar to what is happening with corn in Mexico now as Ingacio Chapela showed (and those are just the ones that we can test for GMOs, not all GMOs have testable markers).

Do you doubt that out of thousands or millions of people there wouldn't be someone stupid and foolish enough to try this?

The more accessible this technology becomes, the more we're going to be relying on the weakest link of the scientists and corporations. What one of them does could/will affect us all forever.

I almost feel for you billvon, trying to argue such a ridiculous position and put a cogent set of points together. Here's a solution to make all your posts work: drop the outlandish support for GMOs. Sometimes there really is no way a technology could benefit mankind over the long term.

 

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Do you have a reputable source for that nonsense?

 

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I´ve ask for reference several times, but iceaura only gives "logical agruments" and assertions.

He agrees that GM seeds cost more but never tells why every year more farms are switiching to use them to get lower yields! (yet claims to be logical and only stating the obvious!)

He ignores the results of approximately 100 scientific tests of GM seeds, none of which show his claimed decrease in yields, although some done in the developed world, where pesticides are used, show little if any benefit for insect resistent GM seeds. These global studies are summarized in two meta-studies. Here are some of the yield results from one that collected data for 12 years from these 100 or so other studies, as extracted from my post 158 where references are given, but not repeated here. Blue text is for those who want to do a quick skim of the main results:

This meta-study was 12 years of data collection and then condensed into a long Guardian article incorporating, either directly or indirectly, the results of at least 100 scientific studies done prior to start of 2011!!

This is the other meta-study, based on the same 100 or so direct tests of GM seeds:
* http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v2...bt0410-319.pdf This meta-study, published in Nature, gives results from many global studies , which are essentially the same results as reported above (as expected as it uses mostly the same 100 or so scientific studies for its data base). I give it mainly as some may prefer to read those results in peer-reviewed Nature, instead of the Guardian newspaper.

 

Back around 1999 when my grandfather was still farming I did an engineering ethics debate on GM food, so I asked him if he would consider switching back and what he thought of people's objections. He laughed at them. After 70 years of making his living farming I think he had a pretty good handle on his yields and economics.

 

First agriculture (i.e. intentional selection and planting of crops) started around 9000 BC. That's 11,000 years ago, or 110 centuries ago.

Yet you eat them, and would find an "all natural" diet nearly inedible. Were we to switch back to all-original organisms much of the world would starve.

I think you may have a somewhat incorrect view of how GMO's are created right now. They don't "splice the genes whichever way they want." They introduce small changes in the genome of an existing plant to modify characteristics of it.

Almost all the produce you eat today are hybrids.

Agreed, and no one has done that.

That's nonsense.

Google "pluot."

Yes, I do doubt that thousands or millions of people will try to do that. There's no point to it.

Now, an edible grass that can grow in salt water estuaries? THAT would likely be very worthwhile, and many people will try to accomplish that.

I feel worse for you, trying to stop progress through fearmongering, and trying to rely on ignorance to make your points. Such tactics often fail.

GMO's are indeed dangerous. Like many other technologies, they have the potential to both help and harm people. They must be carefully regulated and tested to ensure they do not pose an undue risk. So far they have not.

 

The entire genome of both plants and every piece of them as expressed in a familiar plant body has been vetted by thousands of years of human consumption just as they are. The genomes are not combined at random, in a hybrid - the code is not shotgunned or otherwise inserted within arbitrary stretches of the native code. No auxiliary code is packaged with them (such as antibiotic resistance code to check on combination success). And so forth.

Likewise? You have got to be kidding.

No. Bt was not at all familiar as a plant eaten in large quantities by people for thousands of years. Its genetics as expressed within a plant genome and phenotype and under plant growing circumstances were not familiar at all - we had no experience with anything like that. The Bt code is not brought into the genome of the plant via recombination, an orderly process in which the code has its assigned slots, in which similarly functioning code was in place and under evolved, familiar regulation. It is instead shotgunned into essentially randomly chosen places, where we little advance information about its interactions and regulation with the rest of its new and radically different home.

Being familiar with such disparate organisms does not provide familiarity with how pieces of each others code shotgunned in at random would be expressed in each others bodies. That should be kind of obvious - it's a bit disturbing to see such plain facts overlooked so completely and naively by the people we are depending on to not do anything stupid with this stuff.

There is nothing comparable with hybridization here - and that's just considering the Bt code and the plant's code: we haven't even got to the auxiliary genetics used to package and transfer the Bt code and check on its operations and so forth.

Of course we do - the stuff is deliberately designed, engineered, to be transferred - physically, by a physical insertion engineered to insert itself into functioning code. It is packaged for transfer and insertion, provided with code whose function is to do exactly that in its target home, and even on occasion delivered in its transfer by a virus. This target home is an organism of not just a different species, often, but a different Family, Order, even Phylum. If you engineer a stretch of code to make it more easily transferred between completely different kinds of organisms, it's not much of a stretch to consider the possibility that it might be more easily transferred between different kinds of organisms, eh? We even have the specific case: If you engineer it to be transferred by a virus in the first place, you're an idiot if you don't carefully and thoroughly handle the possibility that it will lend itself to transfer by a virus in the future.

Guys, this is pretty obvious stuff.

That isn't true. Again.

I have never mentioned the price of GM seeds, and I have several times pointed to reasons why farmers switch to GM crops - off hand, I have mentioned that farmers often get cheap loans, cheap fertilizer, and other support when they switch; I have mentioned that GM crops are often the only modern and scientifically bred crops available to the poor (remember when you were asserting that farmers were choosing among comparable alternatives, and I pointed out that was nonsense?); I have mentioned that although they usually yield less per acre in fair comparison they often yield more per dollar, especially in the first couple of years before the blowback hits (studies that last less than five years are all but worthless for that assessment).

So that is what, the fourth false assertion you have made about my posts here - about simple stuff that is typed right in front of your face? No wonder you don't seem to be able to comprehend your own links, as they support my assertions; no wonder you demand evidence for what are frankly obvious, sky is blue type observations (such as the one about Golden Rice not yet working as hoped in the real world, the GM non-allergenic peanut not actually on the market yet, the one about the many varieties of GM foods being new and untested and unfamiliar health risks, and so forth).

I just used your references, for the little I've asserted that needs reference, such as in post 167. They work fine, if I can get you to read them carefully.

It's remarkably difficult to find informative studies on that simple question (studies merely showing a year or two of increased yields after adopting a GM variety, without the necessary comparisons and controls, are obviously not informative, agreed?) but the necessary info for assessment is out there. If you can read, Billy already has posted some. Here's a European report: http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/gmo/reports_studies/docs/economic_performance_report_en.pdf but you have to be able to notice the significance of the language used (i.e. understand what's going on when overall yield advantages "vary in time and space" and are "lower in places which already have well adapted varieties" or good pest management practices and so forth).

Here's a more easily read summary of the field: http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/ESHx4FnZadAJZqvIsGRg/full/10.1146/annurev.arplant.043008.092013 And the generally favorable tone and conclusions should be acceptable to you guys. I direct attention to the one small sentence that bears on my assertion labeled "nonsense":

In other words, in most current GM crops, genetic material has been added and is expressed that diverts resources away from yield. Increased yields observed are not in comparison with the same variety minus the engineered code, farmed the same way, and farmed according to best practices. One can read some of the situation between the lines like this:

Here's another, for reading between the lines: http://www.choicesmagazine.org/magazine/print.php?article=129
And for background on the issue (yield vs whatever): http://www.organicauthority.com/org...ue-to-high-yield-selective-seed-breeding.html

Some random stuff for the context:
http://www.non-gm-farmers.com/news_details.asp?ID=2961
http://www.non-gm-farmers.com/news_details.asp?ID=2253

Y'know, maybe, but I bet not. The problem would be profiting, and estuaries are difficult to set boundaries on. I'd predict more salt tolerance in desert and especially irrigated landscapes, as a priority for Dekalb and friends.

 

That's not what the sentence is saying. The sentence is saying that the genetic modification is not directly about yield, but has the indirect effect of increasing yield. Ie, if the direct effect is increased pesticide tolerance, the indirect effect is using more pesticides results in less bugs eating the crops and more yield. Modifications that would be directly about yield would be things like bigger plants, more veggies per plant, etc.

In either case, there are other quotes in those links that confirm the higher yields explicitly, such as:

Please note, your nonsense statement was pretty bold:

"Almost every" is "lower" (as opposed to just not much higher). And the sentence at the top of my post is a hedge on that from you -- an acknowledgment that higher yields are seen. And the evidence you present confirms the higher yields. More from the links:

That's from your second link. In fact, there is not even a single statement about a reduction in yield in that link.

Your first link is too long for me to search through in its entirety for a statement that agrees with you (please do post a quote if you can find one), but in the intro it says this:

Clearly, your assertion is nonsense. Worse than nonsense even. By this point, it can only be either a lie or a delusion, so clearly wrong it is. Once more for emphasis:

The primary proven benefit of GM crops is higher yields.

That's from your source.

 

Correct! They were not tested; they were thrown together at random. Early "testing" (i.e. people ate them and didn't die) indicated they might be safe so they were eaten more often.

Nowadays we have much better tests, so the odds of a random gene insertion being poisonous or fatal are much lower.

Google "meiosis." It's completely random. Which is why farmers had to try thousands of cross-pollinations before they got one that had all the characteristics they wanted.

Fully HALF the auxiliary code is packaged with them, such as different fruit size, different maturation speed, different resistance to blight etc.

Again, if you think that, you don't understand meiosis.

In GE, a small segment of a genome is "shotgunned" into the genome of another organism. In hybridization, fully HALF of another organism is "shotgunned" into a new organism. 99% of the time the transfer is so bad that the organism dies. 1% of the time you get a survivor. .1% of the time it's a better fruit or vegetable and we keep it.

Literally true. GE is a lot more deliberate than the double barrel shotgun blast to the genome that hybridization is.

I would hope there would be massive profits in such an endeavor. That would drive food production in areas that currently see high levels of starvation. Making the poor rich and feeding them is not that bad an outcome.

 

The plants are not engineered for pesticide tolerance, and the benefit is supposed to be less pesticide needed rather than more used. Any yield advantage then derives from lower levels of insect damage being of greater benefit than the diverted resources are of harm. If you read my links, or Billy's, or anyone's really, you will note that the indirect yield gains from Insect Resistance engineering tend to be concentrated in areas in which the GM grop replaced an older varietal, the farming methods are less modern, and the existing insect controls were suboptimal or non-existant - that isn't comparing apples to apples.

The net benefit, if any, lasts as long as the farmers can afford the auxiliary pesticides (Bt comes in several narrowly effective versions, so for multiple pest hazards one needs either multiple "stacked" blocks of engineered code or field applied pesticides) and resistance is postponed. Meanwhile, the GM pesticide is a type specimen of a resistance breeding factor - widely broadcast regardless of need, severely damaging to the pest, constantly present and in a variety of dosages, with immediate and overwhelming reward (no competition for huge food supply) to any pest who can figure it out.

They were not thrown together at random, and thousands of years of careful and detailed field and consumption experience is about as thorough as testing gets. They've been tested. They are not random. They've been vetted. They are familiar in their current roles and functions, just as they are. In this important respect, as well as many others, they differ radically from the products of genetic engineering. How many more times does simple physical reality need to be restated, before the implications of the fact that GM proponents have to deny it to make their case are recognized?
[quote='billvon"] Google "meiosis." It's completely random. [/quote] No, it isn't. This link has pictures, if the description is confusing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis

Meiosis is very, very far from random. Alleles go to alleles, entire gene complexes are swapped for slightly different versions in exactly the same order, not a single string of code alien to both parents appears anywhere, chromosomes end up with with the same roles and influences they started with, the result is a genome with organized functionality only slightly if at all different from the organization of the originals. Hybridization does not randomly shuffle genomes and pack in any old string of code anywhere. Nothing in hybridization does what genetic engineers do, or anything like it - a closer comparison would be retroviral infection, maybe advanced symbiosis, not hybridization.

If we knew what to test for, if we knew what tests we needed, that would be more reassuring. When we have had a couple of complete generations of experience with each and every different engineered block of code and their combinations, we'll have a better idea of what we're doing.

Reproduction in modern organisms is so carefully organized that researchers can find specific genes that code for specific features at specific places along specific chromosomes in any given individual and all their progeny. There are published maps of genomes, accurate for entire species. It is so rigidly organized that the discovery of "jumping genes" - small and partial and limited exceptions to the rigidity - was denied for decades and changed the entire field when established.

That's the straight code, the genome of the plants, the expressed coding for the features. Hybridization involves no auxiliary engineering code, and hybrids don't don't carry any.

Hybridization involves only the normal mechanisms of reproduction. Nothing is "shotgunned" anywhere, and the consequences of shotgunning are not duplicated or imitated or resembled. That's a specific engineering technique, and its natural analogs are found in viral infection and mechanical disruption by parasites etc - not reproduction.

Of course. We all hope for a better future of wonderful benefits. Meanwhile, we have the present reality to consider and deal with.

Spending so much time reiterating simple, basic facts is kind of discouraging, and not making progress on the present reality.

 

Explaining why he has ignored my repeated request that iceaura give some references supporting his claims, Iceaura said:

You must mean "creatively" not "carefully."

There is not one thing in my references that supports your false claims about GM crops giving lower yields, and much that states just the opposite.

Not only do you have no reference supporting your unreferenced assertions, but if you think, in your "careful" reading of my many referenced they do support your claims, then please quote from my references some text* that you can read as supporting your lower yield etc. claims.

*And identify where that text is so we can check that you are not just inventing it, like your BS claims, too.

 

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Glyphosate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Glyphosate (N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine) is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide used to kill weeds, especially annual broadleaf weeds and grasses known to compete with commercial crops grown around the globe. It was discovered to be a herbicide by Monsanto chemist John E. Franz in 1970.[3] Monsanto brought it to market in the 1970s under the trade name Roundup, and Monsanto's last commercially relevant United States patent expired in 2000.

Some crops have been genetically engineered to be resistant to it (i.e. Roundup Ready, also created by Monsanto Company). Such crops allow farmers to use glyphosate as a post-emergence herbicide against both broadleaf and cereal weeds, but the development of similar resistance in some weed species is emerging as a costly problem. Soy was the first Roundup Ready crop.
============

=============
Meiosis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Meiosis is a special type of cell division necessary for sexual reproduction in eukaryotes. The cells produced by meiosis are gametes or spores. In many organisms, including all animals and land plants (but not some other groups such as fungi), gametes are called sperm and egg cells.

Whilst the process of meiosis bears a number of similarities with the 'life-cycle' cell division process of mitosis, it differs in two important respects:

-the chromosomes in meiosis undergo a recombination which shuffles the genes producing a different genetic combination in each gamete, compared with the co-existence of each of the two separate pairs of each chromosome (one received from each parent) in each cell which results from mitosis.

-the outcome of meiosis is potentially four (genetically unique) haploid cells, compared with the two (genetically identical) diploid cells produced from mitosis.

Meiosis generates genetic diversity in two ways: (1) independent alignment and subsequent separation of homologous chromosome pairs during the first meiotic division allows a random and independent selection of each chromosome segregates into each gamete; and (2) physical exchange of homologous chromosomal regions by homologous recombination during prophase I results in new combinations of DNA within chromosomes.
===================

"the chromosomes in meiosis undergo a recombination which shuffles the genes producing a different genetic combination in each gamete . . . .independent alignment and subsequent separation of homologous chromosome pairs during the first meiotic division allows a random and independent selection of each chromosome segregates into each gamete"

The closer an organism is the more likely things will end up in about the right place; many alleles will line up and present a coherent genome. The farther away an organism is genetically the less likely this is to happen. That's why there need to be thousands of hybridization attempts before you get even one living plant; that plant survived the double barrel shotgun blast of random new DNA that is hybridization and just happened to survive.

Agreed. If you spent a little more time learning about meiosis and hybridization you'd likely have better arguments to make.

 

You're making the same mistake with the word "random" that creationists make. A coin flip is random - heads or tails. That's the randomness of meiosis - the choice of alleles to fit into the slot, with two possible at each slotting event and a maximum of four from each pair of chromosomes in a typical plant. The number of combinations is large, but the -> kinds <- of combinations possible are strictly controlled and limited - that's how you get reproduction, instead of haphazard and unviable monstrosity. Meiosis does not separate the available DNA into independently manipulable stretches of code, and randomly assort them. Still less does it incorporate code from nearby bacteria, junk DNA flaoting around in the cytoplasm or available in the nearby environment, etc.

If meiosis proceeded instead by the means of genetic engineering, you would almost never get a viable offspring and even less often one that resembled its parents. And that's just with the genetic resources available from those parents - do that kind of shuffling with strings of code borrowed from the outer world, and the viable space of possibilities approaches measure zero.

A coin flip does not randomly select from among the world's currencies, compress the coin or cowrie shell or whatever into into a cube, and relabel the faces for the "flip". It is not engineered, as we say here.

I'm trying to be polite while responding to someone who not only doesn't comprehend the difference between engineered genetic inclusions and reproductive combination of alleles, doesn't know what the word "pesticide" means despite its context in a post about insect resistance, and can't read with comprehension, but chooses to deliver their bs in the form of personal insult.

I already did. Three times now, counting direct post number reference. And I corrected your several posted misrepresentations of my assertions, politely treating them as simple mistakes easily cleared up. That's enough babysitting. You can read for yourself: go back to your original assertions, read your claims, compare with your own posted evidence and the physical facts of the world, think for yourself if you can't read from my stuff.

I think I've been reasonable for quite a while. I'm going to reiterate an earlier point: the proponents of GM are by and large a remarkably careless, arrogant, and none too alert bunch of suckers for industry propaganda. Regardless of the eventual, future, much anticipated role of GM techniques in providing wonderful benefits for us all instead of the current reality of high risk corporate profiteering, the early years of its rollout look like the early years of atomic power would have if atom bombs had been capable of self assembly and migration - the adults need to step in here, and put a leash on these guys. Clearly we are not in the reliable hands of trustworthy experts, people we can expect to be careful with these techniques.

 

Exactly.

Correct! That's why with similar organisms the success rate is high. That's also why with hybrids (two different organisms) you most often end up with "haphazard and unviable monstrosity." One out of a thousand is viable.

Again, exactly correct. Two orange trees reproducing sexually has a high chance of success. Their genomes are very close to each other. A pomelo and an orange has a low chance of success; as you say, it approaches zero even though their genomes are somewhat similar. But (and this is the important part) it is not precisely zero, and thus grapefruit were born.

The proponents of every new technology, from hybridization to steam power to fluoridation to air travel to rural electrification, have been called similar names. We're used to it, so do your worst.

How many people have been killed due to the direct effects of GMO's? How many people have been killed due to the direct effects of nuclear weapons? Should be a simple comparison to make.

 

To the extent that I am correct, your assertions are contradicted and your arguments invalid.

None of that supports your ignorant reassurances about genetic engineering - clearly (by my description labeled "correct" above) such endeavors are nothing like hybridization, or even actual crosses (you seem a bit confused about that distinction, actually arguing from crosses rather than hybrids most of the time) or any other manipulation of evolutionarily vetted and long familiar breeding methods. Your nonsense about hybridization "shotgunning" code into the genome, your errors in the application of randomness and probabilities, and your insane misrepresentation of the entire engineering endeavor as somehow a continuation of "hybridization" etc, are simply and obviously mistakes.

That radical difference is usually presented as the big advantage of genetic engineering, btw - it isn't subject to the limitations of these breeding manipulations, which cannot provide nearly the range of possibility. That's one reason it was developed - it's brand new and much more powerful in some ways. It does stuff breeding cannot do.

I made it - yes, it was obvious. Of course asking Fox Frame questions and trying to bring in war time use of weaponry would be an attempt to avoid the comparison, but nobody would troll like that in a science forum - right?

I think we can all be grateful that these techniques were not available to anyone during WWII, and only ordinary breeding and manipulations were available to the designers of bioweapons, but that would be a topic for another thread.

Let's make that exhibit A, in evidence as to the level of awareness and comprehension of what they are doing common among the promulgators of GMOs. We clearly need serious curbs and complete transparency in these endeavors.

 

That is simply false. NEVER have you given even one Reference that supports your claim that GM crops have lower yields. After I had asked several times, you said a "careful" reading of my references support that claim. but that too is false. My references adimit that in some developed world cases there was no increase but and average of 7% increase. In the thrid world the inceases are much larger, as stated in my references and quoted in post 159. ranging from a low ot 30% increase to about 50% increase and in one study the average increase was 85%.

You still refuse to give any reference, or to quote from my references text that "carefully read" supports your false claim of GM corps having lower yield, but now you claim you have three times already give the requested references. - Then tell the post number where even one is given or stop with the FALSE unsupproted claim you have just invented of lower yield. It is pure fabricated as well as false!

 

This is not an evidence problem - you are looking directly at the evidence - but a comprehension and argument problem. You appear to have once again suffered a memory glitch, in which I am now supposed to have asserted that people who have planted GM crops have not enjoyed gains in yield.

Here is my assertion, from one of the several posts you have had to get it straight:

Now the key word in there, also present in the other posts, is "comparable". This is at the center of my entire posting, and repeated throughout, and impossible to miss: I regard the accurate comparison set for GM crops as not older varieties farmed in former ways in third world countries, but what we could have instead from modern science - the same kinds of modern varieties the engineers have used, farmed according to the best practices brought in with the GM promulgations, over long enough times to inform us about various weather effects and resistances etc.

So none of those 85% yield gains and so forth you bang on about are even relevant, and the background information present supports my assertions. If you read your links, you will find the same qualifications and demurrals I found: the gains come in the wake of replacement of inadequate pest management, lesser yielding varieties, less fertilizer, inferior farming practices in general, simultaneous with the GM crop's introduction. When these are not present, yield gains disappear - and this is not at all surprising, because as my references show (I quoted for this, above) essentially none of the GM crops now in commercial distribution were engineered to "increase yield per se" (some are designed to increase yield in drought or salt conditions, but they are not in wide distribution yet), and all of them contain code whose expression diverts resources from other plant activities - such as production of whatever we want from them.

Now it is unfortunate that we must dig through a morass of incontrolled field trials and real world anecdotes to come to this assessment. Where are the proper studies for straight yield comparison? And this brings up another of my points - we don't have any. As far as I know, no independent researcher (recall the 2009 Scientific American editorial, the Ecologist article, your own links, above) has run even one long term controlled and publicly available study comparing yield only in any GM crop.

In Bt cotton, for example, we would have expected to see a research set of side by side plot pairs of cotton varieties identical except for the engineered genetics, both farmed according to best practices (the non-GM receiving topical and spot applications of Bt, would be the only difference), for a few years in varying weather conditions at each of the widely separated and geographically varied locations.

Lacking anything of the kind, we are forced to dig through the "methods" and "results" sections, and the accounts from actual deployments, for clues. When we do this, or at least when I do it (nobody else here seems interested), we find that yield gains track the extent of the changes in farming practice, not the use of GM seed, and lack of improvement in farming circumstances is associated with no gains and occasional losses - exactly what one would expect from Biology 101, considering the actual engineering performed.

And that is the yield gain issue, isolated. Now about the rest of your claims - vitamin balance, pest resistance, etc - you have posted no evidence of even mistaken and misleading "support". Your peanut allergy example is not in production yet, Golden Rice is still in troubled development, and so forth. As I pointed out, the wonderful benefits of GM are largely potential, promises for the future. No one is denying them, but no one should be counting these chickens as hatched yet either.

The costs and risks to the public are being fully incurred now, for the profit of a couple of large agribusiness concerns. If these costs and risks when clearly described seem warranted by the potential benefits, one by one for each individual engineering feat, fine. If they are being concealed and denied and buried under deceptive propaganda, then we have a problem.

 

Still no references given. Still no page numbers given where you claim to have given three references. Still just arguments and unsupported assertions.

*still only a claim without the specific post number or clear statement of the reference.

I understand your argument that the third world studies were comparing to older than modern Non-GM seeds, and agree that introduction of other modern agricultural practices certainly would increase yields but if that is the only reason for the 30 to 50% yield increases observed, why pay more of the GM seeds?

Characteristically you still give no support for this being the case and seem to ignore that even if GM seeds were designed to resist insect attack or to tolerate poor growing weather, need less fertilizer, etc. That doe increase yields.

The easiest thing for third world farmers to adopt is to simply change the seeds they use. It is harder to adopt "modern science - the same kinds of modern varieties the engineers have used, farmed according to the best practices." This is demonstrated in Brazil. Most farms (except those exporting to China, which at least a couple of years ago, did not allow import of crops grown with GM seeds) have switched to GM seeds. Small farms in Brazil have many long standing traditions - E.g. Plant in this X phase of the moon, a woman must handle the seeds if not actually plant them, etc. Yet Brazil´s farms, large and small are in the forefront of adopting GM seeds. Especially the largest are adopting other modern practices also but their labor is not well educated and may not actually do some of the modern things told to do. - Again changing seeds is the first thing they do as it is the managers who buy the seeds and can read the good results others who switched to GM seeds achieved.

My focus has been on trying to get you to support your claim that GM seeds lower yields. I don´t know if many missing vitamins and amino acids have been added yet to a significant number of people´s diets where they ever lacking or not - that may be mainly future promises (assuming the anti-GM folks do not get GM developments blocked) I never claimed that GM peanuts exist - I only made the comparison between 100 deaths form peanuts each year and not one death in the more than 10 years due to GM food. I.e. it is peanuts that should be band before GM foods are; However, the great benefits of peanuts to society as a whole (healthy oil and proteins without animal fat) more than compensate for the damage they do to a few.

 

I listed three or four reasons for that, above: a general summary would be their apparent short term economic superiority to the available alternatives, backed by political and economic power. My posting about the lack of genuine alternatives, the opportunity cost, applies here. It was above and is my nomination for the largest cost of GM technology as it is being currently deployed. We paid it for the hybrids, and it cost us the family farm in the US. The engineered stuff looks to be much, much more expensive.

Despite your posting of informative links and my posting of informative links you appear to be still completely uninformed about the real world reasons farmers adopt GM seeds, but you should at least recognize that fact and agree that your presumption of informed and verified market selection among comparable alternatives by the farmers themselves is contradicted by your links and my links and is completely without evidence or argument otherwise.

Not "may be" - is. So that's settled.

No farmer can simply change from traditional agriculture to GM seeds without adopting at least some modern farming methods, as your Brazilian examples show - they require specific fertilizer regimes and various changes in the cultivation and harvesting and so forth (significantly, they require that the farmers stop saving seeds for future planting from the harvest, and take steps to prevent "theft" of the patented engineering modifications). They are different varieties, different plants. Monsanto et al know this, and the deals being cut with their contracted farmers include fertilizers and pesticides and changes in the layout of the farms and many other features. These features usually add up to discard of the older farming methods and setups.

Now you are adding to your list of unsupported assertions about the nature of the engineered modifications actually in commercial distribution. In general they need more fertilizer, not less (and Monsanto is happy to sell it, even giving discounts). They tend to be more sensitive to bad weather, not less (the recent drought in the American plains hit the GM stuff harder than the comparable non-GM, even the GM stuff supposedly engineered for drought resistance). They are usually high performance varieties in the first place, not usually landraces pre-adapted to the local terrain, and the obvious considerations apply.

So pointing out that your basis for claiming otherwise is definitely invalid, and the evidence supports my assertion there, and simple biology applied to the facts of the engineering currently in commercial distribution indicates that a yield hit is exactly what anyone would expect, is not support?

And I noted that 1) ten years (not your original asserted time frame - mine) is not enough time, 2) no one has been keeping track of the public health consequences from consumption of GM food (example: for all we know, the distribution of nut allergen in GM soybeans killed many people - there's no way to tell), no one even knows what the possible health consequences are, or what needs tracking (example: the discovery that antibiotic resistance code and herbicide complex are released into the human intestine during digestion was recent, came only after 80% of the US crop and most US foodstuffs had been converted to GM varieties, and we don't yet know what the effects are if any), and so forth and so on: 3) all of which is summarized in the simple observation that ten years of no research is not enough to vet even one of these modifications, meanwhile we are converting our entire food supply to dozens of different ones, and refusing to even label the consumption of them - the normal first step in tracking their effects, the one thing you have to do before you assert a lack of harm.

Again with the "banning". Who are you talking to? Peanuts are labeled - do you agree that at least some GM foods - say the ones that contain incorporated herbicides and pesticides and antibiotic resistance codes - should be labeled? Then you agree with me.

There is no safety in ignorance. We are ignorant. What you don't know is quite possibly hurting people already, let alone in the next generation - which will be the very first human generation to be nurtured on GM foods from conception on, the first study group of this new diet we are all being committed to.

And that is merely one aspect of GM dominated agriculture - the one most directly relevant to the thread OP, but not the only one relevant at all.

 

Stll no supporting references for your claim GM foods lower yields - just more of your arguments and assertions

I do agree that foods containing GM ingredients should be labled telling that at least n the "fine but readable print". Perhaps you have never called for Banning, but you do (and stated again in post I´m replying to) that a mere decade of testing is not adequate, generations are needed etc. before mass marketing should be allowed - for a comercial firm like Monsato with stockholders and bottom line considerations - that is a ban. (A rose by any other name is still a rose.)