GMO foods a good thing or bad?

One thing, which is a cheek.
If they infect your crops by wind contamination with their patented genes,
then if you resow your seed, they will sue you.

 

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China already has nearly twice as many pigs as rest of world´s total, but with pork the favorite meat and double digit annual salary gains they need still more and more productive hogs. I don´t think US lead in meat productivity per pig is GMO related - just old fashion breeding for 100+ years.

This is probably "bad news" for US pig breeders later, but great news for corn farmers. Hell corn prices will probably climb so high that making alcohol out of corn will finally end.

 

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Asking for a while a more specific question.
Should GMO foods be allowed to contain insecticide genes?

The following quote is from an anti GMO site:
Today, more than 85 percent of U.S. corn crops contain a special gene added that allows them to produce an insecticide. This way, when bugs attempt to eat the corn, they're killed right away (specifically their stomach is split open) because the plant contains an invisible, built-in pesticide shield.

The problem is, of course, that when you eat this corn you eat the built-in pesticide as well, and as you might suspect this is proving problematic for human health and the environment.
http://newconnexion.net/articles/index.cfm/2012/05/Built-in_Pesticides_in_Your_Food.html

Given that these insects are our distant genetic cousins, should we be ingesting food doctored to kill them?

 

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Most plants have natural defenses against pests. Some of them are harmful to humans and some are not. Anyway, that's why we have testing to find out what's safe and what's not and just like nature some humans may have reactions to the new change while most of us would be alright with it. Where do you draw the line in what's alright and what's not?

 

And that's why we are cautious and conservative when faced with major agricultural innovations we don't know much about. That's why, for example, we would never allow 80 or 90 % of our food supply to be taken over in less than a decade by three of four corporations, who engineer their plants - almost all of our locally grown food - to sequester herbicides and express insecticides in ways we have little information about and less than a decade of experience with. Not even a full human generation, let alone the two or three it would take to check this stuff out.

If the few turns out to be half of all second generation pregnant women, then we will be very grateful that we kept all options open and strictly forbade secrecy on the part of the corporations making all the money here - especially, that we labeled this stuff so that those who mistrusted could avoid it.

That would be a minimum, for the label "alright", no? No secrecy in the research and testing, full labeling of the product.

 

That sounds reasonable to me.

 

Bugs don't have stomachs.

 

Most foods (non-GMO's) contain pesticides as well:

==============
Division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Barker Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; and §Cell and Molecular Biology Division,
Lawrence Berkely Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720
Bruce N. Ames, July 19, 1990

ABSTRACT The toxicological significance of exposures to
synthetic chemicals is examined in the context of exposures to
naturally occurring chemicals. We calculate that 99.99% (by
weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that
plants produce to defend themselves. Only 52 natural pesticides
have been tested in high-dose animal cancer tests, and about
half (27) are rodent carcinogens; these 27 are shown to be
present in many common foods. We conclude that natural and
synthetic chemicals are equally likely to be positive in animal
cancer tests. . . .

Dietary Pesticides Are 99.99% All Natural. Nature's pesticides
are one important subset of natural chemicals. Plants
produce toxins to protect themselves against fungi, insects,
and animal predators (5, 16-23). Tens of thousands of these
natural pesticides have been discovered, and every species of
plant analyzed contains its own set of perhaps a few dozen
toxins. When plants are stressed or damaged, such as during
a pest attack, they may greatly increase their natural pesticide
levels, occasionally to levels that can be acutely toxic to
humans. We estimate that Americans eat about 1.5 g of
natural pesticides per person per day, which is about 10,000
times more than they eat of synthetic pesticide residues (see
below). As referenced in this paper (see refs. 16-21 and
legends . . .
===========================

We've been eating food designed to kill them for millennia. It's definitely worthwhile to test any new pesticide (genetic or chemical) to see what effect it has on people - but it's not a new phenomenon.

 

Awesome post and thanks for the link.

 

Yes it is. Thanks; however, it too is biased. For example, "sin 7" is that not all benefits promised by GMFs have been delivered. They may (or may not) be delivered later, but many benefits have been delivered. To see some good in GMFs they do not need to abolish hunger everywhere in the world!

I tend to be a supporter of GMFs as thus far, the benefits are vastly greater than any damage done. One "flaw" of GMFs is common in new medical drugs too: Traditional ways of improving foods (or medicines*) have provided more important benefits to mankind than GMFs have, but can not produce corporate profits (at least not exclusively to any one company as they can not be patented or have long expired patents*). This means that GMFs (and new drugs) do, as article notes, have strong advocates in the corporate world. - That is more a fault of the capitalistic system than GMFs, but like GMFs, the capitalistic system has many compensating large benefits, so with some badly needed modifications, I favor it too..

Possibly true a few people, with a unique set of genes, may even be killed by GMFs, but all must die some way some day. More important IMHO, is that GMFs are reducing the much greater number dying now of malnutrition or even starvation. This is not to say that no other way to feed them is possible - just that in the capitalistic system, in many poor countries, lack of money can kill you.

* Little known is how aspirin was discovered: In the middle ages of Europe, the "Doctrine of Signatures" was widely believed by most Christians. It stated that a kind, loving God would provide cures for diseases AND that their would be some signature (clues) as to where to look for the cure. Usually it was the shape of the plant not the location that was the clue. Colds and fevers were then (and still today) associated with getting cold and damp as one does when wading thru river or swamp. What is common near these wet places? -Answer: the willow tree. Back then extracts of roots and bark were common medicines (still are in rural Brazil**). As it turns out, molecules very much like, if not identical to, Aspirin are found in these extracts of the willow tree. The Bayer chemical company noted, (just as happens today with chemical / drug companies) that some of these natural medicines, including willow extract, did work. So, using their skills, they found the active ingredients and made one synthetically we call Aspirin.

** A few years ago, one rural man, who stripped a little bark from one tree to make a tea for his sick wife, was sent to jail! As lumber companies often pay men who cut down large valuable individual trees for your beautiful wood furniture***, and then to hide their crime, burn down many acres of woods, the public out cry, following newspaper article about man in jail for making a bark tea for sick wife, set him free.

*** If worried about loss of Brazilain forests, don´t buy beautiful wood furniture. Also don´t blame the usually poor man who cut down the tree to get from it more than a year´s wages at the minimum wage! If you must blame some one - look in the mirror.

 

From Wikipedia,

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#13 is labeled "mid-gut (stomach)"

Now watch him come back with something like "that's not a bug".

 

GM crops:

 

Can you imagine how careless places like China are going to be about ecological hazards when they allow smoke to pollute their own cities until a lot of their people have to go around wearing masks and can barely breathe?

 

Great ain´t it? They will do all the in vivo testing for us.

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You will not be left out, of the consequences of the third world testing programs - considering the beneficiaries of the fortunes that will be made regardless of the consequences, not even politically.

You don't know what the benefits are, or what the damages will be. Ignorance is not good support for such huge and short term (human life time) irreversible experiments (economic, ecological, nutritional, political, environmental, medical) with everyone's food supply.

In the long list of incurred and likely damages not being considered by GM proponents, thsi one stands out for me: opportunity cost. As with the most recent corporate power grab in the agricultural arena, hybrid seeds, the alleged benefits of GM crops are calculated by comparison with the agricultural practices of centuries long past, and the cost of failing to gain the benefits of modern science applied to those practices, the cost of redirecting our public research efforts and resources into these corporate benefits, is overlooked. We could, for example, almost certainly, have obtained by now true-breeding maize and soybeans and so forth that match performance with the hybrids - and we would then have a wide variety of high performance crops for which we were not dependent on and perennially indebted to a couple of large corporations in control of the foundation of our food supply. The situation with GMOs as developing now will be even more limited, and expensive, in its options.

 

Agreed. Fortunately we are not operating in a state of ignorance.

 

True, but this is not my field and I´m to lazy to search but quite sure higher yield, less losses to pests/bugs, more balanced mix of vitamins in some corps, better shelf life for lower cost due to lower store losses, etc. can be confirmed.

why are they "irreversible"? I´m sure the PA Dutch who don´t even ride in cars are still planting the same seed types as 100+ years ago. etc. Norway operates a seed depository in a naturally cold artic cave which holds almost all of the seeds of any interest in the world - not for fear of GM contamination etc. but fear of some fungus or blight wipping out all that grow in fields. IMHO, everyone wanting to plant the same "very best" seeds is much more of a danger than if they planted 20 different varieties of GM seeds.

Why would a farmer do that when deciding what seed to use? I think he considers the GM seed vs the alternatives available NOW, not 100+ years ago. Most of the elevations of farm land cost has very little to do with GM corportations but is due to wealthy people wanting some real assets like gold, etc. and land is better than gold as it is productive as well as inflation protection.

I don´t there is much truth in that. County agents still speak of crop rotation, soil testing to see what fertilizers are actually needed to reduce excesive use (cost and water pollution etc.) Do you know of ANY government (instead of private) funds developing GM seeds, etc. OR ARE YOU just blowing hot air. - I bet Monsanto etc. would not even accept public funds as that would greatly damage their patents value.

Who would have done this non-GM development of better seeds and who stopped them from doing it?

Do you think there is some government agent inspecting farms to prevent farmers from keeping records about which bull and cow made the calf that grew to full weight fast? or making framer plow under two geneticaly different strands of tomatos planted so close they may cross fertilzed and make a better than GM developed tomato? Again if this "would have happen" -who stopped it? Or is that just some wild false claim?

 

To the small extent we are not ignorant - such as the inevitability of resistance developing to Bt, which we know from evolutionary theory and generations field research and experience - what we know warns us against creating dependence on corporate dominated GM tech.

Their consequences of their industrial scale adoption destroy the economic and political, as well as physical, resource base. Bt resistance, once developed and spread, is essentially permanent. Seed stores and landraces, once gone, take years to replenish even if the original stocks exist somewhere. Smaller farms once incorporated into big ones take generations and political disasters to recreate, and their soil fertility buildup etc (if well run) may be as irrecoverable as their wetland industrially drained.

You are wrong about that. I have pointed this out to you several times now - if you are too lazy to Google even the simple stuff for yourself, at least pay attention when other people point to the obvious for you, OK?

The GM crops actually in commercial production are somewhat lower yielding per acre than comparable non-GM crops, almost always (think about it - there is no free lunch, the plant is devoting resources to expressing these complex introduced genetics); the alleged prevention of losses to pests and bugs are often phantom, and so far always temporary fixes with permanent damages (resistance, predator suppression, farmer dependence, ecological kickback - as with any overused and indiscriminately applied pesticide or herbicide); the promising and desirable vitamin balance stuff is still in beta and small scale in even its first attempts (various problems, including economic and political);

The better shelf life, although even that in GM form it is still mostly potential, I will give you - that, I think, is of all the promises one of the most likely to actually pan out. That kind of boost to the corporate bottom line is what this is all about, so far in the real world.

The third world farmers involved in this are not comparing options and making an informed choice among equally available alternatives, any more than the US farmers were involved in the choice to concentrate public research efforts and economic alternatives on hybrids and their needs, and the other desires of industrial corporate agriculture. No Indian farmer can get a special low interest loan and fertilizer discounts to plant a standard bred rice that exists only in a research plot somewhere, for example - if he even knows about it. There is no market choice here - what's happening is an industrial power play, a colonization of a kind. The choices being offered the farmers are not at all as you describe.

The public land grant research universities of the US and several other countries, various private foundations, and the corporate interests who stood to gain, of course - the same people who built the American agriculture empire, the green revolution, and the knowledge base under the entire field of industrial agriculture, including the hybrid seeds and the GM crops after their efforts were diverted (by corporate money and its political influence) to these higher private profit areas.

Nothing "stopped" them. The money and political pressure weighed in on the side of encouraging the more business-friendly directions of research, is all.

In the real world the situation is exactly the opposite: several hundred landraces of various crops with dozens of sources and adaptations and choices vs four or five corporate patented near clones of industrial seeds ->deliberately chosen for uniformity in somatotype and genetics, even before being cloned from near-identical genetic modifications <-. We have seen many, many examples of stuff like this already, from which we were usually bailed out by luck and inefficiency (the presence of backup) - this is not arcane stuff. An incoming example you should get familiar with, if you aren't, is rubber - the current industrial high yield rubber trees covering thousands of square kilometers of SE Asia all belong to a very narrow genetic selection of an already narrowed genetic selection (two historical selection steps) of one variety of rubber tree from one small area just upriver from the mouths of the Amazon. As it happens, this narrow selection of a narrow selection is from one of the varieties most vulnerable to a particular fungus disease that occasionally afflicts wild rubber trees in Brazil, where the scattering and genetic variability of the native rubber trees keeps in in check. This disease wipes out entire plantations in a few months, normally, when it takes hold. So far, the spores have not made it to SE Asia. That is luck. Luck of that kind, as the Irish discovered, runs out.

You are two generations behind the curve here - industrial agriculture kills the small farm, third world industrial agriculture does not bother with county agents (Monsanto bribes at the national level), etc. Google is your friend.

The corporate/university partnerships involved in GM tech are almost all government supported to one extent or another. I live near the University of Minnesota, a public land grant institution that a couple of generations ago operated for the benefit of the family farmers who sent their children as well as their tax dollars to it in good faith (and were repaid, after a while, with hybrid corn sold to and patented by various seed companies instead of true bred given to them, fertilizer and pesticide dependencies, etc). The role of such institutions in the agricultural improvements currently feeding the planet is well known - suffice it for illustration to point out that Norman Borlaug got his start as a researcher here.

I doubt there is or ever has been any purely private research into genetic modification - the final tweaks and production details, and of course the final patent and ownership rights, are of course often private, but the basic work has been pretty much university and related foundation based from the beginning. Monsanto puts up some of the money, of course.

Here's how it works at its best and least corrupt:

The expensive and uncertain research on the social dime, the commercial exploitation taken private.

 

OK, You forced me to do a brief search. I trust SCIENTIFIC STUDIES reported in the Guardian newspaper, National Academies of Science, and National Geographic etc for dozens of other peer-reviewed articles included in first quote below more than your or other individual opinions. I.e. this first article quoted below below is a "meta-study" summarizing the results of many dozen, perhaps 50, other scientific studies, with bold added by me to facilitate a quick skim.

Here are some of the scientific studies this "meta-study" of studies is based on:

"A review of peer-reviewed surveys of farmers worldwide who are using the technology compared to farmers who continue to plant conventional crops, published last week in Nature Biotechnology,* found that by and large farmers have benefited. Another report** released last week by the National Research Council in the US concluded that many American farmers have achieved more cost-effective weed control and reduced losses from insect pests. And a survey of farmers in Brazil,*** which is a leader in global adoption of GM crops, shows benefits for soybean, cotton and corn growers ..."

* http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v28/n4/pdf/nbt0410-319.pdf Note this is also a meta-study giving results from many other studies done in different parts of the world.
Thus this 12 years in the making Guardian article is incorporating, either directly or indirectly, the results of at least 100 scientific studies !!

** Link in text does not work for me, but I think this National Academies of Sciences report is what is referred to. It states:
"A new report from the National Academies' National Research Council. The committee that wrote the report emphasized it was not aware of any evidence suggesting foods on the market today are unsafe to eat as a result of genetic modification. And it said that {there is} no strict distinction exists between the health and environmental risks posed by plants genetically engineered through modern molecular techniques and those modified by conventional breeding practices." Read full Report by free down load here: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9795

*** That link in the text did not work for me either, so I search on Brazil and GMO and found this well balanced review (tells of the failures too**** that was originally published in the National Geographic magazine WITH MANY INTERESTING FACTS, include the following two.):

**** No "failure" resulted in human deaths as problems were caught in the very extensive testing GM, and only MG foods, must under go. (If the peanuts in the market were a product of GM, then they would never have made into the market place as every year they kill many more people than GM foods have since the frist GM food was made!) Do you have a link to even one human death defintely known to be caused by eating GM food?

Before I join your efforts to ban GM food, despite their many well established benefits and lack of even a single well documented death caused by GM foods, I´ll ask you to join me in efforts to outlaw the growing and sale of that known killer of many: non-GM peanuts.

The *** link also states there has been for nearly two decades, the opportunity for GM foods to kill many people as follows:
" Most people in the United States don't realize that they've been eating genetically engineered foods since the mid-1990s. More than 60 percent of all processed foods on U.S. supermarket shelves—including pizza, chips, cookies, ice cream, salad dressing, corn syrup, and baking powder—contain ingredients from engineered soybeans, corn, or canola. In the past decade or so, the biotech plants that go into these processed foods have leaped from hothouse oddities to crops planted on a massive scale..."

I use canola as it seems to be the healthiest mix of oils, but know it is GM modified from the poisonous rape seed.

According to the article ** above, thousand in the third world now go blind each year due to absence of vitamin A in their diets. The yellow GM rice is rich in Beta-carotene which converts to Vitamin A in bodies that lack it. A few hundred each year who went blind die annually - often because their poor societies can not prevent thats as there are hundreds of ways being blind can kill. This is the reason the Gates medical foundation developed the GM yellow rice. Does that answer your question?

 

I'll just briefly comment again that it has nothing or very little to do with people dying or getting sick from eating GM food... in fact I hope they all die from eating them. That seems to be the only thing that's going to wake people up.

It's the at-first subtle incompatibility with the organisms that eat them and their irreversible proliferation and forced replacement of the wild types that's the issue. They will never be able to make a test to see whether one food is better than another, they don't even know whether eggs are good for us or bad for us after years and years of research.

The GMs, after an awful lot of testing, will not make us visibly sick, but they will not be completely compatible with us because we have not co-evolved with them. To deny that is to deny evolution.

There is also no dichotomy between "GM" and "non-GM". Some GM foods may not be so bad, while others could be absolutely devastating. Also, over time, foods are going to become more and more distant from natural foods because of GM.

It's not like: "we have the GM corn, and this is what we can expect from GM corn in the future". GM corn now is going to be even more GM in the future. It's continually changing and not because of biotech companies doing it. Natural corn is being run out of existence. GM has no inherent properties, there are no lessons that can be learned from "the GM foods" because GM could be anything.

There's a total ridiculous misunderstanding if you think that somehow GM is just ordinary food but "a bit different" and we'll see what it'll be like. GM could be ANYTHING. They could certainly intentionally make GM food that would be poisonous and kill everyone that ate it.

GM tomatoes aren't really "tomatoes", they are tomatoes + something else. Even if they look like tomatoes, they are not completely tomatoes. I think it's a fair statement to say that they're like tomatoes + some plastics. Now the plastics may not be enough to make people sick... but they're certainly not something that you should be eating. To allow that out into the ecosystem to replace natural foods for the rest of eternity...

This illustrates the general stupidity and fecklessness of many of these people, they have no ability to think properly or have any idea what life is about. Joining a cause isn't something that can be bought and sold or bartered, it's something people should do on principle. Saying "I'll do this if you do that", to try to invoke some sort of reaction in the minds of others is an obvious fallacy.

Added to this his idea that peanuts kill people but not GM food and therefore he has made some point is retarded nonsense showing he is incapable of any scientific thought.

Some of you/these people have extremely concerning misconceptions and attitudes about evolution and GM foods.