License violation, not patent infringement. Being able to use them only one is part of the license purchase agreement. It's a bit like MS restricting use of multiple copies of a program or the RIAA restricting copying of music. That's how they protect against pirating and ensure their profit.
?? It would tend to reduce sales of GMO products and increase sales of non-GMO products; overall people will not eat less. I support labeling of products so people can make informed decisions.
Well, sort of - except in this case a licensed copy of a song would occasionally make an illegal copy of itself onto your machine, and you would then be sued for it if you didn't find it and delete it immediately.
Our ancestors did use fertilizer, and irrigation. All agricultural peoples did. And since GMOs do not result in increased yield per acre, and since all the modern gains in yield per acre are from means available to traditional farmers in Third World countries without GM tech, GMOs have nothing to do with "starvation" except as their commercialization puts local agricultural economies at risk. And in that respect they often increase, not decrease, the odds of starvation. The yield hit from the incorporation of the currently commercialized engineered genetics into a given seed variety (there is no free lunch - resources are being diverted by the plant to express that genetic material) seems to be between 5 and 15%. Very few careful studies in the matter are available to the public, as almost all the research in the field is proprietary - including most of the medical safety and ecological data, if any. Meanwhile, the common GMO means employed to decrease losses are almost certainly, on standard Darwinian grounds, temporary - field data seem to show about five years until significant resistance, and maybe 25 at the outside until uselessness. That uselessness will not be cheap - the insecticides and herbicides currently being destroyed by overuse in GMO plantings are the more benign and easily handled ones, the agricultural practices and infrastructure deployed to make use of them depends on the continued use of those kinds of chemicals and related means. They are mostly the same means used to increase yields from GMO crops, only not as well adapted to industrial farming - at least, at current levels and distribution of research monies and efforts. It's an interesting question, what effects an equivalent modern research and massive deployment effort devoted to "organic" farming would have on costs and prices. We'll probably never know - the great public research programs in the land grant universities have been largely coopted by agribusiness interests since the late 1960s, before modern genetics and technology.
Not if you go back far enough. We planted seeds and hoped they grew. GMO's result in cheaper crops. More expensive crops mean poor people starve, since they cannot afford food. Agreed. Eventually tolerance will be evolved in diseases, insects and weeds, and the utility of current GMO's will decline. At which point you'd logically create new ones. Repeat as needed. Keep in mind that many genetic mods REDUCE the use of insecticides by making the plant less attractive to pests. There are VERY few GMO crops grown organically since there's really no market for them.
The first part is a fact, but intentionally misapplied to the second part, which together yield an intentionally misleading message. A lie. And an obvious one. And one you repeated over and over in a thread about a year ago. Again: farmers aren't idiots. They know their business and they don't grow GMO crops for no reason. They grow GMO crops because they yield more and make them more money. The intentional trick in what you said comes from the fact that the increased crop yields from use of GMO seeds is a secondary effect of GMO use: GMOs enable use of more/harsher pesticides/herbicides, which reduces losses, hence increasing net yields. The yield gains from using GMOs cannot be achieved without the GMOs. You can't just start using Roundup (for example) on non-Roundup-ready crops and expect yield gains: you must use Roundup-ready crops. And the other side of the coin is that using a GMO crop without changing your farming to take advantage of what it does for you won't produce higher yields -- that's the side of the coin that you are using out of context to intentionally mislead about the [lack of] benefit of GMO crops.
Surely I cant respond to all posts but this bizzare statement cant be ignored. This post is awfull. From where I stand this is kndly said diabolical view. Since when sale and revenues are more important then people. "People dont have right to know, in long run we are all dead meanwhile lets enjoy the profit, who cares about people. Who cares about indenpendent long term studies except people that dont have stocks in gmo industry." Bizzare indeed. Remind me of chit chat of some rednecks in front of a store. Sorry.
2009 report demonstrated that GMO soy and corn not increase yields over traditional farming. http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agri...tem/genetic-engineering/failure-to-yield.html study from 2008 which conclude that organic farming with little or no pesticide can increase yields by 116%. http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditcted200715_en.pdf 2012 research which found that that the rise of glyphosate-resistant “superweeds” in the wake of the GMO revolution has actually increased pesticide use in the last 15 years by 183 million kilograms, or 7%. The study estimated that if new strains of GM corn and soybeans are approved for commercial use, herbicide use could increase by a whopping 50% http://www.enveurope.com/content/24/1/24 FDA doesnt test GMO. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012...e-safety-of-genetically-engineered-foods.html Even worse. Scientists must ask corporations for permission before publishing independent research on genetically modified crops. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research/ health effects: http://www.gmoevidence.com/italy-immune-system-disturbance-to-mice-from-gm-maize/ https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/wa/a/14812749/gm-crop-could-cause-liver-failure-scientist/ http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012...ified-corn-increases-body-weight-in-rats.html http://www.cbsnews.com/news/study-s...ut-other-scientists-skeptical-about-research/
"There is no difference between genetic engineering and traditional breeding techniques." Think again. http://genok.no/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Chapter-13.pdf Surprise, surprise. Genetic engineering process leads to random and unintended genetic combinations.(see link above if you skip it) If there is no difference why dont you take corn plant and soil bacteria and 1000 years and show us how would you breed those two. We used to breed corn with corn, not corn with soil bacteria.
Perhaps you should get someone to read my post and explain it to you. I was pointing out that there is a rationale (so far as the manufacturers of GMO foods are concerned) for NOT labelling: because people tend to AUTOMATICALLY regard ANY GMO as bad - and won't buy it. This is something I neither said nor implied. While public ignorance remains with regard to what GMO is (and your opening post - and this quoted sentence - are a fine examples), and that fear is constantly fanned by numerous nutcase websites across the entire internet then I can understand the reluctance of manufacturers to label their produce. (Note that I said "understand" - that indicates neither sympathy nor support of that stance, nor, for that matter, condemnation). The best solution is education. As opposed to, say, some guy posting largely spurious claims on the internet or stuff like this one: Er yeah... "Intrinsic yield" means something very specific, and something different from what most of us think when we hear the word "yield". Because of this, both those sets of data that I've seen can be right, at the same time. The UCS is correct that GMOs plants don't seem to produce higher intrinsic yields — that is, there aren't more kernels per cob. But the data that shows GMO plants can produce more than conventionally bred plants is also correct, because that's looking at a bigger picture of "yield" — one that takes into account the fact that it's easier to protect those plants against pests. Fewer pests = fewer lost plants = a higher bushel-per-acre yield. Even if the plants, themselves, aren't yielding more. Here.
People who act that way dont need techobabble education about GMO paradigm and corparation propaganda. They need to know what they are eating so labeling would be fine. And second they need studies. And not by Monsanto, Sygenta, DuPont and similar.
If I recall correctly, the last time you posted that troll shit, I responded as follows:1) Making more money in the short run is not the same thing as increasing yield in the long run (how many times do you have to be reminded of that?) 2) Farmers, especially Third World farmers, have been victims of corporate power and various economic pressures, as well as outright scams, in the past - and the commercial forces behind GMOs are quite powerful. It's not that farmers are idiots, it's that their choices are not always free. There's a reason 90% of US farmers have gone out of business in the past century, and it's not that they were idiots. Targeted Third World farmers right now often have little access to modern agricultural methods and resources except through GMOs (the GMO marketers package their seeds with politically arranged deals on land, fertilizer, and financing, combined with the threat of competition and exclusion from those, in places and among people more vulnerable than even the American farmers who were dragooned accordingly) - and the contrast between the early gains from GMO adoption and the former pre-industrial era methods is what the claims of great benefits from GMOs have been based on. And that, unlike my posting, is actually dishonest. Not in general. The only currently marketed GM that even approximates that is the glyphosate resistance one - there is no pesticide equivalent - and it encourages the use of a less harsh herbicide (which it is destroying) so that this is only true in invalid comparisons (with failure to use other means of reducing loss, different seeds, failure to average over time, etc etc etc). In valid comparisons, it reduces cost per unit yield in the short run, and that's its advantage. That is a considerable advantage, but it's not an increase in net yield over the otherwise possible. That is not true. In the first place, you are lumping "GMOs" - like almost all naive promoters of these things, you end up making assertions that are not just false but impossible; in the second, nothing achieved by the pesticide and herbicide G manipulations cannot be achieved in other ways. So a net yield gain of 5 - 15% is available by using those means and non-engineered but otherwise identical seeds, as far as we have evidence. I have never used that fact for anything. I accused GMO promoters of using invalid comparisons with incommensurable farming methods to claim yield advantages for GMOs that belong instead to modern farming methods in general, and that accusation is accurate. Are you seriously using comparisons with stone age pre-agricultural landscape manipulation in your defense of GMOs? Fertilizer, efficient machinery, modern seed varieties, transportation and marketing infrastructure, storage and processing facilities, financing, result in cheaper food. GMOs? Some help, some don't. For example? Remember that expressing an insecticide in the tissue of every plant across an entire landscape all the time is the opposite of "reducing the use of insecticides". "Eventually" is five or ten years. As the example of antibiotics demonstrates, it ain't that easy. Nobody has any idea what could be used to replace Bt insecticide varieties in an engineered plant, for example - or as a topical insecticide with that degree of safety in human exposure, its use before Monsanto got hold of it and began to ruin it. When it's gone the way of Penicillin and DDT, like them its replacements are almost certainly going to be comparitively dangerous and expensive and disappointing. And that cost - that loss to the public resources and welfare - will not be borne by the corporate entities that are profiting while imposing it.
You have just described mutation. (Which is how selective breeding works, which is what we've been using for a few hundred years now.) Would be doable over 1000 years - but impossible in 1. Hence genetic modification to speed the process. What you call "corn" did not exist 200 years ago. It is a very different plant. The difference between GMO's and regular hybrids is that hybrids are created by accident.
billvon you remind me on Darwin statement which even now every student of biology is laughing. "In given time polar bear can become whale." Please, you dont need to bother to sell me your propaganda how is doable. For sure I know its not. We always breed corn and corn as I said. Not corn and soil bacteria. edit: and we didnt use it for 100 years. Point of my link is tha genetic engineering process isnt so precise. Which word dont you understand "random" or "unintended?" We will now discuss linguistics here or...?
No. I was answering your claim that our ancestors used commercial fertilizer and irrigation. In fact, the vast majority did not, since agriculture greatly predates irrigation and fertilizer. However, if you cherry pick your dates, you can find a time where there was irrigation but no fertilizer, irrigation and fertilizer but no selective breeding or hybridization, or fertilizer, irrigation, hybridization but no genetic modification. Our ancestors existed in all those times. Some modern seed varieties do not result in cheaper food; they are intended for specific (often expensive) crops. Some marketing structures do not result in cheaper food; Harry and David's marketing scheme, for example, is very high priced. However, MOST modern seeds, machinery, marketing methods and GMO's help reduce the cost of food. Hmm. Douglas firs secrete a natural insecticide to repel boring beetles. Do you consider natural forests of Douglas firs to be examples of massive insecticide use? I don't, since the plant itself generates the insecticide.
