Biotech Opponents Are Playing with Human Lives
There is a specter haunting Europe: the specter of genetically modified foods. Although regularly consumed in the U.S. and around the world, in Europe GM foods are the target of veritable scare campaigns by environmental pressure groups and in the media. As a consequence, even GM crops that have been formally approved by the European Commission are the subject of increasing restrictions in Germany, France, and other European countries. GM crops — including such as have been planted merely for experimental purposes — are regularly destroyed by anti-GM militants in acts of would-be “civil disobedience.” Till Behrend of the German weekly Focus spoke with the geneticist and Nobel Prize laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard about the sources of biotech-phobia.
John Rosenthal
(Translator)
***
FOCUS: Professor Nüsslein-Volhard, farmers all around the world are cultivating genetically modified crops on an ever larger scale. But many Germans appear to be afraid of the new technology. Are they right to be?
Nüsslein-Volhard: Well, we Germans are always afraid of new things. But what are these people actually afraid about? They’re afraid that they will assimilate alien genes while eating genetically modified foods. But that’s nonsense. The genes are digested, broken down, and eliminated from the body just like in the case of traditional foods. This has been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt. The human genome is sequential and you can examine whether there are any cow genes or plant genes in there. Have no fear: there aren’t any.
FOCUS: What distinguishes, then, classically bred crops from genetically modified crops?
Nüsslein-Volhard: People seem to be unaware that practically all the grains and vegetables that we eat nowadays have been highly genetically modified as compared to their natural forms. There’s hardly any crop as artificial as a potato. In the wild, potatoes are tiny and highly poisonous. It took thousands of generations to turn the potato into a decent sort of food. In contrast to the classical development of new plant strains, “green” biotechnology has the advantage that with its help one can proceed much faster and in a much more targeted fashion.
FOCUS: It’s true that for plant breeders that might be a fine thing. But lots of people want to do what’s right for nature and for themselves, and consequently they insist on “organic” products.
Nüsslein-Volhard: Given our level of material well-being and the fertility of our soil, we can afford to do that. But actually that’s a snobby, elitist attitude. Organic farming cannot feed large cities. And it certainly cannot feed the world’s population. It’s not possible, since the yields of organic farming are too small and the area one has to plant is way too much. It really makes more sense to use the particularly rich fields that we have intensively and in a sustainable manner by planting high-yield crops. The environment benefits, too, since then we can return other fields to their natural state.
FOCUS: Nonetheless, organic farming is thought to stand for a more respectful treatment of the environment.
Nüsslein-Volhard: Wrongly. Or do you imagine perhaps that organic farming can do without the spraying of pesticides? On organic farms, too, one sprays pesticides constantly and all over the place! In this respect, genetic engineering really has more intelligent solutions to offer. For example, with the help of genetic engineering we can make corn or cotton that is resistant to insect damage. If we incorporate a particular gene, they become poisonous for harmful insects, but not for humans or for mice. Then you can do without the insecticide. I find this rather smart. There are also strains being developed that grow with less water or that grow on salt-affected soils. It’s both sophisticated and ecologically beneficial!
Excellent interview! It’s so rare to hear from intelligent, flexible minds capable of explaining complex matters effectively.
Once more, we see that environmentalists, such as the Greenpeace crowd, when given a choice between humans and their dogmas, reflexively choose to preserve their dogmas.
Of course, this should not surprise anyone who has read the environmentalists’ two “bibles”, “The Limits To Growth”, from the Club of Rome in 1971, and “The Population Bomb”, written by Dr. Paul Ehrlich in 1970. BTW, “Ehrlich” means “fear” in German- which is ironic in that his book has been used to sow terrors of an impending “population apocalypse” since it was first published.
Both works insist that Thomas Malthus was correct in that our population will, in the near future, exceed our ability to feed same, resulting in a massive “die-off” of humanity. (This “near future”, like fusion, is “just around the corner”- but never actually gets here. Both books predicted their disasters by 1980. Later editions revised the date.)The environmentalists are all in favor of such a “die-off”, as they have theirs and don’t want to share. In fact, they don’t like the rest of us much, if at all, and would be happier if they, and only they, had the Earth (excuse me, I mean “Holy Mother Gaia”) to themselves.
The fact that it is the poorest people on Earth who are harmed the most by their religious zealotry (for that is what it is) is irrelevant to them. They know it, intellectually- but going back to Malthus, they regard any diminution of humanity’s population as a good thing. (Any suffering accrued is regarded as “payback” for our “sins” agains the aforementioned “goddess”.)
IMHO, another good definition for “environmentalism” is “slow-motion genocide”.
BTW (again), I do not eat organic foods. period. Having been raised on a farm, I know that “organic” foods are not treated with pesticides (which means they tend to have much lower yields due to -surprise- pests), and also are much more difficult to santize. Why? Because they are fertilized with “organic” fertilizer. Or, as it’s called by real farmers, liquified manure.
The next time you’re tempted to pay the premium for organic food in a store, remind yourself that you are paying an extra tariff to eat food that has, at some point in its development, been sprayed with what comes out of a cow’s or horses’ butt.
You might also want to read “The Last Centurion” by John Ringo. While it’s an SF novel, the science in it is entirely real. And like me, Ringo is a “farm boy”. Which means he knows what he’s talking about.
cheers
eon
The wind blew the the pollen from the genetic -
inhanced 3M crop over into my field . Now their
lawers are sueing me .
Is it also true that only 3M fertilizers and
insecticides must be used under their laws ?
Corporationally owned bio-food supply and a
brave new world .
The environmental movement seems to have become more of a “Eugenics” movement. Aligning with the philosophies of these “progressives” (?) the drive seems to be to create conditions where farming can not sustain populations as they are now (let alone if they increase). The fact is modern farming technologies enable relatively few farmers to feed billions (plus have a surplus). Traditional farmers (and farms) used huge amounts of land (and human effort) to raise enough food for their small communities (and then only when blessed by weather and a lack of pests/disease).
Can you imagine a world where we’ve taken that giant step backwards to the mid 19th century, where Europe and the US can barely sustain their own basic needs (except for the wealthiest), and the rest of the world? Africa (and a good portion of Asia) deprived of modern techniques, technologies (and direct food aid) experience a die off of biblical proportions. Starting there, with disease spreading through weakening populations and ending, WHere?
one who is interested in agriculture should look at the situation in Ukraine, a country with the best soils for agricultural use in world
but 90 years of socialism there did the job:
agricultural productivity in Ukraine is 4 times less then in European Union on average
same anti-GM madness is constantly fed to naive Ukrainian public
What utter rubbish from yet another academic research grant bludger. Firstly the “nobel laureate” totally misrepresents the argument when she portrays the opposition to GM foods as being confined to the treeh hugging fraternity.
The complexity of the argument is probably beyond the narrow mind of a scientist so the interview is yet another example of trying to address philosophical argument with the tools of bean counting.
First let’s nail the big lie so typically the basis of most scientific arguments. “In the wild the potrato is tiny and highly poisonous.”
Yeah well maybe, if you dig them up too soon. Never eat the green parts of potatoes. When Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the potato to Britain in the last decade of the sixteenth century he brought back the plant because he had seen American natives eating it and not dying and noted its potential as a food crop. I really doubt that the primitive tribesment Raleigh encountered had access to the GM technologies to transform the “tiny, poisonous” tubers into today’s edible potatoes.
It is ridiculous lies like that people in Europe worry about because scientists tell so many of them. If the technology was so good its benefits would be self evident, scientists would not need to invent lies to support their agenda.
As for the people in the thread above who are horrified to find that dung is used to fertilise organic crops, the big news guys is everything you eat has been dung many times, cow dung, horse dung, worm dung, bug dung whatever it was fertilised with; its called the endless cycle of nature. And as our ancestors had nothing except dung to use as fertilizer and we are all here and healthy, putting dung on crops obviously does humans no harm. Welcome to reality.
The political argument against GM in Europe is that because GM crops are sterile, only companies that operate GM processing plants can produce seed crops, farmers cannot lay aside a portion of their crop for next year’s seed. There is no alternative to buying seed from the GM technology companies. This concentrates too much power in the hands of a few corporations that have already shown in the developing world they have no qualms about threatening to withold seed and cause famine in order to hold governments to ransom.
Prof Nüsslein-Volhard should stay in her laboritary and work on world domination schemes for Bond villain types. She simply is not smart enough to engage in political discussions.
Anybody who thinks Monsanto’s dominance of American agriculture would benefit the US economy would benefit from reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath. It describes the effects of first generation intensive farming. Spraying chemical nutrients on land is fine for a while but soil needs organic matter (dung and compost aka putrefied matter to hold those nutrients long enough for plants to absorb them.
Ian,
Your wrong about the potato. It’s called selective breeding. Humans have been practicing it for awhile.
http://www.cliffordawright.com/caw/food/entries/display.php/topic_id/6/id/102/
It only takes a few minutes on Google, but you wouldn’t want that to interfere with what you “know”.
Ian,
You seemed to have used a lot of extra words. Kinda makes me wonder if you are as smart as you seem to think yourself to be.
Naw, I was being nice.
Cheers,
Nüsslein-Volhard: Sometimes I regret the fact that you can’t find certain old-fashioned sorts of fruit in the stores anymore, simply because they spoil too quickly. There are particularly tasty sorts of strawberries or sour cherries, for example, that don’t keep well. You can tell that many types of fruits and vegetables are cultivated for their robustness and the quantity of the yield, but not for their flavor. If it would be possible by using genetic engineering to make the tastier sort of strawberries keep longer, personally I’d have nothing against it. You can’t have everything.
My suggestion to the good Herr Docktor: Irradiation. Not GM for heirloom fruits. Of course, we could save ourselves a hundred or so deaths a year and billions in lost veggies & meat from spoilage if we irradiated here in the USA.
******************
Ian Thorpe:
What utter rubbish from yet another academic research grant bludger. Firstly the “nobel laureate” totally misrepresents the argument when she portrays the opposition to GM foods as being confined to the treeh hugging fraternity…
I believe the Docktor included ignorant Lefties blinded by their ideology, so don’t feel excluded, Ian.
*******************
Ian – First let’s nail the big lie so typically the basis of most scientific arguments. “In the wild the potrato is tiny and highly poisonous.”
Yeah well maybe, if you dig them up too soon.
No, the wild varieties do have higher levels of poison. Much higher. Fortunately the two major poison elements – glycoalkloids and solamine are destroyed by the heat of cooking. But good reason exists why the wild fruit, greens were not eaten raw or even cooked by Amerinds….gastric poisoning, sometimes death.
When Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the potato to Britain in the last decade of the sixteenth century he brought back the plant because he had seen American natives eating it and not dying and noted its potential as a food crop.
Incorrect on two counts. Potatos were not cultivated where Raleigh was. He never saw Indians in Virginia eat the stuff. Nor did he introduce it to Europe. The Conquistadors brought it back via the Canary Islands in the 1570s but it remained a curiosity botanical not commonly cultivated in Europe until the mid-18th century when it spread quickly in Central, E Europe and Ireland (ironically) after wheat and rye rust, ergot blight hit.
Like the tomato, N America only began consuming the crop after Europe “test-consumed” it and the intro of the crop to NA was on the Latin America to Europe to North America path. Asia took even longer. Late 19th century.
If the technology was so good its benefits would be self evident, scientists would not need to invent lies to support their agenda.
People are stupid or culturally resistant. Like the Euros are to new things and foods. Indians still resist soybeans, culturally, despite being more nutritious and higher yielding than lentils. They ate lentils for 3,000 years dammit, and will eat lentils tomorrow.
Of curiosity is how the highest yielding food crop per acre took so long to establish itself globally while the humble chili spread like wildfire and was in wide use in nearly every land but N Europe and the Anglosphere by 1750.
Ian – The political argument against GM in Europe is that because GM crops are sterile, only companies that operate GM processing plants can produce seed crops, farmers cannot lay aside a portion of their crop for next year’s seed.
And the Docktor explained why that is a stupid argument. Farmers globally gave up using their own seed starting back in the 19th Century as natural, sterile high-yield hybrids began replacing self-propogating major crops. 100 years before GM. Many of the pre-GM hybrids are proprietary. You are really making the argument that you oppose hybrids, oppose the Green Revolution Borlaug and his colleagues started, oppose modern cross-breeding (by modern, I mean Victorian era and beyond).
Ian – Anybody who thinks Monsanto’s dominance of American agriculture would benefit the US economy would benefit from reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath. It describes the effects of first generation intensive farming..
Anyone reading Steinbeck for insight into non-existent at the time GM in the “Grapes of Wrath” (written in 1940) will be disappointed. Or Monsanto’s “dominance” in 1940 or today..because Monsanto isn’t the only game in town. Nor was Steinbeck opposed to science. He was scientifically trained, one of his best friends was a scientist. What he described in the “Grapes of Wrath” was repeated in country after country – mechanization of agriculture driving surplus peasants off the land and into the cities. In many cases, off land they were poor stewards of. Soil conservation was not needed for just big farmers with tractors and such, but also for dumbass sharecroppers and their low-tech mules busily destroying their own piece of farmed land with straight furrows, hillside cultivation, pulling all crop up by the roots for silage at harvest leaving nothing to anchor the soil from the elements from late fall to early spring.
“Grapes of Wrath” was more a cry of outrage at the uncaring, exploitative larger American society not taking care of their fellow Americans who were decent, good people who fell victim to larger changes outside their control. It was not “anti-tech”. Nor was Steinbeck a socialist…he might have been the original “compassionate conservative” before Bush II ruined that descriptor, and pragmatic, science-driven environmentalist. (read “Log From The Sea Of Cortez” sometime.)
Ian,
Would you please tell us precisely why “farmers cannot lay aside a portion of their crop for next year’s seed. There is no alternative to buying seed from the GM technology companies.” What, Monsanto has an army armed with AK-47′s forcing farmers to buy GM seed? Name one country where farmers cannot plant their own “organic” seed if they have a mind to. They CHOOSE to buy Monsanto seed because Monsanto’s seed is so superior to their own (i.e., they grow more product and therefore make enough extra money to pay for the seed many times over). What is bad about that? Do your precious “organic” farmers refuse to buy tractors from Ford, or drip irrigation systems, or hoes, or any of thousands of proprietary tools because they are then dependent on the inventors and makers of those tools? Do *you* refuse to participate in blogs because you are therefore dependent on evil monopolies like Microsoft or Apple? To use your favorite food additive, bull manure!
Also, as far as I know GM corn is not sterile. The resulting seed can be planted, but it just won’t yield anything like the original. If I’m wrong please link to a source.
Could some kind soul tell me how much a packet of, say, 100 Roundup Ready seeds costs?
Whenever I casually look around in the garden supply store, I see that seeds cost under a penny each. Even for thousands of seeds the cost is far from the most important one in the farmer’s budget.
I would think that labor, equipment, fuel for the tractor and the mortgage on the land would be overwhelmingly more expensive than seeds – saving even 100% on seed costs would not significantly impact profits.
So if Roundup Ready seeds are really twice as effective as regular seeds, and seeing that seeds are all but free even from Monsanto, the intelligent decision seems to be to buy and plant them every year.
Perhaps this is why they are so popular with farmers, and why it is activists, not farmers, who are protesting these issues?
D
Cedarford: “…while the humble chili spread like wildfire…”
Because chili’s taste good.
Ian: hope you read Cedarford…oh, and agricultural problem in the grapes fo Wrath is that new “dry land farming techiniques were developped, and poorly applied in the dustbowl, leaving gullible sharecroppers from poor areas of the southern(eastern) part of the US to go west to the possibility of owning their own land…which wasn’t capable of being farmed in the ways it was being promised as a new bread basket. Think of Oklahoma, if you’ve ever driven through it!
Mr David H Dennis, you are wrong, farmers do protest, but you probably don’t hear about it, because do you hear about furniture stores complaing when base products are expensive? Seed is expensive, it’s just not an unavoidable expense. Please go to a land grant university’s research site and find out exactly how many seeds per acre are planted, multiply those costs with the price of the seed (the site should have some averages) per dose(farmer size seed packets-usually in kg here in France) and then let’s talk seed costs…also in the arguements I haven’t seen: Here in France, there are measures against farmers keeping part of their seed back because very few farmers are actually using the older non researched “free” varieties… However you are also right that those other things weigh in heavily also, raising the possibility that all inputs use most of the return to the farmer…
I really think that this article is right on the money. Especially when one takes into consideration that hardly anyone even knows where their food comes from( not the grocery store, you know chicken’s & eggs, dairy cows-milk, beef from cattle, pigs=sausage, peas from big fields, corn the same…), how it is produced the risks involved with producing that food and how unsafe a lot of the old varieties of food organically produced could be for human consumption, see Cedarford…anyway great article, someone pull the plug on Greenpeace…Please?
Cedarford,
That was a great fisking of Ian. I have a reply to eon’s assertion that pesticides are not used in organic farming: in Europe certain pesticides are allowed, for instance in growing grapes for wine. Now a question for you: does irradiation work for soft fruits and can it be done easily and economically?
In Germany, one research institute want to do some tests on GM apples and promised that it would bag the flowers to prevent pollen spread. That wasn’t enough for the greenies, and the experiments were stopped. Part of the problem in Germany is that people like Nuesslein-Volhard get into the media once in a blue moon, whereas NGOs like Greenpeace issue terrifying press releases that are published without comment on an almost daily basis.
One of the most ridiculous anti-GM statements I’ve ever heard came from Vandana Shiva. She was talking to some sort of environmental congress, and the talk was broadcast on the German equivalent of C-Span. She highlighted the problems of dependence on Montsano seeds by poor Indian farmers and then noted that the traditional soy beans planted in India are black, whereas Montsano soybeans are white. She then accused Montsano of soybean racism.
vb,
Irradiation works just fine for soft fruits. Cut flowers, too. It is actually used for spices (there is no other way to rid them of insects and retain the flavor). Cost is hard to calculate for two reasons: First, the greens raise holy heck and demand (and get) useless costly regulations and then statisticulate (think junk science) saying it now costs too much. Secondly, how much you are willing to pay for tasty strawberries that are now completely unavailable at any price because they spoil too soon to market is a subjective, but all-important factor that cannot be determined by theory, only empirically (i.e., put it on the market and see if people will buy it). Unfortunately, the greens have killed that idea. A supermarket in Irvine, California some years ago tried an experiment. They imported a batch of fresh mangos from Hawaii, which, by California law, must be rendered free from insect larvae before they can enter commerce in the state. The market offered two types of mangos; those sterilized by heat (I think) and some irradiated to see which their customers preferred. The greens went nuts with pickets, foul mouthed shouting, the whole 9 yards. Some of the scientists at UCI, across the street, were asked to demonstrate in favor of the irradiated fruit by buying some and eating it in front of the protesters. I, to my dieing shame did not participate because I can’t stand mangos, irradiated or not. Needless to say, the irradiated mangos were a flop. Cost had nothing to do with it.
One thing that should probably be noted is that Monsanto’s profiting from their seeds is a time limited affair. After a certain amount of time they should fall into the public domain and generic sources for such seeds will arise, driving down seed prices.
vb – Now a question for you: does irradiation work for soft fruits and can it be done easily and economically?
vb, Bill N mostly answered your question so I will only refine his response with my personal take.
1. By “does it work?”, I take it to mean that it does the sterilizing job and does not impart an “off taste”, lingering radioactivity?? The answer is yes. With a few qualifiers.
a. There are a few items of produce that are radiosensitive. I believe lettuce is one such material – where hard radiation will cause ionization that promotes wilting in certain varieties. But softer rads, in the form of weak X-rays or UV, appear to work on at least the surface wher most bacteria are, of the few produce items sensitive to hard rads, increasing rather than decreasing shelf life.
b. There are certain undesirable biotics that are resistant to irradiation. While zapping stuff is hell on bacteria, tramp seeds, insect eggs, and most fungus…certain mold spores are
all but Armegeddeon-resistant. Irradiation is not foolproof.
c. Other countries have had problems with worker error. Overpacking irradiation chambers so some food doesn’t get sterilized because it is overshielded by other food between it and the source. Other worker errors include not getting exposure times right, and since irradiated and unirradiated looks and smells exactly the same, sometimes double-exposing product or not irradiating product at all.
d. Aside from soft fruits and produce, the keenest interest is in dairy products and meat – which are the source of most food-born epidemics in the US that cause serious illness or death. The chance to wipe out 95% of the salmonella, listeria, e coli outbreaks? Well worth it.
2. Is it done easily?
a. Absolutely. Food in a chamber or passed over a gamma ray radioisotope source or high energy X-ray generator. It makes even more sense for prepared, packaged food that cannot be sterilized by other means once packaged. And the new line of unrefrigerated packaged products…packaged milk in unrefrigerated containers tastes 1000% better in Asia than in America because they allow radiation sterilization there vs. 15 minutes of cooking it at high temperature.
b. The very ease which which it can be done is one of the criticisms. Which I partially agree with. If you rely on irradiation, I have no doubt that many farmers, ranchers, packers will pursue the capitalist bottom line and get a lot slacker about salmonella, rat turds in the food or milk and figure their becoming more lax in food purity would be compensated for by irradiating the stuff. So I would test and still heavily fine and punish such people…if testing shows unacceptable contamination of food BEFORE irradiation. And the food should still be rejected. I don’t like the logic that we should accept 100,000 chickens or cantaloupes crawling with e coli because a new food safety net, irradiation, will “untaint” the tainted food.
3. Done economically?
a. There’s the rub that scientists and engineers generally don’t get, but marketers and business operators do. Yes, the treatment is dirt cheap in terms of the actual irradiation process. The requirement for workers to get full radiation safety architecture and training adds cost to make overall cost of rad sterilization modest. But then irradiation faces the political and lawyer costs of the anti-radiation forces. Court costs, politicians meddling, boycotts aimed at slurring all products a business makes as “radioactive” to an ignorant public. The final economic barrier is the daunting one. It’s what also makes other products like liquor, tobacco, pot so expensive when they are cheaply produced….costs lawyers and activists impose to “save the poor American from themselves”. Fear-driven economic fallout is in fact the biggest reason why supermarkets and food companies still scream “No!!!!” when it is proposed.
b. Anti-irradiation activists and lawyers exploit fear further by insisting that no consumer choice between irradiated and unirradiated product lines should be allowed because of “cross contamination” (Similar to the Euro Greens war on any GM food going on their shelves). They also make the threat, a sucessful one, that they will paint any food outlet with a broad brush of fear…Not just protest say, Food Lion irradiating their chicken and potatos, but promise to scream that Food Lion used “deadly atomic radiation” on Food Lion’s food ( in general) whereas Safeway only has “safe food”.
****The irony of course is that no one ever died or was hospitalized from irradiated food – just the chicken, spinach, hamburger loaded with active e coli, salmonella, cholera bacteria that the activists consider “safer”***
c. The phobia extends even to the military. I tasted experimental Army food at the Fort Natick Soldier Systems Command while there on unrelated business, mainly the not so tasty MREs…which have lost much taste from prep and packaging in autoclaves. They asked if I wanted to try irradiated food and even had a legal waiver for CYA. The irradiated stuff, of the same MRE menu, same identical ingredients – was vastly better. Homestyle restaurant quality.
@7 KDM
You say I’m wrong about the potato and point me to a website where I read this:
“The potato was domesticated in the High Andes as early as seven to ten thousand years ago and was widely cultivated by Inca times. Because wild potato tubers taste bitter and contain toxic amounts of alkaloids, the earliest intensive cultivation of the plant in prehistoric times must have been to recognize and select plants that were less bitter and less toxic. It is not known when this happened but somewhere between 2000 and 5000 B.C.”
The potato WAS domesticted between 7 and 10 thousand years ago? Well as written language was not available then and thus nobody was documenting developments in neolithic agrarian societies that is, is it not, a clear a case of presenting unfounded speculation as fact.
Think about it logically. The native tribes know about this bitter tasting, toxic plant. They have no learned books on selective pollenation as writing had not been invented but for the article to have any validity we must accept these primitive people who had plenty of edible plants available to them suddenly decide “hey if we spend a few thousand years seletively breeding these ugly, poisonous little green things our progeny will be able to make fries.”
It’s just not realistic is it?
But thanks for your contribution.
@ #8 fretless,
extra words? can you define what you mean by extra words? I can’t see any that are not doing the job I wanted them to do.
I admit the quality of writing in my comment is not of a great standard and there are a few typos and some sloppy punctuation but come on, it’s a comment, a quick response, rather than a carefully constructed article.
Oo-er, it begins to look as if I’m even smarter than I think I am.
Monsanto, ADM, and to a lesser extent Cargill are the three major BigAg that are working to put their foot on the throat of the world. ADM artificially depressed corn prices for decades, and wrecked an early 80′s ethanol initiative by farmer coops because they did not have the keys to the gate. Check their government handouts on ethanol; almost 900 million at last count, and that they have an oil executive at their head, and contribute massively to both political parties to keep the gravy train running.
Monsanto is not just about the seed: when you use their seed you have to use their pesticides and herbicides; it’s a closed system engineered specifically to hook the farmer and keep them hooked. Farmers would still be using their cribs for next season’s seed if there was any to use them past the expiration on Monsanto’s patents, but they tie their seed to specific pesticide and herbicide resistance that doesn’t allow farmers to go back or stay where they are. When the farmers around here have to buy 2,000 acres of corn seed by the bag, it gets expensive.
Add to that the skyrocketing cost of potash and ammonia, and how little the government and BigAg cares about keeping those prices in line with reality. And add in the loss of nutritional value of corn, which is now pretty much engineered as an empty starch-and we wonder why modern food has left us fat and stupid.
The American small family farmer is the most productive food producer on the planet, has the largest negative carbon footprint of any type of agriculture enterprise on the planet, and does it with BigAg’s foot to their throat. Give them a heritage seed with even modest capability and get out the way. ADM and Monsanto would be gone tomorrow without being able to addict the world to their version of heroin.
@ #9 Ceadarford
“Ignorant lefties blinded by their ideology.”
Actually it’s the European left that are all for GM, those on the right of the political spectrum (which usually benefits from the rural vote) that opposes it.
Also you seem to assume Raleigh made only one trip to The Ameericas. He actually made many including several to the Orinoco region where, it is documented, he observed natives eating potatoes.
So much of what you use in trying to critique my comment is based on speculative writing rather than facts it is not really worth a response.
@1O Bill N.
Thank you for that comment and sorry I did not make the point about seed crops very clearly. Farmers are first persuaded they will enjoy higher yields and experience less loss to pests and disease if they use GM seed. They find this is not strictly true, they still need fertilizer and pesticides but can only buy “approved” types or risk invalidating insurance taken out against crop failure or weather damage. Naturally the approved products are very expensive.
The farmers plant GM crops and the seed it produces is sterile. The people who point out that most farmers in developed nations buy their seed are partly right, farmers do buy in seed but not from farmers co-operatives not GM companies. It is still the pactice in undeveloped nations for farmers to lay aside their own crop for next year’s seed.
It is also correct to say that modrn agriculture depends on selective breeding of crop species. The pro GM lobby undermine themselves however by trying to pretend genetic modification is no different to selective breeding. Nature will abort unviable seed thus only viable strains will be produced by selective breeding. GM overrides that natural selection process to allow the creation of mutant strains.
Personally I am quite happy to eat GM food, I was simply trying to present fairly the arguments of the anti-GM lobby as they are grossly misrepresented in the original article.
Thanks folks for the info on irradiation. That is an area I know little about, although it has never scared me.
Look, this is all part of a profound plan to suppress reproduction in targeted populations. As farms become less efficient (and therefore less productive) they can support fewer and fewer people, populations without the resources (to afford the more expensive staples) either move (if they can afford to) or stop proliferating and (over time) targeted populations shrink or disappear altogether. Those on “the dole” in the mass consume staples that are compromised in their effectiveness as part of a “healthy” diet, increasing the individuals health risks/expense but in the long run shortening their lives (removing them from the gene pool). It is an end run around letting the stupid knock themselves off early (evolution in action), but in “Nanny States” it is a humane way of doing the same thing. Add to this the encouragement (by the “State” or the “elite”) for the masses to adopt “non-reproductive” lifestyles and we have a two pronged approach to population reduction, saving the Earth for it’s future masters, the Cockroaches.
Oh, and EON, Angstlich = Fearfull, Ehrlich = truthfull
There are no sterile seed technology (Genetic use restriction technology or GURT) sold anywhere in the world yet. Having said that what is so different with such as farmers have been buying new hybrid seeds each and every year for decades.
The zero tolerence regulations for adventitious presense of GM content from the organic industry is a non-starter as such restrictive regulations do not exist for any other crop. It is impossible without absolutely no GM crops being grown. I find the world needs to debate how a group that represent about 2% of the food grown dictate rules for the other 98% of the world food producers. Rediculous. The IFOAM does not advocate any testing for GM content and as far as I know there is no such set limit on what level of GM adventitious presense would revoke organic status. Further I am unaware of any organic certification anywhere being revoked for GM content. This during the past decade of unprecedented growth of both GM crops and organic crops. It is also interesting that GURT crops would eliminate a significant portion of the adventitious “problem” for the organic industry. This seems to be why they scream so loudly about it. It is my opinion the organic industry is very afraid of any technology that will alleviate or eliminate their boogeyman arguments about GM crops and food. After all a significant amount of their marketing is based on pushing fear of other cropping methods.
Ian said:
“It is also correct to say that modrn agriculture depends on selective breeding of crop species. The pro GM lobby undermine themselves however by trying to pretend genetic modification is no different to selective breeding. Nature will abort unviable seed thus only viable strains will be produced by selective breeding. GM overrides that natural selection process to allow the creation of mutant strains.”
You appear to not know about ionizing radiation and chemical mutagenesis breeding. Literally thousands of crop varieties have been created by these un-natural methods which kill the vast majority of seeds exposed. A tiny fraction of the seeds exposed to either chemicals or ionizing radiation survive and then these seeds afre screened for new traits. we have never known anything about the genetic chnages to these crops. This compared to GE crops which has extensive knowledge of the genes involved, locations, expression patterns etc. Genetically engineering of crops are by far the most precise method ever used by man and certainly far more is known about each and every GE crop compared to the thousands of commercial varieties made with random mutagenesis breeding.
7. KDM: is absolutely correct. Corn, potatoes and other useful plants brought from the New World had undergone many centuries of selective breeding.
The use of genetically modified crops does not mean that open pollinated seeds will suddenly vanish from the planet. As far as I know, no farmer is banned from using heirloom seed. They seem to have a larger following than even 20 years ago.
Particularly when corn is grown as a biofuel, I’m all for engineering it to use a minimum of space, chemicals and water.
“The potato WAS domesticted between 7 and 10 thousand years ago? Well as written language was not available then and thus nobody was documenting developments in neolithic agrarian societies that is, is it not, a clear a case of presenting unfounded speculation as fact.”
There is quite a bit of documentation on the plants that predated modern food crops. When humans domesticated food plants, they learned to select the plants with the most desirable characteristics and save some of that seed for the next season. Keep doing that for a thousand years and the crops will bare little resemblance to the original.
@23; Ian Thorpe,
Your civil response to my not-so-civil comment points out the immense superiority of civil discourse to the other kind. The anonymous nature of the internet encourages people to log in, drop a stink bomb, and slink away. This rarely leads to anything worthwhile. I shall try to follow your example:
Your comment fails to answer my question: In what way does mega-agri-business force farmers to use their products (plural)? Granted, it’s not just the seed, but the fertilizer and probably a good many other products besides. However, can’t I still say “No, thanks”? Even if I am a communist peasant working the land without any say in how that is to be done, that only bumps the decision up the chain of command. Somebody can still say no.
Suppose I am a farmer and am sold a bill of goods by Monsanto. I buy their hideously expensive products (plural) and thus generate a huge profit for the mega-corporation. I farm my land with these products. I don’t like the results. Can’t I revert back to my old seed the next year? To answer “No” to that question requires one of the following:
1) The expense of the Monsanto “experiment” bankrupts me and I am forced to give my land to the corporation to pay my debts.
2) The use of the man-made products ruins the land, which will now grow only Monsanto’s plants.
3) The crop is inferior to the old one. For example, the grain lacks vitamins or contains some toxin, or the cotton is weak and cannot be spun into thread, so that nobody will buy my products and/or it results in mass malnutrition.
4) I didn’t save any old seed and can’t acquire any from my neighbors or the local co-operative.
Do you have any evidence that one or more of the above occur? The mere fact that a huge, rich, greedy monopoly has a product that is vastly superior and insists on selling that product at a huge profit does not, in and of itself, make the company or the product bad. If I make $100 farming my land the old way and $200 with Monsanto’s products, which cost me $50, am I not still making $50 more with Monsanto? How is that bad? What’s more relevant, why can’t I revert to the old way anytime I choose?
As for the assertion that man-made mutations are different from natural ones, that just isn’t so. A mutation is a mutation, whether it comes about from cosmic rays, benz (alpha) pyrene (from a fire), or deliberate manipulation in a lab. When you eat a bunch of mutated DNA from a dish of GM corn, that DNA is broken down to its elements in your gut, just like any other. You don’t start growing corn in your intestine. Your DNA is unaffected. The only possible damage is to the corn plant, in which case it never makes it to market. The idea that natural selection will eliminate a non-viable mutation is quite true. The idea that natural selection will not eliminate a non-viable mutation if that mutation is man-made, is bizarre. It is certainly not true. A deleterious (bad) mutation (whatever caused it) that results in a dead plant is eliminated at once. One that results in an inferior plant is eliminated by the human as bad for business. So, how, exactly, are man-made mutations worse than natural ones?
It’s funny that these a****** Republicans don’t want to support stem cell technology, but are eager to push GMF, which I’m sure will prove to cause disease and mutations in human cells. Saving lives don’t create much profit so natural the Reps are against it. Just like saving the planet is not profitable, so they trash the scientific evidence of global warming. We’ve all got to pay attention from now on, and make sure we keep the Republicans out of power or they will surely kill us all.
Bill N:
I don’t think Ian Thorpe knows as much as he thinks he does. It sounds like he’s using generalizations to buttress his arguments.
Having personal experience in the Midwest agriculture industry, I’ll try to answer your questions. Agri-business, such as Monsanto/Dekalb/Asgrow or Dupont/Pioneer don’t have their own fertilizer brand. Usually farmers buy fertilizer at their local co-ops.
If you decide to plant roundup ready corn, then you need to use roundup as a herbicide. if you use a herbicide resistant seed then you don’t have to cultivate during the season which saves your fields from erosion.
farmers i do business with never sign multi-year seed corn/bean contracts with monsanto or pioneer. so if your crop doesn’t do well with monsanto one year, you can either complain to the monsanto seed dealer and he might give you a discount on seed the next year or you can switch to pioneer or one of the many other kinds of seed corn/beans.
nobody i have ever heard of saves the seed they combine from the previous year to plant again. one reason is if your using a GMO then its against the law. there are always stories every year of no account farmers doing this somewhere in the US but they always get prosecuted and fined. another reason is that seed corn/beans can come pretreated before you put it in the planter with different chemicals so you lose out if you use last year’s crop as untreated seed.
hopefully i covered all your concerns Bill N.
JackT:
its not that republicans are against stem cell technology, they are against embryonic stem cell research using embryonic stem cell harvested from fetuses/eggs. I’m all for using adult stem cells and now, if you read popular science which from your tirade i doubt you do, you would know theres now a way to use skin cells and turn them into stem cells. saying that republicans are against all stem cell technology is both unequivocally false and unerringly stupid since you obviously have no idea what stem cell technology is.
Colby,
Thanks for your information. Every little bit helps. However, I think you missed the main argument between Ian Thorpe and me. Mr. Thorpe does not like big business. He feels that farmers, especially poor ones, would do better using non-GM seed rather than be slaves to Monsanto, et al. He argues that Monsanto FORCES farmers into slavery and the world would be better off if the law put big business out of business. I argue just the opposite, that the farmers have a choice and they make it of their own free will and are better off because of it. I asked Mr. Thorpe for evidence to the contrary, if any exists. Nobody is suggesting that farmers plant seed gathered from a previous GM crop. Aside from its being illegal, the F1 progeny from a GM hybrid, if not actually sterile is certainly to be quite inferior. I learned that in my college genetics class. Alas, I forgot so…
Now I have personal experience. I am a city boy, but I do grow tomatoes in my back yard. I buy hybrid plants (for all I know, GM products) from the local mega-agri-business (Wal-Mart). Specifically, I buy “Sweet 100′s”, a small cherry tomato that does produce 100s of the sweetest most favorable tomatoes I have ever eaten, at least when fertilized with Miracle Grow commercial fertilizer, which also must be purchased at Wal-Mart. Last year I decided to save the budget-busting $5.00 and grow my tomatoes from the previous year’s seeds. What I got then were “Sour 25′s” and I had to buy my tomatoes from the other local mega-agri-business, Ralph’s Supermarket. Serves me right, huh? Screw natural, organic foodstuffs!
JackT,
When somebody has a bum, stupid, illogical and/or dishonest argument that nobody would otherwise listen to, they usually camouflage it with gutter language. I hope you recognize yourself there.
You are wrong on every count:
Not all Republicans are opposed to stem cell research, even from still-borne fetuses, only the super religious ones. Alas, these are the only Republicans willing to run for office and subject themselves to the malicious, dishonest, and relentless invective spewed by people like you.
Whether or not global warming is happening is a HUGE red herring dragged across the path of scientific discussions. It DOES NOT MATTER IN THE SLIGHTEST! What does matter is whether or not it is caused by man-made CO2 emissions. Here there is conclusive proof that that is NOT the case. There was a great article on that very issue published here a few days ago. I don’t know how to search the archives, if you do, look it up. What you want to do is force us back to the pre-industrial era, which can only feed 1 billion people or less. How are you going to justify killing 5 billion men, women, and children? It’s not the Republicans, but you Democrats who will “Kill us all!”
There is no, repeat, no; no, no, no chance that GM foodstuffs will effect human DNA (i.e., cause illness and mutations in human cells). That’s complete utter nonsense. There is, probably, no greater difference between human DNA and yogurt bacteria DNA, yet most every Green on the planet swears by yogurt. Nobody has mutated from it yet. Do your insane ideas come from the propaganda the liberal grammar school teachers are teaching now?
6. Ian Thorpe “The political argument against GM in Europe is that because GM crops are sterile, only companies that operate GM processing plants can produce seed crops, farmers cannot lay aside a portion of their crop for next year’s seed. There is no alternative to buying seed from the GM technology companies. This concentrates too much power in the hands of a few corporations that have already shown in the developing world they have no qualms about threatening to withold seed and cause famine in order to hold governments to ransom.”
Ah yes. Too much power in the hands of the corporations.
Imagine walking into an apothocary in 1800. The local pharmacist, like your farmer, made his own compounds from simple ingredients. Opium, arsenic, mercury, a host of dubious and inneffective plant derivitives… None of it worked, except the opiates, but still no evil corporations dominating the industry and forcing pharmacists to buy their vastly superior products.
I think the EU should ban all products made by the handful of evil corporations dominating the pharmaceudical industry today and return to those simpler times.
Same for the handful of corporations that produce your vehicles, cell phones, televisions, fuel and energy, the computers and software we are using right now, the tractor your farmer uses… Think about how many things in your life are supplied by some sort of self supporting cottage industry as you imagine agriculture to be. Its gonna be a short list.
What a bunch of spoiled children you all are. You have never watched your plants die in the field knowing that your family will likely starve this winter. You would not survive one week outside of your pampered existance without some product made in an industry dominated by a handful of corporations “forcing” you to buy their products.
DDT! Global Warming! GM foods!
Yeah notice in all those cases its the poor Africans and Asians who end up dead. You will be fine.
Spindok
rganic farming cannot feed large cities. And it certainly cannot feed the world’s population. It’s not possible, since the yields of organic farming are too small and the area one has to plant is way too much. It really makes more sense to use the particularly rich fields that we have intensively and in a sustainable manner by planting high-yield crops.