GM crops- a story of ignorance and anti-science

Cake and Petrichor highlight some interesting issues. It’s an applied science with the potential to gain its own momentum in unintended and undesirable ways. I saw a show on GM crops and some scientists admitted there are unknowns about all the potential effects. It sort of like, “Hey, we have the ability to change things around, lets get funding and get patents and hope it doesn’t fuck anything up.” Meanwhile the government sponsored Svalbard Global Seed Vault is storing unmodified seeds just in case everything goes to shit because of GM crops. Good idea! Nothing like playing Russian roulette with the planet and having a back up plan in case the important people need to start things over again.

because Monsanto (and other big agro) are just a bunch of cunts in suits and labcoats, when it comes down to it.

Labeling is a big issue for me and the GM group’s insistence that GM foods should not be labeled is just outrageous. What we put into our bodies is important to some of us even if some folks don’t care. We have a right to know what’s in the food we eat and give to our kids. And we should have the right to choose other options.

Are genetically modified foods harmful? I’m no fan of mass agriculture, but genetically modifying or selectively breeding crops to resist drought or blight doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

I live in cotton country, and the harsh methods needed to sustain mass agriculture are on full display. First, the soil quality has eroded over time because the agricultural companies are loathe to let the fields fallow. So before planting even begins the soil is treated with lime and other nutrients. After planting the soil is fertilized again. Then the plants start growing, but because they’re in a giant monoculture, pests arrive en masse. So pesticides are sprayed. When harvest time comes, the plants are sprayed with herbicide to kill the leaves, so that only the stalks and cotton remain. This makes it easier for harvesting machines to simultaneously gather and compact the cotton. Meanwhile, the acidity stabilizers, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are constantly seeping into undergroud water systems, causing environmental harm both locally and downriver, as the nutrient rich runoff in the Gulf sprouts algae blooms that stretch for miles, blocking out the sun and killing sea life.

I have little doubt that inorganic methods produce massively higher quantities than organic methods. But there’s clearly environmental harm, and in any case the system is unsustainable. Modern irrigation methods deplete the water tables faster than the rain can replenish them. The system isn’t going to last anyways, so it seems logical to implement more environmentally friendly methods now. I don’t think a person needs to be a “self-indulgent hippy”, to use Vay’s term, to state the obvious.

Labeling is a big issue for me and the GM group’s insistence that GM foods should not be labeled is just outrageous. What we put into our bodies is important to some of us even if some folks don’t care. We have a right to know what’s in the food we eat and give to our kids. And we should have the right to choose other options.[/quote]

I have been reading up on the situation I’m Taiwan. Most of the soya beans imported are GMO. At last one third of the corn is too.
In terms of locally produced food many papayas are GMO having a very effective resistance gene for rind virus. They were so successful in field tests that farmers have been illegally buying from seed companies without government approval.

There are also many other fruits and vegetables undergoing field tests in Taiwan. I also suspect that some other fruit are GMO here like some breeds of Guava and banana , but it’s just a suspicion, Taiwan also has good traditional breeding techniques.

The thing is, of all the things to worry about when it comes to eating food GMO should be bottom of the list. There has not been ONE proven illness from GMO and basically no cases of cross breeding into wild stocks (which don’t exist in most countries anyway).

Things we should have labels for

  • origin and farm
  • date of harvest
  • how much pesticides applied and when
  • allergy risk
  • e Coli testing
  • processing facility food certs

Why not the big furore about this? I’m not against GM labelling , but it’s ridiculous to ask for that and not for the others above.

Sorry, you should read more to understand how genetics and plant breeding works before commenting. I wouldn’t comment on baseball because I don’t understand it either.

Sorry, you should read more to understand how genetics and plant breeding works before commenting. I wouldn’t comment on baseball because I don’t understand it either.[/quote]

You mean I should be a trained geneticist or understand the basic concepts of sexual reproduction, such as when two plants love each other very much then a small plant arrives? But you’re right, here I go blabbing off about something I’m not a recognized expert in. It sucks having to use the statements of other experts to gain a point of reference :doh:

Yes it sucks as an expert to listen to it :slight_smile:.

I can imagine, being the head honcho of “experts” and all. My apologies. I’ll go try reading a book for once :notworthy: :notworthy: :notworthy:

True enough, but I’d say it’s inherently safer to use traditional breeding techniques. As I understand it, the insertion of foreign genes into a plant genome is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair, and you still have to do a bit of selection to get the result you expected (maybe HH2 can clarify on that). Then you’ve got the regulatory hoopla, patents, etc. All things considered, it must be a right pain in the ass to get a GMO to market. Monsanto et al therefore have to use aggressive techniques to even get their money back.

The problem with releasing a traditional variety onto the market is that it’s hard to make any profit from it. Once it’s out there, it’s a free-for-all. Personally I think that’s a good thing, though. It follows the ethos of free software, which has been astoundingly successful in all sorts of ways.

One thing that’s rarely considered is that plants adapt to their local environment. A seed that performs well in one part of the world might struggle 100 miles away on different soil and in a slightly different climate. This is especially true of highly-selected plants, which are usually bred specifically to perform well with lots of artificial amendments. Non-industrial farms choose local landraces and sometimes breed their own varieties by seed-saving. It takes a while, but they eventually get better results than they would with ‘standard’ seeds.

Good summary. So why would we want to put a band-aid on that? Why not just bloody fix it, and then we wouldn’t need to slap more technology over something that fundamentally doesn’t work?

There’s always this “yes, but”, isn’t there. It’s usually delivered with an apologetic sigh and a shrug by men in white coats, and a patronising pat on the head for those silly old hippies. Firstly, I’m curious as to why you have “little doubt” that this is true. The two methods are incomparable. They have different aims, different methods, different inputs, and different outputs. Industrial farming essentially treats the land as a factory producing a single product. Non-industrial methods treat it as a resource that must be cared for to keep it working properly, and which will incidentally produce a wide range of products that make it economically advantageous to provide that care. Done properly, non-industrial farming produces far more than monocultures, especially on marginal land. The key is “done properly”: some people think organic farming is just industrial farming with fewer chemicals.

Secondly, even if you could prove definitively that inorganic methods produce (say) 20% more output on average than non-chemical methods, of what practical relevance is that result? If we can do something with less trouble, with less damage to natural resources, and with little to no reliance on artificial inputs, isn’t that “worth” a 20% yield reduction?

I’d like to see Vay clarify these statements from the other thread:

Whether it’s “solid science” or not is immaterial. What we’re talking about here are the applications - the technology derived from it. Saying something is wonderful just because it’s “science” is as daft as saying it’s wonderful because it’s “natural”.

Why is it disturbing? 99% of the GM technology on the market is pointless. Most of it is designed to combat problems that have been created by other technology. I don’t like the word ‘organic’ because it’s meaningless, but there’s nothing wrong with promoting soil health, more efficient land use, and reduced inputs. Sooner or later, the inputs for industrial agriculture will become so expensive that we’ll have to abandon the whole sorry mess anyway, but it would be sensible to start the process sooner rather than later. It’ll be cheaper and easier in the long run.

Sorry, you should read more to understand how genetics and plant breeding works before commenting. I wouldn’t comment on baseball because I don’t understand it either.[/quote]

OK, so I might have gotten carried away suggesting it will put the whole planet in danger, but are people unqualified to make opinions about the subject just because they’re not scientists with experience developing GM crops? Here is an article that talks about some of the things I based my comment on from other things I’ve read, watched, and listened to: http://theconversation.edu.au/busting-the-gm-myths-a-view-from-greenpeace-3610 So there you have it, another “expert” like you. You may or may not agree with “experts” that share the same concerns she has. I’m innocent, really :whistle: Please don’t kill the messenger. If I’m still out of line for making my comment due to a lack of personal expertise the thread should have an “Expert Comments Only” disclaimer

You’re preaching to the choir.

I should clarify that I have little doubt that mass agricultural produces the highest yield for the most acreage. Agricultural companies (and small family farmers) want to produce the most cotton with the lowest possible costs to meet global demand. Maybe yield is higher in smaller polycultures, I don’t know, but what they want is big, cheap quantities. I trust the market enough to believe they’ve figured out how to produce the most cotton with the lowest production costs.

Personally, I don’t care. I want to see change regardless. As I said, I’m living the dream over here. I drive past miles and miles of cotton fields every day. The environmental harm is completely obvious, and to make the whole thing even more absurd, nobody is even disputing the simple fact that the water tables are depleting faster than they’re replenishing. So basically everybody knows the system is unsustainable, but they’re going to march forward anyways like lemmings off a cliff.

I am curious if fred smith or any of the other naysayers here actually doubt that monocultures are harmful to the environment. I wonder if they want to drink water polluted with acidity catalysts, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. I’m guessing they don’t, but they think conservationists are all hippy losers so any ideas the hippies come up with have GOT to be the result of frenetic self-indulgence. :unamused:

I don’t know what Fred Smith would say. How about Norman Borlaug?

youtube.com/watch?v=tIvNopv9Pa8

The video you posted didn’t address the long term sustainability of mass agriculture. I don’t have a problem with GM, especially when it reduces the amount of water needed to grow plants. I have a problem with a system of agriculture that requires huge quantities of irrigation and toxic inputs. Some parts of the world receive so much rain that their underwater aquifers are quickly replenished. Florida is a classic example. Despite being half covered in citrus farms that require irrigation even with Florida’s huge annual rainfall, Florida’s aquifers are constantly replenished by rain.

But that isn’t the case for say, the entire western United States, whose main water supply is the Ogallala Aquifer. It took thousands of years for rainwater to fill it, and it will be depleted by the end of the 21st century, possibly middle of the 22nd century. That’s going to be mighy inconvenient. The scale of suffering will be even more massive in densely populated northern India and Pakistan, which is primarily supplied by the Upper Ganges Aquifer. The hundreds of millions who rely on that aquifer are going to be in for a rude awakening in one or two centuries when the water runs out. Ditto for China’s Northern Plain Aquifer. And it isn’t just the people who live in those areas who will be impacted. All of those examples are breadbaskets for major countries and regions.

I’m glad that scientists have learned how to genetically engineer crops to use less water. But that will only slow aquifer depletion, it won’t stop it. The video makes the claim that only 2/3 of the world’s population can be fed with organic methods, and Borlaug seems to agree. I have no idea how to address that problem. But I know that the current method of mass agriculture is unsustainable, so in the long run, a better solution will have to be found.

The video you posted didn’t address the long term sustainability of mass agriculture. I don’t have a problem with GM, especially when it reduces the amount of water needed to grow plants. I have a problem with a system of agriculture that requires huge quantities of irrigation and toxic inputs. Some parts of the world receive so much rain that their underwater aquifers are quickly replenished. Florida is a classic example. Despite being half covered in citrus farms that require irrigation even with Florida’s huge annual rainfall, Florida’s aquifers are constantly replenished by rain.

But that isn’t the case for say, the entire western United States, whose main water supply is the Ogallala Aquifer. It took thousands of years for rainwater to fill it, and it will be depleted by the end of the 21st century, possibly middle of the 22nd century. That’s going to be mighy inconvenient. The scale of suffering will be even more massive in densely populated northern India and Pakistan, which is primarily supplied by the Upper Ganges Aquifer. The hundreds of millions who rely on that aquifer are going to be in for a rude awakening in one or two centuries when the water runs out. Ditto for China’s Northern Plain Aquifer. And it isn’t just the people who live in those areas who will be impacted. All of those examples are breadbaskets for major countries and regions.

I’m glad that scientists have learned how to genetically engineer crops to use less water. But that will only slow aquifer depletion, it won’t stop it. The video makes the claim that only 2/3 of the world’s population can be fed with organic methods, and Borlaug seems to agree. I have no idea how to address that problem. But I know that the current method of mass agriculture is unsustainable, so in the long run, a better solution will have to be found.[/quote]

Water is a bit of a different issue. I don’t know that so called sustainable methods provide much of an answer in either case. Big picture, if the problem gets solved, the solution is going to be technological. That means exploring every technological avenue. Attempting to shut down technological avenues with scare tatics and opinions more akin to susperstition than science is not constructive to tackeling the problem.

Maybe the solution is global warming. More CO2 in the atomosphere will boost plant growth and if we can warm things up enough we could open up vast new farmlands in Siberia and the Northern Regions of the Canadian prarie provinces. Melting ice caps also would free up vast reserves of fresh water, we just have to find a way from it all going into the Oceans.

Yeah, I’m kidding about that AGW part, just trying to give Vay an aneurysm.

The video was mostly Penn ranting and 1970s types in kaftans spouting wibble. It pisses me off seeing the cameramen arranging little black kids in a circle to hold their hands out for food. They’re hungry for all sorts of reasons that could be loosely called “political” or “cultural”, not because they don’t have access to GM seeds. They’re also far too reliant on a small number of staples, and there’s absolutely no need for that. It’s also important to remember that food production is only a small part of the problem. Logistics, storage, and retailing is the other 80%.

Norman Borlaug was a great man, but he had tunnel vision. I read a story somewhere about him being unable to get Mexican labourers to plough their fields, so he hitched himself to a plough and did it himself. It apparently never occurred to him that maybe the field didn’t need ploughing. If he had replanted a functioning, coherent ecosystem, burrowers would have arrived to do the job for him.

I dunno. I think GB brings up a good point: water misuse is an absolute disgrace, worldwide. I can’t think of a single country that makes proper use of its water resources, or takes salination, waterway pollution or groundwater issues seriously. Australia, possibly: although only after they learned the facts the hard way. It’s probably no coincidence that Australia is the centre of gravity of modern sustainable methods and water conservation (eg., Yeomans and Mollison). I believe GB is right that there is going to be a reckoning sooner or later: you can only patch over the holes for so long. There are plenty of civilisations buried beneath the desert who thought they had evolved beyond a reliance on nature.

I think it was Douglas Adams who said that “technology” is stuff that was invented when you were a teenager. Anything invented before that is just normal stuff. Anything invented after you’re 40 is the spawn of Satan. Of course the solution is “technological”, but that’s a big bearhug of a word. Natural water conservation is technology. Designing productive, semi-natural ecosystems is technology. It might not look like it to modern eyes, because it doesn’t (usually) involve computer networks and men in white coats, but it’s still technology. Technology is just the application of scientific methods to achieve a desired result. Flashing lights and toxic chemicals are not mandatory.

Sustainable methods provide an answer in that they are, well, sustainable. Spending $5000 each month on a lavish lifestyle might feel nice for a while - but when you hit your credit limit, it’s going to hurt real bad.

It doesn’t need to be addressed, because it’s demonstrably false. To make such a statement, you have to start with an axiomatic assumption that food can only be grown in certain places. If you use industrial methods, this is actually true: the machinery only works properly on monocultures grown on large, flat fields. Worse than that, you need a functioning technological society to feed and care for those machines, and to create and deliver the soil amendments. That kind of society only exists in a few places on earth. Industrial agriculture is therefore the reason we can’t feed people, not the solution. It frightens me that so many apparently intelligent people observe that it isn’t working, that it can’t work, and yet insist on more of the same.

Natural methods give you more options. I have a little bit of land here that’s about big enough to park a combine harvester on (~250m2). When I acquired it, it had been utterly fucked up. I dug it over and tried planting some seeds on it to see what would happen. They all died. On the rest of it, I dumped three tons of horse manure, dug some french drains and filled them with logs, and re-planted. Two months later, I had insects, toads, lizards, and earthworms back again. Six months later, I spend 4-6 hours each week planting, harvesting, or weeding (weeds are good - they “mine” the soil and you can harvest them occasionally for compost). The guy next door taps the groundwater and drenches his plot every day. I haven’t applied water for three months, except when putting in seeds. The soil is moist and friable instead of hardpan. It’s early days, but I’m on target to get 200kg+/year from this plot, and as much again in compostable output. The implication is that I could farm half an acre as a full-time job, producing enough to feed 5 people and some small animals. The city slickers raise their limp wrists in horror at this point: my goodness! You’re asking people to work the land? Well, why not? Governments are always whining about “creating jobs”. Is pulling up cabbages any worse than working in a bloody call centre? I know which one I’d prefer.

My point is this: we simply need to join the dots. The stables wanted to get rid of their manure. I needed it. My land is useless for industrial agriculture, but there are millions of such plots standing empty, or producing pitiful yields, all over the world. It just needs a bit of human labour; and there are plenty of people unemployed.

It can be done. But not the way Borlaug says.

An interesting (and short!) video about the cutting edge of “natural” technology:

youtube.com/watch?v=sohI6vnWZmk

This is not a joke. This is real project.

That was an interesting video and pretty encouraging. What I’d like to see is some numbers interms of what kind of yields are produced. Regardless of yields, it’s still something to see desert and saline soil being reclaimed.

Does it really matter, though? You can use one of two references as a baseline:

  • The unmodified desert, which has a yield of essentially zero.
  • The “farms” nearby, which simply insulate themselves from the surrounding climate. They’re basically just hydroponics factories: the only thing they harvest from the environment is sunlight, and even then they probably have to use energy or materials to keep things cool (the vast majority of plants grow best at ~18-28’C). Considering the cost of inputs, their economic yield is likely to be pretty pathetic, even if they deliver a reasonable amount of biomass.

In either case, the “natural” strategy is likely to win in terms of pure profitability. There’s no point aiming for high yield-per-hectare in places where there are plenty of hectares for the taking. It’s just a waste of effort.

It’s worth emphasising that industrial methods are preferred in The West partly because government incentives are targeted only at those methods. If you run your farm in a way the government approves of, you will receive assistance in the form of cash for chemicals and diesel fuel, loans for equipment and land, and sometimes price support schemes. If you run your farm as a natural, integrated system, you’ll get nothing from the government - except, in some countries, a visit from a man with a grey suit and a clipboard ticking off a list of things he’s going to prosecute you for. In Taiwan, you’ll get a subsidy if your farm is weed-free (ie., if you spray herbicides) and you’ll also be given a dirt-cheap allowance of fertilizers (Xkg/ha - so of course people use their maximum allowance). In the UK, small farms were aggressively and deliberately put out of business during the 80s and 90s so that their land would be consolidated by “efficient” multinationals. Those multinationals are now teabagging the corpse of British agriculture.