What? How much control one has over the other? Open a restaurant, or any business really, and watch how one exerts itself on you. If you are fancy enough and have investors, they always know someone who knows someone who can make your business flourish, or fail spectacularly.
Capitalism does not weed out corruption. It sows, GMOs, and reaps it!
Yes, pretty much.
I do have a restaurant, as it happens, in a country where the deck is heavily stacked against all private enterprise. That country, despite being nominally capitalist, has rules which are carefully constructed to guarantee failure, except for a certain privileged minority. We make a profit. Not enough to make anybody rich, but enough to pay rent, bills, and supplies, and salaries for six people. Thatâs the best that anyone can achieve without, shall we say, joining the dark side.
Iâm not sure what youâre saying here. It really doesnât work like that. Iâve spent other peopleâs money before. Lots of it. And failed. Access to money and contacts doesnât guarantee success.
There are many different flavours of âcapitalismâ. Itâs such a vague term that itâs almost meaningless. Corruption and skulduggery flourishes when there is murk. Complicated rules. Vague rules. Rules for no good reason. Rules that nobody really understands. Rules that waste immense amounts of time if you try to play by the rules. Thatâs when people in the right places feel justified in asking for (insisting upon?) payments to speed things along.
Since you mention GMOs, theyâve taken root (hahaha) because:
a) Farmers, in general, are a bunch of martyrs, always complaining that theyâre beholden to big business and/or government but always falling over themselves to follow the latest edicts from either;
b) Governments know they have to keep a tight stranglehold on the food supply, because itâs the pivot around which many other things revolve. GMOs have no practical use, but theyâre one useful tool for keeping the farmers obedient, and they bring in a lot of tax revenue, by various indirect means.
That is easy to say coming from the first world, where I don`t mind paying 6 euro for a litre of very organic freshly squeezed juice. 
But Africa where GMO means crops that can survive and provide greater yields to famine areas? We are pontificating through the first world lens.
Rubbish. Thatâs just marketing flim-flam. You have no experience farming tropical soils. I would never, ever use GMO seeds because they simply would not produce a profitable yield under organic conditions. âOrganicâ, in a climate where the sun and the rain will destroy bare-earth cultivation in a fortnight, is a necessity, not a first-world luxury. There is simply no other way of doing it. Iâm making money, while the idiots around me with soils like moonscapes and spraying God-knows-what are perennially poor.
GMOs are designed for heavy applications of fertilizers and pesticides, and are completely pointless in soils capable of producing high yields from open-pollinated varieties. Tropical soils, properly managed, are astoundingly productive without any synthetics except (where relevant) one-off amendments of phosphorus, calcium, and trace elements. Once youâve kick-started a productive cycle, those things are need less and less or not at all.
If African farmers were taught how to manage the soils they have, using landrace seeds developed in their native range, theyâd all be a lot better off. Teaching them techniques developed for North America is madness.
This is amusing since I used the term GMO metaphorically, not in a literal sense. I meant that in a way that corruption was used and how it is always changed toâŚyou know what? Never mind.
Wow, plant a seedâŚ
Give it another go. I donât think i understood what you were saying.
Capitalism breeds corruption and will alter it (this is where the GMO thing was used as a device) to suit its needs.
Whatever. It was a sad attempt to be witty.
ButâŚ
I am open for a spirited debate on GMOs!
I dunno about that. Humans are corrupt, and most of what we call government, religion, culture, etc., is an attempt to rein that in. That includes ânon-capitalistâ models of society, and Iâm not aware of any such model that actually does what it says on the tin.
What about in the desert areas, like Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, and parts of Kenya among others? More nutritious crops can be grown with less effort. Less pesticides. More yields.
There is the possibility of tomfoolery, though. The so-called terminator genes and the copyright/trademark issues. From an ecological standpoint, there is no proof GMO crops are endangering other flora.
I do GMO all the time. I crossbreed peppers and tomatoes, well try. This tropical heat is wreaking havok on my peppers!
You have reasons to be concerned, and your arguments are well founded. Monsanto et al, have not done themselves any favor by keeping lids on their research and battling legislative attempts to get GMO products labeled. While I feel the fear of GMOs is unfounded, I do believe that everyone should have the right to know what is in their food.
Itâs a complicated question with a complicated answer.
First observation is that Africa was not always an irredeemable shithole. Ethiopia, for example, was a notable world power from pre-biblical times to the Middle Ages. Iâve never been there, but it appears to have a very varied climate (depending on exact location) in which you could grow almost anything you wanted. Most of it is not desert. The trick, obviously, is to pick crops that suit the locality. Attempting to grow lettuce in the desert would be a bit daft, but it would probably work just fine in the highlands.
Second is that GMOs are often developed with the specific intent of selling pesticides and fertilizers. That is, they only deliver the advertised yields when sprayed with this and that. The aim is to sell the complete package: seeds are a pain in the ass to produce and not very profitable. Chemicals, on the other hand âŚ
There are well-established techniques for growing crops in semi-arid regions, but personally I wouldnât even bother trying in a country like Ethiopia: itâs not really worth the effort. If I were pulling the strings, Iâd attempt soil conservation in the arid areas with hardy tree crops, and establish efficient transport links to those areas more suitable for agriculture (of which there are many).
As for pest infestations: if youâve got an excess of pests, youâre probably doing something wrong. Huge populations of one particular species (plants or animals) are quite unusual in natural ecosystems. In my experience there are three reasons pests cause problems: 1) attempting to grow crops outside of their native range; 2) failing to create a sufficiently varied ecosystem; or 3) using pesticides. 3) might seem counter-intuitive, but if you spray poisons, then natural selection will ensure that you will give a survival advantage to creatures that are immune to those poisons. Those creatures tend to be hardy little bastards that enjoy eating your crops.
The crops themselves probably donât. Itâs the methods that go along with them that cause the harm. They encourage incorrect agricultural practices - such as bare-soil cultivation and plowing - because they are designed to survive under such conditions where others could not. Thus other plants and animals are âendangeredâ indirectly. And because the soil ends up completely destroyed, nothing else will grow there. âModernâ tropical farming is not much different to hydroponics: the soil is just a sterile, inert medium that keeps the plant upright.
Thatâs not GM though. GM is the insertion of foreign genes in a manner that could not be achieved via a natural cross.
I have no objection to selecting crops for survival in specific locations. Itâs a funny thing: I can grow this pumpkin quite successfully, but this other pumpkin gets completely destroyed. Theyâre both basically pumpkins, so itâs a mystery to me why one survives and the other doesnât. However, as noted, the obvious solution is to not grow the pumpkin that fails.
Iâve never had much success with either tomatoes or peppers in my climate (tropical monsoon), although I enjoy experimenting because anything grown out of its native range is by definition very profitable. Tomatoes, for example, seem to be incredibly picky about air temperature and soil moisture. My default solution is to grow things which look after themselves and donât require endless tampering.
I wouldnât say GMOs are universally, like, bad. Iâm just pointing out that their main purpose is to make profits for the agri companies, not to save the world. What irritates me more than anything is the Monsanto reps swanning off around the world polishing their halos, rather than just admitting theyâre out to make a buck like anyone else.
As I think I mentioned, I was just reading Elon Muskâs book about entrepreneurism. I wish Iâd read it 20 years ago, but I probably wouldnât have understood it without the benefit of hard experience. Anyway, one of his points is this: is your product ten times better than whatâs on the market now? If not, youâre wasting your time. I think heâs absolutely spot-on there, and itâs worth holding up GMOs against that yardstick. Empirically speaking, they give a 10 or 20% yield increase, best-case, over conventional seeds. Considering the extra costs, thatâs not even worth bothering with.
But like you said, we have bred crops with the best traits in hopes that randomly the traits we want would come together. Now we have the ability to not just always hope for the best but actually get the traits we need no?
And I know GMOs are expensive, but is it not our best solution moving forward if we all just got on board and maybe have more companies compete and even have more government subsidies instead of the unfounded fear the GMOs are unnatural so itâs bad.
Using GMO technology to achieve that is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Itâs the main reason it hasnât taken off: itâs just so ridiculously expensive, especially when you consider the regulatory hurdles, that you might as well just do it the old-fashioned way.
Traditional crosses are not as hit-and-miss and you think: the genetics is well understood, and any amateur can produce a stable âcustomâ variety within about 7 years. The downside is that you canât patent it or stop people from reproducing it: the usual workaround for that is to sell F1 seed, which is a first-generation hybrid. They have desirable characteristics but donât breed true, so people canât save their seeds (or, if they do, theyâll get a weird variety of mostly-unusable plants).
Finally, when talking about plants, thereâs no such thing as âbestâ. How would you describe the âbest tomatoâ? A tomato has many different characteristics - colour, shape, size, raw flavour, cooked flavour, acidity vs. sweetness, storage ability, yield under organic conditions, response to synthetic fertilizers, response to drought, response to flooding, climate preference, disease resistance, pest resistance etc etc etc. There is no single âbest tomatoâ just as there is no single (say) âbest computerâ, âbest carâ or âbest dogâ. It depends what you want to do with that tomato. There are literally hundreds of varieties of any product you care to name - farmers are spoilt for choice. There is nothing that GM can offer that hasnât been offered in the catalogs already.
The bottom line is that GM just isnât used this way because itâs not cost-effective. Itâs more often used as a lever to sell other products: pesticides and herbicides, for example. Thatâs the only way the manufacturers can recoup their enormous investment.
I hate subsidies at the best of times, but why would we want to subsidize something that has no apparent benefits? Can you name a specific benefit that makes GMOs worth subsidizing?
Just to be clear, I have no objection to GMOs per se. I dislike the products that have been developed so far because they are - like a lot of modern technology - fundamentally pointless. To be specific: they donât offer me, as a farmer, any features that will help me make more profit, and the reason for that is that they offer me nothing that I can offer my customers as benefiting them.
Interesting, thanks for answering my questions and giving me a perespective that is more practical.
So would you say Your main issue with GM crops is that they are so profit driven by agricultural corporations and not enough practical and useful crops developed thatâs more Profitable for farmers and benefit the consumers. And that better GM crops can be useful. Or itâs really not that worth persuing at this point?
And am I right to assume itâs some of the same problems big pharma companies have when something thatâs suppose to help people become profit driven. So most likely they wonât make GM crops that help poor farmers in certain harsh r conditions for farming in small parts of the world that canât pay big bucks for it. But develop for huge farms that can pay for it for bigger cash crops.
Yes, thatâs about it. I imagine GMOs could be useful. Itâs just that so far, Iâve not seen one that actually is useful. The reason I dislike GMOs is that the companies invested in them hype them so hard that their PR doesnât even resemble the truth anymore. They make themselves out to be potential saviors who are going to rescue those poor starving black people. Yeah right.
The basic problem for them is that theyâve got a solution in search of a problem: well, weâve developed this technology, now what the hell can we do with it? Their solution is a very well-known one in marketing circles: if your customer doesnât have a problem, you need to engineer one for him.
Yes, Iâd say there are very strong parallels. Drugs, like GMOs, are horribly expensive to design and (these days at least) donât really do anything spectacular. All the big discoveries were made decades ago. Theyâre now reduced to fixing problems that donât exist (eg., hypercholesterolemia - a completely made-up disease) or that can be solved without a lifetime prescription for expensive drugs (eg., obesity).
Itâs far worse than that. They target their products at the turd world (via distributors) because poor, semi-literate farmers are suckers for technology. They buy double-page advertorials in the farming magazines, because they know that there are plenty of farmers who will sell the family cow to buy into some new-fangled bullshit product that doesnât work, when what they really should have done is kept the cow and spread the bullshit on the field. Iâm not kidding. Stuff like that happens.
The thing is, farming isnât rocket science. Like anything else, you need to understand what youâre doing. You need to know how the thing works. But people have been doing it for millennia. We know how it works. Big Ag has not offered one single product that makes things better. Youâll probably point me at pictures on the internet of happy smiling rice farmers with lush green fields, but the big dirty secret is this: you can achieve those lush green fields without spending a shitload of money on sacks of fertilizer and bottles with skull-and-crossbones symbols on them.
People like the sacks and bottles because they donât have to think. They donât have to apply any skill. They donât have to understand anything. They can carry on being poor for ever and ever and ever, without investing any effort on thinking: bugger me, this is an awful lot of work and investment for not a lot of payback. I wonder if maybe Iâm doing this wrong?