by frog
Food Democracy has a quiz about genetic engineering myths that begins:
- Many pro-GM commentators hail the technology as the solution to the current food crisis because of its ability to reduce fertilizer use and help farmers cope with problems like drought, salinity or flooding. After 20 years of GM research, how many GM drought tolerant, or salt tolerant, or flood tolerant, or fertilizer-reducing crops are there on the market worldwide? ANSWER: None.
- There have been tens of thousands of articles in the world’s media about ‘miracle’ crops genetically engineered for enhanced appearance, flavour, nutrition, or to be allergen-free, or to combat problems like obesity or to contain edible vaccines that protect against major diseases like cancer. How many of these GM crops are there on the market worldwide? ANSWER: None.
- When published in April 2008, which appraisal of global agriculture, sponsored by the World Bank and the U.N., and undertaken on a scale comparable to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, concluded that GM crops have at best variable impacts on yields and would not play a substantial role in addressing climate change, loss of biodiversity, hunger or poverty? ANSWER: IAASTD – International Assessment of Agricultural knowledge, Science and Technology for Development
The Greens have done a good job stemming the GM tide for the last nine years. But, as we can see from the AgResearch application to genetically engineer all sorts of animals here in New Zealand including using human and monkey cell lines with sheep, pigs, goats, horses and cows, New Zealand is not guaranteed GE free for the future. Aside from the ethical issues around genetic engineering we have GE Free spokesperson Jon Carapiet highlighting the significant economic risk GE poses to New Zealand’s ‘brand’:
A preliminary economic evaluation of biopharming in New Zealand by Lincoln University showed GE organisms in the dairy sector had a theoretical potential to cause a minimum of $539 million in losses to the dairy and tourism industries, said Carapiet…
The Lincoln report signalled that exporters such as Fonterra and “Brand New Zealand” could be stigmatised if some future GE food turned out to hurt consumers.
Food Democracy’s other nine questions are here as well as a link to an earlier quiz, Who’s designing your food?
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Mon, September 15th, 2008
Tags: , agresearch, GE, Genetic engineering, jon carapiet
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Aw, frog, Food Democracy and you spoilt all the fun.
I wanted to do the quiz and win a prize, because I knew all the answers.
But was not to be. Alas!
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- “Many pro-GM commentators hail the technology as the solution to the current food crisis because of its ability to reduce fertilizer use and help farmers cope with problems like drought, salinity or flooding. After 20 years of GM research, how many GM drought tolerant, or salt tolerant, or flood tolerant, or fertilizer-reducing crops are there on the market worldwide? ANSWER: None.”
So your reckless scaremongering has successfully prevented the commercialisation of technology that could potentially save millions of lives every year and transform hundreds of millions of others.
You must be very proud.
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The Green party did that? Must have powerful friends.
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The thesis here is that GE has done “nothing good”, which of course is not a reason to ban it. The argument to ban it is because “there is no market for it”, which of course means a ban is unnecessary, except that people who don’t buy it do so because of a lot of scaremongering noise about it being unsafe – which of course, it isn’t any more than any other food – as many deaths are attributable to what people eat anyway.
What’s wrong with choice?
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wat – “After 20 years of GM research, how many GM drought tolerant, or salt tolerant, or flood tolerant, or fertilizer-reducing crops are there on the market worldwide?”
None indeed, because the claims were untrue. There are scores of techniques for growing crops in difficult areas that would be swept aside in favour of the ‘magic bullet’ ge ‘solutions’, hindering progress and doing nothing to remedy the base problems: salination, desertification, lack of nutrient in soils – all managment problems indicative of modern agriculture, not natural problems in need of a ‘high science’ solution (ge)
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“people who don’t buy it do so because of a lot of scaremongering noise about it being unsafe”
Surely your not demanding an end to scaremongering, Libby?
In a free market I presume people are entitled to promote whatever opinion they wish, be it avoiding GE foods, halaal or kosher diets, vegetarianism, absinthe for breakfast, Hare Krishna recipes or whatever? Or is their going to be some government agency deciding what is or isn’t an acceptable opinion?
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