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There is only one thing that stops your comments from being the reality of New Zealand – fashion!

The carrot you describe is the very one I buy in the local farmer’s market. Me, and a few hundred others who don’t care what the good carrot looks like (Asians in the main) or don’t have the money to pay for the ‘pretty’ ones in the Supermarket!

Mainstream New Zealand (WASP middle class, income circa $80k per earner) doesn’t want to eat ‘ugly’ food. Hence everything that makes it onto the greengrocery shelves of the supermarket looks like the food in childrens’ books! If it takes gene manipulation, including splicing the plants you want to perpetuate and artificially pollinating them as well and ‘engineering’ ‘the market’ will do that to achieve a higher return on their expensive farm, distribution system and retail store!

How will we reeducate society?

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bjchip Says: THIS country, a thousand nautical miles from the nearest source of GE material is the only place on the planet that can realistically maintain non-GE status. We SHOULD be last, and there should be damned good reasons that go beyond the ideological “we can’t afford to slip behind in technology and productivity” in this particular area.

Good point BJ. You’d think they would have learnt a lesson from the introduction of possums, weasels, ferrets,cats, etc etc, but apparently not.

Anyone who encourages GE in NZ is, in my view, effectively working against the conservation principles of DOC and others.

Are we supposed to be showing respect and nurture to indigenous species or not?

Surely acceptance of GE is to shut ones eyes and mind to the reality that many organisms are too small to see.

Just because we can’t see genes, viruses or bacteria etc, does not mean that they are trivial.

Sure, nature changes things over time, but the Monsanto/GE propositions have such a huge potential to negatively alter the balance that it amazes me that so many people cannot see the likely outcomes.

How long before large tracts of land get sprayed routinely with Monsanto pesticides, just because the Monsanto seeds planted there can withstand the spray? Who has the ability to ensure that spray stays inside a 5 wire fenced boundary and leaves the neighbours crops alone??

Did we learn nothing from the painted apple moth fiasco in Auckland? Who enjoyed the taste of Foray48B??

One of New Zealands major selling points has been cleanliness and healthiness. Is this no longer of any value to our exporters? We should be concerned if that is the case.

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Monsanto and their ilk have been found lying time and time again – so why should we trust them anymore?

The last thing we need is our seed and our birthright owned by private interests.

It also makes good business sense for NZ to remain GE. Since the rest of the world has GE then better for NZ to remain with a niche than to try and compete head on with the US and others.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2008/nov/26/gm-food s-horizon-jimmy-doherty

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——-The crop yield isn’t greatly increased…

http://www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/7626dec679c2455580256d e2004bae42/3cacfd251aab6d318025742700407f02!OpenDocument

http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/WhoBenefits_PR_1_9_07.cfm

http://update.unu.edu/archive/issue16_11.htm

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/exposed-the-grea t-gm-crops-myth-812179.html

http://www.non-gm-farmers.com/news_details.asp?ID=2007

—–and the weeds and bugs develop immunity anyway…

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=genetically-modified-crops-survive -weed-whacking-herbicide

and there is evidence that the genes cross boundaries in unexpected ways. I regard this as weak but not yet small enough to be ignored

http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/pae/environmentalscience/casestudies/case15 .mhtml

That problem is compounded by the fact that THIS country, a thousand nautical miles from the nearest source of GE material is the only place on the planet that can realistically maintain non-GE status. We SHOULD be last, and there should be damned good reasons that go beyond the ideological “we can’t afford to slip behind in technology and productivity” in this particular area. Other technology is able to be accepted, rejected, removed if necessary, but Genetically Modified flora and fauna once released CAN NOT BE UNRELEASED. It is a one-way-street. IF the world decides there is a market for non-GE crops and foods (and there are a lot of people who regard them as suspect) we stand to make more money off being able to supply THAT than the non-existent incremental improvement in crop yield that Monsanto salespeople lie about.

Xeno-transplants provide new disease vectors so that virus infections can cross previously unbreakable species boundaries.

Evolution plans further ahead than humans… or rather it doesn’t plan, it adapts over a much longer time period.

The person on the wrong side of GM *IN NEW ZEALAND* is not Frog. This is the LAST place on the planet where GM should be released.

respectfully
BJ

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sweetdisorder Says:
We can, and have been doing better than nature/evolution can, and we have been doing it for many years? Where do you think all the new plant varieties have come from over the last 200 years? Just freaky nature.

There is potentially a substantial difference between what we’ve done for the last 200 years, and what we are capable of over the next 200 years.

Current GE technology puts “natural selection” into hyperdrive.

The problem with this?? Nature generally made small incremental changes over a long period of time. And not in isolation.

All the other species around one changing organism were able to change at the same time, and under the same prevailing conditions. As a result species have “co-evolved”. In many cases this has led to a synergy, instead of just competition.

GE puts the advantage of a single plant or animal species way ahead of the advantage of the community of organisms around it.

That is where nature did it better…tiny changes over a huge amount of time.

No “scientific” lab can duplicate that, and it is a total joke that these modified onions are supposedly surrounded by cages that won’t allow any of the pollinating insects to escape. Yeah right.

However…if they want to use GE to produce an onion that grows on the moon I don’t have a problem with that.

The driver for these experiments has more to do with increasing the corporate bottom line than feeding the world.

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You really are on the wrong side of GM technology. Your reaction is the very essence of ideology – you’ve made up your mind that GM is bad, and then fit the facts around that, rather than a dispassionate review of the risk/reward trade-off.

Firstly, you say it’s hubris to say we can do better than nature/evolution. The fallacy here is evident: Just look at how different all our food crops are from their wild ancestors. Evolution selects for different features than humans, so we’re always going to do “better” than evolution.

Second, you seem to indicate that the majority of GM is trans-genic, i.e transplanting genes from one animal to another. This is false. The vast bulk of genetic modification involves selection of ideal traits within a species. Why would you oppose this form of modification?

Do we have any instances of the fear-mongering scenarios of franken-food and superweed scenarios coming true, and wrecking havoc on the environment? It just hasn’t happened. Even if it had, that would be an argument for regulation and control, rather than an outright ban.

Also, we need to balance the risk against the reward. New Zealand is a country whose economy is dependent on agriculture. We can’t afford to slip behind in technology and productivity – we’ll become poorer and poorer. I for one do not want that.

Finally, have you considered the potential for environmental and human benefits arising from GM? From the ability to do more with less (so lower impact on the land), better pest resistance (use less insecticide) to the direct human health benefits such as food fortification and the potential for xeno-transplants… GM is a technology that holds out huge promise to better humanity.

I guess I’m part of the demographic that cares intensely about the environment, but I am not prepared to take anti-scientific positions (so yes, I am concerned about global warming) nor am I prepared to sacrifice economic prosperity unnecessarily. The Greens’ positions on these issues make it impossible for me to vote for you.

Cheers
Kelsey

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Life has been a continuous process since it first emerged on earth and the idea that this can be “engineered” reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of living systems. They are not designed – they exist as a continuous process that is self-similar through time.

We now know for example, that while Lamarck in the simple sense was wrong, DNA is nonetheless modified by its environment. This happens in the short term as a result of the fact that the epigenetic network is constantly changing, and in the long term as a result of the modification of this network by environmental factors.

The biggest risk of GE is that it is completely unpredictable whether a genetic change that appears low risk now will remain low risk in the future. This is basic problem with humans – we forget the aphorism that absence of complete proof (of risk in this case) is not the same as complete proof of absence (of risk, again).

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But the broiler chicken got than way through conventional breeding, not GM

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Transferring genes between unrelated species is only possible because of the genetic similarities of all living organisms

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Okay, i take your point about the gene transfer. The funny thing is in all the years this (GE) has been an issue, you are the only one who has explained this point to me. If this were a marketing campaign, then it is a dismal failure.

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As you rightly seem to assume, evolution isn’t going to save us, or the planet, in a reasonable timeframe. However, you then suggest “evolution on steriods”. This sounds horrible, suggests evolution is some sort of slothful constant and opens up its own ethical issues (maybe we could breed all the seeds out of bananas and all the libertarians out of New Zealand.

As a society we need to decide if we do the “no nukes” thing, or we accept that the “precautionary principle” would/will occasionally allow some developments given scientific and bureaucratic randomness, creating more or less risk of a stuff-up. I’m sitting on the fence.

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