by frog
We know already that genetically modified crops do not improve yields. Surprisingly, Monsanto has admitted that one of their pest resistant cotton crops no longer resists the pests. How long did it take nature to thumb its nose at Monsanto?
Monsanto’s advice to farmers? Use our Bollgard II version, it’s better. But the science doesn’t back them up.
Agricultural scientists and activists say Monsanto’s advice is “ridiculous”. The Bollgard II product has no additional toxin to combat pink bollworm.
All the hype about the effectiveness of Bt against pests is bogus …This proves that you can’t stay ahead of the pest with … this shortsighted approach.
So. Monsanto wants an arms race. Meanwhile their GE products have made managing normal seeds difficult or illegal in many countries, denying farmers their long cherished right to develop and husband varieties suited to their own unique ecosystems.
The shrill cry of the GE apologists is that GMOs are the only way to save humanity from starvation. First of all, the evidence is rolling in that they don’t deliver as promised. Second, they are destroying a few millennium’s worth of human knowledge and breeding in a few short years, exposing all of humanity to the very crisis they pretend to fix.
I, for one, would rather see our burgeoning biotech industry focus on using their technology to accelerate traditional breeding techniques, not fill our world with failed genetic cocktails.
Hat tip: Greenpeace
Published in Environment & Resource Management | Featured by frog on Thu, March 11th, 2010
Tags: biotechnology, GE, GMO, monsanto
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
I disagree Frog. Our efforts should go toward discovering (or re-discovering) crops and growing methods that are efficient and environmentally beneficial. Always looking to the ‘new’ is a significant part of the problem we find ourselves facing now. It’s not, as they often say, rocket science, that we need.In fact, ‘rocket science’ (sorry bjchip) is the last thing we need. The answer’s in the soil, son.
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Apart from how to make a lot of money while the going is still good.
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Some of us have never trusted their stated goals for GE crops.
A very large rat was smelt waay back in about 2001; Vandana Shiva was writing about the failure of GE crops in third-world contexts around that time, as well.
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How secure are our seeds, here in NZ, do you think?
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You’re bound to get failures with GE but how do you know there wont be spectacular successes? My feeling is that this is an issue the Greens have invested a lot of political capital in (like smacking) but also that you see it more as an issue of how capitalism works than science.
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For example their was talk of adding a birth control substance to carrots to control opossums. Another possible good result for GE would be adding omega3 to plants.
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there are already spectacular successes with GE.
All modern antibiotics are produced by GE organisms. Antigen based vaccines depend on GE.
We are well on the way to enabling whole organs to be regrown using GE.
Human insulin produced from GE organisms has replaced the use of porcine insulin, and similar hormones to treat dwarfism etc are routinely produced from GE organisms.
We cannot be GE free because our environment is full of GE products. Agricultural antibiotics are excreted into the soil every day.
GE free? Show me where.
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You don’t. That is why you should do the research first in a contained and controlled environment to determine that it does the things you want it to do and doesn’t do the things that you don’t want it to do (which in the case of GE could be potentially catastrophic).
And you’re right about it being as much as about capitalism as about science (although possibly not in the way you intended). Monsanto act in the interests of their shareholders. That doesn’t necessarily equate with acting in the interests of good science.
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“Monsanto act in the interests of their shareholders. That doesn’t necessarily equate with acting in the interests of good science. ”
but if they get caught out doing any shenanigans, someone makes a movie about it and wins an Oscar? In other words a corporation has a public profile just like a person (except that they can do things behind the scenes, such as lobby government), but that doesn’t mean we have to bring the whole system down to change it?
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Why trust something as important as food to a corporation that just wants to make as much money as it can.
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Who is suggesting that? Having a strong regulatory regime to control the excesses of capitalism isn’t the same as “bringing he whole system down”.
Anyone for thalidomide?
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http://sciblogs.co.nz/guestwork/2010/02/15/is-genetic-engineering-just-like-breeding/
In relation to crops its all about capItAlism:
“GE plants are protected by an intellectual property (IP) instrument called a patent (Figure). This is unprecedented in the history of agriculture and is fundamentally different to plant variety protection (PVP), particularly as described by the UPOV convention of 1978 (Heinemann, 2007), a convention subscribed to by most of the world (Heinemann, 2009). Throughout a large chunk of the 20th Century, breeders (and farmers) could innovate under the protection of PVP, which helped to foster the plant diversity behind the Green Revolution (IAASTD 2008).
PVPs are different from patents because PVPs allow farmers and public researchers to continue to improve on varieties. They can save and reuse the seeds to breed to their conditions. It is seed savings coupled with local and regional exchanges that promote rapid dissemination of the most productive plants, which must be adapted to local conditions to flourish: to feed us, to build wealth and health, and to limit the impact of agriculture’s ecological footprint.
Patents stop that.”
Therefore a GE firm such as Monsanto in OWNING a strain are able to control and therefore receive more of the economic benefit, whereas IGER (develops seed through conventional breeding) are not given the same legal rights to their R&D efforts. For example a farmer can breed store and reuse his own IGER developed seed, but cannot do the same with Monsanto GE seed.
IGER can only get payment from the initial purchase of seed, but miss out on returns from subsequent development by the farmer to suit his conditions. IGER do not then get as much as monsanto would in returns for their R&D development. However a farmer using Monsanto GE seed cannot develop seed to suit his own microclimates due to patent restrictions.
Therefore seed firms seek to push GE due to the legal constructs created which give a better R&D return for GE seed over conventional seed.
Its all about capitalism!
…no..
ITS ALL ABOUT CAPITALISM!
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> opossums. What happens if the carrots got loose and we ended up eating them?
> Surely they could make a paste or something that possums like to eat.
I think the idea is that the carrots use microRNA sequences which target genes expressed specifically in opossum (or marsupials, anyway).
So they wouldn’t affect humans. However, if those genes ended up in the Australian carrot gene pool, the technology could result in the extinction of some of Australia’s indigineous marsupials. If they got into the New Zealand gene pool, most likely Australia would be forced to ban imports of carrots from New Zealand to protect their wildlife.
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I’d put my hand up for that … if I could …
(bad joke alert!)
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Thalidomide never made it to the market in the US.
The FDA stopped it. It got through the European net and hence made it to NZ.
Since then we have tended to depend on the US screens.
Thalidomide has now proved to be a useful drug in other areas and is approved for those uses in the US too. Just keep it away from pregnant women.
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I may be wrong but I don’t think carrots grow from the root. They are a seed crop.
I have never seen a carrot lying on the ground put down a root.
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You are wrong Owen. Carrots seed in their second year. If you lift and store your carrots, then replant them (even leave them lying on the ground) they will begin their second stage growth, throw up their seed heads, trade pollen, set seed then cast it to the 4 winds)
Who’d have thought?
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Owen, carrots are grown from seed for commercial horticulture, but will also propagate vegetatively from roots.
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Nuke.
Tell that to a diabetic.
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Good to see the Greens know their veges
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I guess our bantams and dogs make short work of any carrots on the ground long before they get a chance to grow new seed heads.
I suspect possums would too.
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Toad – needled by your Hopoate challenge, I’m going to counter with one on your vegetative carrot claims.
You’ll not get a carrot (that is a root-called-a-carrot) vegetatively from another carrot, you’ll force it to seed and carrot seed is a lot less satisfying to eat than a carrot root (if you get my convoluted explanation).
If you wanna grow the orange (or yellow, purple or white) root, ya gotta planta da seed!
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When you are planting carrot roots for seed, plant them horizontally (as with tomato plants)
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greenfly:
> You’ll not get a carrot (that is a root-called-a-carrot) vegetatively from another
> carrot, you’ll force it to seed and carrot seed is a lot less satisfying to eat
> than a carrot root (if you get my convoluted explanation).
In the context of preventing the spread of genes into the broader carrot gene-pool, that isn’t very reassuring.
Owen:
> I guess our bantams and dogs make short work of any carrots on the ground long
> before they get a chance to grow new seed heads.
>
> I suspect possums would too.
If there is a lot of viable carrot tissue being scattered around the country, eventually some will start sprouting… if there is a 1% probability of an event happening each of 1000 times, there is a 99.9957% chance it will happen at least once.
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A1kmm – sorry to set you on high alert with my careless talk of sprouting carrots. Fact is, the carrots in question must have at least some remnant of green top growth attached in order for them to grow on and set seed.
Never the less, it could happen and there is therefore, a risk. I’d be very unhappy if the plan progressed. A safety conscious producer would irradiate the carrot pieces before dispersing them.
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Really sorry I didn’t have any good news
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Owen,
According to Wikipedia, there were Thalidomide deformities in the USA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide#Birth_defects
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A a tiny number compared to the rest of the developed world. 17 in the US compared to a total of 10,000.
Here is what is says:
The impact in the United States was minimized when pharmacologist and M.D. Frances Oldham Kelsey refused Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for an application from Richardson Merrell to market thalidomide, saying more study was needed. Richardson Merrell gave the tablets to doctors on the understanding that the drug was still under investigation. Seventeen children were born in the U.S. with the defects.[11] Canada was the last country to stop the sales of the drug, in early 1962.[18]
In 1962, the United States Congress enacted laws requiring tests for safety during pregnancy before a drug can receive approval for sale in the U.S.[19] Other countries enacted similar legislation, and thalidomide was not prescribed or sold for decades.
[edit]
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I am having to cast my mind back to the mid seventies when I was working in the field of licensing pharmeucuticals, mainly anti-cancer drugs developed at the Auckland Cancer Labs.
There is another dimension to the seventeen born in the US. I seem to remember references to this small number born in the US in spite of the ban but these were generally explained as children born to recent migrants – people who had come to the US pregnant and with their own supply.
The risk of law suits is so high in the US that not many doctors would prescribe a non registered drug to pregnant women. I am not denying the number – but suspect that Wikipedia is not telling the full story.
Actually, the thalidomide “triumph” of the US FDA probably led to a super cautious attitude and has delayed the introduction of many drugs to AIDS sufferers and the like who were prepared to try out drugs that might save their lives but were unable to. Also the cost of trials has skyrocketed which adds to the cost of drugs.
It is a dilemma.
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As much as I hate GM foods, i fear that eventually we will have no choice but to eat them. Too many people in the world, diminishing natural resources and an ever changing climate.
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Beauty, that reason for eating them presumes that they win on performance, which is contrary to the claims made at the top of the thread. I’d be more worried about having no choice because the whole world was contaminated with them, and even if they lost on performance, there was no plan for removing them.
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