Bayer Petitions For Approval of Biotech Rice 266
br_sjrpreto_sp writes to clue us to an article on Foodnavigator.
Agro giant Bayer Crop Sciences has petitioned the US Department of Agriculture to approve a genetically modified rice variety that has been at the heart of a recent contamination scandal. From the article: "Marketed under the brand name LibertyLink, these [varieties] were engineered to tolerate the toxic herbicide glufosinate ammonium. The company in July notified the US regulatory body that it had discovered trace amounts of an unapproved GM rice in samples of commercial rice seed." After the contamination scare, the market for US rice tanked as European countries imposed import limitations. When rice producers sued Bayer, the company responded with this request to the USDA. The petition is open to public comment until October 10. Comments may be submitted via the Internet at www.regulations.gov — search keyword APHIS-2006-0140."
Makes it Worse! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Food containing GM products must be labelled as such in Europe:-
GM Labelling [food.gov.uk]
It's possible that import restrictions aren't necessary, if the labels are correct. But if the consumers don't want GM food, then Bayer might find it doesn't have a market for it's rice in Europe.
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Grow them in those, "starving" countries where if they fuck up thier ecosystem it really doesn't matter given thier ecosystem aparently doesn't have the food they need
What a touching way to phrase the suffering of millions. Unless a particular gene bestows an INCREDIBLY advantageous attribute to a crop (like, say, the ability to fly), the gene's ecosystem penetration will remain minimal. If the advantage isn't powerful enough to make all other versions of the crop "obsolete", this "contamination" will
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That is entirely false. Entirely. I'll ignore the rest of your comment because your basis is 100% wrong.
Prime example: the avocados you eat and the bananas you eat are all genetically identical because they are all grafts of a single mother plant. Cavendish bananas (99.9% of bananas in supermarkets) in particular would never have occurred naturally, because they are an evolutionary dead end
Re:Makes it Worse! (Score:5, Insightful)
brett
Re:Makes it Worse! (Score:4, Insightful)
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We can't control what we do. Eventually, someone on this planet is going to have enough starving people and enough technology and GM foods will happen.
Of course, no one ever seems to bring up how much GM organisms we deal with here in America. 89% of the planted area of soybeans, 83% of cotton, and 61% maize are genetically modified varieties in America. According to wikipedia: The Grocery Manufacturers of America estimate that 75% of all processed foods in the U.S. c
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THERE IS PLENTY OF FOOD TO GO AROUND!
People are starving not because we're not using enough GM stuff.
They are starving because of a few very greedy and evil people. You ship tons of food to some famine-ridden country in Africa, next thing you know, the army seizes all of it and sells it, and the people still starve.
Or things are screwed up by corruption, incompetence, ignorance, and yet more greed. Take Malawi for an exam
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However, it is FACT that the increased use of herbicides and pesticides associated with GM crops is a threat to human health and increases the incidence of many serious diseases.
This threat however occurs in the country in which the crop is grown, so regardless of whether Europe and Japan ban the rice or not, it will be US citizens who die so that a few companies can make a few bucks.
Re:Makes it Worse! (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem 1: Weeds are becoming more and more resistant to pesticides
Problem 2: Actual crops cant take the amount of poison that takes to kill the weeds.
Solution: Gemodify crops also to be more resistant -> use more pesticides
Profit.
No other problems, right?
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It will work, you just need to use a lot more than what you have used before!
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Why on earth would someone develop a GM crop that is resiliant to a herbicide and then not use that herbicide? That makes absolutly no sense at all. GM crops drastically increase the use of herbicides, the only way they could reduce them is to make the GM crop resiliant to all infections and pests - basically impossible.
When using GM crops, the standard procedure is to drop tonnes of the herbicide o
*All* rice is genetically modified (Score:2)
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Besides, the methods of the so called 'classical breeding' has included irradiation of plants in nuclear power plants and treatment with DNA-damaging agents for the last 50 years. There goes the romantic vi
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It's true that the risk to ecosystems is radically reduced by this method, but the damage to farmers and their livelihoods is pretty terrible.
For example, say Monsanto creates an insect-resistant tomato that's also extra big and super red. Almost all of the farmers in your town jump on board, anticipating bigger profits, but you decide to stick with what's always worked in the past.
At first,
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Unintentional, random genetic changes aren't covered by a patent.
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Do you want to see, or are you saying you choose not to see?
If the former, the answer is simple; rate of change. Leaving aside the patent issue (people getting sued because the pollen blown on the wind fertilized their crop), there is the problem of sudden introduction of a new species. When a new species evolves over time, it places gradual pressures on the eco
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http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/unitedstates/m
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Apparently because you know nothing about how many GM foods are created: by the introduction of powerful mutagens, either chemical or radioactive.
Simply because a change is intentional does not mean it is non-random, and GM foods are created with a variety of techniques whose sole purpose is to induce particular, commerically valuable, changes that could not be
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2. The purpose of GM foods is to make them more resistant to herbicides and insecticides. They might even throw in a few genes that could result in longer shelf life. The problem is that the use of these types of crops will result in increased usage of environmentally da
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Humans have evolved for thousands of years eating natural foods with DNA codes by nature. The idea is the further we move away from nature regarding what we put into our bodies, generally, the harder it becomes for the body to make good uses of these nutrients. The human body has evolved to be
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We don't have that advantage for artificially genetically modified food.
Also all the natural cosmic rays in the world aren't going to splice banana genes and fish genes.
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Oh great, "We can't prove it's safe, so we shouldn't do anything ever" argument. We'd have never ventured out of our caves if that was followed. We should let blacks and whites have babies together. Even though it's been done for a long time, we still can't prove that it won't create some mutation that will destroy the planet. Honestly, I can't see how something like that could be said
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How do you figure? I am pretty sure that unless you are talking about a few tiny viral genomes you can't say "Oh, evolution has played itself out by now, and nothing new is possible."
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The basic premise involves DNA testing the seedlings just after they sprout.
They can then remove the ones which do NOT contain the feature and splice those.
They don't have to wait for the plants to fully develop before deciding which strain to develop.
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Did you know that in the US, half of all the food we produce goes to waste? [foodnavigator-usa.com]
It's a myth that people are starving because they don't have sufficiently magical crops to grow. There is far more than enough arable land to feed everyone in the world fully. What's lacking is the infrastructure, education, and technology to create and manage good farms. These things cannot be genetically engineered, and they don't need to be.
As long
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Re:That would likely be a trade violation (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan is just as protectionist as the US. Take a look at the steel tariffs or sugar tariffs the US imposes on other countries to protect their own domestic markets for these or substitute products.
You cast your FUD in a light that suggests that genetically modified crops are obviously harmless. There is no evidence to support that notion. In fact, and you can look in the rest of thread for other examples, there are lots of reasons to believe that genetically modifying foods is a potentially very dangerous game. Some obvious reasons:
These are just some very obvious and immediate problems with genetically engineered foods. You might think that these are not severe problems. But if antibiotic have taught us anything it's that human intervention can cause unforeseen problems over the long run. Problems with unclear answers. For example, what happens when cross fertilization causes other plant organisms to also gain herbicide resistance? Do you know the answer?
What if genetically engineered crops, either through cross-fertilization or by design, become non-digestible by humans or animals? Do you know the answer?
Such possibilities are worst-case scenarios and the risk might be unlikely, but is it worth it?
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I really wish people would stop asking what will happen when GM genes get loose. It is an absolute certainty that they will. Perhaps not in our lifetimes, but then in our childrens, or their childrens. And frankly everything we know about hybridization in plants tells us that it will happen sooner rather than later. It always does.
So my question is: WHEN the engineered gene
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They found that the rate of food related illnesses since GMOs were introduced in 1994 in the USA, have increased 10 fold, but in sweden where they are banned, the rates stayed the same. Seems suspicious to me.
GMOs are artificial foods, programmed at the genetic level. Who knows, maybe ther
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I think, like other artificial things in food, people should be able to avoid this GMO foods and the possible risk that it entials. But the mere nature of GMOs is a threat to the very idea of choice, due to their ability to reproduce and cross breed with other plants where they are not wanted.
To quote Cecil Adams ... (Score:2)
What a shame... (Score:2, Funny)
environmental pollution never to vanish. (Score:3, Insightful)
Only this pollution will never vanish, because these organisms are "genetically engineered" with a dominat special (=patented) gen that will be reproduced and breed with other species.
Monsanto vs. Farmers [google.com]
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Not Quite (Score:2)
I don't see what the problem with G is (Score:2)
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Add to that the fact that this particular GM crop in question is one which is designed to be sprayed with herbicides. The GM crops might be bad for other crops, and the herbicides might be bad for us.
On the other hand it might all be okay, too. The problem is we can't trust anyone to actually tell the truth about that because there's so much
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Duh.
Re:I don't see what the problem with G is (Score:5, Informative)
Yes.
A major problem is allergies.
Much of genetic engineering for crops consists of copying a gene or set of genes from one species to another, in order to confer its advantages on the engineered organism. This results in the engineered plant making a set of protiens (and their fallout products) that were previously lacking in that organism.
Now suppose you're violently allergic to, say, some cell membrane protien in peanuts. Eat a trace of a peanut and you end up in the hospital. Eat a handfull and you might suddenly die. But if you avoid peanuts you're fine, right?
Then suppose somebody discovers that this protien confers a resistance to a quickly-degraded herbicide that gets most of the weeds that currently infest corn, wheat, and soybean fields and rice paddies. So they clone it into corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice. This produces new strains that are easier to grow: Plant 'em, spray once with the herbicide to kill the weeds but not the crops, and get high yields with little effort. The new strains are cheaper to grow and quickly displace their competition.
And now you're deathly allergic to peanuts, corn, wheat, soy, and rice.
Or at least to the GM versions of the corn, wheat, soy, and rice.
But you can't tell from the labeling which strains of corn, wheat, soy, or rice are in any given product you buy.
And once they're growing in the fields, they produce polen that fertilizes OTHER corn, wheat, soy, or rice. A few generations later even some "unmodified" strains (such as those grown by the organic farmer in the next field downwind) will contain it. If the advantage is sufficient it becomes pervasive.
That's just one example. Iterate for other sources of useful protiens. Iterate using animals. Iterate for genes that produce powerful hormones or drug precursors, which may affect you when consumed orally. Iterate for airborne allergens. And so on.
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Of all the people I've known with adverse allergies, not one was breastfed.
But for some reason people think a scientist can come up with a better solution than either God or evolution (doesn't matter which, seems clear to me that either is better than our formula). People see the formula and think "my, that looks thick and much more nutricous for the baby." But only in the last ~15 years did we learn that folic acid was paramount to the developement o
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People are NOT allergic to peanuts. People are allergic to specific protein produced by peanuts. Just because you MAY borrow a gene from peanut does not mean you will automatically inherit the allergic protein as well.
In fact, since the peanut allegen is so well know, there is NO POSSIBLE way the GM producers will add such annoying protein to a modified rice. Why would they? They would liable for MILLIONS in damages (for knowingly adding stuff
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He used a common allergy as an example to convey the idea. Think about how much worse it would be for someone with an uncommon allergy. As you say above, no GM producer would produce a crop that spread a common allergy. Its not just a possibility, but an eventuality that a GM producer would
Why GM crops can be problematic. (Score:2)
This isn't just about these GM crops being harmful to humans. There is a whole slew of other issues with GM crop chief among whom is genetic contamination aka. cross pollination. This has all sorts of implications ranging from the economic through the social to biological. If your export customer is sensitive about GM crops and your neighbor's GM crops cross pollinate with your non GM crops you can possibly wake up one day and find that Bayer
LibertyLink? (Score:2, Funny)
Everybody is bleeding insane (Score:5, Insightful)
And other people think 9/11 was planned and executed by the U.S. government.
Meanwhile people fight to make creationism part of the high school science curriculum.
And many consider homeopathic medicines, also known as "water", as effective treatments.
Gives me a migraine. Where did I put my "head-on"?
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Do any of you really know what GM is? (Score:5, Insightful)
I caught my first episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit the other night, and it just so happened to have a piece on GM food.
Some clips:
A short clip outline [youtube.com]
The entire segment [putfile.com]
It painted a pretty good argument FOR GM food... to feed the millions who are otherwise dying because it's hard to get crops to grow in their parts of the world.
Aren't the 'GM' crops really just an extension of grafting and selective breeding that has been going on for thousands of years?
Please enlighten me if I'm wrong, but in their piece they/those they interviewed stated that two of the things I thought were true about GM foods aren't:
* GM foods contain genes spliced from frogs/fish/other animals: Apparently bullshit
* GM foods don't require any testing/checks before being used: Also apparently bullshit, that they are more heavily regulated than any other food.
Is this true, or have Penn & Teller hoodwinked me?
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no. not even close and anyone selling that to you is either ignorant or a liar.
At what point would a fish and fruit mate?
You taking two or more genes from thing that would in no way be able to be breaded through natural selection.
"* GM foods contain genes spliced from frogs/fish/other animals: Apparently bullshit"
the whole point of GMOs is transgenic splicing.
Yes they do splice F
Re:Do any of you really know what GM is? (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, it is important to carefully examine and test the plants that we select for human and animal consumption, but that's something that is required even for "natural" food sources.
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Yes they do splice Fish and rice.
Really. All right, I'll call you on that one. Point out one case of rice with fish genes, or any plant with fish genes seriously considered for use as an agricultural product.
If you cannot, please sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and leave the decision to grown ups.
Re:Do any of you really know what GM is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, GM seeds might be able to grow in marginal areas. But the vast majority of GM foods is grown in the US where there aren't millions starving. Actually, patented GM foods create a problem for farmers in developing countries since they can't keep back part of their harvest as seed for the next growing season. If they can't afford seed corn, they'll starve or have to wait for th UN air drop. I haven't seen Monsanto or anyone put a huge effort into GM plants for the Sahel or the Tibetan desert yet. And, quite frankly, improved irrigation or similar changes to production are probably much more efficient.
There are reasonably good arguments for using GM foods to help counteract nutritional deficiencies, though. Golden Rice [wikipedia.org] is probably the best example.
GM foods do require stringent testing, but past experience shows that even the most stringent testing can reliably weed out all problems Two examples for failed pharmaceutical testing would be Contagan and Vioxx, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are two examples that even if something is tested to be almost idiot proof, someone will invent a better operator. If you screw up FDA testing for medications, you can just destroy what was produced. With GM foods, you simply can't. Some will escape and multiply.
The no fish/fowl gene argument is a bit spurious. There have been experiments along those lines. But just think what would happen if pesticide resistant rice cross pollinates with weed grasses. Instant huge problem.
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Not "if". When.
It is an absolute certainty that the genes will get loose. That's what they do, and plants hybridize to the extent that there are biologists who have challenged the validity of the "biological species concept" as a general means of categorization, citing cases where up to 40% of the individuals in a particular lump of foliage are unclassifiable hybrids.
The very point of the story here is that GM
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If you're referring to this case [wikipedia.org] then you've been mislead. Monsanto won the case by showing that the farmer had deliberately planted roundup-ready canola.
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I was going to point out why you're wrong, but I don't really see the point. If you can't figure out for yourself how moronic that statement is, you're beyon
Re:Do any of you really know what GM is? (Score:4, Interesting)
And this has nothing to do with GM food, per se. It's an issue with obsolete laws from the dawn of the industrial revolution being stapled onto the modern world. This has more in common with pharmaceuticals (especially AIDS treatments) than it does with agriculture.
GM foods do require stringent testing, but past experience shows that even the most stringent testing can reliably weed out all problems Two examples for failed pharmaceutical testing would be Contagan and Vioxx.
Comparing the testing to pharmaceuticals is absurd. If you can't figure out why you should be ashamed of yourself for making the comparison, do the rest of us a favour and never discuss this topic again.
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are two examples that even if something is tested to be almost idiot proof, someone will invent a better operator.
This is pure technophobia. Three mile island is a non issue. Even the laughable 'cell phones cause teh cancer' nonsense is of more concern than that. Chernobyl was the result of a dying government, rather than the technology itself.
If you screw up FDA testing for medications, you can just destroy what was produced. With GM foods, you simply can't. Some will escape and multiply.
So? The absolute worst case senario is that a highly specialized pesticide will be somewhat less effective against wild varieties of your particular crop. They aren't going to cross breed with any other plant, and if you think they will, you need to turn the god damned scifi channel off.
Re:Do any of you really know what GM is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Charles really manages to sum up both sides of the argument pretty well. For one thing, he explains pretty much what you say Penn & Teller have said: that this stuff just ain't the demonic conspiracy a lot of people want to believe it is. A lot of genetically modified foods are produced by bombarding cells with radiation, or bathing them in chemicals that cause genes to replicate in random ways. In other words, scientists are just forcing the natural process of random mutation that occurs any time life reproduces. Very few GM organisms are created by piecing together bits of this or that -- it's too hard to do successfully.
There is something to be said for "feeding the starving," too, as you say. In certain parts of the world, certain plant diseases are so rampant that you just can't grow a lot of crops. They will grow poorly and not yield what they could in order to feed people. A lot of GM crops aim to solve this problem.
But there are more troubling aspects as well. Here at home, the reasons for using GM crops seem less cut and dried. To give one fairly benign example, a ton of work has been put into genetically modifying tomatoes -- but not to make them taste better, or to be more nutritious. No, scientists modify tomatoes so that they will have more cellulose in them, which makes them take longer to ripen and go soft. That way they can be transported farther without spoilage. Of course, it also makes them sort of taste like a piece of celery. The modifications are done solely for the business of agriculture, not for the customer's benefit.
More troubling is that many of the stated aims of biotech have not come to fruition. At one time, scientists promised that GM crops would be resilient to pests and diseases. If a boll weevil couldn't eat a certain crop, you'd no longer have to dump pesticides all over it, which would make farming more environmentally friendly! Well, that sort of happened. But the most popular GM crops of all, as it turns out, are these herbicide resistant crops like TFA talks about. These are plants that can't be killed by modern herbicides. The reason you want that is because weeds can be killed by modern herbicides. So instead of hiring people to go and painstakingly remove all the weeds from your fields, you just repeatedly spray your fields with herbicides. In other words, with GM farming you're actually using more chemicals than traditional farming. And why not? Because the same company is selling you both the GM crops and the chemicals.
And then you have the intellectual property issues. Most of these GM crops are patented. If you are a farmer and you want to plant GM corn, you have to buy it under a license from Monsanto (for example). Typically, that license will include a clause that says you can never plant corn that you grow. Got that? You have a whole field full of ears of corn, and you are forbidden to take any of that corn and put it in the soil to grow next year's crop. You must buy all your seed directly from Monsanto, year after year. And Monsanto sends people out to test your crops, too! If you're not licensed to be growing GM corn this year, and they pick an ear off one of your plants and they determine that it's GM corn, they will actually sue you. (And yes, there have been "false positives" -- false, because the farmer did not knowingly do anything wrong, because his crops were cross-pollinated through the air with GM crops.) To many people, this move toward farming as a new kind of industrial complex controlled by gigantic, multinational corporations is very troubling. To what extent is it appropriate for these corporations to control our food supply?
Anyway, that's just a snapshot
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That depends on how you define 'traditional'. Most non-GM farmers still use herbicides. They just use different [wikipedia.org] ones that target specific types of weeds, rather than herbicides [wikipedia.org] that kill all non-Roundup Ready plants.
Excellent comment indeed (Score:2)
It is a big issue, and its sad when things that could be for the good of all are turned into the good of some and the bad of most by the greedy.
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=)
Not quite that bad, since we wouldn't just GIVE away the food anyways, but it is capitalism, sell it to the poor countries or feed it to cattle to make even more expensive meat?
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It's called bullshit for a reason (Score:2)
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Sure I can see right through their selective picking of their interviewees on each side (whack jobs on the side they don't like, and rational sorts on the side they do)... but it's the same tactics that right wing nuts use as well, so it kinda balances out.
In any case it's amusing, and I put it out there as a starting point for discussion, which it has indeed been.
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I'm not understanding how that balances out, as P&T appear to lean heavily to the "right wing nut" side of things. How does this balance out the predominance of right-wing messages in the media?
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From what I've watched of their episodes on legalising drugs etc. I would say they are pretty liberal minded.
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I can GM eg corn to be poisonous to humans.
If it happened in nature over thousands of years tho, we would have either developed an immunity or bred out that trait.
Both sides are BS'ing you.
I mean, eg software goes thru testing/checks before being used, does that mean no commercial software have bugs?
Same for GM food, you can't
It's the mega-corps that are scary, not the food (Score:2)
GM food doesn't concern me too much if it's managed appropriately. As your comment implies, I've seen a lot of people who are concerned about things glowing green, but I really don't think this is an issue (unless we're really stupid).
What disturbs me are the predominantly US mega-corporations that hold the majority of rights to produce GM food, and appear to be quite happy to do whatever it takes to contaminate non-GM food, and l
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Did they mention any specific varieties being developed in sub-Saharan Africa? Ahh, I didn't think so. The fat one sure is proud of ol' Norm though. Apparently with Norm, being some random genetic engineer makes him the greatest person in all of human history... clearly ahead of Jesus, who is also in the pile of cards. I'm not religious myself, but I *know* that isn't gonna help Penn and Teller's argument one bit. Also note, Norm's Nobel prize was awarded in 1970... 7 years before scientists discovered
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"Bullshit" is a highly appropos name for that show.
In that particular episode, they find a couple kids outside of a supermarket, handing out fliers, and take their casual comments on the subject, and discount them one by one. They don't even give the dummies a chance to reply to their claims.
On slashdot, crap like that would be modded down in seconds. "Bullshit" makes Michael Moore
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The starvation in the world is not because we don't have enough food, it is because the food can't get to the right places. This is because of wars and corrupt third world governments, so GM will do nothing to help this.
What makes me at least wary, is actions like US companies getting the patent to basmati rice [commondreams.org], even though this has been grown in In
On a serious note (Score:2, Interesting)
I've losing faith in slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, Bayer can't keep the unapproved and approved strains separate when they sell their GM products to the general public. **shudder**
Post Facto $$$ (Score:2, Troll)
Avoid knee jerk GM hysteria (Score:2, Interesting)
This means yes, the crop will succeed better due to natural selection in areas where the pesticide is applied.
However, the associated fitness cost means that it is to the organism's advantage to lose that genitic modification whenever it grows in the absense of pesticide. So that natural selection would often
This seems unfair and unreasonable! (Score:2)
Holding this company responsible when someone else may have just taken their product farmed it and sold it is completely ridiculous. It is kinda like holding a drug company responsible because someone diverted some of their product and it was used in a food
ok, that might SEEM nice but.. (Score:2, Insightful)
What happens when all of the natural species are wiped out by the GE stuff and we end up with a handful of varieties of plant that are only distinguished by their immu
GM Food is Nasty, Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Enter Monsanto. They make GM canola, among other things, as well as having patented over 12,000 varieties of seed, most unmodified and taken directly from the goverments own seed stores.
A little bit of their GM seed blew off of trucks and onto the fields of a farmer in Canada. Monsanto found traces of GM plants on the farmers land (without his knowledge or permission, which in the U.S. we call trespassing), sued the farmer, and cost him his life savings, and he had to destroy all of his seed. He was a real farmer who rotated his fields with a variety of seeds to maintain the soil. He lost literally generations worth of seed, a devestating loss.
Much of the upper echelons of the U.S. government, particularly the FDA, are former executives of Monsanto or it's subsidiaries. The goal is nothing short of utter and total control of the worlds food supply.
Watch the documentary The Future of Food. It'll put a bad taste in your mouth.
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What you are saying is pure propoganda... The
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time to go home!
Only one??? (Score:2)
Biotech Rice (Score:2)
Well this is just what we need: field-grown neon lights, 'Type R' stickers, coffee-can mufflers and wing spoilers. Terrific.
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