Wow, for a second there I thought you were going to cite something other than the infamous Schmeiser case where the guy knowingly and intentionally saved seed he knew was cross pollinated. Accidental cross pollination does not equal knowing reproduction. That's like saying you can get sued for home movies and citing someone who got in trouble for recording inside a theater. You left out the most critical detail.

Offhand I would speculate that, if forever reason, a farmer was trying to age seed to decrease the viability for whatever unknown reason they could simply check some records and find out if the numbers add up. It's an odd situation you've come up with, perhaps you could throw me a shred of something beyond blatant speculation.

Okay then, prove that it's happened once.

Like I said, if someone has a better idea than the current system, I'm listening. Or are you implying the commonly spread falsehood that people get sued for mere cross pollination?

Breeding is a type of genetic modification, one of many (yes, there are more than two). You just change more genes and in a generally less predictable way.

That's an ignorant argument though. It's like telling a doctor not to bandage a slit wrist because it doesn't fix the underlying problem. No one is saying these types of things should be permanent, they're just to keep people healthy until economic development can provide a better diet. Somehow I doubt the people this would help are going to play the nirvana fallacy. Your cost claim is ridiculous. It costs a lot less to make a GMO than to fix a shitload of socioeconomic and political problems. As for your corporate issue, this is developed by a university funded by a charity. Perhaps you should RFTA before making assumptions. You've just justified the GP's post.

Not yet, far as I know, but since every GMO that has ever made it close to commercialization has been protested, I don't see why this should be any different.

It would be if there were not first world activists who actually think that the poorest people on earth should just go buy some healthier foods. There is a reason why people who have made it their life's work to combat starvation and malnutrition are taking the route of Golden Rice and other biofortified crops (and it must also be said that the non-GMO biofortified crops escape all the controversy, almost as if the arguments against the GMO ones have nothing to do with their actual properties and everything to do with an irrational bias against their origin)

No, there aren't. Genetic engineering is not a black box. I don't see how beta carotene production is going to impact the soil. Sounds like a bullshit claim some clueless anti-GMO activist pulled out the usual place. I highly doubt this rice will be any different than any other rice, on average, in terms of soil impact.

If we do that then there is no controversy. This is like creationism, or vaccine rejection. You can reject certain phylogeny, or take issue with particular vaccines, and you can make valid criticisms about certain aspects of some GMOs, but the movements as a whole are without merit.

You jest, but many people believe that modern day crops are natural. Strawberries, wheat, broccoli, corn, all man made, via genetic alteration and hybridization. Many more crops are what a chihuahua is to a wolf. If conventional breeding were invented today, it would be outlawed.

If your goal is helping people become food secure and self sufficient, a reliance on vitamin pills doesn't exactly help in the long term. As an aside, I find it funny how many people (not necessarily the parent poster, but a lot) who claim to support food security issues are quick to talk about keeping people in developing countries dependent on aid once the topic of GMOs that could help them comes up.

Because the argument that GMOs are these evil terrible things that you should totally give us your money to fight is going to be a harder sell once you've got news stories talking about how they are saving the lives of children whose only crime was being born in the wrong part of the world. Golden Rice is a big deal to many in the anti-GMO movement, which just goes to show you how little the 'not anti-biotech just anti-Monsanto' line goes.

I'd like to hear your practical alternative then. Plant breeding and genetic engineering are not easy, and the deregulation process for GMO crops can cost millions of dollars. If you're volunteering to foot the bill, I'm sure we can do away with plant patents. In the meantime, at the end of this year Monsanto's first GE soybean patent expires, which is how I thought patents were supposed to work (as in, develop something, recoup R&D costs and make profit, invention falls to the public). Copyright my be fucked to high heaven, but this is looking like it works to me, so perhaps you could elucidate the flaw you perceive here.

Also, even non-GMO crops can be patented. Plant breeders and genetic engineers, surprisingly, don't like to work for free. Various stonefruit hybrids (pluots, nectaplums, and plumcots) are patented because they took decades of hard work to develop. The Honeycrisp apple, one of the most popular apples, recently went off patent. The royalties from it went to support the breeding program which later produced my favorite apple variety, the SnowSweet apple (the world might not have that apple without patents). There are patented pineapples (like the Mele Kalima variety, which is one of the most amazing fruits I've ever had) and pawpaws (like the Shenandoah variety) developed by very small operations simply to protect the developer's work. A lot of the ornamental and floriculture industry uses plant patents. So tell me, if if those of us in plant improvement cannot patent our work, what do you propose as a fair system for all?

Thanks to people who oppose vaccinations. Boy, I love it when stupidity is used to justify itself. Criticizing that is like looking at the state of the chicken pox vaccine (you remember chicken pox right?) and saying 'Anti-vaxxers' kids still get it, therefore the vaccine is bad because it doesn't work if you don't use it!'

Thing is, they're not. They are no more trying to force anything down your throat than those who developed any other crop via any other method. Does that mean that someone is forcing tomatoes with extra disease resistance genes down anyone's throat? The problem is activist groups relying on consumer ignorance to make it seem that way. Sure, they've done their share of wrong to justify some sentiment against them, but with regards to this issue I have a hard time faulting Monsanto for being the target of a lie.

There is no justification for that other than to make GMOs look somehow different and dangerous, both of which are incorrect. A fact taken out of context is nothing but a deception. And contrary to the weasel words of the anti-GMO activists, this is not the same as 'hiding' information. That information is freely available, that one is too lazy to educate themselves does not imply it merits labeling.

Then you would be treating them incorrectly, and also, they do require safety testing, more than any other crop before they are released.

Then why did the opposition to GMO crops start with the Flavr Savr tomato, developed by a small company? Why is there opposition to Golden Rice, Honeysweet plum, Rainbow papaya, Arctic Apple, low GI wheat, aphid repelling wheat, and other GE crops developed by small companies, universities, NGOs, and government bodies? If anti-corporatism was the actual concenr, and not just a line of bullshit used to make the anti-science seem somewhat justifiable, then those non-big corporation alternatives GMO would be embraced, not opposed with the same if not more furor. This is not the case. The anti-corporation angle is nothing but a weak excuse to justify a belief that has no basis in reality.

I've never heard of your 'crippled plant' claim and have no idea how that would even be biologically possible to be a result of the transgenes presently used in corn.

You can also bake arsenic into bread, yet if someone out there was saying that baking caused every known aliment and then some and I responded that baking is safe and the anti-baking movement were unscientific, especially if they were prone to disregarding scientific consensus and replacing it with conspiracy and shoddy rat studies, I'd be perfectly justified. A thing is not safe simply because it is genetically engineered, that's an absurdity that no one is saying, but effectively, as far as what you are going to encounter and in the context of the GMO controversy, GMOs are safe.

And the problem is, like anti-vaxxers, the GMO denialist is going to continue to adapt, shift goal posts, and develop new and misleading claims. The GMO denialists aren't anti-GMO, oh no, they're pro safe GMO, just like how Jenny McCarthy claims to be pro-safe vaccine, not anti-vaccine, but somehow manages to find flaw in every vaccine. Same thing is happening here, with every type of GMO crop, they are going to find a flaw in, even if they have to mislead or lie to make that point.

What irks me is that so few people have the understanding to see these people for what they really are. Which isn't surprising, because how many people are involved in agriculture anymore? So when someone says that Bt crops are unsustainable because they create superpests, people think they are bad. No one points to the same thing happening in conventionally bred crops and says conventional breeding is wrong, because they do not know about those examples, so those GMOs seem bad.

Then the anti-biotech crowd points to herbicide resistant crops, and hey, doesn't a plant designed to withstand a chemical sound bad? But they conveniently neglect to mention that this enables a switch from less environmentally damaging weed control methods like soil degrading tillage. Instead, they harp on how the herbicides that go with those crops are increasing in usage, but don't seem to care to mention that they are replacing harsher herbicides.

Hit those points and they shift to the anti-corporate angle, which sounds reasonable enough by comparison.Naturally, they don't mention that the opposition to GMOs started with the Flavr Savr tomato, produced by a small company, or that there is also strong opposition to Golden Rice, which was developed by the International Rice Research Institute and could be saving the lives of countless children in developing countries. They even attack the Rainbow papaya, developed by the University of Hawai'i, that saved the Hawaiian papaya industry, and Greenpeace has a creationism grade stupid denial of it's success on their site. In Australia and France, GMO low GI wheat and virus resistant grapes developed by CSIRO and INRA (government bodies) was destroyed. You can't claim to be merely anti-corporate while also opposing all GMO work done by universities, NGOs, governments, and small companies. I've seen people oppose the Arctic Apple (non-browning apple developed by a Canadian company) on the basis of cross pollination (apples are asexually propagated), and GMO taro got banned in Hawai'i because of local politics.

My point is, change the developer, change the trait, change the gene, change whatever, and the opposition still stands. This is not logical by any sense. Let's call it what it is, a symptom of anti-science sentiment and a shift to pre-enlightenment naturalism. As it stands, of all the potential applications of GE crops, we only have a few traits in use due to the overly strict regulatory burden keeping out publicly developed GE crops, and that's absurd. No one is saying there aren't legitimate problems or issues, but you're sure as shit not going to get anything even remotely resembling an accurate picture from any anti-GMO group I've ever heard of. The parent poster is right. It's time we called this movement out for what it is, and threw it in the rubbish pile next to the denial of climate change, vaccinations, and evolution.

Disclaimer, I work with a publicly funded crop breeding program, so if you believe that there is a vast world wide conspiracy among virtually every agricultural researcher and plant scientist on earth to hide the secret dangerous truth about GMOs that you were clever enough to discover at by reading nonsensical bullshit and speculating on your couch (though strangely we shop at the same stores and eat the same foods as everyone else), you might want to disregard this post, but you were going to do that anyway.