Remember that the major plant patent acts were passed in the 30s and 70s, long before GE plants arived on the scene. I'd like to take scionwood of the apples SnowSweet and Suncrisp (both great apples if you ever get the chance to try them) from my university's orchard to graft onto my own apple tree. But I can't do that legally, as they are both under patent. Neither has been genetically engineered in any way. Fact is, we as a society have two choices. We can pour money into public programs, or we can let corporations do it. We have chosen the later.

I'll certainty agree about monoculture, but that is a problem of what you grow, not how you improve it. Genetic engineering is a plant improvement method, not a way of cultivation. Two different things. Any genetic conformity in major crops is due to conventional breeding, not the insertion of one or two transgenes (and wheat isn't GE by the way, at least not yet). Biodiversity should be embraced a lot more than it is, and this is something that should really be harped upon, but it isn't genetic engineering that's holding back crops like fonio, mashua, jujubes, yellowhorn, katuk, or pacay.

Same thing happens in non-GE crops. Google the recent story about wheat and hessian flies.

I absolutely agree, but like the potato blight, it was that way before GE, and it remained that way after. I'm not really sure how much it is though Believe it or not breeders do know the benefits of genetic diversity, and do seek to promote it, even in the mass produced hybrid lines, and farmers often grow more than one variety on their farms to hedge against things like pests or early frosts, ect. Anyway, if anything, gentic engineering introduces biodiversity into plant with the addition of extra genes.

Personally, I'd like to see more intraspecies biodiversity. Replace some corn with quinoa, teff, and sorghum, some apples with jujubes, pawpaws, and shipova, some potatoes with oca, yacon, and sunchoke, some lettice with chaya, salicornia, and New Zealand spinach, some mangoes with rose apples, salak, or marula, ect. ad nasium Unfortunately, with no market demand, biodiversity is unable to achieve its full potential. That's the problem. A lot of people talk about monoculture, but you have to live it too. Go buy something weird. Learn how to eat it. Support the farmers who actually grow those things. And, just think, what if genetic engineering could be used to give all these other species, which did not receive the hundreds of years of breeding conventional crops received, the traits needed to compete. With the current regulatory and funding situations this is impossiblle, but it is an interesting though.

Keep in mind that that is also how conventionally bred pest resistance works. All plants produce tons of insecticidal secondary metabolites. The cry genes are unique in that they're proteins, not secondary metabolites, and they have a very specific mode of action, binding to specific receptors in the guts of certain insects. Insect biodiversity typically goes up on farms using Bt GE crops.

I'd kind of doubt that, since the problem occurs in areas without GE crops under cultivation.

But you have to counter that with the no-till farming these crops have facilitated. Obviously, spraying ANYTHING is bad for the environment. But the question isn't 'what does no harm' so much as 'what does the least harm.' tillage degrades the soil, releases CO2, and causes fertilizer runoff into aquatic environments. Herbicide tolerant crops have gone a good way to decreasing the harm from tillage. For all the ill will directed toward them, they've actually been an environmental win. Also, the herbicides used are more benign than the ones previously used. Again, it isn't herbicide 1 vs no herbicide, but herbicide 1 vs herbicide 2.

That said, they need to be used better, with better rotations, and with additional resistances to herbicides with altering modes of action to prevent the resistant weed problems we're seeing now.

That's an interesting story, made all the more interesting by the fact that there is no genetically engineered wheat on the market. Just corn, soy, cottonseed, canola, alfalfa, sugarbeet, papaya, and summer squash. Whatever was affecting you, it wasn't genetic engineering. Nice lesson on the problem with personal anecdotes though.

You're right in that there are no easy answers. Science based agriculture is what we should aim for. Do what works, reject what doesn't. The problem with organic is that is is dogma based on the appeal to nature fallacy. No matter how safe or sustainable something is, if it is synthetic, or genetically engineered, it can never be organic. No matter what good points it has, it is still quackery. Kind of like naturopathy...while naturopathy says eat lots or produce, avoid fatty and sugary foods, get lots of excise (all good) it also is just naturalistic nonsense that rejects science based medicine, and as such, it is quackery. Organic agriculture is the exact same thing. Conventional on the other hand isn't even a specific thing. The future of food should take approaches from both 'organic' and 'conventional' practices. For example with genetic engineering, you can avoid pesticide inputs, but you still need a good rotation and IPM practices, and also other biological techniques, like intercropping, use of beneficial soil microbes, use of mating disruption, and full utilization of biodiversity (I cannot stress how important I feel biodiversity is) should be researched so that they can be better put into practice. A lot of the nuance gets lost in the organic vs conventional false dichotomy, which I think is mostly due to the dogma of the organic promoters and the fact that most people don't really understand either side.

But you would neither say that operating systems are therefore bad, or that Linux does not exist. This is why we need more publicly funded research, like the Rainbow papaya.

That point has more to do with widely sold hybrid lines than GE. GE just adds on one or two traits, the rest of the breeding (which is conventional, non-biotech) is what determines the vast majority of the plants characteristics. That highlights the importance of locally adapted varieties and biodiversity, but is more an argument against the seed industry than genetic engineering. If you wanted to blame any technique for that, it would be conventional breeding and hybridization, not the cry protein for insect resistance or epsps or bar gene for herbicide tolerance, as neither of those are going to mean anything with respect to climatic interactions. The best thing to do would be to improve local varieties, and that is what some projects seek to do, for example, that's what the Golden Rice people plan to do, and I know there's some people at Cornell doing that with Bt eggplant. I know Monsanto does that in the US and Europe, and I'd have to assume they do it to a degree in other parts of the world.

Here's a good piece on that I highly recommend reading for what the actual numbers say. It's a bit different than it is often made out to be. And when crops do fail, again, it is not the transgene responsible.

From what I hear (and keep in mind that I know a lot more about agronomy and horticulture than aquaculture, so this is hardly my area of knowledge here) the fish will be kept in tropical waters (well, in the mountains of Panama, so that if they do escape they will end up in tropical waters), which should prevent them from getting to wild populations even if they do escape (since salmon don't do well int tropical water), and the fish are all sterile females. I think they might be triploid too. Will this be enough? I personally don't know enough to say, like I said, not my field, I don't know anything about Panamanian aquaculture, but there are precautionary measures in place.

Perhaps for you the issue is not safety, you there are a lot of people who do believe that GE crops are harmful, and they still protest even non-corporate genetic engineering. For example, farmers growing the Rainbow papaya, and the researchers working on the the pest resistant potatoes at the University of Ghent in the Netherlands and the low GI wheat at CSIRO in Australia have all experienced vandalism problems, despite the non-corporate nature of those GE crops, and people have been hating on Golden Rice for years. You can take issue with IP issues if you want, but lets remember that, first, the legal issues are not exclusive to the technology (non-GE crops are patented too, and so are tons of other things out there, so lets not single out one subject), and second, for most people, they are against the technology itself, not just any IP issues.

Also, if you don't like the corporations, demand more publicly funded research and a more rational approval process. As it currently stands, only large corporation can jump through all the hoops to get their crops approved. If that were changed, we'd see a lot more university created GE crops on the market without the profit motive baggage, and that would be a good thing if you ask me.

Then you know nothing about plant physiology. There are thousands of chemicals, called secondary metabolites, out there designed to protect plants from pests. Have you ever stopped to wonder why plants aren't entirely consumed by the billions of insects that would love to eat them, or how conventional breeding produces pest resistance, or where organic pesticides come from? Consider horseradish as an example. You think the plant produces allyl isothiocyanate for the hell of it? Nope, that's a bona fide pesticide. It isn't just natural for plants to produce pesticides, it is ubiquitous. Some of them, even in plants you eat (like the crucifers) are quite toxic. AS for the 'toxin' put into GE crops, it is only a toxin to the Lepidoptera. It isn't active in the human gut (it only activates in alkaline environments) and it works by binding to specific receptors in the Lepidoptern gut. If there were no Lepidoptera, we wouldn't even know those proteins are 'toxins.' In fact, no LD50 has been discovered for it because, to mammals, its just another protein.

I disagree that it is being snuck, at least, any more than any other plant improvement method. There is a big difference between sneaking something in and not publicizing it. If you buy something, you don't know if it has been produced with selective breeding, hybridization, wide crosses, issue culture, grafting, somaclonal variation, embryo rescue, chemical and radiation mutagenesis, induced polyploidy, and anything else Most of the time, except for some fruit, you don't even know what variety of the crop you're eating (and there's going to be more difference between two varieties and a GE crop and its non-GE isogenic counterpart). None of those are labeled or advertised either, heck, most people don't even know what half those things are. With respect to labels, I don't see why genetic engineering should be any different. If you want to label something as being produced by somaclonal variation, or as being polyploid, or as coming from a grafted plant, or as being GE, or as not being any of those, that's fine. In fact, I'd like to see that. But if you don't want to, you shouldn't have to, any more that you should have to explicitly label things as kosher, halal, or vegan. And you could say the same of labeling for inputs. How many people know what pesticides, fertilizers, fungicides, plant growth regulators are on their food? Again, most people don't even know what a PGR is and are completely unaware of all the plant hormones sprayed on fruit.

Basically, any product, food or otherwise, could have more information given about it. But realistically, you need a cutoff for what is required. That cutoff should be determined by real concerns (like containing soy or tree nuts or other known allergens), not by simply wanting to know.

Also, it is fairly easy to tell what is and isn't GE. Corn, soy, cottonseed, canola, sugar beet, alfalfa, summer squash, and papaya (from Hawaii). If it has any of those in it, due to the way those commodity crops are processed, consider it GE unless it says otherwise. The only times you would be unsure are when you eat sweet corn or summer squash.

I see it like the 'evolution is just a theory' labels on textbooks. It is entirely true, evolution IS just a theory, but what does it imply? It implies that evolution is something to be distrusted, that it lacks credibility. Do the same thing thing with GE crops. Put the label on there, and it is true, but what does it imply. Hmm, why does this need a label?

Already done. If you look at the Rainbow papaya, you can save seeds from that GE crop. Granted, it is the only non-corporate GE crop approved for commercial cultivation, but the point is, it can be done. It is mostly regulation holding back other such crops from other universities and NGOs. The regulatory barriers to entry are so high that only corporations can get in, and that's a fault of the system that encourages this, not the technology. Also, farmers must sign the contract before they purchase the seed, and they're free to buy other seed if they choose. That they don't says to me that they feel it is worth it for the benefits they get. I personally don' find the situation to be optimal, but that's how it works in the absence of stronger publicly funded presence. And most of them would buy the seed again even without the contract; the seed is hybrid after all (meaning that while you get the benefits of hybrid vigor the first year, you lose genetic stability the next). Now, if we had apomixis traits, well, that would be cool (and it would shut down Monsanto's seed business overnight).

As for preventing genes to wild plants, I first must point out that no one seems concerned that mutations created by non-GE means escaping never bother anyone, and second, that was one of the reasons for the development of genetic use restriction technology, aka GURTs, or more commonly known as the oft despised terminator technology. If you want that, good luck, not after the way its been demonized.

And that's why it says 'while every GM crop must be individually evaluated as genetic engineering is a process not a product.' It'd be like saying 'vaccines are safe.' Obviously, just because you have some dead microbes in a syringe doesn't mean it is safe, therefore all vaccines must be tested individually. But we'd still have no problem stating that vaccines are generally safe. However, if a study finds that vaccines are safe, it is likely referring to the widespread fears that they cause autism or something. What does this study say about a new type of modification? Well, not necessarily anything, but it would hopefully cause people to be less paranoid about the technique used.

Ugh, some of those ads were reason enough to avoid them.