[Shinrei]

Just watched the "Eat This" episode of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" and they get into the topic of genetically modified foods and world hunger.

Here is the episode - the first part is on Americans and dieting, but the part I want to bring up for discussion starts at about 1:38



They present largely the pro-genetically modified crops and villify the organic movement as elitist.

This is the wiki on the man they bring into the picture on their side,Norman Borlaug

MrBorlaug

The criticism of Borlaug as quoted from wikipedia is as follows:

Quote

Criticisms and his view of criticsBorlaug's name is nearly synonymous with the Green Revolution, against which many criticisms have been mounted over the decades by environmentalists, nutritionists, progressives, and economists. Throughout his years of research, Borlaug's programs often faced opposition by people who consider genetic crossbreeding to be unnatural or to have negative effects.[25] Borlaug's work has been criticized for bringing large-scale monoculture, input-intensive farming techniques to countries that had previously relied on subsistence farming.[26] These farming techniques reap large profits for U.S. agribusiness and agrochemical corporations such as Monsanto Company and have been criticized for widening social inequality in the countries owing to uneven food distribution while forcing a capitalist agenda of U.S. corporations onto countries that had undergone land reform.[27]

Other concerns of his critics and critics of biotechnology in general include: that the construction of roads in populated third-world areas could lead to the destruction of wilderness; the crossing of genetic barriers; the inability of crops to fulfill all nutritional requirements; the decreased biodiversity from planting a small number of varieties; the environmental and economic effects of inorganic fertilizer and pesticides; the amount of herbicide sprayed on fields of herbicide-resistant crops.[28]

Borlaug dismissed most claims of critics, but did take certain concerns seriously. He stated that his work has been "a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia".[29] Of environmental lobbyists he stated, "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things".[30]

I'm afraid I haven't delved into this issue myself, so I'm just operating from this "Bullshit" episode I just watched, so I'm interested in hearing your opinions and any links to other information that might prove enlightening.

[Thel Akai]

Disclaimer: I haven't watched that video.

So I would just add my general opinion about genetically modified foods.

1) I don't see a problem with genetic modifications as such, e.g. giving a vegetable a gene to resist salt better, for example.
2) What I have big problems with is Monsanto's approach which is basically to genetically modify crops to be resistant to herbicides, the idea being that then you can use _more_ herbicide to get rid of weeds. Monsanto sell herbicide as well as crop seeds, so there's a terrible wrongness to the whole approach.
3) They also make crops with built-in BT genes, that is, the plant produce some insecticide by itself. As this gets widespread you suddenly get resistance (in insects) to what was never a problem before. In other words, it backfires.
4) Finally there's the same company's "proprietary" approach to crops and seeds, which is basically about making it illegal for the farmer to do what the farmers have done for ten thousand years: Use seeds from this year's harvest to seed next year's crops. And also their tendency to sue every farmer in the area of one of their customers, simply because seeds fly by wind from one field to another. They even win in court.

To conclude: I don't have problems with genetically modified food. I have enormous problems with the way it's being applied.

This post has been edited by Thel Akai: 05 January 2011 - 03:43 PM

[Gothos]

On #4 - more than that - they have developed, iirc, corn seeds that are unable to grow in the second generation.

That having been said, we should really separate the idea of genetic engineering (I mean, hey, nature didn't grow us airplanes - we built them ourselves; let's see what we can do to other things when you put intent and rationality into random chance's place) and Mosanto's shennanigans. They've got that vibe of being evil overlords, but that's hardly unique in today's world. Making re-using seeds illegal reminds me of the music industry and the general illegal status of file sharing, only worse.

[Adjutant Stormy~]

Honestly, the problem is not that genetic engineering of food-crops is wrong, but it's extremely capital intensive, and so it is corporately driven (which means Monsanto). And Monsanto's very easy to hate (especially with highly motivated/dirty hippies). And profit driven.

[Cause]

The world owes more thanks to Mr Borlaug then perhaps any other man! There is to my knowledge still not one study that shows damage to caused to people who eat GM food or to the environment. If you look at the future trend of population growth vs the growth in the food supply GM food is the only answer. The majority of criticism about GM food is unfounded in reason.

[D'iversify]

Considering that the world produces more than enough food to sufficiently feed its current population, the problem is distribution not necessarily need to grow more. Though, obviously the world population is expected to double within the this century and if GM crops help produce higher per capita yields so as not to necessitate even greater land area usage, that would be helpful. Of course, as said above, Monsanto don't necessarily inspire confidence with regards to the proper utilisation of this technology.

[Gothos]

D, on 06 January 2011 - 09:35 AM, said:

Considering that the world produces more than enough food to sufficiently feed its current population, the problem is distribution not necessarily need to grow more. Though, obviously the world population is expected to double within the this century and if GM crops help produce higher per capita yields so as not to necessitate even greater land area usage, that would be helpful. Of course, as said above, Monsanto don't necessarily inspire confidence with regards to the proper utilisation of this technology.

We only produce more because of GE and other improvements to the process. Without GE and fertilizers we'd only be able to feed 2/3 of us. It's already saving billions every day.

[D'iversify]

Gothos, on 06 January 2011 - 01:59 PM, said:

D, on 06 January 2011 - 09:35 AM, said:

Considering that the world produces more than enough food to sufficiently feed its current population, the problem is distribution not necessarily need to grow more. Though, obviously the world population is expected to double within the this century and if GM crops help produce higher per capita yields so as not to necessitate even greater land area usage, that would be helpful. Of course, as said above, Monsanto don't necessarily inspire confidence with regards to the proper utilisation of this technology.

We only produce more because of GE and other improvements to the process. Without GE and fertilizers we'd only be able to feed 2/3 of us. It's already saving billions every day.

Yes, but my point was that current global yield could accommodate a couple more billion people without the need to further extend current cultivation if distribution was more even. Of course, making distribution more even if easier said than done.

As far as I'm aware, it's fertilisers which are doing the main bulk of the extra work, not GM at the moment, but that's probably more due to GM's potential not being fully realised. I'm not opposed to GM, just believe it should be more regulated and kept out of the hands of swindlers. Fertilisers do a LOT of environmental damage, e.g. algal blooms, and GM may be preferrable in some circumstances as long as its own possible impact on the local environment is first scrutinised.

[Soulessdreamer]

Humans have been genetically modding flora and fuana for years the only differance is that technology has allowed us to tinker faster and specifically target and alter gene strands rather than combining and hoping for the desired results.

Technology allows us to produce new filums practacally overnight instead of over (our) generations. and that is what scares some people. My fear is not of GM research but of careless, rushed, unsupervised GM research done by people who do not understand the dangers and seek only profit.

Creating sterile crops makes sense in prelimanary stages of testing.

Every mouthful of food we ingest today is a product of gene modding going back hundreds if not thousands of years and we are only just now learning of problems relating to these mods as we apply them on a world wide scale.

While there are serious concerns with ungoverned GM research which need to be addressed most of the press coming from greenies is uninformed or blatent scaremongering

TTFN

[Mentalist]

haven't watched the vid either.

general thoughts on the matter:

I don't have issues with GE, as long as it's tested properly, to ensure I don't get a daily dose of something that will 20 years down the road turn out to be a carcinogen, or some crap.

there's a number of criticisms of Green Revolution, primary one being that while it did a lot to improve technology level and efficiency, economycally it was an abyssmal failure, b/c it was accompanied by IMF pressuring the participating recipient countries to abandon subsistence farming in favour of large-scale inedible cash-crop production. And due to corruption of governments in those regions, as well as the way international market works, actual economic benefit in a lot of cases has been reduced to almost nothing.

Oh, and coming from a family that's lived off the land for generations, I find what's being done with copyrights on seeds and such inhumanly wrong. thankfully, my grandmother's neck of the woods hasn't been affected by that yet. but of course, I may be biased in this case.

If GE was run my governmnents, i'd be cool with it. the current model, where most research is being done by private firms who'd do anything to maiximize profits makes me vary.

[Adjutant Stormy~]

Honestly, if the production problem is in fact a transport problem, then it will stabilize eventually.

This is a brutal thing to say, but the regions that cannot sustain their own populations, and cannot purchase their grain, will starve themselves into population equilibrium.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Or until that fish's value on the open market drops below the subsistence level.

[worry]

Does a fish covered in oil go up or down in value?

[Soulessdreamer]

The problem with growing crops in those countries that are facing shortages is climate.

The crops either did not evolve to grow in those environs and do not florish or destroy the environs after only a couple of harvests. Many claim the answer is gene modding the crops (and all the attendant proffits) but the simple truth is with the application of readily available technology, climate can be removed from the equation in a wide variety of crops.

Of course this would require a one off capital investment in those countries infrastructure that the western countries world bank and aid agencies wont fund because actually solving the problem would reduce there cash flow.

TTFN

[stone monkey]

So the upshot of all this is that GM isn't the problem so much as capitalism. But that's pretty much always been the case.

[Tapper]

I dunno. I guess you can never do it right, can you?

You find a way to maximize crop yield, and you drive the poor third world countries out of the one market they might get competitive in. You don't, somewhere, people will starve. Probably the same guys you'd drive out of competition if you did. Meanwhile, we empty out the seas (which are free animals) and animal movements try to get the millions of pigs and chickens free that we keep locked in the tiniest cages possible... but if that livestock were to run free, we'd have no room to accomodate it. Meh.

Personally, I think that the idea to tinker with crop genetics is the next logical step after a lot of the innovations we've had through the centuries. Just don't touch the damned flavour.
Technology is ready for it, well, I guess we better apply it. Just as long as we keep plenty of backstock of the kind of crop we use now in case there is some failing or inbred crop disease, and to sate the people who want to eat 'real' stuff (as real as it can get).

And yeah, I guess eventually, we'd all be much better off if we moved most of the crop productions that don't have better uses for their land - but that's where capitalism kicks in.

[Cold Iron]

Quote

Joel Salatin: The Politics of Food
03 Dec 2010, 11:00

American farmer Joel Salatin, the star of the documentary Food Inc, has become a "pin up boy" for the growing food "re-localisation" movement. On a recent visit to Canberra, he gives his take on food politics after a lifetime of experience in natural and profitable farming.

Salatin came to prominence with his ideas about creating abundance on a family farm. His methods include learning how to mimic nature and arrange the facets of farm life so they don't operate as independent operations, but rather a system of "intertwined cycles".

Disregarding conventional wisdom, the Salatins planted trees, built huge compost piles, dug ponds, moved cows daily with portable electric fencing, and utilised portable sheltering systems to produce all their animals on perennial prairie polycultures.

Salatin believes we're now living through an age of a "food inquisition", not unlike the religious inquisition of 500 years ago, where the powers behind industrialised agriculture and food production are putting heretical farmers like him "on the rack".

In this talk, organised by Milkwood Permaculture in association with Slow Food Canberra, Salatin lays out twelve false assumptions peddled by the "inquisitors" which sustainable farming methods counter.

Joel Salatin has been featured in Michael Pollan's book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma", and in the films "Fresh" and "Food Inc". He is also the author of six books including "Family Friendly Farming", "Salad Bar Beef", and his latest, "Everything I Want To Do is Illegal - war stories from the local food front". He is a fulltime farmer of the highly successful Polyface Farms, and winner of the Heinz International Award for Environmental Leadership.

[Soulessdreamer]

Tapper, on 09 January 2011 - 09:47 PM, said:

Personally, I think that the idea to tinker with crop genetics is the next logical step after a lot of the innovations we've had through the centuries. Just don't touch the damned flavour.

I agree it is the next step. It just needs to be done responsibly.

And as to flavour I say bacon or cheeseburger flavoured brocoli would be a good thing.

Tapper, on 09 January 2011 - 09:47 PM, said:

And yeah, I guess eventually, we'd all be much better off if we moved most of the crop productions that don't have better uses for their land - but that's where capitalism kicks in.

Well you could recondition disused factories or even skyscapers into efficent climate controled "farms" and grow crops in urban centres anywhere in the world. As well as rooftop gardens and green walls you could have a level or two of hydroponics to filter and clean air and provide fresh greens to the cafes salad bar.

TTFN

[cerveza_fiesta]

Having some experience in the spray industry and exposure to the industrial side of things (ie the spray and spray product side) I'll comment from my point of view.

Thel Akai, on 05 January 2011 - 03:43 PM, said:

2) What I have big problems with is Monsanto's approach which is basically to genetically modify crops to be resistant to herbicides, the idea being that then you can use _more_ herbicide to get rid of weeds. Monsanto sell herbicide as well as crop seeds, so there's a terrible wrongness to the whole approach.
3) They also make crops with built-in BT genes, that is, the plant produce some insecticide by itself. As this gets widespread you suddenly get resistance (in insects) to what was never a problem before. In other words, it backfires.
4) Finally there's the same company's "proprietary" approach to crops and seeds, which is basically about making it illegal for the farmer to do what the farmers have done for ten thousand years: Use seeds from this year's harvest to seed next year's crops. And also their tendency to sue every farmer in the area of one of their customers, simply because seeds fly by wind from one field to another. They even win in court.

These are critical points and my main objection to the whole concept of GM crops. Monsanto position themselves through your concepts 2) 3) and 4) as the sole supplier for all growing and crop treatment needs.

Basically as a farmer you buy seed that you can't resupply yourself (or is GM'd so it can't resupply itself) that is resistant to herbicides, enabling higher doses of the herbicides they supply. Oh, and the crop slowly builds up a resistance level in the usual insect pests, requiring higher doses of their insecticides down the road.

Of course in the product literature, the above is spun as:

• Lower losses from herbicide applications
• Protects naturally against a range of typical pests without the need for insecticide application
• Quality-Controlled, guaranteed seed supply

I agree that the whole set up is extremely sinister, but it is designed to operate on the scale of decades (especially the insecticide resistance part) so that by the time we see the effects, the only people organized and prepared enough for the lawsuit is Monsanto.

Gothos, on 05 January 2011 - 04:21 PM, said:

... Mosanto's shennanigans. They've got that vibe of being evil overlords, but that's hardly unique in today's world...

Doesn't make it just though.

Cause, on 06 January 2011 - 09:31 AM, said:

The world owes more thanks to Mr Borlaug then perhaps any other man! There is to my knowledge still not one study that shows damage to caused to people who eat GM food or to the environment. If you look at the future trend of population growth vs the growth in the food supply GM food is the only answer. The majority of criticism about GM food is unfounded in reason.

True, saying GM crops causing damage to people or directly causing harm to the environment is unfounded. You can't stop at that though. You gotta consider the economic harm (above) to farmers, the way GM is peddled around the world and in developing countries, and indirect environmental factors.

As time progresses you will see studies on resistance levels rising in pests on GM crops. Despite the lack of documentation specifically on GM crops, It is a very well documented fact that trace doses (ie under-dosage) of chemical insecticides builds resistance in insect pests rather than killing the population. Same thing as antibiotic resistance in humans...underdoses or incomplete doses do more harm than good.

This post has been edited by cerveza_fiesta: 10 January 2011 - 05:01 PM