Idiotic Enviornmentalist Quote of the Day
August 26th, 2008
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“an industrialised farming system will continue to fail people and the environment around the world”.
- Mike Childs, Campaign Director for Friends of the Earth, speaking of the use of genetically modified crops and modern farming techniques in Africa.
My god, the nerve of this guy! Sitting in the EU with food of plenty and enjoying the finest at whatever ‘organic’ boutique he shops at! “industrialized farming” failing people? Ahem, sir, take a look around you. Here in the “industrialized” world we farm with “industrial” methods like fertilizers, tractors, irrigation, pest control and centralized farming and let me ask, when was the last time you went hungry? I mean really hungry, not just missed your lunch hungry but so hungry you weren’t sure that you’d even live more than a few more days.
Actually, it was once not so uncommon to have real worries about the food supply in what is not the industrial world. Even as recently as the 1800’s areas of the United States, Western Europe and elsewhere were subject to occasional famines which caused death by starvation in the lower classes. These could occur due to drought, a large insect population or just a lower than expected harvest. In Ireland, where I still have family, the memories of the potato famine are still very acute. The famine was caused by a fungus that infected the potato plants and spread in the mid 1800’s. Later a similar famine would ravage Scotland, where potatoes were also a staple crop.
Today the fungus or “blight” (Phytophthora infestans) that caused the original famine is still around and crops up from time to time. I happened to be at my cousin’s home when he noticed some signs of the fungus on the young potato sprouts. Today, the answer is simple: Dig out the plant in question and douse those around it with readily avaliable fungicide. I suppose you can call that “industrial.”
This may not need to be continued, however, because new genetically modified potatoes have been developed that are resistant to fungal infections and thus not requiring treatment with fungicide and careful monitoring like traditional potatoes.
Now lets just review something.
This is what industrial farming looks like to the end consumer:
So much for a “failure”
And this is non-industrial:
Of course, that’s only a picture of non-industrial farming on a GOOD year, because if it were a bad year, instead of the kid being busy toiling in the fields (rather than going to school or something), he’d likely be dead. Seriously, that is how “non-industrial” or “subsistence” farming really is: you’re only one bad growing season away from starvation and the life of those who live this way is so dominated by the constant effort to grow their food that they never have any chance at an education, at upward mobility or at anything beyond a life of toil and being a slave to their own needs.
There is something especially angering of the assclowns at an organization like “Friends of the Earth” who think that its their job to tell others, especially those in desperate need of better technology and methods of growing food, what they can have and to declare the methods that have enabled them to live in a land of plenty a “failure.”
As for the enviornmental price, there is certainly some from industrial farming. Fertilizers can cause runoff, especially when overused and used without preventative measures of runoff control. Insecticides can unintentionally kill beneficial insects. Irrigation can reduce fresh water sources. However, it should also be noted that it has vast enviornmental benefits. For one thing, the use of fertilizer allows the same fields to be reused, with depleted nutrients replenished, rather than continued “slash and burn” agriculture, where new fields are cleared as old ones are depleted. Higher crop yields are possible with irrigation and fertilizer, reducing the land required, often dramatically. Artificial fertilizers may also require less tilling and thus provide for more effecient soil management. And of course, genetically engineered crops can reduce the need for pesticides, fertilizer, irrigation and at the same time offer greater crop yield and security.
I really don’t know how someone like Mr. Childs can sleep at night or look in the mirror without thinking about the implications of his group and their efforts. For so very many in the world this is not a matter of theory or academic debate, it’s as real as the back breaking labor they face every day and the threat of death that is constantly only a locus swarm away. One of the strawman arguments that is made by those like Childs is that “GM crops can’t feed the world.” No, they can’t. Not alone. They can help; they can help a lot, but they’re only part of the equation. GM crops, mechanized plowing, irrigation, modern soil management, properly used synthetic fertilizers, insect control and other such “industrial” methods, when used together, can feed the world – easily.
For you, however, Mr Childs, No amount of irrigation will wash the blood from your hands. Smile, you’ve got plenty to eat.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Enviornment, Not Even Wrong, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 26th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
One thing I like about this blog a lot is that you appreciate reality. The whole ‘organic’ thing and the idea that you can feed africa by having this idealist communal “living in harmony with mother earth” bull**** or that it’s all a matter of getting people to accept what earth gives them is coming from a perspective of generally rich college students, academic types, politicians, activists and alike who have probably never held a real job and certainly have never gotten their hands dirty.
Reality works differently and that is something lost on those who live in an idealistic/academic/theoretical world where they talk about values and social philosophies because they don’t need to worry about more direct issues like getting food.
Those who are hungry in places like Africa should be allowed to use whatever technology can help them and neither their governments nor ours should try to stop it. We should encourage exports of fertilizer and agricultural equipment. If you want to offer them “foreign aid” then the best thing is to teach them to farm better and provide the supplies rather than the food itself. Hopefully they may get to the point where they don’t need to be given it anymore and they can buy it using the revenue from better agriculture. Gee what a concept!
The one thing is I’d support export laws that have some controls to make sure that companies don’t get too exploitive by backing third world countries into signing exclusivity deals or locking them into restrictions. Also, make sure there is some kind of structure for responsible deployment so that those who are ignorant of the proper use of this stuff don’t go plow the fields into dust. Other than that though, I’d say all of the stuff they call ‘industrial’ should be employed in areas with poverty.
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August 26th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
This fool reminds me of this passage from “Southey’s Colloquies,” by 19th Century British historian T.B. Macauley.
“Now in the mind of Mr. Southey reason has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumor does not always prove a fact, that a single fact, when proved, is hardly foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than “scoundrel” and “blockhead”.”
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August 26th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I’d like to make a suggestion: There is still a lot of gas flaring in parts of Africa, especially Nigeria and East Africa like the Somalia area. Under pressure from outside some of the governments there have said they want most of the flaring cut down in the next few years. Nigeria has a ban on it as of this year but they’re way behind on stopping it. See here:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5327/is_200710/ai_n21296571
The governments should mandate the construction of nitrogen fertilizer plants to use the methane for power and as feedstock for ammonia for fertilizers which would be produced cheaply for the continent.
I see a few small problems with this however:
I’m sure the funding is there or could be there from the aid programs that are always being sent to Africa but its hard to be sure it would end up building plants and not lining someone’s pockets.
The chemical companies that produce nitrogen fertilizer (often the same as the gas companies) may try to block any competition for low cost fertilizer
The ecotards would stand in the way.
Anything useful like building a nitrogen plant to stop flaring, provide fertilizer and get locals a job and a product they can export is sure to be a problem for the green bastards of the world.
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August 26th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
I am frightened by any solution that begins with the phrase “The governments should mandate.” It isn’t that I disagree with this specific plan, but in general that phrase causes a lot more problems than it solves.
For example: “The government should mandate that 25% of all electrical power should come from solar by 2015.”
If it really makes sense, someone will do it for the opportunity to get rich.
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August 26th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Chuck said:
They have already mandated that the flaring be stopped. The problem with opening a plant in Africa with entirely private funds is that A) The area is dirt poor B) the risk is extremely high that it will not work due to the volatility of the region and the fact that everyone is so poor
Africa has consumed nearly a trillion dollars of aid since the 1960’s and they’re still all starving. The governments of the region should start considering some kind of solution that involves the resources they already have (gas being thrown away for example) and not just handing bags of rice to everyone and then wondering they they’re still hungry after the bag runs out.
If they’re going to get more western aid (which they no doubt will) it should go to something useful and potentially capable of turning things around.
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August 26th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
“No amount of irrigation will wash the blood from your hands”
This is epic. Right there – that’s the message that should be spread to these groups.
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August 26th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
What a horrible thing to say! How is the blood on his hands? just because he wants to have African people use farming methods that are sustainable and won’t poison the land and themselves? Because he wants them to do things the right way and not rely on destructive ways or ways they could never afford or make money for big companies that would push GM seeds on these people to let them keep starving while they go make money? He wants them to have real food security and end hunger not go in the wrong direction and do things a better way. He wants them to use organic methods which actually produce results and not just pollution. It is the healthy way.
Friends of the Earth is just that and they understand that we rely on earth to live and if we hurt the earth we will hurt ourselves. People care for the earth and earth cares for them that is how it works and that is what FOE wants. That would be a world without starvation.
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August 26th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Julie, I will tell you why the blood is on his hands: Every day that this debate continues as to whether they should or shouldn’t allow for GM crops or seeds in the aid programs or for purchase by entities in Africa. Every kilogram of fertilizer that is denied the people of Africa. Every pound, eruo or dollar that is spent on some good PR campaign to teach organic farming when it could be used to teach them how to use modern methods. Every day that is spent in argument over insect asides instead of using them: Every one of them people die.
There are people dead now, dead of starvation, and some of them would be alive if we had been 100% in favor of sending modern agricultural methods and products as aid to starving countries a year ago. There are thousands of people who are dead because one year ago instead of approving it it was held up. In one year from now, there will be thousands more people who will be dead and they would have been alive if we didn’t sit here arguing about this and just approved the use of the most effective methods.
If the governments of Africa and those who send them aid had approved this people would be alive. You stopped them. He stopped them. It’s not too late for other people, but if you don’t shut up and stop lobbying so hard to stop it it will be.
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August 26th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Jullie said:
Most Africans use what you would consider sustainable low tech methods – that’s why they watch their children starve during famines. Their methods do not yield a sufficient surplus, or are elastic enough to supply food when the weather doesn’t cooperate. It’s just that simple.
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August 26th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Jullie:
We all here want African people to use farming methods that are sustainable. We disagree with you only about which methods those are. Using logic, facts, and reason, people here came to the conclusion that Mr. Childs is pushing methods which will lead to death, starvation, practical slavery of entire groups of people, reduce medical care, reduced water quality, and vastly reduced quality of live for hundreds of millions of people.
We feel that these are bad things.
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August 26th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
To say that the industrial farming system is environmentally damaging might have something to to but to say that it is a failure and that it is not the way to feed a large number of people with plenty to spare is insanity. Just go to the super market and you will immediately see how successful it is. I mean we have so much damn food we throw it away when it’s a little overripe or stale.
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August 27th, 2008 at 2:21 am
I do think RBR1978 has a point. As long as a stupid debate is holding up things or the enviornmental lobby is making African governments unsure whether they should go for useful farming procedures or whatever more people are dying than need to be and this is every day. If not for groups like FOE and Greenpeace then these countries would probably have gone for permitting these long ago but the whole thing is stuck because of the lobbying and confusion about it caused by their protests. And it’s not academic. People are dying because of this and they would not be otherwise.
Maybe it seems less real because you can’t tell which individual would have lived or wouldn’t for sure and you don’t know what the degree of success would be if it had gone all the way. I’m sobered though to think about it. Keep the green revolution out of the developing world and yes, indeed, there is blood on your hands.
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August 27th, 2008 at 2:49 am
Much as I detest the green idiots, I don’t think they can really be blamed for the perpetual poverty in Africa. African hunger is a failure on two fronts. It is a failure by the African governments to provide a stable, economically viable enviornment due to their corruption and other problems. It is also a failure on the part of the West which has spent countless billions on African humanitarian aid and hunger relief in the past decades and yet has administered this foreign aid in a manner which has resulted in very little real improvement.
In general I’m about a free market and not for handouts, but so many areas are just dirt poor that I do think they’re in need of some kind of jumpstart to get it going, and I hope that the governments of the world that are trying to help them can get their act together.
The crap the greens do blocking GM food exports or trying to limit agricultural aid to organic-only crap is not helping. It does not help at all, but still it’s not like the whole situation can be blamed on them.
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August 27th, 2008 at 3:49 am
I remember reading on an anti-capitalist* blog (http://mutualist.blogspot.com) the suggestion that low-tech subsistence farming is actually more productive per acre than industrial farming (albeit far less productive per man-hour). They suggested that the real cause of Third World hunger was that the peasants were driven onto marginal land by colonial rulers or local kleptocrats, so that the best land could be sold to corporate agribusiness.
*Not anti-free market though. In fact it claims that almost all multinational corporations are utterly dependent on the state, as their business models rely either on patents (pharmaceuticals, electronics), copyrights (music, movies, software) or direct subsidies (agribusinesss, armaments).
It also agreed with George Monbiot’s anti-aviation stance, but claimed that aviation is a government created problem because airports are built with taxpayers’ money on land acquired by eminent domain, and because airliner manufacturers cannot stay in business without subsidies (often in the form of the government paying inflated prices for military aircraft produced by the same companies).
Any rebuttals
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August 27th, 2008 at 4:28 am
I am of the opinion that the root cause of Africa’s continued agony is in fact Tribalism. The third world countries which have, over the past several decades, elevated themselves into the first economic rank of nations are mainly those which already had a unified political culture in their history prior to modern development which served them as a template to direct their loyalties towards a modern state. It seems to be a necessary precondition in most cases.
In Africa, even today the dominant social entity to which loyalty is owed is the tribe. This was demonstrated vividly and tragically last year in Kenya, which was previously considered to be a rare African success story. What was the cause of the civil unrest in the wake of the election? The ruling party lost the election but refused to relinquish power because the incoming party had different tribal alleigences. Generally speaking, if your tribe’s party is in power, then as a matter of course the people in your tribe will get the lion’s share of government attention and funding, and everyone else can go hang (unfortunately too often literally).
This situation isn’t unique to Africa. Here in Australia we had a governmant agency called ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders Commission) in charge of allocating the funds the government set aside for the welfare of the aboriginal people. Just so the process could be seen to have great input from the stakeholders, many if not most of the commission staff were themselves aboriginal. Can you guess what happened?
Not to leave you all in suspense, it turned out that in the minds of “the aboriginal people” there was no such catagory as “the aboriginal people”. There was however, considerable loyalty towards the particular tribes the senior staff hailed from, and thus a minority of Australian aboriginals received almost all of the funding. That Commission was disbanded and replaced some years ago for that reason.
I’m not going to call this process corruption, because those folks were just doing exactly what their culture mandated them to do: Look after their own. Until African cultures manage to shift the focus of their loyalties to the nation-state rather than their kin-group, these problems are not going to go away.
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August 27th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Given that most African countries are not nation-states at all, but artificial entities drawn on a map by the colonialists, that may be more difficult than it sounds.
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August 27th, 2008 at 9:48 am
George Carty said:
Yeah, I know. This just underscores the magnitude of the task, really. Still, other regions of the world have managed it eventually. At one time Scotland wasn’t much different from Africa today, what with Clan alleigences. It took the Scots quite a while to feel at one with themselves.
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August 27th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Mmmph. Having “an organic option” is fine in the first world where we’re already rolling around in plenty. That’s great and that’s groovy even if the term itself drives me nuts. (Organic tomatoes. What, as opposed to the metal kind?)
To get to that stage, though, you need to be rich enough – whether monetarily or in terms of having a food surplus – to afford lower productivity farms. Right now, the main issue ought to be growing as much food as is humanly possible on land that’s hard to work. Once people aren’t starving to death in droves is a fine time to start fiddling with how the food’s produced. But the hunger could be ended quickly, and people who stand in the way of that are, as you accurately point out, bloodstained.
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August 27th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
A few years ago, before the ethanol sillyness and commodity investment craze, the cost of corn was 1-2$ per bushel; that is 56 lb, 25 kg. A person working the US legally mandated minimum wage could get their own weight in corn in an hours work. It was so cheap it made financial sense, if you were living in the corn belt and didn’t have to deal with high transport costs, to directly burn corn for warmth in a pellet oven(yes, some people actually did do this); not the stover, not the left overs cobs, the part you actually eat.
Calling conventional farming a failure is to jump the couch; bat-**** crazy.
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August 27th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Were the Highland clans really relevant though, given that the Lowlanders traditionally held almost all the power in Scotland?
Maybe the African tribes need to part of some larger empire (though hopefully, one a bit less exploitative than the European colonial empires)? That might be better than trying to shoehorn the continent into a nation-state model (which would probably be unworkable without massive ethnic cleansing)…
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August 27th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I forgot to mention, but there are other, more fundamental reasons for sub-Saharan Africa’s backwardness. Trade helps to bring down barriers between different groups of people, but under pre-industrial conditions this was almost impossible in Africa. Animal-drawn vehicles are rendered almost useless by the tsetse fly, and the rivers aren’t much use either. It was sleeping sickness which prevented the Boers settling north of the Limpopo.
Africa is essentially a giant mesa, so most of the rivers have waterfalls or rapids near the coast which make them un-navigable. Many of the rivers also U-turn rather than penetrating deeply inland (the Niger, for example). The tropical latitudes mean there are no alpine snowfields to even out the river flow, making water levels wildly seasonal, and there are almost no natural harbours either (Africa has one third of the coastline of Europe, to serve three times the land area).
Worse still, since humans evolved in Africa, the human diseases are far more virulent in Africa than in the rest of the world. That’s why until the discovery of quinine, European colonialism was restricted to a few coastal outposts, without true control of their hinterlands.
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August 27th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Soylent said:
Well, the current federal minimum wage is $6.55, but most states have it a bit higher. So it’d be something like 6.55-7.25 (USD)
The price of corn is the highest it’s ever been. It’s not close to 6 USD a bushell although it was a bit higher a few months ago – thanks in part to the ethanol stupidity.
Even still though, now you’re talking two and a half hours or so for a person to get their weight in corn? Still a damn cheap deal.
On a very low income the average person can afford to eat reasonably well in the US and most industrial countries. The issue of a “living wage” has more to do with housing, transportation, healthcare and such. Food is cheap and plentiful and if you are really really hard up you can get food stamps or go to charaties.
You’re right it’s freakin crazy to call industrial agriculture a failure. It’s mind boggling how cheap food has become by comparison to past centuries.
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August 27th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Just wow. If I read the link correctly then there are people who are fighting to stop things like fertilizer and GM crops from being part of the African agricultural aid programs and they want the aid programs to be ONLY based on what they think is natural enough and organic enough?
They want to get African countries, some with starving people to BAN the use of GM crops? To BAN their import? They’re standing in the way of their adoption in Africa?
How can anyone justify that? How could they live with themselves? Even if adopting GM crops couldn’t end starvation completely and feed everyone, how can they justify it if they could feed even a few more? How can they do that without feeling some kind of guilt? That’s just horrible! I’m dumbfounded!
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August 28th, 2008 at 6:26 am
As long as we’re on the subject, let us not forget about this incident:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2371675.stm
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3317
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August 28th, 2008 at 10:46 am
My god! Clearly the government of Zambia was influenced by the radical elements that have lobbied so hard to cast so much doubt on GM food and have used very effective scare tactics. They have managed to make the whole subject become associated with “danger” and “poison” and it’s gotten to the point where the government of that country fell for it and thus people died!
Look, I’m an American and we have a fair amount of GM crops here. Most of them are not that heavily modified but they’ve all been around since the early 1990’s. It’s no big deal. You can’t tell the difference. I just ate some waffles for breakfast and for all I know they may have had GM crop based material in them. ITS NO BIG DEAL.
I think the thing in the US is that the whole genetically engineered crop thing managed to take hold here before the greens got so bothered by it and started trying to stop it. Once people realize it’s no big deal it’s hard to go back.
Also, I should add that all crops are genetically modified, the only difference is that it is by random mutation and many generations of selective breeding. The “GM crops” just accomplish the same thing faster and with a greater degree of control.
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August 28th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Not only do we grow GM grain in North America, we irradiate (!!) it to prevent spoilage before sending it to Africa in aid programs.
Obviously a plot to kill all the black people there.
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August 28th, 2008 at 11:34 am
DV82XL said:
Aren’t all crops irradiated? Or do they not have cosmic rays outside North America?
Irradiation is a stupid issue anyway. It doesn’t change the food except perhaps to break down a little bit of the proteins that break down naturally anyway but that has no impact on anything. It’s just a safe way of disinfecting the food. It does the same thing as traditional heat-based pasteurization but the big difference is that it does LESS breaking down of the chemistry of the food, it doesn’t reduce nutrition, it doesn’t cook the food and it can be done in any kind of container without it exploding from heat or something. That’s all it is is a better way of pasteurizing food.
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August 28th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Engineering Edgar said:
At current levels for grain treatment, approximately 1 kGy, no damage is done to dry cereal protein structure.
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September 6th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Finrod said:
Good god indeed. And you’ll note that in the BBC article, agriculture minister Mundia Sikatana invokes the “precautionary principle” like he’s waving a cross to keep the vampires away.
Never mind that, as the very same article points out, there are not enough donated resources to feed even half the 2.5 million people who are already starving in Zambia thanks to drought. In what bizarre alternate reality is it okay to let over a million people just die of starvation because of superstitious fears based on nothing but a lack of scientific understanding? It’s not like it’s contaminated with arsenic or something! This isn’t the West trying to force spoiled grain on people, this is environmentalist paranoia causing people in power to reject abundance and leave the common people in starvation and poverty. IT’S JUST GRAIN, PEOPLE. IT’S OKAY. YOU CAN EAT IT.
And since the grain they won’t touch is already there, someone’s going to have to pay to haul it all away. This is an international shame.
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September 6th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Yeah I agree that was disgraceful “precautionary principle?” My god! Tell a group of starving people that you have food that plenty of people around the world have eaten and all signs indicate is perfectly safe and then tell them “We’re just not 100% certain that it won’t maybe trigger allergies in someone and some researchers suggest that there could be unforeseen health effects, although this is really in question.. we think it’d be better not to give it to you”
My god, even if the stuff had a 10% chance of killing you outright, it would still be something most would take given that they’re starving anyway! It’s crazy! These bastards actively lobbying the governments of Africa that these crops are so dangerous that it’s preferable to have people starve than eat donated (FREE) food that is right freakin there!
I don’t know who brought it up, but grain is made out of the same stuff GM grain is: Water, cellulose, glucose, dextrose, salts, a little bit of protein, various starches – that’s what grain is. Just simple, mostly dried out plant matter. This is what GM crops are too! You can’t tell the difference! The only way you ever could is if you took it to a lab for sophisticated genetic tests!
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September 6th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
In particular, the BMA fears antibiotic-resistance genes, which act as “markers” in GM crops, could spread to bacteria, making them resistant to antibiotics. The report also says some GM foods might cause allergies. Neither fear has been substantiated so far.
I just want to address this concern directly because it’s something I get asked about a lot (unsurprising since I live in San Francisco and am actually willing to admit that I work in biotech). Where do people think that antibiotic-resistant traits come from? I think there’s a popular misperception that biology labs are full of radiation-suited tinkerers putting together genes base pair by base pair, crafting “completely artificial genes” like those for antibiotic resistance.
In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. You want to know where antibiotic-resistance traits come from? FUNGI. Not just fungi, but the same fungi we got the antibiotics from in the first place. That’s right — the penicillium mold produces not only penicillin, but the proteins which confer resistance to penicillin, because otherwise the mold would kill itself off. Penicillin production evolved as a self-defense mechanism, a way for the penicillium mold to outcompete the bacteria that are also in its niche. Of course fungi and bacteria aren’t partisan, plenty of fungi produce narrow-scope antifungals which kill off other fungal species and plenty of bacteria produce antibacterials which kill off their bacterial competitors as well. You better believe they’re resistant to their own toxins. Well actually it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not, evolution sure makes it work out that way in the end though
But anyway, my point is that these feared “antibiotic-resistance genes” have been in the environment for thousands if not millions of years already. We already have billions of bacteria that produce beta-lactamase and thus are immune to the beta-lactam antibiotics like penicillin. The only reason for any concern about antibiotic-resistant bacteria is that we are directly shaping their evolution — there’s a lot I could say about the crude techniques used in modern antibiotic production which *directly* expose bacteria to the genetic material they need to incorporate defenses against those same antibiotics, but it’s enough just to look at the way we dispose of antibiotics. If you decimate a population with poison, then only the members of the population who are immune to the poison will be around to repopulate. And bacteria repopulate very, very quickly.
And yet we’re not all dying due to horrible antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, even here in the US where we use these kinds of markers in crops that are just out there growing in the field for anything to pollinate. The notion that bacteria will start invading GMO crops to steal their precious beta-lactamase markers is just ludicrous. There are so many other places they could have gotten it already.
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September 6th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
And just in case it wasn’t clear, I am assuming that readers here know the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. Eukaryotes have a complex cellular structure and prokaryotes do not; prokaryotes are basically just simple sacks of DNA with a lipid membrane to hold them together. Prokaryotes like bacteria and fungi swap DNA promiscuously, they’re the dirty whores of the cellular world. Eukaryotic DNA, like that of maize, is bundled up inside a nuclear membrane where it is very difficult for anything to get at it. It really is a miracle of science that we’re able to create transgenic eukaryotes at all, and it is that much more of a crying shame that scientific illiteracy has made it possible for people to whip up ridiculous fears of bacteria gaining antibiotic resistance from eukaryotes.
I could start ranting about the human immune system and how if it were really as fragile as people seem to think it is we would all have died thousands of years ago, but if I started doing that I’d get too depressed.
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