Take GM Crops Seriously? You must be sane!
April 29th, 2008
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Right now the world is experiencing one of the sharpest rises in food prices and the shortages to go with it in modern history. The reasons vary but biofuels are blamed for a large portion (perhaps one third) of the problem, with more land being devoted to growing fuel and not food. However another part of the problem is simply the increase in demand for food by a world with a growing population and increasing demand for the kinds of food which are more resource intensive to produce.
A good article appeared in the Guardian on the issue and it suggests that perhaps it’s time for the “Eco-Warriors” to start to consider that genetically modified crops may not be evil. GM crops are, of course, actually not new at all, but rather are as old as cultivation itself, when the first farmer decided to replant his better growing plants and discard those which did not produce as well. Of course modern “Genetically Modified” crops don’t simply come from mutation and selection but are based on genes transplanted in the laboratory.
To date, nearly all big “environmental” groups oppose any GM crops anywhere, anyhow and for any reason at all. Why? Just because they’re new and therefore evil. (There have also been some sizable donations earmarked for opposing GM crops by a number of groups. Could it be some might stand to lose if food became cheaper and farming was not as resource intensive?)
The fact is that there are some problems with GM crops, but they’ve proven manageable. There can be allergic reactions, but they are very rare to almost nonexistent in well tested crops. There can be unwanted cross-pollination and occasionally unexpected traits show up. But these are all completely manageable with good standards of testing and certification. Despite what environmentalists have claimed, no GM crop deployments have yet destroyed the world.
One of the biggest issues with GM farming has nothing to with the crops at all, and that is the patenting and copyright laws which apply to genetic modifications, especially of crops which could be further cultivated. This really does not have much legal precedent to guide it, and right now laws on the matter are not very clear or well defined. In order to facilitate farming of genetically engineered crops, it will be necessary to establish a framework of laws to govern who owns the rights to the seeds and how they can be distributed and produced fairly. But remember, this is only a political issue and does not change the science behind the final product.
On the other hand, creating GM crops can have massive advantages. They may be more resistant to diseases, grow more efficiently, require less irrigation and fertilizer and produce more food for a given amount of land. This can be extremely environmentally beneficial and increase food supplies. They can also be modified to provide more nutrition, which is especially for populations which are deficient of a certain nutrient.
Finally, lets remember something which was pointed out by a commenter a while back. GM crops are basically the same thing as regular crops to those who eat them. Aside from the very rare allergy to a certain protein, a genetically modified crop of corn is made of: water, cellulose, sugars, starches, proteins, salt, trace minerals and so on. This is exactly the same as the genetically modified foods. Since your body doesn’t absorb the genetic material in any meaningful way it can’t tell the difference!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Enviornment, Good Science, 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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April 29th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
If the debate on GM foods was a rational process, in which emotion, subjective judgment and ideological commitment were laid aside in the interests of rational decision-making, then it is highly unlikely that the debate would have taken on its present intensity. The truth is that what is known (as opposed to just guessed at) about these dangers is substantially less weighty than what is known about their potential benefits.
The real truth is that GM crops have become a symbolic battleground for a wide range of contemporary disputes, from the privatization of scientific knowledge to the marketing practices of global corporations. It is no accident that that the GM issue has become a key focus of anti-globalisation campaigns. For it neatly encapsulates many of the concerns that form the core of this movement.
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April 29th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Frank said:
Dagnamit, it’s “lose”, not “loose”!
Sorry, it’s just a pet hate…
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April 29th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Is that a genetically modified pet (hate)?
Buzzo/DV: Bingo.
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April 30th, 2008 at 1:22 am
i am not against gm crops as long as they are well tested. but i have a problem with not reproducing crops. just imagine that in 20 years the gm crops that do not reproduce dominate the planets agricultural crop land and some poor farmers can’t afford the gm crops for next year – out of business.
this will lead to global mega farming corps and these guys and their political friends are going to have absolute control over our food – brave new world and no thank you.
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April 30th, 2008 at 1:36 am
martin said:
This is purely a political issue, and really has nothing to do with the technical/scientific questions about GM food. Nothing is stopping UNESCO or some individual State from buying a designed genome outright and distributing it to farmers ‘Open Source’ as it were.
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April 30th, 2008 at 4:55 am
Finally, lets remember something which was pointed out by a commenter a while back. GM crops are basically the same thing as regular crops to those who eat them. Aside from the very rare allergy to a certain protein, a genetically modified crop of corn is made of: water, cellulose, sugars, starches, proteins, salt, trace minerals and so on. This is exactly the same as the genetically modified foods. Since your body doesn’t absorb the genetic material in any meaningful way it can’t tell the difference!
I have no problem with wierd DNA. It’s all sugar in the end.
I do have a problem with the expression of such DNA if it involves things like, oh, insecticides in the cells. It’s a bit disingenous to poke fun at people by focusing on the DNA when the entire point is for that altered DNA to do stuff. Plus genetic transfer – I’m a lot happier with GE cows than with GE plants.
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April 30th, 2008 at 5:00 am
i am no expert for this topic but as far as i know it is not really possible to buy the genome you just buy the crop. the genome is patented so open sourcing it is not possible.
it is like a windows license, you do not own the crop but you license it and you are allowed to raise it and harvest its fruit. you are not allowed to temper with its genome to, i.e. to enable it to reproduce.
and you are right, this is a political, financial issue and i would like to keep corporate greed and political mischief away from my food.
if the government (or un, who etc) would finance the development of gm crops, buy the genome, get the patent and publish all under i.e. the GFDL so that all humans could benefit from it than we should push for gm crops as fast and cautious (better to avoid human-flesh eating tomatoes) as possible.
but with greedy politicians, shareholders and ceos this is not going to happen or do you really believe that once the gm crops are the standard the poor countries of the world are going to benefit from it???
just look at hiv pharmaceuticals, their cost and their need in poor countries. i can already see the headlines:
“A flaw in super-gm-crop-v1 has almost extinct natural corn. Monsato is sorry that this has happened and offers all farmers super-gm-crop-v1.1 for free for the next 3 years.”
3 years later:
“USA threatens to attack [insert poor country] when it does not stop to infringe on super-gm-crop-v1.2.”
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April 30th, 2008 at 7:52 am
martin said:
It is just as posible as it is for any other IP. The point is that this is where the focus of the fight should be, not running about crying about ‘Frankenfoods.’
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April 30th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Actually, I have a problem when years of research are funded by public dollars then the seed company suddenly pops up & says the genome is patented. Publicly funded research should be open source.
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April 30th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Patents last for 20 years, so in 20 years, farmers will be able to reproduce the GM crops all they want. Companies need to be able to recoup their investments in the technology, that’s why there are patents. Without them, it’s unlikely that such research and development would occur.
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April 30th, 2008 at 10:22 am
further problem (for me) with GM crops is that, as far as I can see, so far they have mostly been developed in the direction of e.g. making the crop immune to herbizides, with which you can then liberally spray the field in order to kill everything else (iirc it’s Monsantos “Roundup-ready” thing). Frankly, I’d like my food to be as whatever-izide free as is possible under the circumstances. Not as much as name-of-company wants to sell of the whatever-izide.
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April 30th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Michael said:
Which is why knee-jerk opposition to GM has to stop. Right now only firms like Monsanto can benefit from GM research. Governments should be forced to fund research on high yield, drought-resistant, nitrogen-fixing cultivars that don’t need a lot of chemical inputs and place them in the public domain.
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April 30th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Frank said:
I have used this writing before on at least one comment. I should know better but it might be because it was used in the post I was commenting on and I didn’t notice it. Sorry.
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April 30th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
It’s ironic that the same people that protest globalisation (and GM crops by proxy) are also the same ones causing it. They are the ones forcing expensive energy. Cheap energy beats cheap labour any time. But if you force energy to be expensive, then industry does have no choice but to go to cheap labour.
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April 30th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Michael said:
Well, first of all that is “What it is geared to” and not to the crop in general. Secondly, there seems to be some kind of belief that all “artificial” or “chemical” substances are bad for you. I do not want to eat anything with something toxic to humans sprayed on it, but if it’s proven safe and has a short chemical half-life and washes off easily, then that’s three good reasons why I would not mind eating it.
Lets remember something. Agriculture is not low impact. It clears land and it tills up soil and has runoff and energy needs and other issues. It needs to be managed well to keep the impact reasonably low and make it sustainable. What’s more sustainable and ecologically friendly? More land used or less land used? More tilling or less tilling? More energy or less? More need for fertilizer or less need? In general, GM crops are the thing that can help achieve BETTER enviornmental footprints. They can also achieve worse. They are a tool and can be used or misused. A wrench can be used to fix a tire or wack a baby over the head. I don’t oppose the manufacture of wrenches because you can hit people with them.
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April 30th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
The problem with GM crops is that we start to think that man is capable of doing better than nature. We know nature made these plants a certain way for a reason and because they’re natural our bodies are able to digest them because we coevolved. Now we start saying that the way to do it is to take a gene from this plant and put it here and this plant and put it here and move this one here. It’s Frankenstein! We don’t know what we’re doing because the system is beyond what we understand and it exists a way for a reason.
We will only show how little we know when it comes back to haunt us. This happened many time before for example nuclear we thought we understood and then found out that it was blowing up in our face and ruining everything. We can’t afford to ruin all our crops and pollute them with our chemicals that were never meant for our bodies or the world!
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April 30th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Deb said:
We are nature. This sort of dualism has no place in modern thinking. It’s a product of the belief that some how we are on one side of some arbitrary divide and ‘nature’ is on the other. We are as much a product of evolution as anything else here and that evolution gave us the ability to modify our environment. Other animals can do this too; beavers can have profound impacts on huge areas of woodland, changing the course of rivers, changing populations of the biota in a large geographic region. There are ther examples as well.
We are life this is what we do; the difference is we can think, and keep the impacts to a minimum if we want to.
Deb said:
Examples please? I don’t think you have any idea what nuclear is, do you? Maybe you should look into it a bit more before making statements like that.
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April 30th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
All I know about it is the ppl who really care about the earth and the future and being sustainable are all against it for good reasons. I’m not an expert on it and I bet anyone who wants it either isn’t or maybe they are and get paid for it, but those of us who care about it can tell you every environment group that looked at it saw the problems right away! Everyone who cares and knows feels the same way and they’re the ones I would like to listen to.
Why should I believe you? You’re for it and that’s why I’m not about to trust you!
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April 30th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Deb,
You have been lied to by people who make money of your concerns.
Look at this list of environmental groups score-card:
http://gwperplexed.niof.org/scorecard.htm
Of the things the United Nations consider the most pressing problems facing us, the so called environmental groups give only short shrift or lip service. Why? Because they don’t generate as many donations and they are not as sensational.
For example the reason we should restrict the amount of fish we eat is because of Mercury poisoning. Do you know where most of that Mercury comes from? It’s coal power plants. Why do we still have coal plants that are killing thousands of people per year? Because of the scare-mongering and money making of environmental groups that fight better solutions, like nuclear with lies and propaganda.
We would not nearly have the problems today with global warming if we had followed the rational path we took in the past and had not been derailed by that money making machine for lies and propaganda. Do your own research. Don’t believe us, but also don’t believe the propaganda.
GM crops is the same thing. Genetic manipulation is nothing else than what nature is doing itself over time. We are just using a shortcut. Just because you don’t know ANYTHING about it does not mean everybody else doesn’t either.
Nobody is asking you to trust us. Get your own facts instead of having somebody else think for you. It’s obvious that you are not doing that job yourself.
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April 30th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Deb said:
How dare you presume I do not care for this planet? Who are you to judge me in that manner?
Unlike you I do have enough education to understand these things and it is my considered opinion that unless we want to see suffering on an unprecedented scale both from privation and the subsequent wars that always have historically followed such events, we had better use the tools that technology has made avalable to us to avoid what is coming.
Worse, in your case I suspect you haven’t had a hungry day in your life (and I don’t mean ‘ready for dinner’) that wasn’t self-inflicted. You have stuffed your mouth on the efforts of others, and now you arrogate yourself as judge of who shall eat and who shall starve based on nothing more than the incredibly stupid, narrow-minded, and unworkable ideology of those as ill-informed and as stupid as you are.
Pull your head out of your butt and grow up; real problems need real solutions, not imaginary ones.
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April 30th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Amazingly, PETA, which would normally be lumped in with fanatical groups that oppose all progress and general civilization, is encouraging biologists to go into their labs and produce (GASP) artificial meat, using genetics and cell biology to make it grow “in vitro” but outside a NATURAL animal
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April 30th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
As with anything new and especially considering that it is involved with something as important as the food supply, I’d expect any GM crops allowed on farms to first be tested very well to make sure they won’t have any unintended consequences like allergies in humans or spreading at a rate unwanted like a weed. I also want to be sure there are good regulations in place.
If they’re proven safe first then I am 100% for seeing them on farms. I agree they’re made of the same damn stuff and more importantly they could mean less need for land clearing and more reliable harvests. Especially in areas that are poor or distant, if the plants need less water or insectaside or something that is very good news for those in the area who can’t get those things.
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April 30th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Jerry in Detroit said:
Yes, and remember that a lot of us here agree that the law is not as good as it should be on this matter. I also can see how this could be a complicated issue though because if there is publicly funded research on general purpose genetics that does not yield one kind of seed or another, but it benefits research by a company.
Like for example, what if an aircraft company builds a new airplane and they use published government research on airfoil types by the faa and NASA and other groups and they use that to help design the wings.
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April 30th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Deb said:
You would like to listen to those who say things you want to hear.
Congratulations, you are the perfect ecopawn.
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April 30th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Radio Roy said:
Every GM plant submitted for authorization is tested for its potential to trigger allergies. Every novel protein produced in a transgenic plant undergoes a rigorous allergy check. A concrete example for this was the development of a GM soybean that contained a gene from the Brazil nut, a plant that is known to cause allergies in some people. It was determined that a protein responsible for causing allergic reactions in the Brazil nut had been transferred and the development program was abandoned.
Soybeans like many plants have intrinsic allergens that present problems for sensitive people. Current GM soybeans, have not been shown to add any additional allergenic risk beyond the intrinsic risks already present. Now GM technology is being used to characterize and eliminate allergens naturally present in crops. It has been used to remove a major allergen in soybeans, demonstrating that genetic modification can be used to reduce naturally occurring allergenicity of food and feed.
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April 30th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
It would be nice if they could do the same for peanuts. Peanut allergies are becoming more common (possibly due to exposure to peanuts earlier or before birth) and they can trigger violent allergies. A crop of hypoallergenic peanuts would be nice.
Oh wait, what am I talking about, that would be UNNATURAL!
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November 21st, 2008 at 9:13 am
Bloody spammers…
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June 20th, 2009 at 11:43 am
just sex every day
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May 3rd, 2011 at 5:00 am
Depleted Cranium – I love you. If you don’t mind I’m going to steal that image from your post and use it as a link to here. Probably steal your title too and then genetically modify it.
Ok that’s the link on my site!
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