Fair enough. Let’s bring it back up: You don’t seem to think that antibiotic resistant bacteria are an argument against antibiotics. Why do you think that GMO resistant pests are an argument against GMOs?
Because the benefit of higher yields and lower pesticide use is only temporary. The risk of GMOs are long term and potentially very dangerous.
Pesticide resistance of weeds and insects has been accelerated by GMOs. The previous practice of using many different chemicals meant that pests were hit by multiple attacks and if they adapted to one then another would get them. GMOs rely on one attack. BT crops depends on the toxin working and being strong enough in the cells of the plant. Round-Up ready crops depend on round-up working. It’s easier for pests to adapt to the one mechanism in the plant.
When those mechanisms stop working, then you either get pest damage and lower yields or you go back to using other chemicals. And there is an impact to non-GMO crops which have to deal with the superpests.
You say that when one GMO plant is no longer efficient , then we can create another GMO plant. That requires a lot of testing and analysis to make sure we don’t make something which is dangerous for humans and the ecosystem. I think you underestimate the risk. There are many examples of poor decisions and planning by scientists. (The introduction of the cane toad in Australia comes to mind. )
And new GMOs will need to be created over and over. It sounds like playing Russian Roulette … play long enough and you will get the bullet.
Doesn’t this apply to antibiotics too? We temporarily were able to save millions of lives, but now we have superbugs that are resistant to both antibiotics and human immune response. We’ve been replacing antibiotics with new antibiotics, each of which has required significant time and resources to develop and test.
But just as it now appears that bacteria are developing a generalized resistance to all antibiotics, rendering our current and future antibiotics useless, science is discovering ways to create very fine-tuned responses derived from bacteria’s own ability to attack and suppress rival bacteria. We’re changing strategies, from general antibiotics to highly specific responses, and thereby staying ahead of the resistant bacteria.
I would argue that the same pattern is the most likely future for GMOs. We’ll develop several generations of GMOs that will change as pests adapt to them, but will continue to deliver the benefits of higher yield and lower chemical use while they do.
There are, it’s true. And, as is too common in discussions like this, I overstate my position. We should of course consider the consequences, the risks, and evaluate GMOs before widespread adoption. But that caution needs to be weighed against the benefits. In the case of GMOs, we have decades of recorded benefits in the form of increased yields, increased nutritional value, and the accompanying decrease in malnutrition and starvation. There are risks, of course there are risks, but the benefits are already tangible, and we need to be careful not to underestimate those either.
Agree or disagree: If we could snap our fingers today and remove GMOs from the world, the results would be catastrophic. (the answer will in part depend on the definition you’re using of GMO, but in any case your response will help to clarify our disagreement)
Do you hear that folks?? They are litterally putting toxins in our GMO foods, to keep us “safe”. I have about had enough of these baboons.
Carleas, so far you have given nothing but plausible deniability arguments favoring those who lust for absolute power and control over every human and all life for all time (generically referred to as “Nazi’s”). What you are saying is that the Nazi’s could have been a good thing so they should have been allowed to have absolute power.
Once GMO’s are the standard, there is no going back and everything anyone eats will be 100 determined by what those in power choose to feed them. They already don’t tell you what you are being medicated with every day. When those in power choose that one race is not desirable, that race suddenly has fertility problems and dies out. Who was controlling their food, air, and diseases? Who was controlling what information and disinformation got released concerning such things?
There have been a variety of films exposing this strategy of silently and subtly gaining control of a population for the purpose of subjugating it while feigning the role of savior: Earth - Final Conflict, Stargate SG1,… Such more real and recent false flag events concerning 9/11, school shootings, disease outbreaks, and so on prove that the strategy is still quite popular and in affect.
After secretly sterilizing the home world race:
“Never under any circumstances go to P4C-970 [the home world of the Aschen-Nazis]”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dytMP6WeHIs[/youtube]
You offer only plausible deniability favoring absolute dominance. I offer plausible deniability favoring prudence against absolute control. You favor absolute global domination by the Godwannabes, as do all liberal globalists (“please Ms Government, save us from all the bad by forcing those bad people to do the good”). I don’t. I have no reason to believe that “they” are holy (or even good) people, do you? And yet, I have plenty of reasons to believe that they are not.
And no, your “antibiotics” argument is a strawman. Antibiotics are given one on one. They are not [supposed to be] put into everyone’s food, water, and air such that there is no choice and no one left untainted by them (although you would have had them do so). How else can one control all life on Earth if not by controlling their food, water, air, money, media, and medicine?
- I find it odd that it should be liberal to be against GM foods. It seems to if anyone a conservative would be skeptical about suddenly setting up so that nearly all americans get GM foods with little animal or human testing and despite the threats intimidation corruption bad science and history of lies of Monsanto. A literally conservative approach would be to take many decades of testing to see if these things are OK.
- They haven’t helped anyone yet, for all their BS.
- their behavior in relation to governments means that there is no way to know. So it is at best a crap shoot.
The documentary I posted does a nice overview of the damage of these products in the various areas of life, that is all of them.
No, it would not be catastrophic. Sufficient food can be grown using conventional plants.
The problem of world hunger is not lack of food … it is poor distribution and waste. Between one third and one half of all food is wasted.
This claim is hard to square. Most corn and soybeans in the US are GMOs, if the cost of growing those crops has decreased, doesn’t that count as helping? If pesticide use has decreased while yields increased, doesn’t that count as helping? More than half of GMOs are grown in the developing world, if they’ve increased yields, decreased pesticide use, cost, and ultimately the price of food in those countries, wouldn’t that count as helping?
This reminds me of an anecdote about the federal budget, which contains a line item for “waste, fraud, and abuse”, and during budget shortfalls it’s often suggested that we can save money by just striking that line item.
Food waste is something that both producers and consumers have every incentive to avoid if they could, and the fact that it persists suggests that it’s not being wasted by choice. Food is perishable, by its nature some of it will be lost in transit from producer to consumer. If we reverted to all conventional plants, we should predict a similar rate of food waste, just of a smaller initial pool of food. That means higher prices and, especially in places where the pool of available food is already low like the developing world, shortages.
Moreover, note that your own source states that “most loss occurs during production”, and that one important way that GMOs increase yield is by reducing loss to pests. For at least some crops, we should expect that eliminating GMOs would actually increase food waste.
And I don’t think you’re wrong to criticize food waste, I agree that it would be better if less food were wasted. But I’d still argue that, even if we could eliminate most food waste, we should still adopt GMOs to decrease the amount of resources we use to produce food.
Whatever one thinks of humans in general, smart ones, use genetic technologies is one thing. One can think of this abstractly, come up with moral guidelines or precautionary ones, decide it would e OK if these were followed - say as one might with a company developing nuclear weapons.
But Monsanto has a record of lying, bribing, allowing harm, manipulating, breaking laws, strongarming, and destruction of regulation and so on.
Do we really want to allow such an organization to have that power which in the abstract we might grant to some organization under different conditions?
My position is harder than that. I do not think most humans could be trusted and no corporation can be trusted. But that is an abstract issue, one that a case can be made against in the abstract.
In the specific cases, where Monsanto is the worst of the big players but certainly not the only one who should be disbarred, it is a different matter. Here we know enough t knw they must not have this kind of power. But some of we seem not to.
What you are saying is that the problems of food waste and food distribution cannot be solved and therefore conventional crops will not provide sufficient food for our needs and we must use GMOs.
Well if you begin with that mindset, it’s not surprising where you end up.
I have heard this many times in the past.
Automobile manufacturers saying that fuel efficiency could not be improved, emissions could not be reduced. Until legislation forced them to do it and then, not surprisingly, more efficient and cleaner engines became possible.
More coal-fired and nuclear power plants had to be constructed to meet energy needs. Turning off lights, improved efficiency bulbs, efficient air conditioners. And the number of plants which had to be constructed at great cost is significantly reduced. And the pollution problems associated with the plants is reduced.
Water supply problems. Low flush toilets, low flow faucets, improvements to infrastructure.
Philosophically, you and I approach the problems completely differently. I think we need to use what we already have … efficiently. We don’t need to increase production before we have reduced waste. This planet has finite resources and it is our responsibility to use them as best as we can.
Notice that I don’t object to technological solutions to problems. Nor do I want or expect people to live austere lives in order to solve the problems.
As I wrote before, there is huge potential for GMOs to cause damage to human health and to the environment … maybe not this batch but the next one or the one after that.
Think about GMO corn that causes sterility.The research was partly funded by the US government. Consider how that can be intentionally abused and consider the consequences if it gets out of control in the biosphere.
That’s the tip of the iceberg.
I mean to say just that it is a separate issue. Food waste exists, there’s no reason to think eliminating GMOs would affect decrease the level of food waste. We can agree that tackling food waste is a worthy policy. But given the level of food waste, GMOs seem important in producing sufficient food to feed the world, and even seem to decrease the problem of food waste by reducing the role of pests in food waste during production.
To put it clearly: food waste is bad, I’m sure we can address it and we are addressing it. But GMOs are alleviating some of the ill effects of food waste now, and they would continue to provide benefits in a world with no or negligible food waste.
But that’s just the thing: GMOs are more efficient. They take less land area, less fertilizer, less water, less money, less pesticide. They may use more herbicide, but it is less toxic. They represent a lower resource burden for food production. They are what we have, and they are more efficient.
I tried to find a study finding sterility caused by GMO corn. I found this review of literature (again one funded by an anti-GMO government) finding that “GM plants are nutritionally equivalent to their non-GM counterparts and can be safely used in food and feed.”
But this is speculative! At the very least, we can say that modern GMOs are lowering costs, increasing profits, and increasing yields, and more so in the developing world than in the developed world. Even given that there is a particularly huge potential for harm, there is already actual benefit that would be lost by the restriction or elimination of GMOs. We’re weighing a potential harm against an actual, extant benefit.
Should we be weighing in speculative benefits?
I don’t find these lines of argument compelling. I generally find conspiracy theories to be a poor explanation for how the world works, and to have low predictive power. Besides, the future looks to be decentralized: there’s currently an Indiegogo campaign for a DIY CRISPR kit.
I agree that monopolies are bad, but any government that can ban GMOs that would bene can also break up agricultural monopolies. If the best argument against GMOs is that agricultural monopolies will abuse the power, then we should focus on breaking up those monopolies, that seems to be the greater good (surely Monsanto was doing just fine with a monopoly on conventional crops as well). I think a better target for ire are agricultural subsidies, they distort the global food markets, hurt developing countries, and most of the money goes to huge agribusinesses.
In any case, this, again, seems like a separate issue. That bad actors may use something for bad says nothing about whether that thing is inherently bad.
Rubbish.
Ah, I see, I misunderstood your point. But again, this is developed to fulfill a legitimate medical need (or want, since it’s arguable that people don’t ‘need’ recreational sex). I could be misused by an evil corporation or government, but so could a lot of good things. That seems like a separate issue.
To put it another way, GMOs are empowering, and power can be used for good or evil.
I never realized that there were so many ‘separate issues’ surrounding GMOs. 
Practically everything that I bring up, in fact. 
I don’t believe in (most) conspiracy theories. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Feed the GMO’s to Africa then, and leave the civilized people alone. We don’t NEED Gmo’s…we know how to farm!!! The fuck do civilized people need gmo’s for? Feed them to africa as an experiment…who knows, maybe it will mutate them and turn them into super geniuses, even!
Therefore it WILL be (already is) used for the good of chosen people and evil for the unchosen people.
And again, you propose a strawman with the corporation analogy. The food you eat infests your entire body and probably for the rest of your life. It proposes freedom to permanently infect (as has been done many times throughout history). Every time “they” come up with what they think is a good thing for the population, they infect the entire population. They haven’t learned. And they are not going to learn. They WILL NOT stop.
GMO’s are even worse than forced vaccines. With the vaccines, you at least have a chance of knowing from where your illness came. Hidden influences kill via obfuscation, even if they were otherwise doing good. The simple fact that you can’t figure out which thing is making you ill, kills you in the end.
Hey, nukes are empowering. What kind of regulation do you think companies making, say, portable nukes should have? Is that regulation in place for Monsanto?
Let’s say in this analogy that the nukes are not meant as nukes. They are supposed to be very good energy sources for homes: for heating, electricity and so on. The only potential problems might be that they can be weaponized, or leak if the contruction is shoddy in some way, etc.
If someone keeps arguming that having a widespread possession of portable nukes is good and people have been owning nukes for a while, wouldn’t you expect that the company selling portable nukes, with the very high subscriptions fees they charge those leasing those nukes, should be able to demonstrate that widespread ownership of portable nukes is postive. They could point to the effects and show that the benefits achieved already outweigh the negative effects`? But the ;GM companies cannot do that. More harm has been done. No great increase in food or reduction in poverty has happened. Now average farmers have a new bill and no extra benefits. Just like if everyone in weightlifting is on steroids has a new bill each month to pay for their injections.
You would also want to see, before taking these risks, if there are other methods that do not have the side effects, negative ones, that are already well documented.
Add in the potential risks that thankfully, as far as we know, have not been actualized, and I cannot see why anyone would want to play fast and loose with the worlds ecosystems, especially in the hands of corporations.
And the corporations do not have to be evil. In this case several of them are. But corporations are machines that demand the dismissal of long term risks and the prioritization of short term gains. It is a machine with heuristics THAT NO BABYSITTER FOR EXAMPLE SHOULD HAVE. No one would want a corporation set of priorities and decision making processes to be the parallel ones of the babysitter of their children.
One does not want a psychopath to be a babysitter. That is not a negative assessment of a corporation, it is a literal one. The way they look at their goals parallel a psychopaths. And please not a psychopath is not someone who just kills and maims. It is their lack of care and total utilitarian outlook on all other humans that makes them a psychopath. And many psychopaths are quite successful in the business world because there is no contradiction.
We need something more than the profit motive, and a fairly short term one nowadays, as driving heuristic for someone playing with the potential equivalent of global nukes.
If you have a baby, Carleas, that baby is in Monsantos hands right now. The company that lied about agent orange and PCBs for as long as it could.
Google MOnsanto Protection Act.
This act entails that Monsanto cannor be sued for any health issues related to GM foods and organisms.
globalresearch.ca/monsanto-p … aw/5329388
Now imagine the maker of portable nukes, for all sorts of great for mankind reasons in their brochure, IMMUNE FROM LAWSUITS.
There goes one of the few responses that might control a psychopath. And again this may seem like too charged a term for you. But organizations, not being people, and corporationsin particular, do not have empathy. They make decisions based on numbers. Here we have an organization with a specific criminal history. IOW in the realm of organizations, this one has been criminal and regularly has lied.
Would you hire a baby sitter without empathy who has a criminal record and can be shown to regularly lie about issues where he health of people are threatened by the miniinformation?
Well, actually you have already hired that babysitter, especially by being an apologist for them in media. But you’re hiring them for other people’s children.
Thanks.