GM - Yes or No?

[Odin]

Originally posted by Wernazuma III



Not only does the massive use of pesticides kill local ecosystems completely, settlements close to large agricultural areas where, e.g. roundup-ready soja is produced have huge problems with polluted water, and massive health problems, esp. the children. Nobody compensates.

Secondly, even more than ordinary monocultures, GM crops are more likely to cause total loss because of other reasons. Most often, regional sorts have much more adapted to local problems, something a large scale GM production can't do.

And that's just two problems, others include (but this is also true for hybrid crops):
that farmers are made completely dependent: Farmers have a contract that doesn't allow any legal action against the producers of seeds in case of crop loss etc., even if there should be a problem.
Farmers who don't use GM crops are coerced to use it or be sued because due to natural cross-breeding, they can't evade that the licensed genetic sequences come to their own crops - that's crazy, but it happens all the time!

Contrary to what is being told, most GM crops have not been sufficiently tested to judge what they may cause in the environment (including allergies).


So, I don't think that genetic research or the possibility of GM food in itself is bad, but how it is pushed now, the socio-economic consequences it brings along etc. Farmers find themselves in a new form of feudalism, their lords being Pioneer and Monsanto.

Only when the state controls more and defines better frames within which the companies have to operate, this is a good concept for the future. It doesn't help when half a dozen ex-Monsanto managers are in over very close to the US government.

I agree, this is a regulation issue. Unfortunately the anti-GM morons try to spin it as meaning the technology itself is bad, and start to spew eco-luddite talking points based on buzzwords like "holistic".

[Addled Platypus]

most of you pepole would freak if you really knew for how long you have been eating GM food and where never told.....

Whos has noticed the wheat does not grow has high anymore ???......eh

tomatoes having tougher skin to survive transport


face it..we all have done it and will do it again

[Az]

most of you pepole would freak if you really knew for how long you have been eating GM food and where never told.....

erm, no.

I knew it from the 1st grade or so,when I ate my first red bananas...

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Platypus Rex
most of you pepole would freak if you really knew for how long you have been eating GM food and where never told.....

Whos has noticed the wheat does not grow has high anymore ???......eh

tomatoes having tougher skin to survive transport


face it..we all have done it and will do it again

If you want, GM food is in use almost since the stone age because all directed selection is, in fact, genetic manipulation. The relatively new thing is how complete genetic sequences are transferred without any process of natural selection. And that's the weak point.
But yes, everyone today, including me, consumes GM food in one way or the other, that's a matter of fact.

[dannubis]

for consumption: i don't think there are much downsides on this (although I do not know what the effects are of altering the gene sequence on the nutricious value of the GM food)

for nature: i think we should be carefull. we can not possibly forsee what the effects will be on the crops when we change the gene structure (e.g. resistance to certain diseases)

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by dannubis
for consumption: i don't think there are much downsides on this (although I do not know what the effects are of altering the gene sequence on the nutricious value of the GM food)

for nature: i think we should be carefull. we can not possibly forsee what the effects will be on the crops when we change the gene structure (e.g. resistance to certain diseases)

We can't possibly forsee the effects of anything we do by that standard. Might just as well collectively curl up in a fetal position and wait to die with that philosophy.

It's always claimed that unforseen consequences are unusually unpredictable for engineering GM crops with no justification given for assuming this is the case.

Nature takes genetic modifications in stride becuase that's just biochemistry. Nature has been dealing with biochemistry for as long as there has been life and it's taken an extreme laissez faire approach to regulating the gene modifying antics of it's flora and fauna.

The human activities that are actually most likely to monkey wrench nature are going to be those activities that have no prior natural parallel like agriculture itself or industrial products in general.

After that the most disruptive will likely be things like geographically transplanting whole species from distant locations. And yet everybody assumes that transferring one or two genes can somehow be more disruptive than all of this.

Horizontal gene flow is a fact of nature and predates humans by billions of years. There's been so much of it in fact that cladistic studies relying on genomic divergence have tremendous difficulty due to things like entire prokaryotic genes having somehow found their way into the human genome that don't seem to trace to the mitochondrial heritage.

We are simply not going to make a bigger mess of things transferring a few genes than we can transferring whole species much less engaging in wholly novel and weird activities like actually having a civilization in the first place.

[MOBIUS]

One of the side effects of the GM rapeseed trials here in the UK IIRC was that rapeseed is related to a wild cabbage family, with the very real danger that you risk crossing over the genes for herbicide tolerance or insect resistance to weeds...

Bravo!

[dannubis]

@ geronimo:

What you say is true. However, the species we transpplanted from one ecosystem into another were already "tested" by nature. And even then in most of the cases it has led to near catastrophies (e.g. african bee in america, western colonists in America, ...). So maybe we should just be a little bit carefull when introducing new species into ecosystems not equipped to handle them. Usually it blows up in our face.

Or you can stick your head in the sand...

[MOBIUS]

Until you disengage GM from the blatant profit-making exercise that companies like Monsanto are engaged in, the risk of putting greed before public health is currently far too great IMO...

[Wernazuma III]

Geronimo: You are right in assuming that introducing species from other ecosystems into systems they do not belong to is extremely harmful. And at the moment, for our ecosystems, there is no comparison between the downside effects of this and the effects of GM food - not even closely.
Yet, exactly the same kind of risks apply to GM food. The genetic alterations are not minor changes but designed to have a major effect, so it is difficult to predict what effect those changes will have. I have mentioned a few, transfering the engineered qualities to weeds is another possible one. The more GM crops we have the more we will have problems of this kind.

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by dannubis
for consumption: i don't think there are much downsides on this (although I do not know what the effects are of altering the gene sequence on the nutricious value of the GM food)

I'm not so confident. There is much that can go wrong. For example those crops that try to make pesticides useless producing their own pesticide which, in turn, could have side-effects. The plants can produce new harmful proteines; allegenes; hell, if you WANT, you can make corn poisonous.
I'm not saying anyone wants that, and I am sure there are made not few tests to evade health risks from consuming (the companies, I hope, are too afraid of being sued), but they can't claim that it can't possibly be harmful by default.

[dannubis]

I took that for granted obviously

[BeBMan]

Dunno if it's teh good or teh evil, I'm just a bit sceptic that GM stuff will "feed the world" (if that means something like ending world hunger) if the underlying causes for poverty etc. aren't touched.....

Aside from this label the stuff, and let the costumer decide if he wants it.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Wernazuma III
The genetic alterations are not minor changes but designed to have a major effect, so it is difficult to predict what effect those changes will have.

Not really. The genetic alterations are significant (at least vis-a-vis agriculture) but very simple. We don't have the understanding to perform complex changes.

I have mentioned a few, transfering the engineered qualities to weeds is another possible one. The more GM crops we have the more we will have problems of this kind.

Lateral gene transfer is an inherent and forseeable risk of any genetic alteration, even a natural one. If a natural strain of crop evolved pesticide resistance, for example, it'd be just as likely to transfer those genes to other plants.

[Wernazuma III]

Lateral gene transfer is an inherent and forseeable risk of any genetic alteration, even a natural one. If a natural strain of crop evolved pesticide resistance, for example, it'd be just as likely to transfer those genes to other plants.

True, but normally, this transfer would start very locally, and in case of success then spread more or less slowly, while when you have large cultures all over the world, the probability of this happening increases and when it happens, it does so on a completely different scale.



And, more importantly, I insist again that we cannot have the GM debate without discussing all that surrounds it, socio-economically speaking.