Public needs to be 'educated' into accepting GM

contadino · Post by **contadino** » 24 Sep 2009, 19:02

chubbygristle wrote:I saw something about this the other week on Country File on the BBC. It looks as if the mainstream media is now reversing it's 'GM is evil' stance on things with the 'looming food shortages'.

What really got my goat though was that the issue of GM seems to have been polarised into the two arguments, i.e. we need GM to feed everyone and we don't want dodgy GM food because we don't trust what it will do to our health etc... The point that seems to be missed every time this whole thing comes into discussion is that if we go down the route of GM crops we will most likely

a) end up with the vast majority of food becoming the "Intellectual Property" of a handful of rather large corporate bodies who's main interested is securing profits for themselves over anything else. (think Microsoft wanting to take everyone and anyone to court for software patent infringements and apply that to the food chain)

and

b) continue the large scale, intensive, fertiliser / pesticide based mono-cropping which has allowed the soil to become so degraded and infertile in the first place.

Also, there is a hell of a lot more money going into researching the GM options as opposed to the research of say deploying Permaculture techniques to combat such problems of pests etc which also makes the GM route appear to be more successful.

The GM approach appears to only address certain problems facing the food supply chain and takes things like the current availability of external oil / gas / chemical inputs as a given - so I fail to see how in 20 years from now when we've clung on to this ridiculous model of food production, we'll be any better off for it.

Anyway, feel free to pull this apart with some more coherent thoughts and arguments than I can put together in these small hours

I think I am trying to say that even if GM food is completely "safe", it is in fact very unsafe in the sense that it allows us to try to continue to sustain the unsustainable thus wasting the one most precious 'non-renewable' resource... time.

Bang on. Except that the most frightening aspect of GM for me as a small scale farmer is terminator technology. If I suddenly find I can no longer save seed because my varieties have crossed with GM strains, I'll be in the hands of the agribusinesses.

Quintus · Post by **Quintus** » 24 Sep 2009, 19:53

contadino wrote:Bang on. Except that the most frightening aspect of GM for me as a small scale farmer is terminator technology. If I suddenly find I can no longer save seed because my varieties have crossed with GM strains, I'll be in the hands of the agribusinesses.

Cross contamination and lack of labelling are some of the reasons I said earlier "will shoppers get a choice?". Add to that customer apathy - and I suspect most of the population will be chomping on GM produce before too long.

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 24 Sep 2009, 23:14

Erm, Snow, GM is qualitatively different from "selective breeding", in that bits of DNA are spliced in, not just from other species but from other kingdoms (animal kingdom, plant kingdom, etc). Also (unless this has changed recently) from viruses: more specifically every GM food has in it genes from the "cauliflower mosaic virus", which acts as some kind of "activation agent" to switch the other alien genes on.

But my main beefs with it are, that no-one has tested its long-term effects, that it spreads (by cross-polination), that it hands an extra advantage to the already-advantaged large companies and that research into it (including safety research) detracts from what we should actually be doing to improve food supplies.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 19 Jan 2012, 16:50

Very odd that BASF's move out of Europe hasn't generated any mainstream media comment. Or is it?

http://rajpatel.org/2012/01/16/guest-bl ... of-europe/

energy-village · Post by **energy-village** » 19 Jan 2012, 21:30

emordnilap wrote:Very odd that BASF's move out of Europe hasn't generated any mainstream media comment. Or is it?

http://rajpatel.org/2012/01/16/guest-bl ... of-europe/

Perhaps good news doesn't sell!

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 20 Jan 2012, 10:38

energy-village wrote:
emordnilap wrote:Very odd that BASF's move out of Europe hasn't generated any mainstream media comment. Or is it?

http://rajpatel.org/2012/01/16/guest-bl ... of-europe/
Perhaps good news doesn't sell!

It's bad news for oligarchs, so I reckon it's deliberately ignored.

SleeperService · Post by **SleeperService** » 20 Jan 2012, 11:27

emordnilap wrote:
energy-village wrote:
emordnilap wrote:Very odd that BASF's move out of Europe hasn't generated any mainstream media comment. Or is it?

http://rajpatel.org/2012/01/16/guest-bl ... of-europe/
Perhaps good news doesn't sell!
It's bad news for oligarchs, so I reckon it's deliberately ignored.

But only in English, at the moment anyway

I heard the line that the US internet legislation is 'because the US wants their internet to be like China's' I think the UK wants our 'news' to be like Stalins CCCP

RogueMale · Post by **RogueMale** » 28 Feb 2012, 00:44

About the only crop I'd consider genetic modification for is the banana: it cannot reproduce itself, every banana in the supermarket is a clone of every other one (in some ethnic shops there are two or three other cultivars) and they are threatened with diseases which they cannot evolve resistance to.

For anything else, while GM food might be safe to eat (I don't doubt that) it risks contamination of wild species with GM pollen, and many varieties are environmentally damaging in other ways, e.g. allowing farmers to blitz fields with pesticide to which only the GM variety is resistant, killing everything else that grows there. Also, some varieties are designed not to produce viable seeds, so farmers have to keep going back to their supplier.

And the idea that they will solve the food shortage is ridiculous: there's a huge amount of overeating and obesity already in the west, and in third world countries abundant food will either result in it there, or allow the population to increase, so that they would need to engineer even more productive strains.

I think we should move away from too much dependence on technology.

Post by **kenneal - lagger** » 28 Feb 2012, 03:43

RogueMale wrote:...

For anything else, while GM food might be safe to eat (I don't doubt that) .............

You should. Read this. There are a wide range of diseases and poisons that can enter the food chain as a result of soil fungal growth encouraged by the use of glyphosate. There have been widespread reports of animal infertility and birth deformations resulting from the feeding of GM crops to animals. These animals are getting into the food chain as well so could start causing the same problems in humans.

woodburner · Post by **woodburner** » 28 Feb 2012, 07:20

Useful link k-l. I was banned from an allotment website because I persistently voiced opposition to the use of glyphosate for every weed situation. If I posted links to information of the problems, others would post links to sites (usually manufacturers) saying how wonderful it was. Years ago Denmark banned its use because of ground water pollution. It had not been neutralised by the soil as claimed.