Well, yes, it is good to be an skeptic. But a lot of what they are pointing out here was already looked at.
While I go see the antivax people from the left to be a small number, the numbers that are against GMOs are bad (they are still comparable to the ones the conservatives have but that is a small comfort)
As a teachable moment I do recommend to use a basic test to see if a source of info is reliable; even if I’m also more of a liberal I do think that eventually politics has to yield to science.
The basic test for me is to look if a source that is skeptic or specializes in debunking fake information does have a problem with climate change, GMOs or vaxxines.
It is noticeable to me that many sites out there from the right do disparage places like RationalWiki, Snopes, The Skeptic or the Skeptics Dictionary, etc. When all of them actually do bust the heads of anti vaxxers and anti GMO people regardless if they are from the left. While those are not experts in the field they do however rely on expert advise and they end up being equal opportunity offenders of ideologies. Something that a real skeptic should appreciate.
The GMO well was poisoned, fairly early on, by some ideas floated by proponents that struck many of us as a bit scary.
The specific one I have in mind was “copyrighted” crops, which would yield and then die, requiring farmers to buy a whole new planting of seed. It seemed to me to be a VERY bad idea to put “…and then I die” into the genome of the grains that produce our food.
Wiser heads prevailed, and the stupid or extreme ideas never came into practice. But the public-relations damage was done, and, as we all know, it’s damn hard to reverse a negative public association.
Another uncomfortable debate re GMO is labelling. There has been opposition to the labelling of GMO products, which strikes some as an attempt to interfere with the consumer’s right to be informed. The real issue is more complex than that, but it has been presented poorly, and led good people to hold views more skeptical than fully warranted.
That said, I’m a liberal, and I hang with liberals, including some extremely liberal university folk – the full-blown post-modernist guys – and never a one of them is opposed to either GMO food or vaccinations for children…although several do want to see GMO food fully labelled.
…particularly given the history of certain industries’ willingness to conceal the truth about product safety from the public, and especially considering now that we have a president who shows contempt for scientific research and public health.
I’m a Democrat, not far-left leaning, but definitely left of the middle. I view vaccination as a Very Good Thing. I’m non-committal on GMO foods. I don’t view them as harmful.
Copyright law grants exclusive rights to the author of an original and creative work of expression. A seed is not a work of expression. Copyright law has nothing to do with it.
You might thinking of patents. Monsanto, for example, holds patents on Roundup Ready seeds. It licenses use of those seeds to farmers under a contract that prohibits them from being saved and used beyond the planting season they were licensed for.
However, Monsanto still does this, so it’s not something that was rejected by the marketplace.
What you’re talking about, seeds that are engineered to die, wouldn’t require patent enforcement (although they could still be protected from copying by patent law). So the situation you describe is not a copyright, nor a patent situation, nor any kind of intellectual property. You’re essentially blaming IP for something that’s not an IP issue.
OK, I’ve got to ask - do you have a cite for that? Because a pound of RoundUp should cost the farmer a heck of a lot more than what he gets for a pound of wheat, and soaking wheat in RoundUp to increase wheat revenue would be kind of like soaking potatoes in gold to increase the weight of your potato harvest.
OK, I looked it up myself. The claim that farmers soak wheat in Roundup to increase the weight of their wheat crop is not true (and, as I pointed out above, would be silly).
However, it turns out that a few farmers do treat wheat with glyphosate (the main ingredient in Roundup) before cutting it because it acts as a desiccant that speeds up the drying process and lets them harvest the wheat quicker. (Apparently the longer wheat lies on the ground between cutting and harvesting, the more things can go wrong with it.) According to Snopes, this is a rare practice in the USA and basically only happens in North Dakota and Canada (and has something to do with the short growing seasons there).
Huh. I’m a leftist and I’m pretty anti-GMO. Genetic engineering is a clever idea, but it seems like we have a lot of screwballs advocating for ecologically (and economically) reckless policies. Patenting DNA on cereal grains? Putting toxins in cereal grains, and never mind the fallout on beneficial insect populations? Trying to outlaw labelling so consumers can’t tell or can’t prove what was in the food they ate that they suddenly had an unforeseen reaction to? *Any *marriage of Koch-style “deregulation” to experimental bio-manipulation? We have the same kind of fools selling GMOs as we have had selling pesticides, and this time the poison will be in the genome itself for a while.
I’m not anti-vax though. As I point out repeatedly; even Wakefield wasn’t anti-vax; he sold vaccines; he just wanted to wreck his competition’s business with slander.
I have an aunt who’s…more skeptical of vaccines than I am, but she’s pretty hard-right. I expect she’s probably anti-GMO too, it would fit.
It was talked about early on, and, as far as I know, not pursued. It was a bad idea, and gave the whole GMO idea a black eye.
Thank you for clarifying the legal terminology, but you haven’t actually dismissed the problem: companies spoke of using licensing/patent/copyright/other law to compel farmers to buy a whole new planting, which was an ugly idea and which harmed the overall momentum of GMO foods.
(And you’re wrong; there were IP ramifications. There were proposals making it illegal to reproduce the crops, just as it is illegal, today, to reproduce by cuttings certain brands of roses. It actually is an IP issue.)
It’s not a straw man when someone argues incorrectly against it, it’s a mistake because it’s a poor explication.
You literally said Genetically modified organisms aren’t crops who’s genes have been modified, they’re crops who’s genes have been modified.
I’ll give you, however, that’s it’s basically the same definition that I see on the nongmoproject’s website:
But I’d like clarification since that’s fairly open ended. Can it better be defined what they ‘allow’ or ‘don’t allow’? It just seems like new=bad
Can it be better explained what the problem is with GMOs?
I’m sure there’s more, but I just think people have it in their head that gmos are bad and either don’t know what it is or equate non-gmo with organic.
Either way, if I didn’t have the definition correct, I’d rather know the right one. It drives me nuts when people argue against something and clearly have no idea what they’re talking about. One that comes up regularly is “It’s so cold out, global warming is bullshit”.
One of the difficulties of arguing against a denialist of any sort (I’m not talking about anyone here), is the way they decide their conclusion, then start sweeping up varied justifications for it. You see it in climate change denial, vaccine-safety denial, GMO-safety denial, even more extreme things like holocaust denial.
You might ask an anti-GMO person why they oppose it, and they answer that they think it hasn’t been studied and might be dangerous. You show them that these crops have been studied like crazy, and that most non-GMO crops are actually less-studied than they claim is necessary. So they switch to saying companies shouldn’t be allowed to patent living things. You point out that hybrid seeds have been patented for years before GMOs came along. Then they shift to another tack, et cetera, ad infinitum.
They have picked their conclusion and then sought reasons for it, rather than looking at reasons and getting to a conclusion. It’s bad thinking, and it’s annoying as hell.
Companies already use patent law to prohibit saving of seeds. It has been standard practice for years. It has nothing to do with “terminator gene” technology. And, after I explained the issue to you, why would you say “licensing/patent/copyright/other,” when I just told you that copyright law can’t possibly be involved?
And what kind of compulsion are you talking about and what does it have to do with IP law?
What are you talking about? Are you talking about using patent licensing contracts to stop farmers from saving seeds? Then you’re talking about something that is already standard practice and wouldn’t need any new laws to enforce.
Or are you talking about terminator gene technology, whose sale would not require any changes in IP law? How exactly is IP law involved?
That sentence makes no sense. What exactly are you trying to say? What exactly was being proposed?
Show me actual cites then. Be specific. How is it an IP issue? Which kind of IP law applies and how (you may choose from patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, personality/publicity rights, idea misappropriation, moral rights, or sui generis rights)? What proposed changes to what IP laws were discussed?
Saltire, you can put words in my mouth, or you can look at the people who claim that even *labelling *GMOs is “anti-science”! I’m opposed to the GMO lobby because they’re afraid of even letting what they do be visible. They are untrustworthy.
Also, I (typically) expect GMO products to be safe to eat. That’s the purpose, after all. I’m worried about the larger economic and environmental questions of putting something like this out there. Does it become an invasive plant? Are you seriously going to maintain IP protection on it? Stuff like that.
I’m left of moderately left. I have a degree in engineering. I cheered when Australia denied entrance to an anti-vaxer. And I am leery of GMO processes, not so much the foods.
I readily admit that even if GMO crops have negative effects do to being eaten, that’s by no means the worst part of my diet. I don’t believe we have any idea of the long term outcome of growing GMO crops, and the practices that they allow. What happens when the extra herbicides and pesticides, that these crops will tolerate, drifts into the neighboring wet lands? How long were DDT and PCBs used before we figured out they was killing off our raptors? How long to make the lead in paint connection?
I’m not worried about the food. I’m worried about the farming.
The concept of a genetic sequence that makes the crop sterile (i.e. what was called the ‘terminator gene’ back in the 1990s) isn’t any more problematic than seedless grapes. Do you object to seedless grapes too?
In the case of GMO’s, the terminator gene thing would have been a really good idea, since it would short-circuit the problem of these genes spreading to wild plants.
Seed saving isn’t a common practice in developed countries anyway (except if you’re growing noncommercial ‘heritage’ varities, I guess), so I don’t see why that even matters. It’s common in places like Africa and India but I’m certain most farmers there would prefer to have a more productive crop, at the cost of having to buy seed anew every year.
Roundup is not in fact a carcinogen (to be more precise, it’s not seriously carcinogenic or toxic, although some of the ‘adjuvants’ it’s formulated with may be somewhat toxic). What some foreign countries choose to ban, or not, isn’t really relevant to whether it is in fact a carcinogen.
In any case, objecting to GM as a technology because you have concerns about Roundup is like objecting to modern medicine, in toto, because some people have bad reactions to antidepressants (which they certainly do).
There is no Roundup Ready wheat out there anyway as far as I know (at least, not on the commercial market), and herbicides are intended to be used well in advance of the harvest so that we won’t be ingesting them.
it is common among the small holder farmers who can not afford access to the commercial seed. Despite the westerners romanticism and that of the anti economic left, it is a poor practice that damages the land from the expansive over use out of the desparation and reinforces the poverty because of the low yields and the non resistance to the pests, to the climate factors.