Its an industry worth over 40 billion. I’ll leave it to you to explain why that is ‘not large’.
It’s the opinion of American’s about alot of things. And we are talking about GMO not climate change, so stay focused.
Doesn’t matter if it’s woo or not, when it comes to putting things inside your body, the individual gets to decide what and how much. Having to explain what processes the manufacturer or farmer used to bring that delicious apple to the store might not mean anything to you, but it is important to alot of people. It doesn’t have to be a 12 page dosier attached to each apple, but the information should be public knowledge and easily accessible. And you may have noticed I and others have stipulated the safety of current GMO technologies. but favor putting regs in place (including some form of labeling) is to ensure that it remains ever thus so.
mc
You are taking me out of context. “Not large” was referring to numbers of people, not money. I was talking about people, as in members of the public, who would support a GMO labeling proposal. I posit that the vast majority of them would not have a problem with a combined GMO & radiological/chemical bombardment labeling proposal, if one were put forward and seriously debated. The organic industry is not peanuts (no pun intended), but I do not believe they have a lot of influence over public opinion. I have also not seen any real argument from the pro-GMO labeling camp against such further labeling, but then again I have also never seen any serious proposal.
GMO label advocates seem to be quite happy when their blindspot is pointed out to them, so I rather doubt this is the case.
Keeping in mind that I’m not arguing for mandatory labeling of GMOs at this time, I brought up the example of the EU in response to the poster who said that “the whole point [of mandatory labeling] is to create a Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt cloud over GMO”. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that the EU is trying to create FUD over GMOs as opposed to the much more reasonable assumption that they are being conservatively cautious in protecting consumer interests. Nor is it reasonable to think that they’re doing it because they hate America or because they’re idiots, as you seem to be implying. The EU is more likely in general to enact laws in favor of the consumer rather than the corporation for the same reason that they have much stronger privacy laws than the US where corporate intrusion into personal privacy is epidemic, and for the same reason that they provide their citizens with universal health care – because, unlike the US Congress, their governments are not owned and run by corporate interests.
Whoever those persons may be, I am not one of them. I’ve emphasized the relevant part here:
The statics I can glimpse without shelling-out seem to indicate that food industry revenues (retail) are somewhere between $5~7T. That would place “organic”, by your numbers, somewhere under 1% of the market. These numbers will be skewed by price: “ORGANIC!” stickered products tend toward double price in stores. Of course, there is probably some amount of pollution, with processed items not being purely “organic” or purely non-organic.
EU regulators have an interestingly selective way of informing and “protecting consumer interests”. For instance, a number of pesticides used in organic farming pose potential hazards to the health of consumers and applicators, and have worse effects on the environment than non-organic pesticides, but I know of no country in which organic food products are required to list on the label which pesticides have been sprayed on them. They’re supposed to be so much healthier for us - what are the organic growers trying to hide? 
It’d be a mistake to assume that the EU Commission, which has apparently felt the need to appease anti-GMO pressure groups, speaks for European scientists in general. When Seralini et al released their notoriously bad study alleging harm from GM corn and glyphosate, joining the overwhelming condemnation from regulatory and scientific organizations was the report from the European Food Safety Administration.
Oh, and speaking of trying to evoke FUD…
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
The power of biotechnology becomes worrisome given the track records of big agribusinesses and the food industry, and the degree to which their PR machines and lobbyists control public perceptions and public policy. It may be fashionable for the organic granola crowd to hate Monsanto, for instance, but that doesn’t change the fact of their aggressive and well-funded PR and lobbying which is on a par with what we used to associate with the worst of the tobacco companies, and with Exxon Mobil on climate change denial back in the days of Lee Raymond.
[/QUOTE]
Gosh, that’s quite a list. But you forgot to mention company goons battling labor unions in the 1930s auto industry, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and Joe Hill being framed. :dubious:
Playing the Corporate Fear card is a tactic identical to that used by antivaxers when they suggest we can’t trust vaccines because of Big Pharma and Vioxx.
It also ignores (as mentioned earlier in this thread) the power and influence of the organic industry including the corporations that make a ton of money selling its products*, such as Whole Foods, whose annual sales and growth have been running neck and neck with Monsanto (it’ll be tougher to make fun of and/or demonize either company now that they’ve been swallowed up by bigger corporations).
What really counts in this debate is the science. Those who largely or completely ignore it in favor of things like mandatory labeling and corporate fearmongering are admitting that the science is not on their side.
*It’s amazing how organic marketers have been able to deceive American consumers into thinking their products are healthier. One company I recently heard about is Luke’s Organic, a California producer which sells snack foods that are, like, really good for you. Check out (for instance) their organic sour cream and onion potato chips, which surprisingly have as much or more calories, fat and sodium than the Evil Corporate Lay’s sour cream and onion potato chips (Luke’s chips are Non-GMO Project Verified, so there’s that).
I have a bunch of extremely progressive/lefty cousins who live up in Humboldt County (I’m a more mainstream liberal myself). I’ve had several lengthy and interesting debates with one of them who is not only against GMOs, he’s against flouridation of water, and generally against hospitals and modern medicine. He once spent several years up in a tree to keep it from being logged.
Smart, nice guy, but boy do I disagree with him about a lot.
That said, I live in a very liberal bubble with almost all liberal friends and he’s the only person I know to have such opinions, although it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the other Humboldters agree with him on some or all of his opinions. But still, the ratio appears to be miniscule, if my friend group is representative.
Show me where in this thread or any other I have ever been a staunch defender of the organic food industry. It actually has nothing whatsoever to do with a sensible discussion of GMOs. As for the EU, it is a fact that EU consumers as well as those in most Commonwealth countries generally have better protections in many areas like personal privacy because there is far less corporate lobbying and it’s far less influential; it’s a fact that everyone has access to health care because there’s no massive insurance lobby that has a chokehold on public policy; it’s generally true that the public interest there tends to prevail over corporate interests. Whether their GMO policies are excessively cautious is a different debate, but the primacy of the public interest in European culture seems to me a far more rational explanation for many of their consumer-friendly policies than trying to attribute them to stupidity.
Who are these “anti-GMO pressure groups”? Is this about that evil cabal of organic food producers again? It makes no sense that the EU is relatively immune to US-style corporate lobbyists yet for some reason caves to a bunch of organic farmers threatening them with stalks of organic arugula. Or perhaps you mean that consumer groups wanted GMO labeling. If so, this isn’t “appeasement” but a legitimate response to a public desire to be informed about the provenance of their food. Science-based evidence that a particular product is safe argues for permitting its sale; I see nothing wrong with complying at the same time with the public’s expressed wish to put it on a label, which is a matter of preference and policy.
As for your favorite and utterly irrelevant anecdote about the Seralini study, I have to wonder why you keep perpetually citing it. So there was once a study suggesting harms from certain GMOs and it was badly done and turned out to be wrong. The EFSA quite rightly condemned it as being wrong. The EFSA is the science advisory body to European governments on food safety and this just seems to reaffirm that decision makers are guided by sound science.
You do nothing to help your case by specious proclamations that some argument sounds just like some other argument that’s being used to support a ridiculous proposition. Again, the malign influence of corporate interests on public policy in the US is a fact. The problem with the anti-vaxers’ arguments is that they are nonsense in the alleged claims about the vaccines, not because they happen to be correct about corporate power.
Rather ironic coming from someone who just used the “identical tactic” gambit, since this is the identical tactic used by climate change deniers who claim that the self-interest of the fossil fuel industry is countered by all the climate scientists enjoying supposedly lavish grant money. But I’m not interested in argumentative games. What is pertinent here is that the food and agribusiness industries are trillion-dollar enterprises which, like other large enterprises, have a stranglehold on US public policy and on shaping it in their own interests. All that reasonable people are asking for is an improved regulatory framework as I’ve already touched on and reiterate at the end of this post, which may become increasingly important as biotechnology becomes more and more capable of overcoming natural obstacles to creating increasingly novel traits and food products.
Since I haven’t argued for mandatory labeling, and since corporate dominance of the legislative process is abundantly evident, I don’t see the point or relevance of this statement. It’s not “fearmongering” to describe a manifestly evident reality – see my previous cite. But you don’t even need the Princeton study. Ask yourself: why is America the only industrialized country in the world without universal health care, but with the biggest and most influential health insurers in the world? Why is it a major hotbed of climate change denial, but with the biggest and most influential oil companies in the world, some of which have bigger budgets than many nations? Why do other countries go to such great lengths to protect personal privacy, while the US is the only country in the world where grandmothers and small children can be threatened and sued with impunity by media conglomerates for alleged copyright violation under draconian copyright laws written by those same conglomerates, just like the health insurance industry practically wrote the ACA?
Frankly, ISTM that anything other than enthusiastic unconditional support for all biotechnology, present and future, causes you to pop out of the woodwork with scathing attacks on the slightest suggestion for caution and prudent regulation, which you routinely mischaracterize and link to fraudulent arguments like those of anti-vaxers. The kind of unconditional support that you demand is never justified and you’re not going to get it from me. What is it about my concluding comments in the following that are objectionable or hard to understand?
The poo-pooing that this issue propagates makes it difficult to express real concerns about it. Any time I hear talk that sounds a lot like “but, because we can”, it troubles me. Yes, it does not make sense to shackle every new technology with a million what-ifs, but the ecological and environmental risks that have already been shown to happen with GMO applications are potentially serious. There seems to be very little regulation or restraint on genetic manipulation, and the marketplace is not equipped to rein in abuse with this technology that could threaten our very survival in the long term – but you and I will almost certainly be fertilizer by the time it should come to pay the piper, so fuck it, let’s party now.
And the massively high injury and disability rates in the modern meatpacking industry. And the ongoing massive safety violations in coal mines. And the [endangerment of workers by the companies that run nuclear plants](company endangers safety of workers). And agricultural use of the carcinogenic substance Alar, and the agricultural industry’s subsequent PR campaign to promote the false narrative that concerns about Alar were just unsubstantiated hype. And the decades of corporate misdirection and lobbying for toxic “flame retardant” chemicals. And the high fatality rate among oil company drivers whose employers lobbied for exemptions from transportation safety regulations. And so on and so on and so on.
Look, I don’t approve of public paranoia about nefarious “Big Industry” conspiracies and stubborn disregard for scientific findings either. But it’s stupid to act as though corporate endangerment of workers and consumers is just a matter of a few quaint little archaic stories from the history books hyped up to “play the Corporate Fear card”.
Corporations do very often bend rules and lean on regulators in the interests of increased profit and against the interests of workers and consumers, because they have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits. Where the profit motive combines with power, taking advantage of the less powerful parties in the situation is always going to be a serious risk.
Acknowledging that unremarkable and persistent fact isn’t “paranoid” or “anti-science” in any way. Trying to handwave or sneer it away by insinuating that it’s all just outdated scandals from the musty past that only a credulous ninny would worry about nowadays does not make you look like a defender of science.
I’d have to think personal conviction without any evidence of harm to point to, is insufficient to require market intervention. If I am a strict keeper of no-left-hands-touching-food, can I ask for that to be labelled? Now, if the population is large enough to be a market concern, plenty of companies will tout non-GMO products just to serve the demand. I guess if GMO becomes ubiquitous, really die hard non-GMO fans will have to go to self/small producers, and plenty of people do that already for similar reasons.
I wouldn’t say the EU is engaged in a conspiracy theory, more that the folks making those announcements are bending to the FUD in their populations. If the EU is rich enough to all eat less efficiently produced food, good on them for being the control group. I’d prefer they back things up with science though.
And corporate money and lobbying is big and bad in the US, but it seems there is enough independent science going on in GMO that there is sufficient support of the public interest. (at least so far)
What, specifically, about the EC GMO labeling laws do you feel is not “backed up with science”? AFAICT, they are not making any claims about GMOs being bad; they’re just saying that consumers should get to choose products based on information about their content.
If we’re going to argue that jurisdictions shouldn’t regulate any food labeling of any characteristic that isn’t definitively empirically linked to some scientifically validated issue of importance, there go all labeling laws concerning religious dietary prohibitions, which are scientifically about as meaningless as you can get.
Aren’t religious labels voluntary? I thought that brands did it to gain a place in a niche market, like vegan and cruelty-free labels. I see GMO-free labels everywhere too.
Yups, but there are some general legal regulations about what they can/can’t/must say, like exactly what the definition of “kosher” or “halal” is and what procedures are required to qualify for such a label.
The symbols are trademarked by the certifying organizations, so federal law prohibits unauthorized use.
I have a problem with this assertion. What evidence is there that all modern GMO-created plants could be created by cross-breeding? Certainly some could, but all? I admit, that I’m not an expert on biology or genes, but I thought the whole point of modern GMO technology was to create plants that could not be created by standard cross breeding. I would say that if you produced an exactly identical plant though traditional cross-breeding then I’d be fine not labeling it GMO. But if you produced it by cross-breeding, then why bother with modern methods? The problem comes from someone saying “I could produce this by cross-breeding, but have not done so.” What then?
I feel that the standard of proof for GMO safety should be higher than those for global warming or vaccinations. GMO’s touch on DNA, ecology and the environment. DNA is the very core of life itself; so yeah, I’m asking for a higher standard of proof. If vaccinations worked by altering our DNA, then I’d be more wary of them too. But they don’t, so I’m not. If the only way to combat global warming was altering DNA, I’d be skeptical about that too.
Furthermore, humankind has been has been absolutely terrible at foreseeing the impact of ‘small’ pokes at ecology and environment. I had the pleasure of visiting New Zealand earlier this year. Wonderful country. They made a big mistake way back when by bringing non-native species (on purpose!) to New Zealand. Now they are overrun with bunnies and mammal predators that threaten native wildlife. And these were all earnest attempts to make thing better, not some nefarious conspiracy.
So, I’m not keen on GMOs. Because people think they can control nature, but they can’t.
Am I wrong? Hopefully yes.
This kinda proves my point though – it’s just a “blindspot”. It seems like these things are only brought up in a backhanded way, to undermine GMO labeling and/or organic foods. Where are the actual serious proposals, anywhere, from anyone, to implement mandatory labeling of foods produced with radiological bombardment? Why can’t we debate that on the merits instead of it just being a “gotcha” that gets trotted out in GMO discussions?
Becasue frankly there is no reason either should be listed. Neither is a real threat but GMO has had a deliverate scare campaign complete with faked science aimed at it by rivals and fear mongerers.
I don’t like giving into fear mongerers, even when you try to sweeten the sewer emissions they sell by labelling it ‘customer choice’ and ‘informed customer’. Its pandering to a fer market and frankly you the customer doesn’t always need to know how the sausage is made, as long as it is made safely.
So bringing up Radiological MO labelling is purely a defensive tactic. Its pulled out because the primary backers of GMO labelling is the orgranic market and they suddenly get very shy when this is proposed. But the people bringing up Radiological MOs don’t have a vested interest in it because they know it is safe and don’t have a finincial interest in fearmongering a competitor’s crop modification methods.