Why is Monsanto evil?

Great Debates
42

Argument from popularity (in this case, argument from scientific illiteracy) = fail. Besides, Europe is far from uniform on these matters (the “horror” does not extend to Spain and Portugal which allow GM crop cultivation, and there’s support for it in Britain as well).

Like the poor Indian farmers who’ve seen their incomes increase thanks to genetically modified Bt cotton?
If they (or any other farmers) want to go back to the seeds they previously used, there’s nothing stopping them.

Yea, and creating new varieties through conventional breeding (or using radiation, a popular method for establishing new traits) creates new genetic combinations that go untested for impacts on human health and the environment. Contrast that with insertion of limited DNA sequences in defined portions of the genome through genetic modification techniques, where we have a much better understanding of what will occur, which probably explains why we’ve had about 20 years of experience with this technology and no deleterious health impacts found to have occurred.*

*there’s a newly approved GM potato variety with far less content of potentially carcinogenic acrylamide compared to conventional potatoes. Maybe we should shun that potato because having fewer carcinogens could have unintended consequences. Or, as one pundit observed, maybe we should demand labeling of the conventional potato to warn consumers that it contains lots more carcinogens than the GM potato.

43

Oh, and for all of you cooking up holiday meals: remember NOT to use regular GMO table salt.

Instead, I highly recommend Organic, Natural, Non-GMO, Halal & Kosher Gourmet Himalayan pink table salt, sold by these fine people:

The customer comments are good too, including the one warning against buying Monsanto Franken-salt.

44

Exactly. For 5000 years now we’ve basically been throwing genes at the wall and seeing what stuck. How can that be any less dangerous that actually knowing what we’re doing?

45

I do not understand the western romanticism about the saving seeds. No good farming is done this way. to reach productivities that avoid starvation, in good farming one buys every year the high yield varieties. It seems to me there is a very ignorant and romanticist left movement that is quite ignorant of the realities of the plant sciences and rely on romantic stereotypes for their knowledge.

46

Yes, this is an idea promoted by the leftist Western NGO who like the photogenic poor and like to dream of the magical solutions.

The reality in Africa is that the substistence farmer is already unable to meet the needs, and the “saving of seeds” is the worst thing possible for such farmers who remain trapped in the extremely poor and the ever degrading returns off of the weak traditional genomes.

This argument is a sheer ignorant romanticism that I hate, it is this sort of aciton that undermines the real actions needed for the African agriculture to achieve a green revolution. It is not scientificially ignorant romantic foolishness of saving low quality seeds that will allow the african farmer on his and her small plots to escape the poverty and the actual real peonage to the Grands Chefs who dominate and extract the rents, while making the nicest noises for the ignorant white european volunteers who come for their poverty tourism with the photogenic African farmer and sow bad ideas about GMO.

no it is modern agriculture using the well adapted varietes for higher yields, for the better pest resistances and the better resistance to the declining soil qualities that the old traditional crops can not meet because they were bred for a less intensive usage when there was land and space to rotate - a reality that will not return without massive death and famine.

I have contempt for the people who spread these ideas. They do active harm to us.

Trapped into buying monsanto seed (it is actually the Syngenta that is most present, our fine suisse friends)? Do not show such contempt for the farmer.

47

The latest threat: Frankenswabs.

48

It embodies the concept of the noble, romatic, independent farmer who simply reclaims seed from his crops over and over, year to year. Humbly harvesting his crops by hand with little aid except a bit of help from his fellow, rough, independent farmers. The idea that farmers today are part of a system and parts of that system involves a corporation rubs people the wrong way.

Namely people who know fuckall about modern farming.

49

Well, yeah. And a whole lot of people object to this too. There are tons of us out there that don’t believe you should be able to patent software. A whole lot of us have a seriously problem with the idea of “intellectual property,” at least as the concept it used today.

The thing is, with software, I can pretty much just ignore what I disagree with. I have MP3, AAC, MPEG-4, etc. encoders. I will download and use abandonware because I think once something is offered to the public, you can’t withdraw it. I rip my movies from disks and make copies of my software. I remove the DRM from all my ebooks.

Farmers don’t have the choice to ignore the IP rights they don’t agree with.

51

I used to as well. Then I started going to school for computer science. If I come up with a revolutionary algorithm that, let’s say, reduces the complexity on collision detection by a factor of n (where n is the total number of polygons in the simulation), this would be ground-breaking, industry-redefining shit in scientific simulations and games design. Without IP, how would I profit from this? Should I just do it out of the goodness of my heart? I just made something that’s a huge boon to mankind. I would like some compensation for that.

Yes, there are problems with software patents. Patent trolls who never do anything with the software, companies holding back industry-wide improvement for profit… But how are we supposed to make money off of our advances? Maybe software patents aren’t the best comparison. There are real issues with software that GMOs don’t have. But the issue comes down to, again, intellectual property and profiting off an invention. Anyone who wants Monsanto’s seeds can buy them. Monsanto has done something that really helps a lot of people. Why shouldn’t they profit off that? What’s more, if they don’t turn a profit, why should they be expected to do it again?

Yeah, and I don’t see the problem with this.

52

Probably McD’s could, but it must first establish its right to, and exclusive rights to the name, so the bear-maker can’t just do whatever she wants. It takes the lawsuit to establish this. Meanwhile, the bear-makers can’t sell bears, and may prefer to come up with a different name.

53

Understood but there are already high yielding seeds developed through decades of research breeding and which are not genetically modified. Why not deliver these through agricultural programs to poor countries?

High yield hardy seeds are no secret.

54

It’s already happening. The Gates Foundation recently gave a bunch of money to this project.

No one is saying that genetic modification technology is the only means of increasing agricultural productivity and preventing starvation. It is one important tool which we can ill afford to lose through unjustified fears and ignorance.
There’s a parallel with antivaxers deriding immunization campaigns in Third World countries and arguing that there are other ways of reducing disease. Of course there are…but why would you throw out one of the most effective means of doing so?
Similarly, why shouldn’t agricultural scientists engineer a crop variety that is immune to a serious pathogen, if it’s possible to do so?

55

The whole point to rights is that they are rights whether or not you agree with them.

56

Research breeding is just another form of genetic modification.

57

And selective breeding has been going on for as long as humans have had agriculture.

58

To answer the OP, I believe the movie “Food, Inc” is part of the reason Monsanto is considered evil. It hammered Monsanto.

59

Any specific claims therein worth taking note of? I didn’t see it, and I’m not sure I’m particularly interested in seeing it from what I’ve heard. Looking at the NPR review, I see stuff like this:

I highlighted the false, polemic, and/or misleading statements in red. You may have noticed that that’s about every single claim made.

60

What he said, only more. They use radiation, and various mutagenic chemicals, to cause larger/greater numbers of genetic mutations, and then use the results of those treatments for further breeding. This creates the same danger risks as GM, only much much more, but you’ve never heard the greens complain about it. If you cause a bunch of random ass changes, it’s much more likely that you will have effected some change in the plant that would create toxins than if you manipulate a few genes that are relatively well understood

Indeed, so far only more “traditional” methods of breeding have caused dangers: a few varieties of potato that had to be pulled from the market because they were later found to contain too high levels of natural toxins in potatoes (alkaloids, particularly solanine, though I’m not sure if it was another or that and also another)

*I say “traditional” to include the mutagenics mentioned above. I’m not sure if such varieties that caused problems were at all bred using the mutagenic methods or the more typical methods. I just know that this is a thing that has happened in general.

61

I have to say, I find it amusing that a nation famous for its love of sausages is suddenly so concerned about where its food comes from.

62

Whatever one may think about healthy diets, a Bavarian that doesn’t at least occasionally eat sausage is neither Bavarian nor German, ja?

I don’t really know what this means. It sounds like something for vidya game graphics.

Let’s talk about an actual boon to mankind. Imagine a new technology that allowed recycling of waste phosphate from streams fed by farm runoff, and allowed your beloved high-yield agriculture to exist past 2030, when the phosphate rock mines become completely tapped. (Upps! Technology is not a fundamental resource, after all, but a derivative!)

(Now, of course, this is most likely fantasy. It won’t happen because it can’t happen, obviously, or we would already be doing it. But let’s pretend.)

Whoever invented that, or rather their [del]masters[/del] [del]owners[/del] employers, and their lawyers, would have the world by the balls. Everyone would be desperate to use this technology. How high a price should the world have to pay for the continued productivity of high-yield staples, and for how long?

How many countries would ignore the IP law in the name of not collapsing in an orgy of starvation and literal cannibalism, and how many would lose practically everything just to stay on the good side of the owners of the technology according to international treaty—and of the World’s Policeman, who enforces that treaty?

(If I were to engage in fabulous conspiracy theory, I might hypothesize that phosphate recycling already exists but is being suppressed so that a Western corporation can reveal it—with a new research program to justify a late patent date—at such time to maximize profits. But as a pessimist Malthusian, I can’t allow myself even that much optimism.)

Leaving aside vidya games, if it’s really life-changing tech, private IP ownership can easily become inhumane.

I’m mulling over a pit thread for you rose-bespectacled techno-utopians.