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It’s interesting to read Greenpeace and other environmental groups’ writings to see what they are objecting to. It seems they are primarily concerned about two

It’s interesting to read Greenpeace and other environmental groups’ writings to see what they are objecting to. It seems they are primarily concerned about two types of issue; one is why I’d call “safety”: gene transfer/escape into wild species, unintended ecological consequences, human safety of consuming GM plants. Tho other group is around “licensing”: essentially a deep concern about going down a path where plant seeds are licensed instead of bought, and all the “Monsanto is evil” concerns. I think on the safety point there is some FUD about what kind of gene transfer is actually biologically possible, but you can make a more general rebuttal that selective breeding has the same risks, it’s just harder to get positive changes into your genotype. Maybe Greenpeace would argue that we’re already endangering the biosphere a bit with selective breeding, and going any faster would dramatically increase the danger. On the licensing point, I’m very sympathetic, but I think that is an argument for IP law reform or public investment in GM, not an argument against GM itself. But of course if you believe the safety concerns then you don’t want public or private research to happen because you think it’s prima facie harmful.

wefarrell 5y ago
GMO plants are modified to make them more difficult to propagate and produce seeds, in order to protect intellectual property. The ecological consequences of those variations being released into the wild is devastating and has adversely affected farmers who do not grow GMOs.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  > GMO plants are modified to make them more difficult to propagate and produce seeds Can you name a single commercially available GMO that has this property, aside from being a hybrid (hybrids don't breed true, but that's because they're hybrids, not because they're GMOs)? It is my understanding that there's no real need for any such technology anyway, as legal protection suffices.
  - theptip 5y ago
    I thought this was common knowledge, but I looked for a citation and couldn’t find one. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/dupont-to-pick-up-where-monsanto-stopped-on-enforcing-seed-patents/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/dupont-to-pick-up-wher... suggests that roundup-ready soy seeds are viable. So perhaps they rely solely on IP for protection.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      I think if you drill down on many (all?) anti-GMO arguments you will find the evidence for them really isn't there. It's remarkable how the whole ideological edifice is built on nothing.
      - firebaze 5y ago
        Occam's razor suggests the best strategy - if available - is to suppress natural reproduction, if you were in possession of a superior genetic strain, in order to stay ahead of the market. Suppressing natural reproduction is the same general principle as suppressing others using your idea/strategy/copyright. I'm sincerely curious why this seems so far fetched to you. If I were the CEO of a company having the option to nudge my researchers into this, I probably would, seen from a ethics-detached point of view. By the way, I'm not anti-GMO; in fact I think it's the only way to sustain the whole of humanity until we've passed the next great filter. Still I don't buy into that line of thought.
        pfdietz 5y ago
        No one is holding a gun to farmers' heads forcing them to buy GMO seeds. If a particular kind of seed doesn't increase their profit they won't buy it. The older non-GMO seeds will still be around. They won't be outlawed. So, the scenario you seem to be thinking of is that GMOs will drive down the price of agricultural commodities, so that farmers who don't avail themselves of them will be unable to compete. But this argument "proves too much": it's an argument not against GMOs, but against ANY agricultural technology that boosts yields and reduces costs. Presumably the Green Revolution is not something we should object to because food prices declined. I think you are on to something in understanding the anti-GMO motivation in Europe, though. Farmers don't want to have to compete against the more efficient large scale farmers in the US. Anti-GMOism is a kind of camouflaged protectionism.
pfdietz 5y ago
The argument against IP protection for GMOs makes no sense to me at all. If there were ever a technology for which IP protection was appropriate, it's this one. The plants literally manufacture themselves, so if the IP wasn't protected the investment in the creation of the variety could not be recouped. There would be one season of sales then the market would be gone.
- theptip 5y ago
  I think it’s immensely problematic that a seed can fall in your farm, and you can be sued for illegally growing Monsanto’s IP. More generally I think it’s a bad societal outcome for one company to use IP laws to monopolize the food production economy. I think allowing this will lead to a much less robust society. I’m all for free markets for most markets, but things get very bad if people don’t have food. So I think there is a good case for the government funding research and open-sourcing the work here, and also potentially restricting eligibility of patents in this area too. I think your argument is sound in a free-market maximalist / small-government libertarian framework, I’m just less convinced that the current IP framework produces good results in this case.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    That scare scenario has never occurred, and it's legally doubtful that any such lawsuit by someone like Monsanto could succeed. Monsanto itself explicitly said it would never sue anyone for accidental contamination. What Monsanto DID do was sue someone whose field was contaminated, and who then repeatedly sprayed the field with glyphosate to kill all but the GMO plants, so he could selectively concentrate the interlopers to continue to propagate. It's this last step that got the farmer in trouble. > but things get very bad if people don’t have food GMO IP protection does nothing to prevent farmers from continuing to grow previously existing varieties. So this is another scare argument without foundation. > I think your argument is sound in a free-market maximalist / small-government libertarian framework, I’m just less convinced that the current IP framework produces good results in this case. I think the anti-IP argument is an underhanded way to try to ban GMOs without actually saying you want to do that.
mahogany 5y ago
> Maybe Greenpeace would argue that we’re already endangering the biosphere a bit with selective breeding, and going any faster would dramatically increase the danger. This is an interesting point. The practice of using GMOs, including the broad category of selective breeding, could ultimately lead to much less biodiversity which is, at best, not fully understood by us, but seems to be quite bad for life.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  Already has led, although I guess the bigger effect is agriculture itself – basically giving those few genetically homogeneous cultivars a vast selective advantage by converting biologically diverse natural land into monocultural fields on a vast scale.
- xorcist 5y ago
  The Cavendish banana is a common and well known example of this.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  Conversely, it could lead to much greater biodiversity as we control the process.
  - theptip 5y ago
    Agreed. In principle we could introduce deliberate biodiversity, and as it becomes cheaper to create new variants, it would become easier to find multiple genotypes that achieve the same desired adaptation. You could even imagine doing so programmatically, perhaps even with explicit inputs describing the known issues that need to be optimized around (e.g. Panama Disease in bananas). Unfortunately I am not optimistic that this is an inevitable outcome, at least not in the short-to-medium term; if you look at the software ecosystem or even just corporate structure in general, you see a strong pressure towards consolidation and monoculture rather than an emphasis on robustness to systemic risks. However I think it's encouraging that advances in GM technology provide us with a potential long-term solution to the problem of monoculture, without asking us to give up the benefits that the market selected for in our current state. Of course we could solve monoculture in our current system by giving up the cultivars that the market prefers, and instead switching to more-localized and less-productive cultivars, but this doesn't seem like a realistic way of feeding 7-8B people.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

wefarrell 5y ago

GMO plants are modified to make them more difficult to propagate and produce seeds, in order to protect intellectual property. The ecological consequences of those variations being released into the wild is devastating and has adversely affected farmers who do not grow GMOs.

pfdietz 5y ago
> GMO plants are modified to make them more difficult to propagate and produce seeds Can you name a single commercially available GMO that has this property, aside from being a hybrid (hybrids don't breed true, but that's because they're hybrids, not because they're GMOs)? It is my understanding that there's no real need for any such technology anyway, as legal protection suffices.
- theptip 5y ago
  I thought this was common knowledge, but I looked for a citation and couldn’t find one. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/dupont-to-pick-up-where-monsanto-stopped-on-enforcing-seed-patents/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/dupont-to-pick-up-wher... suggests that roundup-ready soy seeds are viable. So perhaps they rely solely on IP for protection.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    I think if you drill down on many (all?) anti-GMO arguments you will find the evidence for them really isn't there. It's remarkable how the whole ideological edifice is built on nothing.
    - firebaze 5y ago
      Occam's razor suggests the best strategy - if available - is to suppress natural reproduction, if you were in possession of a superior genetic strain, in order to stay ahead of the market. Suppressing natural reproduction is the same general principle as suppressing others using your idea/strategy/copyright. I'm sincerely curious why this seems so far fetched to you. If I were the CEO of a company having the option to nudge my researchers into this, I probably would, seen from a ethics-detached point of view. By the way, I'm not anti-GMO; in fact I think it's the only way to sustain the whole of humanity until we've passed the next great filter. Still I don't buy into that line of thought.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        No one is holding a gun to farmers' heads forcing them to buy GMO seeds. If a particular kind of seed doesn't increase their profit they won't buy it. The older non-GMO seeds will still be around. They won't be outlawed. So, the scenario you seem to be thinking of is that GMOs will drive down the price of agricultural commodities, so that farmers who don't avail themselves of them will be unable to compete. But this argument "proves too much": it's an argument not against GMOs, but against ANY agricultural technology that boosts yields and reduces costs. Presumably the Green Revolution is not something we should object to because food prices declined. I think you are on to something in understanding the anti-GMO motivation in Europe, though. Farmers don't want to have to compete against the more efficient large scale farmers in the US. Anti-GMOism is a kind of camouflaged protectionism.

pfdietz 5y ago

The argument against IP protection for GMOs makes no sense to me at all. If there were ever a technology for which IP protection was appropriate, it's this one. The plants literally manufacture themselves, so if the IP wasn't protected the investment in the creation of the variety could not be recouped. There would be one season of sales then the market would be gone.

theptip 5y ago
I think it’s immensely problematic that a seed can fall in your farm, and you can be sued for illegally growing Monsanto’s IP. More generally I think it’s a bad societal outcome for one company to use IP laws to monopolize the food production economy. I think allowing this will lead to a much less robust society. I’m all for free markets for most markets, but things get very bad if people don’t have food. So I think there is a good case for the government funding research and open-sourcing the work here, and also potentially restricting eligibility of patents in this area too. I think your argument is sound in a free-market maximalist / small-government libertarian framework, I’m just less convinced that the current IP framework produces good results in this case.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  That scare scenario has never occurred, and it's legally doubtful that any such lawsuit by someone like Monsanto could succeed. Monsanto itself explicitly said it would never sue anyone for accidental contamination. What Monsanto DID do was sue someone whose field was contaminated, and who then repeatedly sprayed the field with glyphosate to kill all but the GMO plants, so he could selectively concentrate the interlopers to continue to propagate. It's this last step that got the farmer in trouble. > but things get very bad if people don’t have food GMO IP protection does nothing to prevent farmers from continuing to grow previously existing varieties. So this is another scare argument without foundation. > I think your argument is sound in a free-market maximalist / small-government libertarian framework, I’m just less convinced that the current IP framework produces good results in this case. I think the anti-IP argument is an underhanded way to try to ban GMOs without actually saying you want to do that.

mahogany 5y ago

> Maybe Greenpeace would argue that we’re already endangering the biosphere a bit with selective breeding, and going any faster would dramatically increase the danger. This is an interesting point. The practice of using GMOs, including the broad category of selective breeding, could ultimately lead to much less biodiversity which is, at best, not fully understood by us, but seems to be quite bad for life.

Sharlin 5y ago
Already has led, although I guess the bigger effect is agriculture itself – basically giving those few genetically homogeneous cultivars a vast selective advantage by converting biologically diverse natural land into monocultural fields on a vast scale.
xorcist 5y ago
The Cavendish banana is a common and well known example of this.
scoopertrooper 5y ago
Conversely, it could lead to much greater biodiversity as we control the process.
- theptip 5y ago
  Agreed. In principle we could introduce deliberate biodiversity, and as it becomes cheaper to create new variants, it would become easier to find multiple genotypes that achieve the same desired adaptation. You could even imagine doing so programmatically, perhaps even with explicit inputs describing the known issues that need to be optimized around (e.g. Panama Disease in bananas). Unfortunately I am not optimistic that this is an inevitable outcome, at least not in the short-to-medium term; if you look at the software ecosystem or even just corporate structure in general, you see a strong pressure towards consolidation and monoculture rather than an emphasis on robustness to systemic risks. However I think it's encouraging that advances in GM technology provide us with a potential long-term solution to the problem of monoculture, without asking us to give up the benefits that the market selected for in our current state. Of course we could solve monoculture in our current system by giving up the cultivars that the market prefers, and instead switching to more-localized and less-productive cultivars, but this doesn't seem like a realistic way of feeding 7-8B people.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]