4 ms·

Rejecting GMOs hinders human progress and keeps the poor hungry

25 points by jseliger 2y ago

kodr 2y ago
we produce enough food to feed everyone on earth.GMO can be useful, but 90% of the time it is used to sell herbicide resistant crops, GMO and herbicide sold by the same company like Bayer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer
dvh 2y ago
It's not about health issues. I don't care if some poor guy with fish allergy dies after eating GMO potato. It's about licencing issues! GMO has potential to literally enslave humanity. GMO should either be public domain or banned. There is no middle ground!
- sabas123 2y ago
  You know patents expire and their contents are released into the public domain after 25 years right? Seems like an short time to enslave humanity
danpalmer 2y ago
Rejection of GMOs and rejection of large corporations controlling food sources, are different issues that are completely tied up in each other. Most of the problems with GMOs are problems with the patenting of crops, suing farmers for ridiculous reasons. The rest of the problems are people screaming "but the chemicals!" with no real scientific basis. We definitely need more GMO crops to feed the planet. We most likely need less of Monsanto et al meddling in the farming industry. I also find there's an opposite view of organic crops – there's this glorified notion that "organic" crops are better, but they're only better along very specific axes, namely the lack of pesticides, of which some may be dangerous (but often regulated). In reality, organic crops use more land, more water, and produce less for sale, in many ways making them worse for the environment than (responsible) pesticide usage. Everyone just needs to take into account their externalities. Right now industry and (some) eco campaigners don't.
- kjetijor 2y ago
  > namely the lack of pesticides lack of synthetic pesticides, you can use as much organic pesticides as you want.
  - reducesuffering 2y ago
    Sure, theoretically. But what does the reality on the ground actually mean for choosing organic rather than “”they could use 100x organic pesticides”, therefore no point. “Consumption of organically produced food reduces pesticide exposure and is linked to a variety of health benefits, according to multiple studies, especially according to a large study from France. Clinical trials continue to show that people who switch from non-organic to organic foods see a rapid and dramatic reduction in their urinary pesticide concentrations, a marker of pesticide exposure. Other studies have linked higher consumption of organic foods to lower urinary pesticide levels, improved health outcomes, including reductions in maternal obesity and pregnancy-associated preeclampsia risks, lower BMI and reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes.” https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/faq.php# https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/faq.php#
- grumbelbart2 2y ago
  > We definitely need more GMO crops to feed the planet That, too, is debatable. Google "Do we have enough food" - we could feed 10B people with what we produce. Feeding the world is currently more a matter of donating (who pays?) and distributing it, not so much of producing the food in the first place. > namely the lack of pesticides, of which some may be dangerous (but often regulated) There is also overfertilization, which puts nitrates into ground and ultimately drinking water, and the over-use of herbicide, which massively strains local ecosystems to their collapse. The farmer revolts in Europe over the last 1-2 years have shown how politically difficult any kind of regulation in this area is. The EU is now backing down. It seems to be very difficult to find a middle ground in the "excessive vs. organic" spectrum.
  - v7n 2y ago
    Distribution is in itself a problem, yes, but there's also the geopolitical angle of depending on foreign imports to feed a nation.
asterix_pano 2y ago
We have more than enough food for everyone. Actually, we waste most of agricultural land to grow crops to feed animals that we eat later on, which is extremely inefficient, like a 10 to 1 calorie conversion rate. It's also cruel, bad for the environment, etc.
- rockemsockem 2y ago
  No one agrees with this because we all like eating meat. But yes, distribution is the real problem
  - vaylian 2y ago
    > because we all like eating meat. I don't. I understand that some people like the taste of meat and they don't want to miss out on that, but the animal and ecosystem exploitation have unfortunately serious consequences that we can't ignore. If we can create alternative products that taste just like meat (or maybe even better), then this would be beneficial to everyone.
- dvh 2y ago
  But humans cannot eat grass, there are animals that only eat grass (sheep, geese, cows, goats) that are perfectly edible for humans.
  - kadkads 2y ago
    That would only be true if they eat a pure grass diet. They do not. They are fed soy, which is perfectly edible for humans. https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation >More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception. If we stop that, we free up a lot of calories for human consumption. I'd say the total amount of pure grass fed animals would be way lower, which would be better for the environment of course, and meat would be much more expensive. Actually, I like that. Good idea!
moi2388 2y ago
GMOs are under patent and increase prices, they do not keep the poor hungry, they are simply resistant to more pesticides. And pesticides like Roundup have been linked to neurological problems like Parkinson. If you’d want to save the poor, you’d teach them about greenhouses and irrigation and soil enrichment, which are actually the biggest issues in these poor countries
- Kuinox 2y ago
  What do you have against GMO like the golden rice ? None of what you listed applies to it, yet your statements harms GMO like golden rice.
  - moi2388 2y ago
    Yes, general statements never (almost never? :p) deal with all edge cases. Did you know they don’t need a patent on the crop? They can file patents on variations of the genes in question, meaning even other variations can be protected under patent laws. I guess it would be more honest to say I think there are other, more pressing matters in agriculture than GMOs, and that I have serious problems with patents on basic needs like medicine and food sources. But the topic was about GMOs, so I phrased my response in this context. Do with it as you like.
    - Kuinox 2y ago
      Crops patents is not specific to GMO. Calling the golden rice an edge case is showing you are unaware of all the GMO used to solve locals problems, that is a net benefit for the human and reduce the agriculture impact.
- defrost 2y ago
  Roundup is a broad-spectrum glyphosate-based herbicide. A weed|plant-killer (not a pesticide) that grain crops are modified to be resistant to.
jraph 2y ago
> The rejection of modern agricultural methods, genetic engineering, and the utilization of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is exclusively the prerogative of wealthy humans living in developed, largely Western nations Here we are. The article criticizes environmentalists against pesticides but never addresses environmental concerns. Convince me that "GMOs making pesticides resistant bad because most pesticides bad, because it harms the environment of which people are part" is false first. What keeps the poor hungry is keeping the poor poor. The solution to this political choice is not a technical answer.
michelsedgh 2y ago
This is whats wrong with articles. You can never know the motive behind them. There’s no way this article is actually written organically and the big corps aren’t paying them to write this. There should be some regulation stopping this. Basically any company with money can now spread their own propoganda.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  Agreed. This particular piece is hot garbage, and the entire operation has many hallmarks of astroturf.
  - michelsedgh 2y ago
    It’s not just this, you search about anything on google, any subjects there’s hundreds like this. You search if eggs are good you get hundreds saying how they’re great for you and if search if eggs are bad you get another hundred. It’s becoming impossible to be able to sort from good and bad articles. Even the research behind them many times can be paid by the corps. This is not good. There has to be a mechanism that changes this.
itsanaccount 2y ago
I learned recently theres a "biomass specific" cultivar of switchgrass. If you've been around wetlands in the Midwest, switchgrass is the most prolific plant. You have to fight it to plant anything. The cultivar is a few percentage points better, but don't mistake it being better for anything other than marketing for the seed company. You can't have something that just grows free and wild and is easy to propogate and to harvest with old square balers. You can't make biomass digestors palletized for home or community use to reduce our reliance on propane. No, you gotta make money from investor based corporate ag on a slightly different angle, mostly to grift clueless government green energy mandates. I don't believe for a second modern agriculture companies give a fuck about the poor.
tossandthrow 2y ago
Could as well say that too little development into synthetic meats hinders human progress. It is not that we can not grow enough food for humans. It is that we feed all the food to unethically treated animals in large warehouses, only to dig them down when the meat is unprofitable (looking at you, Australia). My bet is that we increase agriculture free land, and utilize what we grow much better.
imtringued 2y ago
A lot of poor countries have a large proportion of subsistence farmers that are living off the land and are not participating in any form of formal economy. That is how you get those less than two dollars a day figures. They simply aren't using money. The food they produce and eat is definitely worth two dollars. When you look at the economics of commercial farming, most of the cost is spent on inputs such as synthetic fertilizer and seeds. There was a hybrid rice company telling you, you can earn a whopping $1000 per unit of land, all you have to do is pay them $800 for the inputs. You still have to pay for the land and the equipment. The seed and fertilizer companies are earning most of the money. Meanwhile if you are a simple subsistence farmer you don't have a thousand dollars, so you will have to borrow the money and if your country isn't self sufficient agriculturally and bleeding money because of trade deficits then what is it exporting to buy the inputs? It is not like you are selling basic necessities to some high tech country that is better off doing something else. So you borrow money from foreign countries in a foreign currency, a currency that is much more stable than yours. This is hardly a business model that works for the poor. Whenever people talk about GMOs, they think the fundamental problem of agriculture is that there is an insufficient quantity of food, when the actual problem is that the economy needs to formalise and poor people need access to markets to buy or sell things.
awaythrow999 2y ago
Crazy to consider we already forgot about other big ideas that ended in a pandemic because gain of function research conducted in a lab. And now companies like Montesanto want to push more such dangerous ideas by arguing it is to combat hunger. Having more humans on the planet is not the solution to climate change. And science isn't going to save our ass from it. Sustainable agriculture is not about monoculture farming GMO crops while the rest of the environment gets obliterated by the practice. Utterly stupid.
jareklupinski 2y ago
> Over the next 25 years, the development, and successful use of genetic engineering in the production of agricultural crops, will play a vital role in the support of human flourishing and save and enrich the lives of millions. This will, however, only be possible if we support the research, development, and use of GE technologies in a rational manner. seeing the side-by-side comparisons of how much wheat has increased in yield from radiation-gardening made me realize that all we're really doing is speeding evolution / domestication using technology, and this was over 50 years ago! https://youtu.be/LPZqVSu_fu4?t=549 https://youtu.be/LPZqVSu_fu4?t=549 the most democratizing step would probably be distributing CRISPR kits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing) to farmers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening was close but I guess we can't have errant atoms running amok ("The Atomic Gardening Society utilized an early form of crowd-sourcing, in which members received irradiated seeds, planted them in their gardens, and sent reports back to Howorth detailing the results.")
johnea 2y ago
As with almost all things, it's not really to have it, or not. It's a matter of how much, and in what way. The overwhelming majority of GMO crops are modified to allow the increased use of "round up" type pesticides. More pesticides = not good. Examples of other modifications include "golden rice". It is sad that all of this gets rolled into one thing, since it's not. And I was not in favor of the Greenpeace campaigning to prohibit golden rice propgation. But using this greenpeace mistake as an argument for all GMO crops is also a mistake. The really sad thing is that the human primate is so bound to binary logic that actual good decisions are almost impossible to reach...

25 points by jseliger 2y ago

kodr 2y ago

we produce enough food to feed everyone on earth.GMO can be useful, but 90% of the time it is used to sell herbicide resistant crops, GMO and herbicide sold by the same company like Bayer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer

dvh 2y ago

It's not about health issues. I don't care if some poor guy with fish allergy dies after eating GMO potato. It's about licencing issues! GMO has potential to literally enslave humanity. GMO should either be public domain or banned. There is no middle ground!

sabas123 2y ago
You know patents expire and their contents are released into the public domain after 25 years right? Seems like an short time to enslave humanity

danpalmer 2y ago

Rejection of GMOs and rejection of large corporations controlling food sources, are different issues that are completely tied up in each other. Most of the problems with GMOs are problems with the patenting of crops, suing farmers for ridiculous reasons. The rest of the problems are people screaming "but the chemicals!" with no real scientific basis. We definitely need more GMO crops to feed the planet. We most likely need less of Monsanto et al meddling in the farming industry. I also find there's an opposite view of organic crops – there's this glorified notion that "organic" crops are better, but they're only better along very specific axes, namely the lack of pesticides, of which some may be dangerous (but often regulated). In reality, organic crops use more land, more water, and produce less for sale, in many ways making them worse for the environment than (responsible) pesticide usage. Everyone just needs to take into account their externalities. Right now industry and (some) eco campaigners don't.

kjetijor 2y ago
> namely the lack of pesticides lack of synthetic pesticides, you can use as much organic pesticides as you want.
- reducesuffering 2y ago
  Sure, theoretically. But what does the reality on the ground actually mean for choosing organic rather than “”they could use 100x organic pesticides”, therefore no point. “Consumption of organically produced food reduces pesticide exposure and is linked to a variety of health benefits, according to multiple studies, especially according to a large study from France. Clinical trials continue to show that people who switch from non-organic to organic foods see a rapid and dramatic reduction in their urinary pesticide concentrations, a marker of pesticide exposure. Other studies have linked higher consumption of organic foods to lower urinary pesticide levels, improved health outcomes, including reductions in maternal obesity and pregnancy-associated preeclampsia risks, lower BMI and reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes.” https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/faq.php# https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/faq.php#
grumbelbart2 2y ago
> We definitely need more GMO crops to feed the planet That, too, is debatable. Google "Do we have enough food" - we could feed 10B people with what we produce. Feeding the world is currently more a matter of donating (who pays?) and distributing it, not so much of producing the food in the first place. > namely the lack of pesticides, of which some may be dangerous (but often regulated) There is also overfertilization, which puts nitrates into ground and ultimately drinking water, and the over-use of herbicide, which massively strains local ecosystems to their collapse. The farmer revolts in Europe over the last 1-2 years have shown how politically difficult any kind of regulation in this area is. The EU is now backing down. It seems to be very difficult to find a middle ground in the "excessive vs. organic" spectrum.
- v7n 2y ago
  Distribution is in itself a problem, yes, but there's also the geopolitical angle of depending on foreign imports to feed a nation.

asterix_pano 2y ago

We have more than enough food for everyone. Actually, we waste most of agricultural land to grow crops to feed animals that we eat later on, which is extremely inefficient, like a 10 to 1 calorie conversion rate. It's also cruel, bad for the environment, etc.

rockemsockem 2y ago
No one agrees with this because we all like eating meat. But yes, distribution is the real problem
- vaylian 2y ago
  > because we all like eating meat. I don't. I understand that some people like the taste of meat and they don't want to miss out on that, but the animal and ecosystem exploitation have unfortunately serious consequences that we can't ignore. If we can create alternative products that taste just like meat (or maybe even better), then this would be beneficial to everyone.
dvh 2y ago
But humans cannot eat grass, there are animals that only eat grass (sheep, geese, cows, goats) that are perfectly edible for humans.
- kadkads 2y ago
  That would only be true if they eat a pure grass diet. They do not. They are fed soy, which is perfectly edible for humans. https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation >More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception. If we stop that, we free up a lot of calories for human consumption. I'd say the total amount of pure grass fed animals would be way lower, which would be better for the environment of course, and meat would be much more expensive. Actually, I like that. Good idea!

moi2388 2y ago

GMOs are under patent and increase prices, they do not keep the poor hungry, they are simply resistant to more pesticides. And pesticides like Roundup have been linked to neurological problems like Parkinson. If you’d want to save the poor, you’d teach them about greenhouses and irrigation and soil enrichment, which are actually the biggest issues in these poor countries

Kuinox 2y ago
What do you have against GMO like the golden rice ? None of what you listed applies to it, yet your statements harms GMO like golden rice.
- moi2388 2y ago
  Yes, general statements never (almost never? :p) deal with all edge cases. Did you know they don’t need a patent on the crop? They can file patents on variations of the genes in question, meaning even other variations can be protected under patent laws. I guess it would be more honest to say I think there are other, more pressing matters in agriculture than GMOs, and that I have serious problems with patents on basic needs like medicine and food sources. But the topic was about GMOs, so I phrased my response in this context. Do with it as you like.
  - Kuinox 2y ago
    Crops patents is not specific to GMO. Calling the golden rice an edge case is showing you are unaware of all the GMO used to solve locals problems, that is a net benefit for the human and reduce the agriculture impact.
defrost 2y ago
Roundup is a broad-spectrum glyphosate-based herbicide. A weed|plant-killer (not a pesticide) that grain crops are modified to be resistant to.

jraph 2y ago

> The rejection of modern agricultural methods, genetic engineering, and the utilization of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is exclusively the prerogative of wealthy humans living in developed, largely Western nations Here we are. The article criticizes environmentalists against pesticides but never addresses environmental concerns. Convince me that "GMOs making pesticides resistant bad because most pesticides bad, because it harms the environment of which people are part" is false first. What keeps the poor hungry is keeping the poor poor. The solution to this political choice is not a technical answer.

michelsedgh 2y ago

This is whats wrong with articles. You can never know the motive behind them. There’s no way this article is actually written organically and the big corps aren’t paying them to write this. There should be some regulation stopping this. Basically any company with money can now spread their own propoganda.

mandmandam 2y ago
Agreed. This particular piece is hot garbage, and the entire operation has many hallmarks of astroturf.
- michelsedgh 2y ago
  It’s not just this, you search about anything on google, any subjects there’s hundreds like this. You search if eggs are good you get hundreds saying how they’re great for you and if search if eggs are bad you get another hundred. It’s becoming impossible to be able to sort from good and bad articles. Even the research behind them many times can be paid by the corps. This is not good. There has to be a mechanism that changes this.

itsanaccount 2y ago

I learned recently theres a "biomass specific" cultivar of switchgrass. If you've been around wetlands in the Midwest, switchgrass is the most prolific plant. You have to fight it to plant anything. The cultivar is a few percentage points better, but don't mistake it being better for anything other than marketing for the seed company. You can't have something that just grows free and wild and is easy to propogate and to harvest with old square balers. You can't make biomass digestors palletized for home or community use to reduce our reliance on propane. No, you gotta make money from investor based corporate ag on a slightly different angle, mostly to grift clueless government green energy mandates. I don't believe for a second modern agriculture companies give a fuck about the poor.

tossandthrow 2y ago

Could as well say that too little development into synthetic meats hinders human progress. It is not that we can not grow enough food for humans. It is that we feed all the food to unethically treated animals in large warehouses, only to dig them down when the meat is unprofitable (looking at you, Australia). My bet is that we increase agriculture free land, and utilize what we grow much better.

imtringued 2y ago

A lot of poor countries have a large proportion of subsistence farmers that are living off the land and are not participating in any form of formal economy. That is how you get those less than two dollars a day figures. They simply aren't using money. The food they produce and eat is definitely worth two dollars. When you look at the economics of commercial farming, most of the cost is spent on inputs such as synthetic fertilizer and seeds. There was a hybrid rice company telling you, you can earn a whopping $1000 per unit of land, all you have to do is pay them $800 for the inputs. You still have to pay for the land and the equipment. The seed and fertilizer companies are earning most of the money. Meanwhile if you are a simple subsistence farmer you don't have a thousand dollars, so you will have to borrow the money and if your country isn't self sufficient agriculturally and bleeding money because of trade deficits then what is it exporting to buy the inputs? It is not like you are selling basic necessities to some high tech country that is better off doing something else. So you borrow money from foreign countries in a foreign currency, a currency that is much more stable than yours. This is hardly a business model that works for the poor. Whenever people talk about GMOs, they think the fundamental problem of agriculture is that there is an insufficient quantity of food, when the actual problem is that the economy needs to formalise and poor people need access to markets to buy or sell things.

awaythrow999 2y ago

Crazy to consider we already forgot about other big ideas that ended in a pandemic because gain of function research conducted in a lab. And now companies like Montesanto want to push more such dangerous ideas by arguing it is to combat hunger. Having more humans on the planet is not the solution to climate change. And science isn't going to save our ass from it. Sustainable agriculture is not about monoculture farming GMO crops while the rest of the environment gets obliterated by the practice. Utterly stupid.

jareklupinski 2y ago

> Over the next 25 years, the development, and successful use of genetic engineering in the production of agricultural crops, will play a vital role in the support of human flourishing and save and enrich the lives of millions. This will, however, only be possible if we support the research, development, and use of GE technologies in a rational manner. seeing the side-by-side comparisons of how much wheat has increased in yield from radiation-gardening made me realize that all we're really doing is speeding evolution / domestication using technology, and this was over 50 years ago! https://youtu.be/LPZqVSu_fu4?t=549 https://youtu.be/LPZqVSu_fu4?t=549 the most democratizing step would probably be distributing CRISPR kits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing) to farmers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening was close but I guess we can't have errant atoms running amok ("The Atomic Gardening Society utilized an early form of crowd-sourcing, in which members received irradiated seeds, planted them in their gardens, and sent reports back to Howorth detailing the results.")

johnea 2y ago

As with almost all things, it's not really to have it, or not. It's a matter of how much, and in what way. The overwhelming majority of GMO crops are modified to allow the increased use of "round up" type pesticides. More pesticides = not good. Examples of other modifications include "golden rice". It is sad that all of this gets rolled into one thing, since it's not. And I was not in favor of the Greenpeace campaigning to prohibit golden rice propgation. But using this greenpeace mistake as an argument for all GMO crops is also a mistake. The really sad thing is that the human primate is so bound to binary logic that actual good decisions are almost impossible to reach...