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The problem isn't GMO plants in Europe, it's the IP system surrounding them that's the problem. The massive upwelling of opposition to GMO's on the part of nati

• marknutter 13y ago
  The problem, though, is that people are incorrectly assuming the opposition to GMO is related to health concerns.
  • Anonazon 13y ago
    The problem with this statement is it is assuming that there are no health concerns.
    • jjm 13y ago
      +1 For me I just want choice (at the super-market). Choice to not choose GMO, until there is more than enough evidence and discussion around the topic. Maybe you feel there is enough evidence, but I want more. I do not want said firm to 'force' me into eating their product just yet. This is my due diligence on the one life I live.
      • smsm42 13y ago
        Why not go full scale and demand choice of not using the fruits of scary science at all? Demand every store to carry the products made of wild plants and hunted down wild animals only, with no products of selection (aka "genetically modified") at all? Why would mega-corporations force you to eat modern wheat, whose yields and chemical composition was completely modified by the corporate puppetmasters and whose production requires to use herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizers and a variety of modern chemicals and technologies that very well might be accepted? Why not do the due diligence and eat the healthy diet that allowed our cavemen ancestors to live long and healthy lives? And if you can not feed 7 billion people with caveman technologies - too bad for them, you only have one life and you can't spend it worrying about such things.
        • api 13y ago
          Changing the subject. The subject is conservatism. A conservative is not someone who rejects all of a thing, but someone who is skeptical and suspicious of new things. As a result of many past issues with novel food products, people have become increasingly conservative about food. That doesn't mean that they reject all industrial or scientific agriculture, but they're likely to be suspicious of things that haven't been around for more than one or two generations. They're quick to reject novel changes in the food supply and very slow to accept them. Along with having been burned in the past, I can think of another reason why this might be rational. The cost function is weighted heavily on the conservative side. It feels like something that could be modeled well with game theory. The cost of food conservatism is likely a small increase in the amount of money paid for food. This is a very small cost for most first-worlders, where food is so available that obesity is a health crisis. The benefit is that the risks, if any, are well-known and are known to be tiny. The cost of food liberalism, by contrast, is an unknown chance of getting cancer, heart disease, diabetes, allergic reactions and inflammatory disorders, etc. The unknown chance is probably very small, but many of those health effects have astronomically high costs that possibly include death or permanent disability. But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food. The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies on unlikely events such as floods or tornadoes. Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance -- otherwise how would it be that the insurance company could make money? But you'd rather trade the risk of losing everything you own and having no recourse for a small amount of money that you're not going to miss.
          • smsm42 13y ago
            >>> The unknown chance is probably very small, but many of those health effects have astronomically high costs that possibly include death or permanent disability. This is a very basic math error. If you multiply two unknown quantities, you can not assume anything about the result, even if one of them is very big. So basically what you're saying is "we have no idea if it's dangerous or not, and there's absolutely no evidence on any danger present, but if it were, you could DIE!!! so PANIC!!!" This would be an extremely irrational and stupid behavior. >>> But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food. The problem is that it is very fragile. If the anti-science idiots ever prevail, the whole food abundance we have now could very well collapse pretty quickly - without science, malthusian scenarios are very real, and the people who predicted massive hunger by 2000s could very well be right if science did not intervene. If the idiots ever succeed in their war on science, first world would be in no way insulated from the disastrous effects of their victory. The whole abundance is the direct effect of what you call "food liberalism" and it is the only thing maintaining it. >>> The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies Not at all. Insurance companies have very accurate actuarial and statistical data, which they use in very accurate and specific ways to issue insurance. They never base their decisions on "multiply two unknown numbers, make assumptions on the result, panic". Your decision on buying the insurance may very well be irrational, but the insurance market itself is very rational. >>> Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance It is not true, since you can not be better "statistically" - the fact that it didn't happen to 100000 people would not improve your situation if it happens to you. The whole function of insurance is to make statistics work for you, without it statistics would be just a useless trivia - just as the fact that if Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average income of the bar visitors jumps - is useless for anybody in the bar, because they get no money from it. Insurance is the way to get you some money from statistics.
    • api 13y ago
      A lot of people see opposition to GMOs as irrational, but I don't think it is. It's perfectly rational, especially if you don't really understand genetics (which most people don't... it's an esoteric subject). The reason it's rational is this: were GMOs to be found to be unhealthy, it would be a continuation of a well-established pattern. Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy. - Trans-fats (hydrogenated oils) are basically artery plaque in the form of fake butter or shortening. - Nearly all additives such as MSG and artificial sweeteners are either unhealthy or suspect. - Bleaching and other treatments to improve shelf life denude food of its nutrients. Re-enrichment only replaces macronutrients, leaving micronutrients and minerals unaccounted for. - Preservatives enhance shelf life and reduce the likelihood of food-borne illness, but many are themselves suspect and many have been taken off the market. - Nitrites are possible carcinogen. - Google: brominated oil, arsenic poultry. ... and so on. The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients, namely iodine and vitamins C and D. But we're talking two successes out of dozens of failed experiments. In every case, the "experts" told people it was safe or even good for you before the experts proceeded to change their minds. Margarine in particular is illustrative. It was recommended as a health food. As a result, people have become rightly ultra-conservative about food, viewing any modification to food as guilty until proven innocent. "GMO is safe" means "we haven't figured out how GMO kills you, yet."
      • jamesaguilar 13y ago
        - MSG is fine. Denying this is basically anti-scientific. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety) - Preservatives -- it's hard to know what you're referring to without you being more specific. Something being "suspect" is basically a comment about human paranoia, not actual health effects. - Nitrites -- again, weak evidence that they may be carcinogens in some circumstances. Nothing epidemiological as far as I can tell. The alternative (botulism or other contamination) is far worse.
        • api 13y ago
          "Anti-scientific" Herein lies the problem. Science is a method, not a dogma or a series of religious pronouncements. Trans-fat and even cigarettes were once considered healthy according to the science of the day. As far as suspicion of new food items goes, there's a scientific argument to be made there too. Human beings are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution that has optimized us to metabolize certain nutrients in certain ratios. In a healthy individual, this diet is likely to be optimal since evolution has been optimizing for it in a feedback loop for thousands of generations. Any deviation from this diet is likely to be neutral to suboptimal, and anything not present in this diet likewise. Don't get me wrong... far worse than anything I mentioned in my original post above is the way we eat: tons of simple carbs and sugars. Drinking soda and eating empty calories is likely a lot worse for you than GMOs would ever be likely to be. I do know a bit about genetics too, and I personally think that GMOs are probably safe in most cases. The only legitimate health issue I'm aware of is the possibility of allergies. I was talking more about the social context of opposition to them, and pointing out that it's based on reasonable extrapolations of a trend.
    • deleted 13y ago
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    • mpyne 13y ago
      To be honest this whole "debate" reminds me more of the popular antivax movement than anything else. I suppose I can understand Europe's arch-conservatism regarding food products after the thalidomide disaster, but I would certainly prefer to see actual evidence of harm from genetically-modified food, or even a plausible explanation of why a given GM food could cause injury and not just FUD FUD FUD.
      • DanBC 13y ago
        You're correct that a lot of the anti-GMO side are spouting alarmist nonsense. But that doesn't matter. The reason we're careful about GMO technology is that there is a reasonable mechanism whereby harm may be the result. We thus require careful testing and good quality science before allowing these technologies. Unfortunately, politicians are often in the chain of "people granting permission", and many of them are stupid and ignorant and not interested in science. You ask for a plausible mechanism for harm, but you also mention thalidomide. Thalidomide is a great example of unknown unknowns - we didn't know that chirality was important, and it was only after many birth defects that we found out. So maybe there's something we don't know with GMOs, and we don't know that we don't know it so we can't reassure ourselves about it. We can do as much as we can to rule out those unknowns, and to reassure ourselves about the knowns.
        • deleted 13y ago
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        • mpyne 13y ago
          Well GM foods certainly seem to have a much more substantial body of evidence in support of their safety than thalidomide did. E.g. even since I was a kid seedless grapes have been available here in America, and in fact the history of farming is of farmers forcing evolution along faster to get the genetic modifications that they want to make it easier to grow food. They just didn't know that it was actually genetics they were forcing to be modified. I think what it comes down to is that the human body is the descendant of billions of years of evolution to help survive the introduction of what could be quite poisonous foods without dying. We have large livers and kidneys for an eminently practical reason, and I simply don't see how a GM food can really be considered in general more hazardous on the balance than the kinds of things our ancestors had to eat because they had no clue if it was harmful or not.
  • hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
    This is also a problem, patents just happen to be the more immediate issue.
• deweller 13y ago
  Actually, the problem IS with GMO plants in Europe. > ...among those [Europeans] who know what GMOs are, 59 percent of surveyed citizens believe they are unhealthy, with only 22 percent believing they are not. > In its history, the European Union has only approved two genetically modified organisms for cultivation: Monsanto’s MON810 maize, in 1998 (which was renewed in 2009), and BASF’s Amflora potatoes, in 2010.
  • _pmf_ 13y ago
    > > ...among those [Europeans] who know what GMOs are, 59 percent of surveyed citizens believe they are unhealthy, with only 22 percent believing they are not. It would be nice to correlate this with the percentage of people who are considering dihydrogen monoxide to be unhealthy.
    • qb45 13y ago
      The herbicides Mosanto's GM plants are resistant to aren't exactly H₂O.
    • talmand 13y ago
      You shouldn't joke about that stuff. I know for a fact that every single creature that has ever consumed it later dies.
      • mikeash 13y ago
        That's just plain wrong. Only about 90% of humans who have consumed it have died.
        • freehunter 13y ago
          The rest are in various stages of dying.
  • gutnor 13y ago
    There are 2 things: 1. GMO is famous for making crop that produce herbicide or other sort of toxin, terminator seeds, or stuff that resist to things that you would not like to be sprayed on your food. Bad PR. "Technically cool" food is not a selling point in Europe. 2. Recently the industry has proven that they will fraud on actual existing regulation with the meat crisis in Europe and nobody has forgotten the other various food crisis from the 2 last decades. There is a massive distrust of the food industry, and the GMO has as much potential for good than for bad.
• pod4369 13y ago
  Let's do the math. 250,000 farmers sold. 144 total suits. 144/250000 = 0.0576% The absurdity here lies in your claim.
• mpyne 13y ago
  What system of IP protections would be suitable to allow private industry to subsidize the expense of developing genetically-modified foods that are able to be planted over and over again after the first purchase? I suspect it will at least resemble patent protection, which at least does eventually end. It's a very old problem, with parallels with Unix (as I understand it you could duplicate the install media after purchase for free; it wasn't until later AT&T would realize the value of what they were sitting on and try to control distribution of SysV to extract capital from it). While open-source programmers like myself don't mind volunteering time and code, there is not a comparable contingent of "open-source geneticists" that I'm aware of. That means someone has to pay the piper if they want the GM seeds. If you concentrate the cost in the first batch of seeds you make them prohibitively expensive, which would lead to a gray market of fellow farmers selling their excess seeds at much cheaper cost. So I don't see buying seeds yearly as a tithe, as much as a requirement of the overall business model given the reality of the large capital investment required. Am I missing a superior alternative?
  • arebop 13y ago
    If genetics and biotech knowledge is a public good, then one alternative to IP would be to let the public i.e. governments fund the development of this knowledge. I agree that buying seeds yearly seems pretty practical to me too, but alternatives are imaginable.
    • mpyne 13y ago
      I do agree that both would and should be public goods, but on the other hand I am all too familiar with the inefficiency of government in actually overseeing projects like this, and that's not counting the very large pool of people who oppose government involvement in this kind of thing anyways. But I wonder why that wouldn't work in Europe... it seems Germany, France, even Hungary and other EU nations could combine to beat Monsanto at their own game... of course, U.S. farmers would then just use those seeds if they ended up being really good and so the EU would have subsidized the U.S.'s development on that. As long as that's acceptable to the EU that could certainly work though.
• 205guy 13y ago
  There are many, many reasons to oppose GMOs: 1) The IP system and the companies who exploit it to essentially disrupt agriculture (licences to grow seeds, cannot replant, must buy seeds annually, aggressive lobbying, regulatory capture). This is upsetting to the agricultural status quo (political and economical) in Europe (their farm subsidies would essentially be funnelled to foreign corporations). There is also the use of courts to abuse the IP system, where farmers who unknowingly grow patented seeds (pollen drift or seed stock contamination) get sued, instead of the other way around (farmers should be able to sue--and win against--GMO companies for contaminating their farm with unwanted plants). 2) The issue of eating the produce of GMO plants. On the health side, many (industry-funded) studies show no effect (surprise, surprise), watchdog groups say the industry covers up any bad results, while some independent long-term studies are starting to uncover problems (though results and methods are controversial). Then there is labeling and the fundamental right of people to know what they buy and ingest. 3) Huge but not mentioned yet: the environmental impact of the large (and growing) herbicide applications required by GMO crops (the glycophosphate-resistant varieties, but ther are other herbicides and pesticides involved). Again, this is a multifaceted impact: water runoff and groundwater contamination, impact on the polinators and other sub-ecosystems, evolution of resistent "super-weeds," escalation to other herbicides such as derivatives of Agent Orange. The fact that Monsanto sells the herbicides as well further muddies the problem (it is biased towards not seeing any environmental impacts). The problem is that environmental impacts take years to build up, become significant, and be pinpointed through studies--and by then it's too late.