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The problem with GMO is that it's basically a vendor lock-in scheme for agribusiness giants. It's not a good engineering solution to the real food problems we f

by beat 11y ago

The problem with GMO is that it's basically a vendor lock-in scheme for agribusiness giants. It's not a good engineering solution to the real food problems we face. Of course, the DONT EAT THE SCIENCE OR IT WILL GIVE YOU THE CANCER political nonsense is wrong. That doesn't let GMO off the hook, though. The problem it attempts to solve, on the surface, is increasing the productivity of monocropping. But productivity isn't the problem of our food chain. We can grow plenty of food, and cheaply. So what are problems? Loss of biodiversity. Modern nutrition-related health problems like obesity and diabetes that are related to factory-manufactured junk food. Et cetera. We should be focusing on making food fresher, better tasting, more nutritious, more interesting, and more ethical. Racing to the bottom on price isn't good for anyone but the companies that provide vendor lock-in.

Kalium 11y ago
Racing to the bottom on price isn't good for you because you have access to lots of food at prices you can easily afford. For a great many people, more and cheaper food means they can actually afford to get enough to eat. Foods have been modified to stay fresher and be more nutritious. But you don't see them in stores.
- beat 11y ago
  The real advances have been in packaging and transportation, not genetics. That said, the cost improvements in food aren't such a big impact on real hunger. When people are too broke to eat, making food half as expensive really doesn't have that much impact. And much of the savings-per-calorie relative to fresh food get factored into profits. Food deserts are a huge problem in this country - places where there is no access to fresh food. They don't happen because junk food is cheap, but rather because it's stable. Fresh food can be just as cheap, if you can keep it flowing.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    You're thinking too small. There are places where a 30% rise in the cost of rice means people starving en masse. And riots, because this prospect does not please said people. Major yield improvements mean stable food supplies for much of the third world. You're not wrong about the lack of advances in genetics arriving in markets. What I think you've overlooked is that between attacks on the business models that make such advances possible and the political cover that such attacks bring to the "DON'T EAT THE SCIENCE" people... this isn't likely to change. So please, don't complain about the lack of advances in genetics until you're prepared to stop giving cover to the Luddites ranting about frankenfoods. Proposing a different - and practical and workable - business model that allows for the commercial development of GMOs without abusing copyright would be a great way to go about this. Also: look up Golden Rice. More nutritious foods have been made. And the lock-in angle addressed. Yet the stuff is still not widely grown. Your reading of food deserts is naive, however. Junk food isn't just cheap in money. It's cheap in time, infrastructure, and required knowledge. A burger from McD's is cheap, hot, and instantly edible. Even the cheapest of Healthy Fresh Green Things requires time to cook, facilities to cook in, equipment to cook, the knowledge to cook, and a place to store the results. You cannot just put Healthy Fresh Green Things in food deserts and get results. People have tried, and the stuff rots on store shelves.
    - beat 11y ago
      I agree that part of the Food Desert problem is due to the time-cost of making fresh food. But that's a macroeconomics problem, not a supply problem! Making more, cheaper junk food doesn't address the health issues or the quality-of-life impact caused by not having anything but junk food to eat. I completely and utterly disagree that I'm "giving cover" to the people that I called (and you quoted) "DONT EAT THE SCIENCE". That's open mockery of their Luddite ways, and I come down hard on them in these discussions. I loathe their ignorance-wrapped-in-smugness attitude. But by the same token, I have no love for the people who love GMO because "It's SCIENCE!" (you know, the ones who downvote my comments on this subject), without thinking about what problems they're actually trying to solve. Solving problems that don't actually exist is why many startups fail. There's indirection going on here. As I've said repeatedly, the problem GMOs solve isn't food supply, because we don't have a food supply problem. The population of the Earth has doubled in 50 years, and food costs have dropped 50% over that same period. Does this sound like desperate measure time? No, it sounds like what we've been doing has been tremendously successful at making food more available and less expensive. So the the problem GMO solves isn't making more food - it's making more money for Monsanto. Is this what we really want as a society? More concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a business model that can and does buy governments? For all the self-styled libertarianism around here, people sure are eager to hand massive corporations that don't act in their interests even more power. Me, I think that's stupid. Again, what problem are you trying to solve? And does that problem actually exist? If you start with a solution that stimulates your nerd fantasies, and then defend that solution instead of reframing the problem, you're probably wrong. Loss of biodiversity is an observable problem. Monocropping damaging the soil is an observable problem (and is nitrogen fertilizer and Roundup a solution?). Cash crops bringing outside money and political abuse into developing countries is an observable problem - one far more directly involved in third world hunger than crop yields. I'm after the real problems of the food chain. Are you?
- primroot 11y ago
  I'd really be interested in knowing those that have been modified to be more nutritious, especially since a lot of nutritious food gets to stay out of the market due to its incapacity to stay fresh. I only know of Golden Rice, and I'm not even sure how fresh it stays.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/01/08/260782518/this-gmo-apple-wont-brown-will-that-sour-the-fruits-image http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/01/08/260782518/thi... This is a case of GMOs to preserve freshness, rather than nutrition.
Protostome 11y ago
We're GMOing crops long before the DNA revolution. Plants were selectively bred for certain qualities since the dawn of agriculture. None of fruits or vegetables we eat in the present (even without GMO) could be found naturally few hundred years ago. We were genetically modifying them without really knowing the mechanism. There some ecological as well as regulatory challenges. That doesn't mean GMO isn't a solid approach to improving accessibility to high quality fresh food
- sobbybutter 11y ago
  Here's a good paper discussing risk w.r.t. GMOs: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
- nickbauman 11y ago
  Selective breeding is not the same as editing a genome. You cannot "selectively breed" a fish gene into a tomato.
  - splawn 11y ago
    sure you can, its all just DNA... it just takes waaay longer.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Uhm. You can, in fact, selectively breed any given gene into any creature. You are, of course, aware that plant mutation rates has been accelerated with mutagens for decades in search of desirable changes. So while it may not be a gene copied directly from a fish, it will be a base-for-base identical copy of the gene found in a fish. Then it can be merged back into the main line of the plant via a recombinant backcross technique. This is how plant breeding has been done for quite a long time now.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > You cannot "selectively breed" a fish gene into a tomato. The actual results of breeding and natural selection, including particularly convergent evolution, suggest that its quite possible to achieve equivalent results to that by breeding, though the timescale required, if you are relying on natural mutation as your source of variation, might be very long. Which is why selection breeding techniques that kick up the pace of mutation with radiation or chemical mutagens are still competitive means of developing new desired traits in a world that has gene editing.
sampo 11y ago
"The problem with GMO is that it's basically a vendor lock-in scheme for agribusiness giants." Hybrid seeds already did that 50 years ago.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  Are hybrid seeds designed to be one use only like terminator seeds? How is the vendor lock-in structured?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Yes, many hybrid seeds are one use only. Farmers cannot save and resow the seed. They need to buy the seed each year. The seeds might not be sterile, but even then the seed would produce unreliable plants. http://www.granny-miller.com/the-difference-between-hybrid-non-hybrid-seed/ http://www.granny-miller.com/the-difference-between-hybrid-n...
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      This is not intentional. Its how genes work. The seed on a plant depends on the pollinator. Just like fruit trees - you plant that seed from the apple you just ate, it won't grow more of those apples. It will grow whatever that apple was pollinated with.
    - colechristensen 11y ago
      This is true for many flowers and garden crops, it is not true for corn, soybeans, & similar. The viability of hybrid offspring depends on the closeness of the parents. Lots of flowers can be bread from very diverse stock and the offspring are sterile, cash crop hybrids are not made from such diversity and are generally re-plantable.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Corn is generally carefully crossed as a last step in hybridization. The next generation will grow a plant almost completely dissimilar from the one being sold. Its an issue trying to support farmers in developing countries. Our Romanian sister church didn't accept our corn hybrids. They had their own 'land race' seed they've been creating for generations, which works well on their difficult soil. If we sent them hybrids, they'd work for one season. And then they would be dependent on us for continuous shipments of seed each spring. We left them with their self-sufficient seed.
transfire 11y ago
You forgot the pecticides.
vinceguidry 11y ago
> But productivity isn't the problem of our food chain. We can grow plenty of food, and cheaply. We can. The rest of the developing world has a lot of trouble keeping people fed. There's only so much aid can do, but if we can find ways for small-time farmers to produce more, and also to transport those goods, then the rest of the world could feed itself, something small-time agriculture has historically had a lot of trouble doing. Better, hardier crop strains aren't just a profit-making scheme, they're absolutely critical in the fight against world hunger.
- danbruc 11y ago
  The problems in the developing countries are at least partially caused by things not directly related to agriculture, for example speculation with food and subsidies in developed countries making local agriculture unprofitable.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    Speculation is ultimately driven by scarcity. There's no purpose in speculating if you can't generate an arbitrage. Greater productivity on the part of small farmers will alleviate scarcity, driving food prices down. Similarly, there are lots of markets that are unserved by the global food chain. How can one say that food subsidies in developed countries can affect these unserved markets? They can't sell to the developed world, and developed world food doesn't really make it there. I spent some time in Colombia, not quite a developed or a developing nation, in mostly big cities, and even there much of the food consumption was local. Sure, bigger farmers would be able to sell at a profit to Western conglomerates, and Western food was available (at steep prices) in the large chain grocery stores. But most people shopped at the ubiquitous small family-run groceries that served a mix of local agricultural output and mass-market, also locally-produced goods. I'd be very surprised if Western agricultural innovations weren't being employed to grow all of the great-tasting produce I ate there. Seeds are much much easier to transport than mangoes.
    - danbruc 11y ago
      What is your point? You can not disprove what I said with one counterexample. Look for examples that confirm what I said. I for example remember a documentary I saw a couple of months ago with starving people collecting single grains of rice, I think, from the streets at a market in India if I remember correctly. On the other side of the street behind a wall was a huge open space with hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of rice, bought by speculators hoping for rising prices but they didn't. Hell, even if everything worked as expected, less supply because everything got bought up causing rising prices in turn, this would be plain unethical extortion. One other example that comes to mind is milk producers in Africa going out of business because of cheap subsidized milk powder flooding the markets. Cheap milk in exchange for now unemployed milk producers and capital leaving the country seems not such a great deal to me. And because of credits from the world bank they are not allowed to counter this development with import taxes. Free trade may be - not necessarily is - a good thing between equal parties, but between a rich, developed and powerful party on one side and a poor, underdeveloped and powerless party on the other side it becomes quite probable that it will not turn out as a win-win situation.
dimino 11y ago
> The problem with GMO is that it's basically a vendor lock-in scheme for agribusiness giants. It's not a good engineering solution to the real food problems we face. GMO isn't that, Monsanto is that, and the fucked up patent system is like that. This is like creationists saying they dislike evolution, when they really mean they dislike abiogenesis, but accept everything else about evolutionary theory.
- beat 11y ago
  But why is Monsanto pursuing GMO? What problem are they really trying to solve? It's not a problem of food supply. It's a problem of getting greater control and higher profits out of a saturated market. What's good for a single business is often not good for the general public.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Friend, a question if I may. Are you reading the comments of those who respond to and attempt to engage with you with an open and generous mind?
    - beat 11y ago
      I am listening - but I'm also educating. "Open and generous" covers both sides. I've been studying this issue for a long time - I first got involved with hunger issues when I was a kid, and later as a young adult during the Ethiopian famine. Years of study have convinced me that the general train of thought expressed here is wrong - and have given me a theory for a reason that so many smart people are wrong about it. The wrong idea, imho, is the idea that hunger comes from insufficient food production, and that exotic technology (GMO) will solve the production problem, thus ending hunger. I think this is wrong on both counts. The reason so many people here believe something I find obviously wrong is because of basic technofetishism. We love "science". We love exotic technology. And we want to believe exotic technology can make the world better, because it so often has. So people are starting by jumping to a conclusion (GMO is good, because science!), and working backwards to a problem they imagine it can solve (hunger). But that's not critical thinking. That's wishful thinking. Problems first. Figure out what the actual problems are, and why we have them. Apply the Five Whys.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> The problem with GMO is that it's basically a vendor lock-in scheme for agribusiness giants. That may be a problem with the IP regime and some specific common business practices around GMOs, but its not a problem with GMOs qua GMOs -- its a social, not technical, problem.
- cmrdporcupine 11y ago
  Right, which is why the problem is genetic engineering (GE), not genetically modified organisms (GMO) themselves. To put it more bluntly, the horrors of this stuff (I live next to it and suffer its idiocies, see post elsewhere in thread) is the fault of engineers and marketers, not "science" per se.
cmrdporcupine 11y ago
This.

by beat 11y ago

Kalium 11y ago

Racing to the bottom on price isn't good for you because you have access to lots of food at prices you can easily afford. For a great many people, more and cheaper food means they can actually afford to get enough to eat. Foods have been modified to stay fresher and be more nutritious. But you don't see them in stores.

beat 11y ago
The real advances have been in packaging and transportation, not genetics. That said, the cost improvements in food aren't such a big impact on real hunger. When people are too broke to eat, making food half as expensive really doesn't have that much impact. And much of the savings-per-calorie relative to fresh food get factored into profits. Food deserts are a huge problem in this country - places where there is no access to fresh food. They don't happen because junk food is cheap, but rather because it's stable. Fresh food can be just as cheap, if you can keep it flowing.
- Kalium 11y ago
  You're thinking too small. There are places where a 30% rise in the cost of rice means people starving en masse. And riots, because this prospect does not please said people. Major yield improvements mean stable food supplies for much of the third world. You're not wrong about the lack of advances in genetics arriving in markets. What I think you've overlooked is that between attacks on the business models that make such advances possible and the political cover that such attacks bring to the "DON'T EAT THE SCIENCE" people... this isn't likely to change. So please, don't complain about the lack of advances in genetics until you're prepared to stop giving cover to the Luddites ranting about frankenfoods. Proposing a different - and practical and workable - business model that allows for the commercial development of GMOs without abusing copyright would be a great way to go about this. Also: look up Golden Rice. More nutritious foods have been made. And the lock-in angle addressed. Yet the stuff is still not widely grown. Your reading of food deserts is naive, however. Junk food isn't just cheap in money. It's cheap in time, infrastructure, and required knowledge. A burger from McD's is cheap, hot, and instantly edible. Even the cheapest of Healthy Fresh Green Things requires time to cook, facilities to cook in, equipment to cook, the knowledge to cook, and a place to store the results. You cannot just put Healthy Fresh Green Things in food deserts and get results. People have tried, and the stuff rots on store shelves.
  - beat 11y ago
    I agree that part of the Food Desert problem is due to the time-cost of making fresh food. But that's a macroeconomics problem, not a supply problem! Making more, cheaper junk food doesn't address the health issues or the quality-of-life impact caused by not having anything but junk food to eat. I completely and utterly disagree that I'm "giving cover" to the people that I called (and you quoted) "DONT EAT THE SCIENCE". That's open mockery of their Luddite ways, and I come down hard on them in these discussions. I loathe their ignorance-wrapped-in-smugness attitude. But by the same token, I have no love for the people who love GMO because "It's SCIENCE!" (you know, the ones who downvote my comments on this subject), without thinking about what problems they're actually trying to solve. Solving problems that don't actually exist is why many startups fail. There's indirection going on here. As I've said repeatedly, the problem GMOs solve isn't food supply, because we don't have a food supply problem. The population of the Earth has doubled in 50 years, and food costs have dropped 50% over that same period. Does this sound like desperate measure time? No, it sounds like what we've been doing has been tremendously successful at making food more available and less expensive. So the the problem GMO solves isn't making more food - it's making more money for Monsanto. Is this what we really want as a society? More concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a business model that can and does buy governments? For all the self-styled libertarianism around here, people sure are eager to hand massive corporations that don't act in their interests even more power. Me, I think that's stupid. Again, what problem are you trying to solve? And does that problem actually exist? If you start with a solution that stimulates your nerd fantasies, and then defend that solution instead of reframing the problem, you're probably wrong. Loss of biodiversity is an observable problem. Monocropping damaging the soil is an observable problem (and is nitrogen fertilizer and Roundup a solution?). Cash crops bringing outside money and political abuse into developing countries is an observable problem - one far more directly involved in third world hunger than crop yields. I'm after the real problems of the food chain. Are you?
primroot 11y ago
I'd really be interested in knowing those that have been modified to be more nutritious, especially since a lot of nutritious food gets to stay out of the market due to its incapacity to stay fresh. I only know of Golden Rice, and I'm not even sure how fresh it stays.
- Kalium 11y ago
  http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/01/08/260782518/this-gmo-apple-wont-brown-will-that-sour-the-fruits-image http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/01/08/260782518/thi... This is a case of GMOs to preserve freshness, rather than nutrition.

Protostome 11y ago

We're GMOing crops long before the DNA revolution. Plants were selectively bred for certain qualities since the dawn of agriculture. None of fruits or vegetables we eat in the present (even without GMO) could be found naturally few hundred years ago. We were genetically modifying them without really knowing the mechanism. There some ecological as well as regulatory challenges. That doesn't mean GMO isn't a solid approach to improving accessibility to high quality fresh food

sobbybutter 11y ago
Here's a good paper discussing risk w.r.t. GMOs: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
nickbauman 11y ago
Selective breeding is not the same as editing a genome. You cannot "selectively breed" a fish gene into a tomato.
- splawn 11y ago
  sure you can, its all just DNA... it just takes waaay longer.
- Kalium 11y ago
  Uhm. You can, in fact, selectively breed any given gene into any creature. You are, of course, aware that plant mutation rates has been accelerated with mutagens for decades in search of desirable changes. So while it may not be a gene copied directly from a fish, it will be a base-for-base identical copy of the gene found in a fish. Then it can be merged back into the main line of the plant via a recombinant backcross technique. This is how plant breeding has been done for quite a long time now.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > You cannot "selectively breed" a fish gene into a tomato. The actual results of breeding and natural selection, including particularly convergent evolution, suggest that its quite possible to achieve equivalent results to that by breeding, though the timescale required, if you are relying on natural mutation as your source of variation, might be very long. Which is why selection breeding techniques that kick up the pace of mutation with radiation or chemical mutagens are still competitive means of developing new desired traits in a world that has gene editing.

sampo 11y ago

"The problem with GMO is that it's basically a vendor lock-in scheme for agribusiness giants." Hybrid seeds already did that 50 years ago.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
Are hybrid seeds designed to be one use only like terminator seeds? How is the vendor lock-in structured?
- DanBC 11y ago
  Yes, many hybrid seeds are one use only. Farmers cannot save and resow the seed. They need to buy the seed each year. The seeds might not be sterile, but even then the seed would produce unreliable plants. http://www.granny-miller.com/the-difference-between-hybrid-non-hybrid-seed/ http://www.granny-miller.com/the-difference-between-hybrid-n...
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    This is not intentional. Its how genes work. The seed on a plant depends on the pollinator. Just like fruit trees - you plant that seed from the apple you just ate, it won't grow more of those apples. It will grow whatever that apple was pollinated with.
  - colechristensen 11y ago
    This is true for many flowers and garden crops, it is not true for corn, soybeans, & similar. The viability of hybrid offspring depends on the closeness of the parents. Lots of flowers can be bread from very diverse stock and the offspring are sterile, cash crop hybrids are not made from such diversity and are generally re-plantable.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Corn is generally carefully crossed as a last step in hybridization. The next generation will grow a plant almost completely dissimilar from the one being sold. Its an issue trying to support farmers in developing countries. Our Romanian sister church didn't accept our corn hybrids. They had their own 'land race' seed they've been creating for generations, which works well on their difficult soil. If we sent them hybrids, they'd work for one season. And then they would be dependent on us for continuous shipments of seed each spring. We left them with their self-sufficient seed.

transfire 11y ago

You forgot the pecticides.

vinceguidry 11y ago

> But productivity isn't the problem of our food chain. We can grow plenty of food, and cheaply. We can. The rest of the developing world has a lot of trouble keeping people fed. There's only so much aid can do, but if we can find ways for small-time farmers to produce more, and also to transport those goods, then the rest of the world could feed itself, something small-time agriculture has historically had a lot of trouble doing. Better, hardier crop strains aren't just a profit-making scheme, they're absolutely critical in the fight against world hunger.

danbruc 11y ago
The problems in the developing countries are at least partially caused by things not directly related to agriculture, for example speculation with food and subsidies in developed countries making local agriculture unprofitable.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  Speculation is ultimately driven by scarcity. There's no purpose in speculating if you can't generate an arbitrage. Greater productivity on the part of small farmers will alleviate scarcity, driving food prices down. Similarly, there are lots of markets that are unserved by the global food chain. How can one say that food subsidies in developed countries can affect these unserved markets? They can't sell to the developed world, and developed world food doesn't really make it there. I spent some time in Colombia, not quite a developed or a developing nation, in mostly big cities, and even there much of the food consumption was local. Sure, bigger farmers would be able to sell at a profit to Western conglomerates, and Western food was available (at steep prices) in the large chain grocery stores. But most people shopped at the ubiquitous small family-run groceries that served a mix of local agricultural output and mass-market, also locally-produced goods. I'd be very surprised if Western agricultural innovations weren't being employed to grow all of the great-tasting produce I ate there. Seeds are much much easier to transport than mangoes.
  - danbruc 11y ago
    What is your point? You can not disprove what I said with one counterexample. Look for examples that confirm what I said. I for example remember a documentary I saw a couple of months ago with starving people collecting single grains of rice, I think, from the streets at a market in India if I remember correctly. On the other side of the street behind a wall was a huge open space with hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of rice, bought by speculators hoping for rising prices but they didn't. Hell, even if everything worked as expected, less supply because everything got bought up causing rising prices in turn, this would be plain unethical extortion. One other example that comes to mind is milk producers in Africa going out of business because of cheap subsidized milk powder flooding the markets. Cheap milk in exchange for now unemployed milk producers and capital leaving the country seems not such a great deal to me. And because of credits from the world bank they are not allowed to counter this development with import taxes. Free trade may be - not necessarily is - a good thing between equal parties, but between a rich, developed and powerful party on one side and a poor, underdeveloped and powerless party on the other side it becomes quite probable that it will not turn out as a win-win situation.

dimino 11y ago

> The problem with GMO is that it's basically a vendor lock-in scheme for agribusiness giants. It's not a good engineering solution to the real food problems we face. GMO isn't that, Monsanto is that, and the fucked up patent system is like that. This is like creationists saying they dislike evolution, when they really mean they dislike abiogenesis, but accept everything else about evolutionary theory.

beat 11y ago
But why is Monsanto pursuing GMO? What problem are they really trying to solve? It's not a problem of food supply. It's a problem of getting greater control and higher profits out of a saturated market. What's good for a single business is often not good for the general public.
- Kalium 11y ago
  Friend, a question if I may. Are you reading the comments of those who respond to and attempt to engage with you with an open and generous mind?
  - beat 11y ago
    I am listening - but I'm also educating. "Open and generous" covers both sides. I've been studying this issue for a long time - I first got involved with hunger issues when I was a kid, and later as a young adult during the Ethiopian famine. Years of study have convinced me that the general train of thought expressed here is wrong - and have given me a theory for a reason that so many smart people are wrong about it. The wrong idea, imho, is the idea that hunger comes from insufficient food production, and that exotic technology (GMO) will solve the production problem, thus ending hunger. I think this is wrong on both counts. The reason so many people here believe something I find obviously wrong is because of basic technofetishism. We love "science". We love exotic technology. And we want to believe exotic technology can make the world better, because it so often has. So people are starting by jumping to a conclusion (GMO is good, because science!), and working backwards to a problem they imagine it can solve (hunger). But that's not critical thinking. That's wishful thinking. Problems first. Figure out what the actual problems are, and why we have them. Apply the Five Whys.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> The problem with GMO is that it's basically a vendor lock-in scheme for agribusiness giants. That may be a problem with the IP regime and some specific common business practices around GMOs, but its not a problem with GMOs qua GMOs -- its a social, not technical, problem.

cmrdporcupine 11y ago
Right, which is why the problem is genetic engineering (GE), not genetically modified organisms (GMO) themselves. To put it more bluntly, the horrors of this stuff (I live next to it and suffer its idiocies, see post elsewhere in thread) is the fault of engineers and marketers, not "science" per se.

cmrdporcupine 11y ago

This.