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[Baffler]

He'll never live it down, and I figure they'll probably disown him. Trying to pass off Polandball-tier nonsense as an expert opinion is an... unfortunate mistake to say the least.

[Frumple]

Oh come off it Maryam, I trust that the American people wouldn't believe Birmingham is Birmingharam just because some guy on fox noos said so.

Oh, not the majority of them, but that fairly substantial population that are unapologetic and unaware compulsive fox news watchers... they kinda' will, especially if some kind of retraction is never made on said news network.

[Antsan]

Please expand on how GMOs are responsible for the long-existing trend of farmers choosing to plant a few high-performing varieties.

It's also false than GMO have to lead to monoculture. For exemple, the World Agroforestry Center is currently analyzing the genome of Faidherbia trees to understand what cause its special "loosing leaves in the west seasons" phenotype and apply it to other fertilizer trees.

It's not about farmers, it's abouzt GMOs being more robust (for the surroundings they are made for) and thus replace naturally occuring plants.
The corn variety in Mexico has gone down since Monsanto started pushing their corn there.

Why do you believe patents to be outdated?

Let me just say I believe that they are not needed to incentivize research but instead are often used to prevent research by potential rivals. They do more damage than good.
Instead of putting tons of money into getting the patent system right (junk-patents are a thing and most patents granted today are probably junk) we instead should maybe shovel the same money at open hard- and software, public education and governmental research institutes.

[Sheb]

Yeah, right, because naturally occuring maize is a thing.

[Antsan]

First: You know, both can be happening.
Second: I thought it was in Mexico. I may be wrong about that.

Even if maize isn't naturally occuring, maize is a pollinating plant, meaning that even if someone decides not to grow modified maize that won't help in any way. Keeping the modified stuff out is impossible and thus replacing the naturally occuring varieties.
Black maize, for instance, has been vanishing, if I heard that right.

[Sheb]

Ok, first of all, naturally occuring maize is not a thing. Maize derives from teosinte, but has evolved so much since that we had to wait for molecular biology tools to be able to figure that.

Second, while pollen cross-contamination can happen, it won't make local variety extinct. At worse the transgene would indeed be spread around, but the end result would be local varieties with that one mutation, not the disparition of all varieties. It's also something that can happen whenever you introduce a new variety, GMO aren't different in that regard.

Now, the real threat to agricultural biodiversity is not some shady gene transfer thing, it's simply that farmers, when given the choice between the old traditional variety and a new, better one, will all pick the better one. Again, it's not a GMO thing: that dynamic has been going on ever since the first plant grower decided to create a better variety of something.

Now, this is a problem, but we do have a solution: we simply need to improve more varieties, and cross-breed the newfangled GMOs with the old varieties adapted to their local environment.

[Antsan]

My point is that GMO are basically invasive species by design.

[Sheb]

Which doesn't make sense as a maize plant cannot survive outside the field.

[10ebbor10]

On another note, due to the way most versions are created, (hybridization), it's quite unlikely that a GMO plant would succesfully spread in the wind. Most of it's descendants would not share it's traits.

[MarcAFK]

Which doesn't make sense as a maize plant cannot survive outside the field.

Well, not very well.

They're high maintenance plants. GMO reduces the maintenance, increases yield and stuff, but it'd still do pretty shoddily outside the field. Ecology isn't 'one plant is better than the others', but 'Which plant fits in the niche best? That plant will do fine. The rest that live in the niche are fucked.'. And trust me, maize would REALLY struggle to find a niche anywhere. Hell, it's wind pollinated. Wind pollinated plants tend to do worse unless they have a dense population (such as grass), and in the wild, maize wouldn't do well as a wind pollinator because it wouldn't do a good job of reaching that density.

I've planted commercial corn and it's been pollinated fine, it struggles without stupidly high nutrient levels though.

[Sheb]

How did you plant it? Did you just scatter a bunch of kernel around? Did they grow to produce kernel? That themselves manage to grow into plants? Because you need all of this to survive outside the field, let alone outcompete native species.

[MarcAFK]

How did you plant it? Did you just scatter a bunch of kernel around? Did they grow to produce kernel? That themselves manage to grow into plants? Because you need all of this to survive outside the field, let alone outcompete native species.

I dumped some popcorn onto bare dirt then throw some mulch onto it.  Most of them were stunted due to lack of nutrients, but 1 or 2 produced full sized ears.  Anyway, this is non GMO corn, most GMO corn shouldn't be plantable like that, but it's not 100% infertile like they would have you believe. Are you aware of the Canadian farmer who was sued by Monsanto because of patented GMO that escaped neighbouring fields and colonised his?

[Sheb]

Actually, we have the tech to make it 100% infertile, it was just never rolled out because of outcry about "terminator gene" and "seed companies taking over the food chaine".

[10ebbor10]

To reiterate, what happened is

In 1997 a farmer noticed that some of Monsanto's round-up resistant seeds had entered his field.  He sprays part of his field with Round-up, harvested the seeds of the survivors, and then replanted them. Monsanto sued, after he refused to purchase a license.

The question answered by the court was whether Schmeiser's intentionally growing genetically modified plants constituted "use" of Monsanto's patented genetically modified plant cells.

The accidental contamination in 1997 was irrelevant to this, and was not part of the proceedings.

[scrdest]

There was a similar case in 2007 (ruling in 2013), except in this case, the farmer (Vernon Bowman) actually intentionally bought mixed soybean seeds, some of which were Roundup-resistant, from an elevator - which weren't supposed to be used for planting - then used Roundup and thus killed off all seeds except those that were GMO, then planted and harvested the seeds several times.

E: Also, the 1997 case was in Canada; The 2007 one was actually in the US.