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No

9 (37.5%)

Yes

15 (62.5%)

Total Members Voted: 23

[Helgoland]

TBH, I never really understand the argument against having to buy new seeds every years. It's not like a farmer can re-use fertilizer, or pesticide, or tractor fuel or any of the other inputs used on a modern farm.

And interestingly no-one ever gave a shit about non-replantable seeds until they became useful to construct an argument against GM plants...

Or, you know, people have just become more aware of the circumstances because of gm crops. But I guess that won't make you feel as superior to others, so it's probably just people pretending to care for the sake of arguing against gm food.

That would make sense if the people decrying non-reusable GM seeds would also decry the use of hybrid seeds. They don't, though, so you just go shove that ad hominem where the sun don't shine, alright?

[scriver]

"People only make sense if they follow the path I decided they should follow since they don't so they would fail. Lol people are so dumb god I am so justified in all my opinions"

[Sheb]

No, but seriously, F1 hybrid seeds don't make F1 hybrids. There ain't anything special about GM in that regard (since the Terminator was never commercialized).

[scriver]

I apologize, I got too engaged over Helgoland's self-righteous assitude that I lost track of the argument. Would you mind reformulating your point for me?

[evilcherry]

I'm okay (and actually enthusiastic) with GMOs if and only if government/courts can declare them "works of public good" and demands it be released into public domain, and their creators be tied to a lucrative tenure with the government, or prepare for a bloodbath.

[Loud Whispers]

TBH, I never really understand the argument against having to buy new seeds every years. It's not like a farmer can re-use fertilizer, or pesticide, or tractor fuel or any of the other inputs used on a modern farm.

And interestingly no-one ever gave a shit about non-replantable seeds until they became useful to construct an argument against GM plants...

Actually people did give a shit about non-replantable seeds, largely because they were angry by the fact that replantable seeds were pointlessly being treated as non-replantable for profit and not for sanity
Agriculture is already wasteful enough as is, does not need to be more so just because; seeds grow plants which grow more seeds

[Sergarr]

I apologize, I got too engaged over Helgoland's self-righteous assitude that I lost track of the argument. Would you mind reformulating your point for me?

Yes:

if you sell super-good crops that can reproduce in the wild, you're evil because what if they cause superweeds to appear

if you sell super-good crops that can't reproduce in the wild, you're evil because you force the poor farmers to buy new seeds every year

if you don't sell super-good crops at all you're evil because millions of hungry africans


you can't do anything good to people without them calling you out as evil in this modern society

I would bet that if Monsanto gave away super-good crops for free, these people would still bitch and call them evil

oh wait that has actually happened

[Loud Whispers]

I would bet that if Monsanto gave away super-good crops for free, these people would still bitch and call them evil
oh wait that has actually happened

Vandana Shiva, an Indian anti-GMO activist, argued the problem was not the plant per se, but potential problems with poverty and loss of biodiversity. Shiva claimed these problems could be amplified by the corporate control of agriculture. By focusing on a narrow problem (vitamin A deficiency), Shiva argued, golden rice proponents were obscuring the limited availability of diverse and nutritionally adequate food.

Sounds like a reasonable criticism. Greenpeace, obviously excluded. Sometimes I feel sorry for them. One of the saddest things I've seen was one of their fundraisers to help fix one of their arctic icebreakers, after it had been impounded by the Russians who then promptly took icepicks and axes to all the electronics before handing the ship back and saying it was like that when they took it. Dick move, but at least they have a sense of humour.
But yeah Indians have bad relations with corporate control of humanitarian products. One moment they're giving you free antibiotics and the next they're pulling them away because you're not paying enough.

[Sheb]

Golden Rice wasnt even Monsanto, it was a product of a public research institute. And still called evil. But of course, when free GM food was given in the middle of a famine, it was also called evil.

Actually people did give a shit about non-replantable seeds, largely because they were angry by the fact that replantable seeds were pointlessly being treated as non-replantable for profit and not for sanity
Agriculture is already wasteful enough as is, does not need to be more so just because; seeds grow plants which grow more seeds

I am sorry, but you just don't know what you are talking about. F1 hybrids cannot be replanted (Well, technically they can, but the offspring lack the parent's quality). F1 hybrids have been used for close to 100 years now. By 1960, virtually all corn grown in the US was hybrid. Rice, wheat, sunflower, sugar beets are all crops which are almost only grown as hybrids in develloped countries.

[Reelya]

Yeah, I generally support GM crops. Everything is already GM anyway. But done at random or they used to irradiate the seeds to increase the mutation rates. It's just now with current science we know a little about what's going on inside the cells. We've been GMing for thousands of years by trial and error so far. So I'd expect the issues with GM crops are not going to be massively outside our own experiences so far.

The golden rice criticisms seem a bit unfounded. Especially since it's a non-profit program, that makes the one reasonable one actually unreasonable.

Critics of genetically engineered crops have raised various concerns. An early issue was that golden rice originally did not have sufficient vitamin A.

So, it's worse than having none at all?

Greenpeace opposes the use of any patented genetically modified organisms in agriculture and opposes the cultivation of golden rice, claiming it will open the door to more widespread use of GMOs.

Well it would do that if the program is proven to help people...

Vandana Shiva, an Indian anti-GMO activist, argued the problem was not the plant per se, but potential problems with poverty and loss of biodiversity

Growing a different type of rice isn't going to imporverish people or reduce biodiversity any more than intensive rice agriculture is already...

Other groups argued that a varied diet containing foods rich in beta carotene such as sweet potato, leaf vegetables and fruit would provide children with sufficient vitamin A.

That sounds really expensive to pull off in poor communities where they may not have electricity for refrigeration. It sounds a little like a "let them eat cake" solution from a middle-class person who doesn't understand how hard it is to pull all that together. Maybe we can put the third-world on the paleo diet instead

[Sheb]

Yeah, its note like people just now noticed that eating veggies give vitamin A. But as you said, it is hard to pull in poor community. Currently India deal with the issue by giving out huge dose of Vitamin A supplements to children together with their vaccines.

[Reelya]

Wow, that's worse than the rice. There's actually a toxicity level for vitamin A.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis_A
Carotenoids can't actually cause the overdose because they get converted in the body to needed vitamin A only. But giving the type of vitamin in that one-off supplement could cause toxicity.

[scriver]

I apologize, I got too engaged over Helgoland's self-righteous assitude that I lost track of the argument. Would you mind reformulating your point for me?

Yes:

if you sell super-good crops that can reproduce in the wild, you're evil because what if they cause superweeds to appear

if you sell super-good crops that can't reproduce in the wild, you're evil because you force the poor farmers to buy new seeds every year

if you don't sell super-good crops at all you're evil because millions of hungry africans


you can't do anything good to people without them calling you out as evil in this modern society

I would bet that if Monsanto gave away super-good crops for free, these people would still bitch and call them evil

oh wait that has actually happened

The request was directed at Sheb. I don't really know what your point above is though. Monsanto is less bad because extremists think they're evil whatever they do? Fuck, even if they did give away food for free (which they didn't) it's not like they would've done it for any reason than improving their own profits later. They're the kind of company that would argue that water or air is just a product like any other if they got the chance.

Critics of genetically engineered crops have raised various concerns. An early issue was that golden rice originally did not have sufficient vitamin A.

So, it's worse than having none at all?

I'd say it's a pretty valid criticism when that's the very point the breed, yes.

[Helgoland]

TBH, I never really understand the argument against having to buy new seeds every years. It's not like a farmer can re-use fertilizer, or pesticide, or tractor fuel or any of the other inputs used on a modern farm.

And interestingly no-one ever gave a shit about non-replantable seeds until they became useful to construct an argument against GM plants...

Actually people did give a shit about non-replantable seeds, largely because they were angry by the fact that replantable seeds were pointlessly being treated as non-replantable for profit and not for sanity
Agriculture is already wasteful enough as is, does not need to be more so just because; seeds grow plants which grow more seeds

I was gonna make a point about plant breeders' rights, which have existed since the '50s and nobody is giving a shit about even today, but I guess I'd rather take my

self-righteous assitude

elsewhere.

[Aerval]

to get back to the beginning of the argument

I think that the distinction between GM and GM-free crops is completely frivolous, and that people will eventually get over it. They got over dehydrated food, after all.

The funny thing about this distinction is not only frivolous but ridiculous. In France there is currently a new kind of potato in the market admission process. It was modified in a single nucleic base of a sugar expression gene by TALEN nucleases, so that said sugar is expressed less in the genome. Now the EU regulation commission said that this does not count under GM (though it certainly is) because such a mutation could have happened in nature. As nucleases like TALEN and especially CRISPR are only just starting their revolution of genomic manipulation this is only the beginning of a lot of GM that will probably never be labelled as GM.

I am not sure what to say about that but: Stop talking about GM and not GM and decide on a case basis. What Monsanto did with cotton in India was outrageous and unforgivable, the pesticide stuff like MON810 maize with round up from my point mostly just stupid but not unforgivable since everybody should decide for themself whether they want food with more pesticides in the production chain or not. But there are also positive cases like blood factor VII? production in goats or enhanced starch production in potato like BASFs Amflora (or the example above). I am all for control of a transparent process (and proper product labelling) but saying no just because you can is only stupid