there is a lot of nuance and challenging trade-offs, also big players, subsidies, and potential regulatory capture. TO an extent, technology has unquestionably improved agriculture, and arguably, beyond a point, technology is being used for profits at the expense of ecological and dietary health. the calculus has been based on minimizing human labor and maximizing profits via useage of subsidized fossil fuel. One specific vision of the economy.
Yes, there is the farming 1e9 acres with mostly automated mega-machines and a few decorative human operators. There is also Curtis Stone and JM Fortier making 6 figures on less than an acre. If you decide one thing is the answer and subsidize it, you've made your own conclusion instead of letting the market decide.
Farming subsidies etc are the reality in high-income countries like UE or USA. But UE doesn't really *need* GMO because it can produce huge amounts of cheap food already.
GMO is needed in the first place by low-income countries in Africa and Asia, which still experience famines or vitamin deficits in 21st century! And here you have Greenpeace "heroically" destroying Golden Rice or Bt brinjal crops for the sake of... "purity" and fanatics like Vandana Shiva.
Its fine if you want define GMO like this, but then provide another term for specifically laboratory gene splicing from different species or synthesized genes.
I'm not saying all of the concerns are justified, but there are SOME concerns that apply to GMO, and its inaccurate to write them off as "we've literally been doing this for thousands of years".
> provide another term for specifically laboratory gene splicing
Which one? The one you probably mean is CRiSPR.
Mutation breeding is also done in laboratories, if this matters at all? But it has been done for ~100 years.
> we've literally been doing this for thousands of years
Because we have. The whole environmental narrative about what is "natural" is completely ahistoric.
Do you know what is truly "natural"? Well, just go out to a meadow and try to find anything edible there. Maybe a frog, maybe some grass, maybe some tiny fruits.
But this is how homo sapiens lived for the last 1.8 million years! This occasionally comes back in various "paleo" diets.
Only 11'000 years ago we domesticated first plants. Domestication means we switched from hunter-gatherers into someone who lives along a field of specific grass, weeds it, cultivates, nourishes waters.
Some grains are larger, some are smaller as result of random mutations. You eat the smaller, and you leave the larger to grow, because someone noticed larger seeds result in more larger seeds.
Bingo, you've artificially selected a modified DNA for future breeding!
100 years ago we discovered that some chemical substances accelerate DNA changes in plants (and in humans, where we call them carcinogens"). That's great thing, as random mutations are slow - so we started to chemically induce mutations in thousands of seeds, breed them and select the ones with desired mutations.
Obviously, a mutagen is like a bulldozer - it can modify a dozen of genes. Can make the plant more sweet, or more poisonous. But we don't care as long as the result is sweeter or bigger or whatever we like.
Then we discovered gamma rays, which do the gene splicing even better. New varieties of tomatoes, apples, potatoes, wheat etc etc. All produced through 20th century using mutation breeding.
> mutation-induced genes are present
Back to naming confusion.
All edible plants are certainly genetically different from their natural ancestors and they were created by selecting *random* mutations by desired traits.
Many but not all edible plants were created using mutagens like dimethyl sulfate or gamma (which we usually understand by "mutation breeding").
Few edible plants were created by CRiSPR, mostly due to the legal restrictions.
> how much genetics comes from mutations, and how much comes from breeding, selecting
But "breeding", "selecting" *is* "mutations".
Precisely, they are random DNA changes, that result in change of existing traits, new traits, disappearance of traits, thus leading to either a new variety within the same species (sexually compatible) or appearance of new species (sexually incompatible). Human skin colors are result of a random mutation in MC1R gene 1.2m years ago that was later reinforced by natural selection, but we are all varieties of the same species and we can reproduce regardless of skin, hair or eye color.
Horses and donkeys are different species but they can reproduce and have children (mules)... but these cannot reproduce further.
Humans actually also had various species (Denisovan, Neanderthal) which most likely coexisted at the same time and there's evidence they could have sex (well, that you can always have...) and children. Right now there's just homo sapiens left.
A fascinating book on this subject - Harari "Sapiens" (2014)
https://libgen.lc/ads.php?md5=9DB80AAC6758446E18354478F0843049
Actually, Non-GMO Project maintains a whole list of plants that are "high risk" of being modified using CRiSPR (which they call GMO). The funniest part however that for many plants they *cannot* in any way distinguish them from non-CRiSPR (non-GMO as they call it) plants, yet they speak of "risk" and "contamination".
Here's a simple question to illustrate my point, if you have a "peanut allergy" you have an allergy to a compound produced by all or most species of peanut cultivated. There is no gene that makes any tomato, or tomato compatible plant produce this compound. No matter what a classical plant breeder does with tomatoes, you can assume its safe for anyone with a peanut allergy to eat them. Put CRISPR on the table and this isn't a safe assumption anymore. Again, I'm not saying to march in the streets, just that this is distinct, new technology (even if its to pursue a long time goal) that does have some unique concerns to its predecessor techniques.
> No matter what a classical plant breeder does with tomatoes, you can assume its safe for anyone with a peanut allergy to eat them
You cannot make this assumption due to random mutations. If prolamin protein appeared in peanut, it could appear in tomato as well.*
With CRiSPR you can be pretty certain that nobody will put peanut cupin and prolamin proteins into tomato just to cause allergy in people.
* obviously probability is close to zero due to different evolutionary paths
Check this book -
https://libgen.lc/ads.php?md5=3816FB871D4DF90AC879E582BAEE07AF
chapter 5 "Green Genes" as it goes into great detail about genetic engineering techniques, including origins of opposition, and including peanut allergies (screenshot). It was written by a recognized environmentalist Stewart Brand who condemned WWF, FoE and Greenpeace on their anti-scientific position, as many other environmentalists did.
overall I thought it was a good explanation of the science, including even admitting some of GE's shortcomings/limitations in regards to Africa: it doesn't help depleted soil, doesn't fix lack of access to irrigation or fertilizer.
The author dispels some fears about Monsanto monopoly by listing a handful of other potential competitors: syngenta, dupont, dow. Most of these companies have merged or been acquired, and look at ownership of the largest producer of vegetable seeds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminis
I think this centralization is whats concerning, not GMO technology. Another thing that book implied is that we'd be seeing a proliferation, or cornucopia, of biofortified GM crops being developed and freed from patents as Golden Rice and GE Corn. The book predicted the technological capability would proliferate, in fact it has centralized.
That book did highlight many completely absurb criticisms, eg fear of "playing god", that I agree are totally irrelevant and not unique to GMOs.
> potential competitors: syngenta, dupont, dow
The only reason why GMO market has centralised in recent years was nothing else than continuous attacks from anti-GMO groups. You can't run a small competitive research company if your crops are continuously destroyed and your scientists attacked physically. Anti-GMO became a well-organised business too thanks to US tort law companies.
https://european-seed.com/2019/04/american-tort-lawyers-and-iarc-a-toxic-mutual-interest/
So the argument about "GMO market not being successful" is a bit like Greenpeace blocking nuclear plant building and operation by *any* means and then saying "look, it's expensive and delayed" 😂
Having said that, many GMO plants like Golden Rice and Bt brinjal *are* available without patents and were developed by public research institutions or NGOs. We just need more public research into this... but public universities are harassed even more!
Just because you've demonstrated the presence of protestors, you can demonstrate 100% lack of progress to Greenpeace and 0% lack of progress to inherent technical challenges? I don't buy it that easy.
> you've demonstrated the presence of protestors
Development, sales and even research of genetically engineered organisms in many countries, especially EU, is very restricted, and this is specifically as result of Greenpeace lobbying.
How can you make any progress if you can't even legally do research? That's probably the largest absurdity of the "precautionary principle" that they embedded in the EU legal framework to fight GMO.
Also we have publically funded land grant universities all doing this research, i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the success stories originated from university research. However, by design these universities focus on research not commercialization. So their work gets sold, or spun off into commercial ventures to pursue it.
So why aren't there more and more competitors? Why is every company getting acquired, fewer and fewer companies competing, with more resources each, building a bigger moat against competitors. In my view its a monopoly, same as tech companies have been in the past. Hoping a startup brings competition to the Monsanto conglomerate is like hoping a garage startup displaces (or even competes with) facebook or google.
Maybe this is an American corporate-dominated economy centric view. Maybe Europeans have precedent to be more optimistic in this case?
> American corporate-dominated economy centric view
It indeed is. You probably haven't heard about University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad or Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore have you? Neither did I until I read Brand's book.
But it was them who created the Bt brinjal and released it to India and Bangladesh, leading to a 39% reduction in the use of pesticides and 43% increase in yield. Which, by the way, translates to equivalent decrease in land use.
I do agree with many of the claims in that book, but to remain critical, why has the list of success stories like bt corn and golden rice not proliferated?
What is the cost to develop one GMO crop? What are the top goals/challenges of agriculture? Are there other areas of research besides GMO with potential benefit, that are unfunded? How are the organizations receiving funding for GMO researching choosing their research goals?
(and to re-iterate, i'm not saying any of these questions I asked are to imply that GMOs are demons and should be banned. just, that in addition to blanket unscientific denial that is dispelled in Brand's book, there *are* some questions that can be asked
involving GMOs and where we're going with them without being thrown into the "scientifically illiterate brainwashed" group.)
> i'm not saying any of these questions I asked
Oh, no - I actually respect your position very much and the fact that you are actually checking the sources and responding to them in informed manner. We are actually discussing, not having two monologues!
You can't imagine how rare this is these days!
Yes, it's quite a surprising phenomenon - the first GMO scare came from Jeremy Rifkin (US) and then was imported into EU by Greenpeace, Friends of Earth and WWF. They actually lost many prominent supporters (including Brand) due to their fanatic position.
But what happened next was even more surprising. Right now you've got situation when IARC (an EU agency) produces highly controversial opinions about various things being carcinogenic (e.g. glyphosate).
Then these opinions are used for class lawsuits in the US (!) to win massive amounts of money from US companies. The law companies then employ IARC people as consultants, they write more opinions etc etc.
https://european-seed.com/2019/04/american-tort-lawyers-and-iarc-a-toxic-mutual-interest/
Just to be clear: I'm absolutely for suing companies like DuPont for what they did with PFOA in the US - unfortunately, some cases that look like that one, aren't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Employees_and_DuPont_exposed_community
Just like Union Carbide no longer "exists" so it can't have responsibility for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Its not black and white, good and evil, because despite slimy behavior these chemical companies do also manufacture the foundation of most infrastructure and technology.
The book is only tangentially related to our discussion, so just see Ch 22 which focuses on this issue. Don't expected any bombastic "This will DESTROY GMO" claims. In fact, the author does explain the unique problems that only GMO can solve, some areas where GMO may offer a solution, and also cases where GMO is not an appropriate tool. It doesn't discredit anything in the Brand's book, but it just clarifies the whole process including research beforehand - to determine what gene to put where to do what - and field trials and growouts of seedstock afterwards, in addition to the actual laboratory component. While the chapter ends with what sound like critical comments on GMO, I would argue it's critical of *how GMO is currently being used* but is still in support of the science and its potentials.
> a startup brings competition to the Monsanto
This is actually incorrect. There's a thriving independent community of independent biotechnology researchers - individuals, small companies etc, all around the world. You can find tons of them on https://indiebio.co/
Surely, its as easy as pick a vitamin, pick a crop, insert the gene, then just start propagating to grow enough to sell? With 1.1 billion i'm sure they've produced a lot, or are going to?
But once they do, what stops them from being acquired Monsanto? Payday for them, payday for investors, best quality labs in the world for researchers. Are these guys pledged to release their work somehow?
Do you think ycombinator is an attack on facebook or google? independent software consultants and google are both tech companies, but that doesn't mean they are competiting.
None of my points are meant to be specific brand, CEO, or company. more general to any agtech(or ag-pharma-chem-tech) company big enough to be in the fortune 500.
Its like solving the Microsoft monopoly by selling Microsoft to Google.
> can you send me a list of some varieties
No, I cannot. I find it quite arrogant of people to ask "can you show me" in a debate if they can easily check for themselves and my experience indicates this is a simple blame-shifting technique to justify their own beliefs and bias. And when presented with data they just ignore it or dismiss further escalating demands.
@kravietz Golden Rice is a pointless PR tactic. People in rice-growing areas never used to suffer from vitamin deficiency. Until industrial ag champions came along and told them it was a great idea to grow rice in monocultures, instead of using polycultures that provided them with a range of foods, covering all their nutrient needs. The solution malnutrition is mixed farming, controlled by communities, not GMOs from the Great White Saviour.
@hushroom
Yes, that's a well known tune in some environmental circles: move THEM back to jungle where they can live at pre-industrial mortality levels as WE live in developed countries and send our precious WHITE kids to schools.
Kill two birds with one stone: prevent progress, and at the same time stop overpopulation by letting them die in the bushes where WE don't see them.
Sorry, I was born in 80's Eastern Europe and I can tell you one thing: nobody there wanted to live like our grandparents, who worked 16h per day to feed themselves in old-style farming and died at age of 50.
Everybody wants to live like Vandana Shiva, who lives in Delhi, charges $40k per speech at events where she flies in business class to teach how the poor people should be living in the jungle farming polycultures...
A case study - I can guarantee, that if we in Eastern Europe did not already transform farming during communism (mostly in 60's after fall of Lysenkoism), we would with no hesitation clone, steal and do everything else necessary to obtain the seeds as farmers in India and Bangladesh are doing now. And then prevent Greenpeace activists from destroying it with any means necessary.
@kravietz what about the use of virus to force genes from one species into another species (eg from an animal into a plant)?
https://ib.bioninja.com.au/standard-level/topic-3-genetics/35-genetic-modification-and/gene-transfer.html
This sort of technique was used to develop a lot of the GMO crops people want their food to be free of, and for good reason. For one thing, it increases the risk of unwanted horizontal gene transfer:
https://earthopensource.org/gmomythsandtruths/sample-page/5-gm-crops-impacts-farm-environment/5-11-myth-horizontal-gene-transfer-gm-crops-bacteria-higher-organisms-unlikely-consequence/
Then we start to understand *what* we're actually doing on the molecular level - there's DNA, there are genes, genes code traits. If we change just this single gene, we get this desired trait. We don't get more toxic solanine (potato alkaloid), we just get the potato more sweet or whatever we want.
This is precisely what CRiSPR does.
So the natural state was essentially eating what grows out there. Ancient breeding was waiting for random mutations. Mutagens were like bulldozer, this is like a scalpel, safe and precise.
And... now the hell unleashes, people marching against "Frankenfood" and all this. I hope you now understand why this whole GMO war is so frustrating for anyone who really understands how this works.
> this capability gives me control over the outcome
But this is precisely what what it does and we've been doing for 11'000 years.
We've been waiting for a random bytes to change in firefox.exe to maybe see if it runs faster or eats less memory.
Then for 100 years we rammed firefox.exe with a fuzzer replacing not only but hundreds of bytes, and it worked very well.
Now patch a single byte, and people are suddenly marching...
All I'm saying, is recognize that its in its own category. People who think everything in this category is bad are wrong, but it is still a distinct category. If you want to call it Happy and Fun Gene Editting instead of GMO, that's fine.
> you have made many assumptions
This one I understand, and I understand your concern. There's plenty of improvement we can add to the current farming practices. There's biochar, permaculture, hydroponics etc.
But there's one thing you can't do: you cannot move people from their lives back to farming from before the Green Revolution, when whole countries were largely agrarian, and people were working 16 h per day, 200 days per year just to feed themselves.
And the OP of this thread imo just doesn't understand that the term GMO is commonly used to refer to certain advanced gene editting techniques bypassing the typical plant reproductive cycles, requiring a laboratory and done for the first time in the 1990s, as a distinct technique within the more general category of "intentional breeding" that has been going on for thousands of years.
By ignoring the common use of GMO and parsing each word individually, you can argue that GMO is the whole broad category JUST so you can make fun of people based on a technicality of your own definition?
Its like how a bunch of studies, data, and models were combined about climate, atmosphere, themodynamics, industry, population growth, etc were used to make some alarming projections, and they called the overall concept "Global Warming" and despite predicting more extreme weather events including winter storms, it gets constantly "disproved" by people who think "Global Warming" literally just means global warming.