RE: The Minister of Agriculture & Agri-Food

[?Impact]

8 minutes ago, TimG said:

Show me studies of non-GMO plants even approach the level of scrutiny that GMO plants have to go though to get approval.

Non-GMO plants have thousands and thousands of years of scrutiny. GMO plants are deemed safe on the false premise of substantial equivalency. It is companies like Monsanto, the people that brought us safe PCBs, DDT, agent orange and a whole host of others that tell us they deem their GM plants safe. They don't undergo any scrutiny from independent researchers, and Bush Sr. cozied up to them to ensure that the FDA was crippled. 

[TimG]

27 minutes ago, ?Impact said:

Non-GMO plants have thousands and thousands of years of scrutiny.

Really? Most of the non-GMO plants we eat today did not exist 200 years ago. They have been bred and cross bred many times to the point where the nutritional composition of these plants is very different from what they were in the past. These new strains are simply assumed to be safe and no testing is done. GMOs, OTOH, undergo extensive testing to ensure the mutations do not significantly alter the nutritional composition of the plants. So despite your claims otherwise, GMOs are more studied than any non-GMO plant and your assertion that they are not studied is demonstrably false.

BTW: do you think that the EU is incompetent? Do you believe that they would not do whatever they could to find a scientific basis for their ideologically driven desire to ban GMOs? Why do you think the US government approvals could hide significant results in a global marketplace?

Edited January 2, 2017 by TimG

[?Impact]

30 minutes ago, TimG said:

These new strains are simply assumed to be safe and no testing is done.

Yes, our diet has changed over the past 200 years but that is not due to new strains but the reduction of the diversity of strains. There have been many efforts in recent years to reverse some of that by increasing diversification. Look at carrots for example, a couple of hundred years ago the Dutch wanted a perfect orange one and bred out all of the other colours. Today we are returning to a mix, the purple carrots are closer to the diet we would have had years ago but the yellow and white ones also existed then although fewer in numbers than we see in the market today. Of course manufacturing food has changed our diet about 1000 fold more than any of that. 

GMO is completely different, it is taking parts of other organisms (bacteria in the case of corn and soybeans) and inserting them into the plant. This is not breeding out diversity, it is modification of the fundamental DNA. In the case of corn and soybeans they are modified to resist the poison chemicals that kill most plants that we are now saturating the soil with. That way farmers can dump megatons of poison into the earth to kill everything but their mono crop. Of course that soil is now contaminated for years, decades, perhaps centuries. Every year we dump more of their poison into the soil and its concentration increases. 

Monsanto, Dupont and other have their own ideology, it is called greed. They want to hide everything in order to push their chemical poison.

[TimG]

41 minutes ago, ?Impact said:

GMO is completely different, it is taking parts of other organisms (bacteria in the case of corn and soybeans) and inserting them into the plant.

First, you don't need to use genetic modification to do such things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeding

Quote

Following World War II a number of techniques were developed that allowed plant breeders to hybridize distantly related species, and artificially induce genetic diversity.

When distantly related species are crossed, plant breeders make use of a number of plant tissue culture techniques to produce progeny from otherwise fruitless mating. Interspecific and intergeneric hybrids are produced from a cross of related species or genera that do not normally sexually reproduce with each other. These crosses are referred to as Wide crosses.

Note this comment:

Quote

With classical breeding techniques, the breeder does not know exactly what genes have been introduced to the new cultivars. Some scientists therefore argue that plants produced by classical breeding methods should undergo the same safety testing regime as genetically modified plants. There have been instances where plants bred using classical techniques have been unsuitable for human consumption, for example the poison solanine was unintentionally increased to unacceptable levels in certain varieties of potato through plant breeding. New potato varieties are often screened for solanine levels before reaching the marketplace.

As I said, GMOs are subject to much much more testing than any non-GMO plant and according to wikipedia, some scientists see this as a problem.

Second (and most important), not all GMO plants involve the insertion of foreign DNA (see http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45155/title/Gene-Editing-Without-Foreign-DNA/). This is one of the reasons why a GMO label is meaningless because it groups too many unrelated plants under the same label. It is simply not possible to make a rational, science base decision on what to eat based on such a label.

Edited January 2, 2017 by TimG

[?Impact]

1 minute ago, TimG said:

First, you don't need to use genetic modification to do such things:

Really, I don't see anything in there about crossing corn with bacteria except under genetic modification. 

[TimG]

10 minutes ago, ?Impact said:

Really, I don't see anything in there about crossing corn with bacteria except under genetic modification. 

Viruses are natural mutation vectors..You cannot assert that a spontaneous plant mutation by absorbing bacteria DNA via a virus vector has never occurred. The only thing genetic modification gives is better control over the process which brings us back to your central fallacy: your belief that genetic modification is significantly different from the mutation process that occurs in nature. It isn't. It is just more controlled.

Edited January 2, 2017 by TimG

[?Impact]

11 minutes ago, TimG said:

Viruses are natural mutation vectors..You cannot assert that a spontaneous plant mutation by absorbing bacteria DNA via a virus vector has never occurred. The only thing genetic modification gives is better control over the process which brings us back to your central fallacy: your belief that genetic modification is significantly different from the mutation process that occurs in nature.

Genetic modification is nothing like nature. There are not millions of years to sort out what plant species are poisonous. The potatoes you cite above, they naturally contain solanine which yes is a poison. Potatoes are part of the nightshade family of plants, which includes tomatoes and eggplants among many others. Some of the subgenera of this family like Solanum dulcamara are highly poisonous, but we won't find them on the dinner table (although there are some in the past that used them as 'medicine' just like doctors used to bleed people). The levels in cultivated for food varieties however are low enough in the tuber or fruit that the poison is not an issue, while unripe fruit or the green part of the plant may be. Yes, as man learned to breed potatoes he might have picked some of the strains that were high in solanine levels and grew them in a [near] monoculture. Yes we did learn from that mistake and started to do better testing. When are we going to learn from the GMO mistake of substantial equivalency? 

[TimG]

18 minutes ago, ?Impact said:

Genetic modification is nothing like nature. There are not millions of years to sort out what plant species are poisonous. 

Except we are not talking millions of years. Normal plant breeding has drastically altered the make up plants in less than 100 years.

On top of it: the every species on the planet exists because of random mutations that where likely caused by radiation, toxic chemical exposure or viruses. The mechanisms that produced these random mutations is not materially different from the mechanisms used with GMOs. Why is a random mutation that makes grapefruit pink more of a concern than a directed mutation?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/science/28crop.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
 

Quote

A similar story unfolded in Texas. In 1929, farmers stumbled on the Ruby Red grapefruit, a natural mutant. Its flesh eventually faded to pink, however, and scientists fired radiation to produce mutants of deeper color — Star Ruby, released in 1971, and Rio Red, released in 1985. The mutant offspring now account for about 75 percent of all grapefruit grown in Texas.

 

Edited January 2, 2017 by TimG

[?Impact]

4 minutes ago, TimG said:

Except we are not talking millions of years. Normal plant breeding has drastically altered the make up plants in less than 100 years.

No, I already explained this before. Our diet has been altered, but in general the plants have not - we just happen to cultivate a less diverse number.

I agree that plants created through accelerated mutation (e.g radiation) should be labelled. They are not however the same as GMO, not by a long shot. 

[TimG]

18 minutes ago, ?Impact said:

No, I already explained this before. Our diet has been altered, but in general the plants have not - we just happen to cultivate a less diverse number.

I agree that plants created through accelerated mutation (e.g radiation) should be labelled. They are not however the same as GMO, not by a long shot. 

Orange carrots were a mutation that was likely caused by some external factor (radiation, virus, et. al.). Farmers can discover random mutations in plants that allow them to create new strains. There is no difference between this random mutation process and what is done in the lab. The species we have today are not some static set of DNA that never changes - DNA changes on its own all of the time. Your argument that random mutations are fine as long as a human was not involved is nonsensical. 

Edited January 3, 2017 by TimG

[?Impact]

5 minutes ago, TimG said:

 Your arguments that random mutations are fine as long as a human was not involved is nonsensical. 

Humans cause global changes in the worlds food supply, something that has never before occurred. Even in countries that have tried to keep out GMO foods, we see them creeping in and overtaking others. It is time to sue the shyte out of the GMO companies for contaminating our environment with their creations. If they want to patent something, but release it into the environment, then they should be sued out of existence.

b.t.w. Orange carrots have been around for thousands of years, and probably much more but that is a limitation of documentation. The Dutch farmers used selective breeding to bring out only the orange and sweetest ones, no mutations needed. In fact if you cut open a purple carrot, the most common species a few hundred years ago, you will see it contains orange colouring inside as well. I am not promoting selective breeding, for example we have seen some of the issues it has created in dogs. 

 

[TimG]

6 minutes ago, ?Impact said:

b.t.w. Orange carrots have been around for thousands of years, and probably much more but that is a limitation of documentation. The Dutch farmers used selective breeding to bring out only the orange and sweetest ones, no mutations needed. In fact if you cut open a purple carrot, the most common species a few hundred years ago, you will see it contains orange colouring inside as well. I am not promoting selective breeding, for example we have seen some of the issues it has created in dogs. 

Orange carrots were originally a random mutation. Once the mutation occurred it become part of the genome that farmers could exploit. The only debate is when the mutation occurred originally. What is the difference between a random mutation that occurred in a nursery last week and a GMO? Why is using food which is the result of rare random events preferable to using food which is the result of the same types of events but triggered by humans? Why is the selection of preferable genes better when nature does it than when humans do it? You keep making these artificial distinctions that make no sense from a scientific perspective.

Edited January 3, 2017 by TimG

[?Impact]

1 minute ago, TimG said:

 Why is using food which is the result of rare random events preferable to using food which is the result of the same types of events but triggered by humans?

I already answered that. The difference is the eons of testing that occur before you foist your frankenfood onto the whole of humanity. One genetic mutation before was localized and took forever to scale to a regional, national, continental, and finally global scale. That gave a long time for it to be thoroughly tested. Today the GM foods are taking over, and at a global scale within a few short years. The processed foods that include the GM foods are scaling even faster in weeks. 

[TimG]

3 minutes ago, ?Impact said:

I already answered that. The difference is the eons of testing that occur before you foist your frankenfood onto the whole of humanity. One genetic mutation before was localized and took forever to scale to a regional, national, continental, and finally global scale. That gave a long time for it to be thoroughly tested. Today the GM foods are taking over, and at a global scale within a few short years. The processed foods that include the GM foods are scaling even faster in weeks. 

So what testing do you expect to occur if a random mutation occurs in a nursery next week? Given your anti-human stance would that random mutation would be fine simply because no human was involved? To be logically consistent you would have to insist that ALL new plant strains be put to the same testing that you expect for GMOs. 

 

Edited January 3, 2017 by TimG

[SunnysideTroll]

On 2016-12-28 at 0:55 PM, PIK said:

Let it happen, to many people starving that this food can help.

Big Ag would have you believe that growing GMOs is the key to feeding the world's growing population, but that's just not true.

 

"Hunger is not the result of too little food being produced, but rather of marginalization and disempowerment of the poorest, who lack the purchasing power they need to procure the food that is available" -- Olivier De Schutter, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

[SunnysideTroll]

GMOs have never been about feeding the world.  They're about control.

Bayer/Monsanto is a prominent chemical/GM seed company (they've recently formally merged).  I don't trust this partnership at all.

"Monsanto and Bayer have a long history.  They made explosives and lethally poisonous gases using shared technologies and sold them to both sides in the two world wars.  The same war chemicals were bought by Allied and Axis powers, from the same manufacturers, with money borrowed from the same bank." -- Dr. Vandana Shiva, environmental activist and renowned author of 'Stolen Harvest'     

Edited January 3, 2017 by SunnysideTroll
added the word "prominent"

[GostHacked]

19 hours ago, TimG said:

Really? Most of the non-GMO plants we eat today did not exist 200 years ago.

Most GMO plants you eat did not exist 50 years ago.