food

[Brosville]

A small addition to the above - firstly, the summary

"In conclusion, the ‘golden rice’ project was a useless application, a drain on public finance and a threat to health and biodiversity. It is being promoted in order to salvage a morally as well as financially bankrupt agricultural biotech industry, and is obstructing the essential shift to sustainable agriculture that can truly improve the health and nutrition especially of the poor in the Third World. This project should be terminated immediately before further damage is done.

The ‘golden rice’ possesses all the usual defects of first generation transgenic plants plus multiple copies of the CaMV promoter which we have strongly recommended withdrawing from use on the basis of scientific evidence indicating this promoter to be especially unsafe. A growing number of scientists (318 scientists from 39 countries to-date) are calling for a global moratorium on the environmental releases of GMOs until and unless they can be shown to be safe"

Full scientific explanation here -
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/rice.php

As I suspected, GM corporations telling porkies again! They really do proper science a great disservice, by allowing the perversion of science by commercial concerns..........

[academic plant scientist]

Well, I think it's a sad reflection on you, thast you have such a cynical and biased view of the world and are unwilling to contemplate issues that  could improve lives of others. Your "discussions" smack of the blinkered brainwashing used by people such as friends of the earth and greenpeace, unwilling to even contemplate another view. It is really a Luddite viewpoint.

I wonder if you can show me the evidence that normal, non-GM organic food is not harmful. It is the same issue: there is never enough to convince people that gossip and hearsay is correct or incorrect. I would love to see organic food removed as a precautionary principle; there are horror stories about people poisoned by organic food, except they are not well publicized.

I am a research scientist, working on fundamental research, that is not funded by industry or biotech companies, and my work is not directly related to any commercial goal. I have no vested interest in GM. However, I think it very sad reflection on society that such a luddite viewpoint is so widespread.

[Brosville]

I have seen people crippled and die from organophosphates whilst the companies making and selling them swore blind they were safe, I have seen people die in their droves from "safe" drugs while the pharmaceutical companies swore blind they were safe............
I notice use of the word "luddite" which is rather a giveaway, it is a word much used by the US neocon lobbying companies in their "big push" to get GM accepted by a gullible world.
  I'm somewhat horrified to hear from someone who claims to be a scientist that it is perfectly all right to throw all precautionary principles out of the window in a headlong rush to strongarm a potentially dangerous, unproven, and most of all "has never done what it says on the tin" technology on an unwilling world.

My personal greatest objection is that it is a "pandora's box" - it is a deliberate attempted contamination of the entire ecosystem, which removes the right of people who choose NOT to eat food contaminated by it!
I have no objection to "pure research" into the subject in totally sealed research establishments - pure research and knowledge is good, perversion of science to economic ends is unforgiveable!

IF there were the slightest chance that GM offered in any way to deliver what it promises, and there were no other way of achieving it by safe, proven methods, then there may be some sense in a very cautious look at it's potential use, BUT conventional breeding methods are achieving more in improving crops, and properly applied permaculture can already double yields - in a totally sustainable and proven safe manner - which also does not hand total control of all crops grown worldwide to a handful of totally immoral US corporations - which is what this is really about...........
According to the picture that you paint of "poisoned" organic food, apart from me falling off my chair laughing rather points to the fact that we obviously can't really exist as a human race, as we'd all have died off eating all that dreadful "organic food" our antecedents ate for millenia.........
Wake up - chemical farming is dead - oil is rapidly running out - we need sustainable, not chemical...........

[Brosville]

ps, here's a link to short film which clearly sets out my objections to GM - before anyone else points it out - it is sensationalist and emotive, made for an unsophisticated US audience, but clearly shows what is really going on
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/380.html

I would also like to express my sorrow and surprise at the bitterness  shown towards Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth  - they do not have the advantages of bottomless pits of lobbying cash, they are grass roots organisations seeking to preserve life on earth, against all threats, however inconvenient that may be for the forces of darkness, I'm rather grateful they're there!
I'm not anti-science, or anti-scientist, but very much against it's perversion by major corporations for profit at the possible expense of life on earth........

[academic plant scientist]

The "pandora's box" argument could go for all scientific and technological changes (I deliberately do not use advances). I cannot advocate that we do not make use of our knowledge. We would still be living in caves. This is part of what humanity is- the wish to strive for something better. And I agree that perversion of science to economic ends is unforgiveable.

You say that IF there were the slightest chance that GM offered in any way to deliver what it promises, and there were no other way of achieving it by safe, proven methods, then there may be some sense in a very cautious look at it's potential use, but you then seem to write that off. There will always be a limit to what we can do with conventional crops, as certain genes are not present in some species, and some genes do not recombine. This is why people are struggling to breed increased yields without having problems with other attributes.

The point about "safety" of organic food was intended as such. You can't prove that GM is any more harmful than organic. And equally, why do so many people believe that organic food is better for you?

Your point about chemical farming is real - this is why GM technology could really come inot its own, If we have crops that are pest-resistant, drought-, salt-resistant... etc. we would not need all the chemicals. This is what many scientists are working towards at the academic level. If this is possible, then there shoudl be a way forward in the future to use this to good ends, without exploitation.

We spend too much time at loggerheads with people form Greenpeace etc. We need some real dialogue about the real issues, not these political arguments. We have to move on.  It is very dispiriting for the scientists working on these projects to have the idealistic intentions opposed for what seems like political advantage games. We in the West can afford the luxury of saying "we don't want" "we don't need", but sunsitence farmers and their children die from malnutrition. We should not oppose something that could potentially do good for others. The "Golden rice" example meets all the criteria that the GMO opposition expressed earlier, but still they don't want to accept it.

See an article by Ingo Potrykus for more on the arguments. http://www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/content/full/125/3/1157

[Brosville]

Of course noone in their right mind wants to accept it - as I've clearly pointed out until I'm blue in the face, GM is a thinly-disguised attempt of US corporations to "corner" the entire world crop "market" to their own ends. No GM research has been  into things which do not further that end in one way or another (even if it's a giveaway of "old technology" to lull people into a false sense of security), and far from seeking to feed the hungry,  their mission is to make the greedy even richer, and to hand them even more control.
As I've also pointed out, conventional plant breeding accomplishes far more - entirely safely, and is not playing into those companies' hands.
  I'm afraid science is reaping the whirlwind of allowing itself to be used by big business to it's own ends - I am deeply distrustful of anything that comes from "scientists" in many fields these days for precisely that reason, as thankfully, are many people!
I actually sympathise with scientists with a conscience - in certain fields it is almost impossible to gain employment outside the deeply tainted areas.
I fear the effects of all "icides", chemical fertilisers, the effects of monocultures, GM, but most of all, I fear the effect of the power over our food being concentrated in the hands of a few deeply immoral corporations
The nettle we MUST grasp is not how to produce more food (the earth just can't take any more abuse), but that of overpopulation - fix that problem, all the others fade..........
The GM Pandora effect does not hold for many other technologies (apart perhaps from nuclear power, and "icides"), certainly not to the same extent - I choose (rightly or wrongly) to never consume GMOs - that is my right, how DARE anyone try to take that right away.....
If we had a "divisible" planet, and we could for instance bung a dirty great bubble over Alaska, and they choose to grow and eat GM food, pollute their air with coal fumes, and nuclear fallout, and there was no way it could contaminate the rest of the world - absolutely fine - but they can't, therefore I do not consider they have the right to impose THEIR choices on us...........

[academic plant scientist]

P.S. The use of the term "luddite" is not a giveaway, it is (pardon the plaigiarism from Wiki): "In recent years, the terms Luddism and Luddite or Neo-Luddism and Neo-Luddite have become synonymous with anyone who opposes the advance of technology due to the cultural and socioeconomic changes that are associated with it."[/i]

P.P.S. I find it incredible that GM foods are compared with, and put in the same league of danger, as organophosphates. This is scare tactics. Plants are plants, even if modified with an additional gene. Again you are straying off the point as to whether GM food itself is dangerous to health, for which there is no evidence.