I thought us tree hugging, tofu eating, bleeding heart liberals would get little good news about GMO as huge corporations and the men with the money ploughed on with their evil schemes.

Following a recent report from the US that Organic growers are finding increased support in their campaigns against the spread of GMO comes this to warm our hearts...




My gripe was actually never with the geneticists and theri modifications, I was always against the whole thing because of the way that poor farmers would and were being fleeced by big corporations. The idea coming from the anti genetics lobby that we'd all end up having kids with birth defects or grow ourselves and extra head after eating dodgy tomatoes was just plain daft. But on reflection...


Oi! Monsanto! Take yer GMO and fuck off!

well said!

in principle i am against gm crops but my problem with the anti gm movement is it will make it very difficult for farmers from developing countries to compete in the world market - a market they were forced to join in the first place and now through policies and economic neccesities they have no choice but to remain in. Due to weather and soil conditions, only very basic machinery, the time it takes to package and process goods and air flight times these farmers often have to use chemicals to preserve their crops.

With regards to the allergies and "Frankenstein food" claims, genetic engineering is no different to selective breeding--farmers have accidentally produced poisonous crops by selective breeding (a.k.a artificial selection, the products of which make up all our domestic crops and animals and 99.9% of the world's food). Claiming that we should drop all genetic engineering because one plant causes allergies in mice is like saying we should ban rice because some potato breeds are poisonous or we should ban programming languages because somebody used one to produce the Microsoft Office paperclip.

Genetic engineering has the potential to increase crop yields--feeding the starving in the third world, and allowing the first world to turn more farmland over nature reserves and national parks. Plants with built in pesticides (which, incidentally, isn't abnormal, plants evolve their own pesticides but get into evolutionary "arms races" with the pests, the engineering is just giving them a little help) will hopefully increase biodiversity as the pesticide will be perfectly targeted, rather than sprayed randomly over crops and allowed to run off into rivers. Etc, etc.

And this is what a lot of researchers are look at. Generally, funded from the public purses of the US, India, Europe and China.

Monsanto doesn't have such noble aims, but when a corporation profiteers off technology, doesn't make the technology inherently bad. Monsanto etc use GMOs is two ways: make a crop resistant to their brand of herbicide so farmers have to buy their brand of herbicide; or patent their crop breed and charge sky-high annual royalties.

We should be encouraging the publically funded research in this field--research with the goal of cheap, productive, environmentally friendly agriculture--as the antidote to profit driven private research.

(Edited nearly two years later as I noticed I was sloppy with a particular term.)

An ideal behind which I can most emphatically get.

But how to achieve it?

Perhaps if we all support the pro-organic anti-gmo movements to the point at which the suited scum fuck off and invest in something else, then governments might take up the financial reins and ethical non exploitative gmo production might become a reality.

I personally think there is a case for ethically motivated GM research, with a big ‘however’. The research done at the moment is driven by the corporations with a huge emphasis on highly profitable products & proving the products in question to be ‘safe’ under EU or US regulations. I feel there should be a requirement for them to fund profitless products aimed at alleviating third world problems – I don’t know if this already exists or would be implementable, but that impetus & balance to the research should be there & I wholeheartedly support publicly funded research too.

I find it terribly saddening that when this technology was first developed, rather than addressing what is a major problem for third world farmers for example - banana & plantain fungal resistance - Monsanto developed a drug that increases milk production in cattle, it's an expensive drug that can only be used in the first world where we already had (& still have) overproduction of milk, coupled with supermarket buying power dropping the wholesale cost of milk below it's production costs. The only people making profits here are Monsanto and the supermarkets, and there are claims that use of this drug damages the health of the cattle & potentially the consumers of the end product.

Bananas however are a very interesting plant, they are only spread by cloning as they are mutant strains of an inedible wild plant - this mutation rendering them seedless & therefore edible, but unable to reproduce naturally. They are a heavily relied upon staple food in many area's of the world (some sources quote half a billion people dependant on them as a staple food in Africa & Asia) and under serious threat from fungi that cannot be eradicated from the soil once infected. Surely this is a suitable, ethical subject for GM as resistance cannot be obtained via selective breeding as in other crops. Wild varieties do show resistance, so genes for resistance can even be taken from the same species & should express in the resulting offspring in the same way as the resistant parent, decreasing the risks shown up by the GM pea.

Research on the banana genome & fungus resistance is going on – there is a team in Montpellier in southern France headed by Dr Frison, but he reports that research is being hampered by large corporations who believe that western consumers will reject GM bananas – Dr Frison points out that this research is not primarily aimed at western consumers.

I have huge reservations about GM products as on the shelves at the moment & will choose to avoid them unless considerably more independent research is done into environmental & long-term health implications.

Well sorry for the essay, but great topic!

how do you know you are not eating gm foods?

A lot of us probably don't know what we're eating.

In the UK food producers are required under the law of the EU (I think) to make clear to potential purchasers/consumers that their products either do or do not contain GMOs.

Not the case in the US. It will be a long hard struggle to get US politicians to vote in legislation making US food producers behave similarly to those in Europe.

The US loves to portray itself as a bastion of freedom and democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth when so many politicians are owned by corporations with seemingly limitless wealth.

I wonder if they'll find backbones from January 09 onward?

My fear is that Obama's "changes" will be increasingly difficult to discern as he moves closer to securing the presidency. He's already been backtracking on many of what I would have seen as the most welcome and necessary changes of direction form all previous administrations. Not least his change of stance on the Iraq conflict.
It therefore seems unlikely that he'll do anything in a hurry to interfere with the way in which multi billion dollar food production companies do business. He will have his hands full for at least two terms simply getting started on repairing just some of the damage the Bushies have done to the US and the world.

In the meantime we are left with few very practical choices...

Grow yer own. Not easy in the middle of a metropolis.

Buy only non GMO. But how do you know what isn't and what is?

Buy only organic produce. Fine and dandy to advocate this, which I would wholeheartedly, except that we're now heading deeper into a recession with fuel prices affecting food prices and organic produce was already a little beyond the pocketbooks of the working poor.

Right on Martyn !

We are extremely lucky (sorta) in that the locally grown stuff (much of it "more-ganic", as the hoops one has to jump through to get certified organic are sadly financially impossible for small growers--yes, even that's gone the way of big agribusiness in this country) is now the same price or less expensive than the commercial stuff that's trucked in. It's all still way too expensive, though.