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Bayer Petitions For Approval of Biotech Rice
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Sep 12, 2006 08:10 PM
from the it's-good-for-you dept.
from the it's-good-for-you dept.
br_sjrpreto_sp writes to clue us to an article on Foodnavigator.
Agro giant Bayer Crop Sciences has petitioned the US Department of Agriculture to approve a genetically modified rice variety that has been at the heart of a recent contamination scandal. From the article: "Marketed under the brand name LibertyLink, these [varieties] were engineered to tolerate the toxic herbicide glufosinate ammonium. The company in July notified the US regulatory body that it had discovered trace amounts of an unapproved GM rice in samples of commercial rice seed." After the contamination scare, the market for US rice tanked as European countries imposed import limitations. When rice producers sued Bayer, the company responded with this request to the USDA. The petition is open to public comment until October 10. Comments may be submitted via the Internet at www.regulations.gov — search keyword APHIS-2006-0140."
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Makes it Worse! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Makes it Worse! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Makes it Worse! (Score:5, Insightful)
brett
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Re:Makes it Worse! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Makes it Worse! (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem 1: Weeds are becoming more and more resistant to pesticides
Problem 2: Actual crops cant take the amount of poison that takes to kill the weeds.
Solution: Gemodify crops also to be more resistant -> use more pesticides
Profit.
No other problems, right?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why on earth would someone develop a GM crop that is resiliant to a herbicide and then not use that herbicide? That makes absolutly no sense at all. GM crops drastically increase the use of herbicides, the only way they could reduce them is to make the GM crop resiliant to all infections and pests - basically impossible.
When using GM crops, the standard procedure is to drop tonnes of the herbicide o
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently because you know nothing about how many GM foods are created: by the introduction of powerful mutagens, either chemical or radioactive.
Simply because a change is intentional does not mean it is non-random, and GM foods are created with a variety of techniques whose sole purpose is to induce particular, commerically valuable, changes that could not be
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Humans have evolved for thousands of years eating natural foods with DNA codes by nature. The idea is the further we move away from nature regarding what we put into our bodies, generally, the harder it becomes for the body to make good uses of these nutrients. The human body has evolved to be
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The basic premise involves DNA testing the seedlings just after they sprout.
They can then remove the ones which do NOT contain the feature and splice those.
They don't have to wait for the plants to fully develop before deciding which strain to develop.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you know that in the US, half of all the food we produce goes to waste? [foodnavigator-usa.com]
It's a myth that people are starving because they don't have sufficiently magical crops to grow. There is far more than enough arable land to feed everyone in the world fully. What's lacking is the infrastructure, education, and technology to create and manage good farms. These things cannot be genetically engineered, and they don't need to be.
As long
Re:That would likely be a trade violation (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan is just as protectionist as the US. Take a look at the steel tariffs or sugar tariffs the US imposes on other countries to protect their own domestic markets for these or substitute products.
You cast your FUD in a light that suggests that genetically modified crops are obviously harmless. There is no evidence to support that notion. In fact, and you can look in the rest of thread for other examples, there are lots of reasons to believe that genetically modifying foods is a potentially very dangerous game. Some obvious reasons:
These are just some very obvious and immediate problems with genetically engineered foods. You might think that these are not severe problems. But if antibiotic have taught us anything it's that human intervention can cause unforeseen problems over the long run. Problems with unclear answers. For example, what happens when cross fertilization causes other plant organisms to also gain herbicide resistance? Do you know the answer?
What if genetically engineered crops, either through cross-fertilization or by design, become non-digestible by humans or animals? Do you know the answer?
Such possibilities are worst-case scenarios and the risk might be unlikely, but is it worth it?
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environmental pollution never to vanish. (Score:3, Insightful)
Only this pollution will never vanish, because these organisms are "genetically engineered" with a dominat special (=patented) gen that will be reproduced and breed with other species.
Monsanto vs. Farmers [google.com]
Everybody is bleeding insane (Score:5, Insightful)
And other people think 9/11 was planned and executed by the U.S. government.
Meanwhile people fight to make creationism part of the high school science curriculum.
And many consider homeopathic medicines, also known as "water", as effective treatments.
Gives me a migraine. Where did I put my "head-on"?
Do any of you really know what GM is? (Score:5, Insightful)
I caught my first episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit the other night, and it just so happened to have a piece on GM food.
Some clips:
A short clip outline [youtube.com]
The entire segment [putfile.com]
It painted a pretty good argument FOR GM food... to feed the millions who are otherwise dying because it's hard to get crops to grow in their parts of the world.
Aren't the 'GM' crops really just an extension of grafting and selective breeding that has been going on for thousands of years?
Please enlighten me if I'm wrong, but in their piece they/those they interviewed stated that two of the things I thought were true about GM foods aren't:
* GM foods contain genes spliced from frogs/fish/other animals: Apparently bullshit
* GM foods don't require any testing/checks before being used: Also apparently bullshit, that they are more heavily regulated than any other food.
Is this true, or have Penn & Teller hoodwinked me?
Re:Do any of you really know what GM is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, GM seeds might be able to grow in marginal areas. But the vast majority of GM foods is grown in the US where there aren't millions starving. Actually, patented GM foods create a problem for farmers in developing countries since they can't keep back part of their harvest as seed for the next growing season. If they can't afford seed corn, they'll starve or have to wait for th UN air drop. I haven't seen Monsanto or anyone put a huge effort into GM plants for the Sahel or the Tibetan desert yet. And, quite frankly, improved irrigation or similar changes to production are probably much more efficient.
There are reasonably good arguments for using GM foods to help counteract nutritional deficiencies, though. Golden Rice [wikipedia.org] is probably the best example.
GM foods do require stringent testing, but past experience shows that even the most stringent testing can reliably weed out all problems Two examples for failed pharmaceutical testing would be Contagan and Vioxx, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are two examples that even if something is tested to be almost idiot proof, someone will invent a better operator. If you screw up FDA testing for medications, you can just destroy what was produced. With GM foods, you simply can't. Some will escape and multiply.
The no fish/fowl gene argument is a bit spurious. There have been experiments along those lines. But just think what would happen if pesticide resistant rice cross pollinates with weed grasses. Instant huge problem.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not "if". When.
It is an absolute certainty that the genes will get loose. That's what they do, and plants hybridize to the extent that there are biologists who have challenged the validity of the "biological species concept" as a general means of categorization, citing cases where up to 40% of the individuals in a particular lump of foliage are unclassifiable hybrids.
The very point of the story here is that GM
Re:Do any of you really know what GM is? (Score:4, Interesting)
And this has nothing to do with GM food, per se. It's an issue with obsolete laws from the dawn of the industrial revolution being stapled onto the modern world. This has more in common with pharmaceuticals (especially AIDS treatments) than it does with agriculture.
GM foods do require stringent testing, but past experience shows that even the most stringent testing can reliably weed out all problems Two examples for failed pharmaceutical testing would be Contagan and Vioxx.
Comparing the testing to pharmaceuticals is absurd. If you can't figure out why you should be ashamed of yourself for making the comparison, do the rest of us a favour and never discuss this topic again.
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are two examples that even if something is tested to be almost idiot proof, someone will invent a better operator.
This is pure technophobia. Three mile island is a non issue. Even the laughable 'cell phones cause teh cancer' nonsense is of more concern than that. Chernobyl was the result of a dying government, rather than the technology itself.
If you screw up FDA testing for medications, you can just destroy what was produced. With GM foods, you simply can't. Some will escape and multiply.
So? The absolute worst case senario is that a highly specialized pesticide will be somewhat less effective against wild varieties of your particular crop. They aren't going to cross breed with any other plant, and if you think they will, you need to turn the god damned scifi channel off.
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Re:Do any of you really know what GM is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Charles really manages to sum up both sides of the argument pretty well. For one thing, he explains pretty much what you say Penn & Teller have said: that this stuff just ain't the demonic conspiracy a lot of people want to believe it is. A lot of genetically modified foods are produced by bombarding cells with radiation, or bathing them in chemicals that cause genes to replicate in random ways. In other words, scientists are just forcing the natural process of random mutation that occurs any time life reproduces. Very few GM organisms are created by piecing together bits of this or that -- it's too hard to do successfully.
There is something to be said for "feeding the starving," too, as you say. In certain parts of the world, certain plant diseases are so rampant that you just can't grow a lot of crops. They will grow poorly and not yield what they could in order to feed people. A lot of GM crops aim to solve this problem.
But there are more troubling aspects as well. Here at home, the reasons for using GM crops seem less cut and dried. To give one fairly benign example, a ton of work has been put into genetically modifying tomatoes -- but not to make them taste better, or to be more nutritious. No, scientists modify tomatoes so that they will have more cellulose in them, which makes them take longer to ripen and go soft. That way they can be transported farther without spoilage. Of course, it also makes them sort of taste like a piece of celery. The modifications are done solely for the business of agriculture, not for the customer's benefit.
More troubling is that many of the stated aims of biotech have not come to fruition. At one time, scientists promised that GM crops would be resilient to pests and diseases. If a boll weevil couldn't eat a certain crop, you'd no longer have to dump pesticides all over it, which would make farming more environmentally friendly! Well, that sort of happened. But the most popular GM crops of all, as it turns out, are these herbicide resistant crops like TFA talks about. These are plants that can't be killed by modern herbicides. The reason you want that is because weeds can be killed by modern herbicides. So instead of hiring people to go and painstakingly remove all the weeds from your fields, you just repeatedly spray your fields with herbicides. In other words, with GM farming you're actually using more chemicals than traditional farming. And why not? Because the same company is selling you both the GM crops and the chemicals.
And then you have the intellectual property issues. Most of these GM crops are patented. If you are a farmer and you want to plant GM corn, you have to buy it under a license from Monsanto (for example). Typically, that license will include a clause that says you can never plant corn that you grow. Got that? You have a whole field full of ears of corn, and you are forbidden to take any of that corn and put it in the soil to grow next year's crop. You must buy all your seed directly from Monsanto, year after year. And Monsanto sends people out to test your crops, too! If you're not licensed to be growing GM corn this year, and they pick an ear off one of your plants and they determine that it's GM corn, they will actually sue you. (And yes, there have been "false positives" -- false, because the farmer did not knowingly do anything wrong, because his crops were cross-pollinated through the air with GM crops.) To many people, this move toward farming as a new kind of industrial complex controlled by gigantic, multinational corporations is very troubling. To what extent is it appropriate for these corporations to control our food supply?
Anyway, that's just a snapshot
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The starvation in the world is not because we don't have enough food, it is because the food can't get to the right places. This is because of wars and corrupt third world governments, so GM will do nothing to help this.
What makes me at least wary, is actions like US companies getting the patent to basmati rice [commondreams.org], even though this has been grown in In
Re:Do any of you really know what GM is? (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, it is important to carefully examine and test the plants that we select for human and animal consumption, but that's something that is required even for "natural" food sources.
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I've losing faith in slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, Bayer can't keep the unapproved and approved strains separate when they sell their GM products to the general public. **shudder**
GM Food is Nasty, Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Enter Monsanto. They make GM canola, among other things, as well as having patented over 12,000 varieties of seed, most unmodified and taken directly from the goverments own seed stores.
A little bit of their GM seed blew off of trucks and onto the fields of a farmer in Canada. Monsanto found traces of GM plants on the farmers land (without his knowledge or permission, which in the U.S. we call trespassing), sued the farmer, and cost him his life savings, and he had to destroy all of his seed. He was a real farmer who rotated his fields with a variety of seeds to maintain the soil. He lost literally generations worth of seed, a devestating loss.
Much of the upper echelons of the U.S. government, particularly the FDA, are former executives of Monsanto or it's subsidiaries. The goal is nothing short of utter and total control of the worlds food supply.
Watch the documentary The Future of Food. It'll put a bad taste in your mouth.
Re:I don't see what the problem with G is (Score:5, Informative)
Yes.
A major problem is allergies.
Much of genetic engineering for crops consists of copying a gene or set of genes from one species to another, in order to confer its advantages on the engineered organism. This results in the engineered plant making a set of protiens (and their fallout products) that were previously lacking in that organism.
Now suppose you're violently allergic to, say, some cell membrane protien in peanuts. Eat a trace of a peanut and you end up in the hospital. Eat a handfull and you might suddenly die. But if you avoid peanuts you're fine, right?
Then suppose somebody discovers that this protien confers a resistance to a quickly-degraded herbicide that gets most of the weeds that currently infest corn, wheat, and soybean fields and rice paddies. So they clone it into corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice. This produces new strains that are easier to grow: Plant 'em, spray once with the herbicide to kill the weeds but not the crops, and get high yields with little effort. The new strains are cheaper to grow and quickly displace their competition.
And now you're deathly allergic to peanuts, corn, wheat, soy, and rice.
Or at least to the GM versions of the corn, wheat, soy, and rice.
But you can't tell from the labeling which strains of corn, wheat, soy, or rice are in any given product you buy.
And once they're growing in the fields, they produce polen that fertilizes OTHER corn, wheat, soy, or rice. A few generations later even some "unmodified" strains (such as those grown by the organic farmer in the next field downwind) will contain it. If the advantage is sufficient it becomes pervasive.
That's just one example. Iterate for other sources of useful protiens. Iterate using animals. Iterate for genes that produce powerful hormones or drug precursors, which may affect you when consumed orally. Iterate for airborne allergens. And so on.
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