China Rejects 545,000 Tons of US Genetically Modified Corn 215
hawkinspeter writes "The BBC is reporting that China has rejected 545,000 tons of U.S. corn that was found to contain an unapproved genetically modified strain. Although China doesn't have a problem per se with GM crops (they've been importing GM soybeans since 1997) — but their product safety agency found MIR162 in 12 batches of corn. 'The safety evaluation process [for MIR162] has not been completed and no imports are allowed at the moment before the safety certificate is issued,' said Nui Din, China's vice agricultural minister. The Chinese are now calling on U.S. authorities to tighten their controls to prevent unapproved strains from being sent to China after the first batch of corn was rejected in November due to MIR162."
Dennis Rodman just called (Score:3)
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Hope it gets past the FDA approval...
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Monsanto's frankenfood is approved by default.
when your government is in the pockets of large corporations, legality is by fiat
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The pinnacle of capitalism: When laws themselves are subject to the laws of supply and demand.
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actually, that's a different system than capitalism. too bad we have it
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Capitalism, like Communism, would be a great system. Too bad neither of them has ever been implemented correctly.
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If its approved by default, why do they spend millions testing it? Is it out of the goodness of their hearts? Why are they waiting for regulatory approval of their dicamba tolerant cotton & soy? [usda.gov] Do they just care that much? You must have a lot more faith in them than I do.
when your government is in the pockets of large corporations
If that were in any way true, I think we'd have more than just seven species that are genetically engineered on the market sold by corporations. But keep on playing that conspiracy card & weasel words like 'frankenfood' in the
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Hope it gets past the FDA approval...
by the former Monstanto Executive :)
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Yeah. Stop eating my motor vehicle fuel additives.
They'll take it soon however (Score:2, Insightful)
"The safety evaluation process [for MIR162] has not been completed and no imports are allowed at the moment before the safety certificate is issued," said China's vice agricultural minister, Niu Dun.
The Ministry of Agriculture has recently launched a publicity campaign to allay concerns over GM foods and says the criticisms are unfounded.
Seems pretty fair to me. sloppy testing on the US end is all.
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MIR162 is a Syngenta product... the company is Swiss...
Didn't meet their standard... (Score:5, Funny)
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Sprinkle with lead, and put for two hours at PM2.5 set to 1000.
Once baked, package carefully for shipping in that nice Walmart box.
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Normally I'd agree with you about the melamine content being too low (and/or the bribes were too low). However, considering the public example they made of the guy responsible for the milk scandal (execution even though he was a wealthy, influential, individual) I have to say that unless the guys at the Ministry of Agriculture are incredibly stupid this is probably a legit complaint on their part.
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In China you don't get executed for screwing up. You get executed for embarrassing the Party.
Egads! (Score:5, Funny)
Assuming that Chinese health authorities have their priorities straight, that must mean that eating US corn is more dangerous than breathing the air in Beijing. This is worrisome!
Re:Egads! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, the air in Beijing is thicker than corn anyway.
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end world hunger now?!!
"Product safety agency"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep, one the main points of these free-trade zones was to remove the burden of local compliance for export products.
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I really like this quote from the article:
The agency called on US authorities to tighten controls to ensure unapproved strains are not sent to China.
This reminds me of a saying my friend regularly uses;
Pot,Pot, this is Kettle, Kettle, colour check, over.
Trust us.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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FYI, MIR162 was approved for use by the EU [europa.eu].
Of course, this might be because it was developed by a Swiss company (Syngenta)...
The modification made to MIR162 (insertion of a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis aka Bt which creates the Vip3Aa protein) is in some ways the complement to what was known as BtCorn (which is the generic moniker for many varieties of corn which inserted one of the other genes from Bt and created a different protein Cry1Ac and was developed by the non-European company Monsanto). Appare
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Not only by the EU. It is also approved for food in Canada, Australia, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, Columbia and Korea.
I am sure there will be no problem finding customers. Meanwhile billions of Chinese babies will go hungry.
The expressed protein is a Bt toxin, which is approved for and used on organic farms as a natural pesticide.
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The expressed protein is a Bt toxin, which is approved for and used on organic farms as a natural pesticide.
Although the expressed protein is a Bt toxin, and application of Bt is considered as a organic natural pesticide spray, they aren't quite the same.
In the GM variant, it is actually produced in the corn itself, where in the organic farming case, an inactivated Bt bacteria solution is sprayed on corn and you are only consuming the pesticide residue. The difference is in the quantity that you might ingest.
Personally, I don't think GM modifications like MIR162 as a major consumption hazard (I'm sure I've eaten
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when you start messing with food.... (Score:3)
The whole point of some of these changes is to make the food no longer attractive (or possibly even toxic) to pests. It seems reasonable that the changes required to do this may have some impact on people as well.
That said, direct genetic modification is a lot less likely to cause problems than the radiation-based mutation where they just blast it and see what they end up with--that ends up changing a lot more DNA than the direct modification would, and has far fewer labelling restrictions.
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It seems reasonable only to uninformed people.
The pest control is bacillus thuringiensis toxin, a group of proteins so specific that they affects only a few species of insects.
These materials are permitted for use by organic farmers as a natural pesticide.
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The whole point of some of these changes is to make the food no longer attractive (or possibly even toxic) to pests. It seems reasonable that the changes required to do this may have some impact on people as well.
In this case, we know exactly how we are making it pest resistant. The Bt genes produce a protein that has no known affect on mammalians. It isn't 'possibly' toxic to the pests it targets, it kills them. It is, to them, toxic, but just like grapes and chocolate are toxic to dogs, that does not mean it is also toxic to humans. The Bt proteins have a very specific and well understood mode of action, and they simply have no impact on humans.
direct genetic modification is a lot less likely to cause problems than the radiation-based mutation where they just blast it and see what they end up with
You don't even need to go that far. People all over are breeding
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>Drugs are specifically designed to interrupt or change normal metabolic pathways and processes, whereas food is not.
All foods affect metabolic pathways. Try eating a few slices of bread and see what happens to your insulin, blood glucose and LPL receptor expression.
Try eating lots of broccolli and see how your thyroid hormones react.
As xkcd probably said, we are all big bags of chemical reactions and we throw other chemicals in our gobs to keep the reactions going. Don't think there is a magic division
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Food is not a drug.
Bullshit.
Drugs are specifically designed to interrupt or change normal metabolic pathways and processes
Medical dictionary: "A chemical substance, such as a narcotic or hallucinogen, that affects the central nervous system, causing changes in behavior and often addiction." Food fits the entire description.
That drugs take years to make it to market and food does not is to be expected.
The FDA disagrees with you [examiner.com]. Apparently, Walnuts are a drug if you make health claims supported by science on your packaging. Cherries have been subjected to the same treatment. So you see, clearly food is a drug, both literally and legally.
And if we did this to China, would it be news? (Score:2)
Let's say China ships us 545,000 tons of toothpaste laced with lead, and our health inspectors reject it. Would this even be news or just another day at the Los Angeles shipping ports?
As it stands, our trade deficit with China is so great, we're coming up with creative uses for all the shipping containers being stocked 30 or 40 high -- we could build housing for the homeless from all those containers, and completely eliminate homelessness in this country, if only we had the land to put all those containers
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Yes, it probably would be news. The "Chinese Drywall" scare in 2007/2008 made the news for a few weeks as well.
The only reason this made Slashdot was because its related to GMO. GMO tends to be a hot button for nerds because a fair number of misinformed people will malignly knee-jerk in response to GMO, while people who are more likely to understand GMO tend to be okay with minimal variations or even approve wholeheartedly.
After all, if you disapprove of all GMO, you shouldn't eat orange carrots or else y
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"- we could build housing for the homeless from all those containers, and completely eliminate homelessness in this country, if only we had the land to put all those containers somewhere else."
Much love for my ISO containers, but the homeless problem isn't necessarily due to a lack of "homes".
If you have "land", then the ubiquitous "single wide mobile home" is usually a better choice than the "same thing in a shipping container". By the time you turn an ISO into a lodging structure (as many firms do, check
Wrong poison (Score:2)
I'm fing fed up by American exceptionalism... (Score:4, Insightful)
This sick propaganda starts with the media. Fuck reading a story's contents, you give me the color/race, ethnicity, religion, sexual-orientation, wealth/affluence, partisanship of the story (domestic and international), I'll tell you exactly what the reactions of my countrymen will be regardless of the facts. This post-colonial imperialism is sickening and runs through the veins of our society from top to bottom. It creates double standards, domestically and internationally.
China and its Ministry of Agriculture rejects unapproved goods just like our FDA would. How dare they expect the same as us? Let the smear campaign begin! China executes Uyghur Muslims, all of a sudden China is the best. Why? Because in our hierarchical caste system, China seems ranks higher than Muslims. This is the reality, a single stamp on your forehead of an identity defines one entirely and groups you with a stereotype irrelevant of the facts. And if you think that people are willingly going to accept second-class treatment, you are tripping, keep investing in the military as this is the only way.
This is exactly why:
These double standards and injustices go on BECAUSE you permit it to happen. I'm the fucking patriot here, you are just a mindless sheep falling in line, fuck you!
American Exceptionalism (Score:2, Insightful)
"How dare China ban our GMO exports!"
American Exceptionalism is Exceptional Hypocrisy.
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Unless our GMO exports are full of lead (which wouldn't really surprise me), the two aren't equivalent.
Kinda Ironic (Score:2)
A country responsible for leaded paint in toys, melamine in pet food and baby milk is refusing corn over GMO concerns ?
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Are you going to build a house out of Corn?
Re:"Hey, we'll take it," said Africa (Score:4, Informative)
Are you going to build a house out of Corn?
http://inhabitat.com/corn-waste-transformed-into-versatile-building-material/ [inhabitat.com]
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With that much corn, you could build a palace [cornpalace.org]!
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Think of all the corn and E.T. cartridges we could donate to the starving if we weren't so short-sighted.
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Usually the seller know that the country will not accept the product before they have processed and shipped the product.
Also depending on your views of GM Foods, either china is rejecting food that will feed a lot of people, due to some politics. Or China saving its people from the US Sending China Poison food.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where is the news? (Score:4, Informative)
Article says they don't have an issue with GMOs.
They have an issue with unapproved GMOs.
Seems pretty reasonable. Even if politics are at play.
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That's also part of the reason GE crops are so convenient for international issues. If you have a political issue with a shipment of a crop, there's not a lot you can do about it without outright making something up or being very obvious the issue is political. It would not be possible to do this with less regulated and less controversial methods of crop improvement (for example, if you don't want to eat peanuts with non-peanut genes for nematode resistance that were brought in without the direct use of g
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No, I'd say its more dependant on your reading comprehension of the summary. They have a regulartory system that approves specific mutations. They accept others, but have not finished certification of this one.
Its the most sensible way of dealing with GMO's, IMHO. Not a complete ban, but approval after testing for safety.
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Isn't this just things working as they should?
I think if things were working as they should, the unapproved corn wouldn't have made it all the way to China before it was rejected. China makes headlines for sending tainted food to the USA, so the USA should make headlines for sending tainted food to China.
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When the US rejects Chinese food products, it's usually due to high levels of heavy metals and real poisons. When China rejects US food products, it's due to pseudo-scientific fear of "frankenfoods" which have zero evidence of human health risks. It's not the same thing. Only one is "tainted".
If you place an order for a million red gummi bears, and you find out that when you receive the order that 10% of them are blue gummi bears, it's still correct to say that the blue ones are "tainting" the order, even if they are generally equivalent and perfectly safe to eat.
China is not anti-GMO, but they have an approved list of GMO crops they will accept. If the USA supplier can't do a simple thing like keep track of which GMO variants they are supplying, what other quality control problems do they have?
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You are replying to something that was not stated. Your parent post was pointing out the difference between tainted as in proven harmful and "tainted" as in scaremongering. The article and the rest of the discussion (at least this portion) is about the validity of the argument against GM foods.
Making up some BS about somebody having to buy every product for sale somewhere on earth unless they can prove it harmful in some way pretty much proves that you have no actual argument against GM foods other than you
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Exactly THAT is the news.
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The not I'm not seeing mentioned is how soon this is after they rejected shellfish from the entire US west coast - again, a not entirely uncalled for, but unusual move.
I'm not sure if this is more in response to internal unease about their own food quality problems, or a more general snub of the US - admittedly, these things are hardly exclusive.
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Isn't this just things working as they should?
When things work the way they should it's because the Chinese gummint wants to leverage something. It could be they genuinely don't want GM produce, but considering the way they are destroying and polluting their own environment wholesale, I figure they're totally good with the GM produce, but want to extract a concession somewhere, like the US opening markets to paint-thinned milk.
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Yep, GM food is destroying and polluting the environment. So is fertilizing with anything other than letting the cows eat half your crop so they can fertilize it for you.
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FWIW, cows prefer to eat foods that people can't digest. (Except for things like apples, and even those aren't particularly good for cows.) Cows do quite well on grass and alfalfa, and CAN even live for awhile on a mixture of partially sawdust. Clover tends to be too rich for them. (OTOH, they do like a bit of molasses added to their fodder. It helps keep them quiet while you are milking. But don't add too much, or you'll have a sick cow.)
Cows are not horses. Horses compete much more with humans for
Re:Good luck keeping the genie in the bottle (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure how the South China Sea incident relates to this, the US ship continued following the Chinese aircraft carrier.
Re:Good luck keeping the genie in the bottle (Score:5, Informative)
In this case, it isn't really so much about "keeping the genie in the bottle," since they're quite alright with the genie in general. This is just about double-checking safety of a product and one country's industries not doing enough to respect another country's approval process by keeping the supply-chain neatly segregated.
Of course, the irony is that this sort of story usually happens the other way with China. e.g. Honey containing traces of pesticides of antibiotics approved for general use in China but not approved in the US.
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Don't discount the very real possibility of this being done for some political purpose too. You think the Chinese government gives a damn about the virtually non-existent safety hazard here when they are letting the Chinese people be poisoned by very real things like pollution? Fat chance. Ah, but this is FOREIGN corn for people to focus on, those damn Americans are trying to sell something that might be dangerous. This, like a lot of things related to genetically engineered crops, is being driven by p
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The irony is that people who consider themselves critical thinkers are buying this story wholesale. It's more likely that they just decided they didn't want this corn for some reason, and they found an opportunity to bad-mouth us in the process.
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some GMO crops have failed safety testing in Europe
makes you wonder eh
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Citation needed. I haven't found any specific strains rejected as not being safe.
On the other hand [biofortified.org].
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http://online.sfsu.edu/rone/GEessays/Ingham.htm [sfsu.edu]
http://www.cracked.com/article_18503_how-biotech-company-almost-killed-world-with-booze.html [cracked.com]
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Those are great references. The first one gets the paper citation completely wrong, they probably mean http://ucbiotech.org/issues_pgl/ARTICLES/soil_sterilization/KlebsiellaHolmes1999.pdf [ucbiotech.org] - Different issue, different authors, different title - you know they put effort into fact checking!
And of course cracked will run anything. Never mind that it was never approved for field testing - Ingham made that up (ok she claimed to have "received
this information from third party sources and was mistaken about it").
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Both of which have nothing at all to do with GMO plants and whether or not they have been rejected by any country in Europe. The citations are about bacteria and not plants. Good information but wrong topic
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In other news, rye can naturally develop ergot. And if you know how to do it, you can make silohooch from in your silo in the fall.
Re:Good luck keeping the genie in the bottle (Score:4, Informative)
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The reason for singling out GMOs is that they can vary more wildly while being apparently the same species. I'm not saying it wouldn't be easy to breed a potatoe that was poisonous. (The wild variant of the potatoe was nearly poisonous, and even the modern potatoe has poisonous leaves. OTOH, the genetics of potatoes is quite complex, so that was a bad example. But it was the first that came to mind.)
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Because we don't assume safety. Nothing stops you from making a GM crop that produces a poison toxic to humans (lots of non-GM plants already do after all) that of course doesn't mean that all GM products are unsafe.
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Those who say that genetically modified products are safe are not necessarily saying that all GMOs are safe.
Genetic modification is a process which leads to a food with a different genetic profile than the original stock it came from.
It's quite possible to introduce a toxin this way, or an allergen; it's also possible to increase production of a vitamin, or to make a change that has no effect on the food portion. And it may be possible to reproduce the genetic code of a different species (which is what mos
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China holds all the cards
Not all the cards. China is - in some ways - like the uncontrolled and empowering Germany of the early XXth. They're the young new world superpower which doesn't have a superpower-history long enough to feel how dangerous it can be to lack diplomacy and look for trouble every other week. That obnoxious behavior is particularly strong and obvious since a couple of years ago - which is worrying. China is powerful thanks to its economic and commercial ties with most of the rest of the world. Unless there is an
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They're the young new world superpower which doesn't have a superpower-history long enough to feel how dangerous it can be to lack diplomacy and look for trouble every other week.
Are you serious? Chinese have mastered the diplomatic game better than most others.
Re:Good luck keeping the genie in the bottle (Score:5, Insightful)
The China of today is nothing like the China of old. It's really not much like the China of 10 or 20 years ago.
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Mod parent up. China is evolving at a staggering rate. Anyone who has been there in the past couple years will be amazed. Still lots of work to do (human rights, etc.) but they will all come in time also.
Re:Good luck keeping the genie in the bottle (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure if troll or ignorant. Chinese empire is the oldest one on earth by far. No other civilization in our history survived as long as theirs.
The current Chinese "empire" is only about 60 years old. It replaced the one before that in the Communist revolution, which in turn replaced the dynastic empire of ancient China 40 years before that. The current government has about as much connection to that ancient empire as modern day Egypt does to the pyramid builders, so if we're defining civilizations simply by their geography and demographics, the Egyptian civilization is actually older than the Chinese one by a thousand years or so.
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And the China today is simply an extension of the Ming dynasty, right?
Civilization may have existed in China for that long, but it has not been a continuous civilization in the sense you are portraying and not even close to a continuous empire.
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Not quite, but sort of. In many ways Mao Tse Tung was a "Chinese Emperor", even if not of the same dynasty. And the government now has a bit of the appearance of a Mandrinate. How true this is I'm not certain. Certainly changes are in process. Many of the changes have to do with speed of communication more than anything else, however. I wouldn't be surprised to see another Chinese Emperor emerge from the current Mandrinate, and he might be only a figure-head, as many Emperors have been before him.
Ther
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There is a single continous Chinese (specifically Han) culture however. Parents argument was that "chinese are new to diplomacy". As far as we are concerned, current chinese culture practiced diplomacy about ten times longer than white colonists lived on American continent.
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The Olympics are coming soon.
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Right. And that means they can refuse to accept food that doesn't meet their standards. If they were desperate, they couldn't afford to be so picky. (That's oversimplifying, though. It wouldn't be the people in the government that were starving. They'd just be in danger of being overthrown.)
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Re:This is despicable and indecent (Score:5, Insightful)
HOW CAN ANYBODY THROW AWAY HALF A MILLION TONS OF FOOD WHEN SO MANY HUMAN BEINGS ARE STARVING?
Well, it depends. Is that food actually safe to eat? In this case, probably, but that hasn't been vetted and proven by the Chinese government, so they're quite sane in erring on the side of safety. Especially considering all the product recalls involving tainted food from their local producers. Plus, it's not like the US or China are strapped for food at the national level.
The problem with starvation has been one of distribution for much of the past century. If this food IS being thrown away (and that's a big "if"), then it's because there's no good way of getting it to someone who could pay some price for it before it spoils. (And food aid is generally not done for completely free.)
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...been vetted and proven by the Chinese government
Not sure if serious.
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I know I'm not the first one to point this out here, but seriously, let me repeat this:
HOW CAN ANYBODY THROW AWAY HALF A MILLION TONS OF FOOD WHEN SO MANY HUMAN BEINGS ARE STARVING?
How have we - collectively - come to the point where this sort of things is acceptable? This is completely indecent, and someone in power should be shot over this.
You dont see the big picture - people are starving BECAUSE we overproduce thanks to huge subsidies. Africa was able to feed itself before we started sending cheaper food that destroyed their economy.
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Much the same way that we, as a society, decided that we would rather see millions of those darker folks die from Malaria just so we can pretend to care about the birds that were not being harmed (as proven by the EPA study) by a certain pesticide.
Curious, what pesticide are you talking about? While some insecticides such as those that are arsenic based have been banned for everything it's hard to believe that ingesting lead arsenic wouldn't negatively impact birds (and people). Of course that was banned before the EPA existed.
Then there are insecticides such as DDT that are banned for everything except using on malaria carrying mosquitoes. Of course DDT is pretty useless now as it was overused and mosquitoes have evolved resistance to it. Important
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We could, but then again do you want to explain to some lowlife why he can't have his cheap electronic toy?
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Because we're not subsidizing 3D printers?
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Are you nuts? People who can create their own crappy toys won't buy them!
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Give the import-exporters and shop keepers a basic income, and let them work on bug bounties if they want to keep busy, or take MOOCs, or volunteer, or ...
Leisure time is the goal, technology can help us get there.
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Yeah, just like it worked for the content industry which instantly realized that their old business model is dead and instead of trying to fight tooth and nail for laws to prop up their failed model they adapted and reinvented themselves.
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>No wonder people are obese, sick and have cancer. GM is poison.
Don't look to the micro-nutrients first. Start with the macro-nutrients. We eat a lot more of them.
Try sugar, wheat and weird fats that didn't exist before 1970 for starters.
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I can accept that you hope that, but I consider this foolish.
OTOH... ... And of changing the laws so that the descendants of a plant belong to the farmer that
My chief beef against GMO foods is the way the patent laws are interpreted and enforced. I do think that Monsanto should be put out of business by fair means or foul...and if I thought banning GMO plants outright would to that, I might be in favor of it for THAT reason. It wouldn't, however, so I'm more in favor of requiring extensive safety testing.