China Pulls Plug On Genetically Modified Rice and Corn 152
sciencehabit writes China's Ministry of Agriculture has decided not to renew biosafety certificates that allowed research groups to grow genetically modified (GM) rice and corn. The permits, to grow two varieties of GM rice and one transgenic corn strain, expired on 17 August. The reasoning behind the move is not clear, and it has raised questions about the future of related research in China.
Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Considering this is the country that put melamine in milk and cadmium in toys, this speaks volumes.
I would like to know their official justification.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering this is the country that put melamine in milk and cadmium in toys, this speaks volumes.
Except in those cases those things were done in violation of the law. The issue was that it wasn't being enforced, not that it was legal. Of course, that doesn't change the fact that I want to know both the "official" and the actual reasons. Oddly, the permits that are being denied are for Bt rice and phytase corn, but they continue to support Bt corn, so environment or food safety doesn't seem like it would be an actual reason, although it could be the "official" reason. A more likely scenario is politics and lobbying (or whatever the Chinese version of lobbying is, they probably just call it bribery).
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Oddly, the permits that are being denied are for Bt rice and phytase corn, but they continue to support Bt corn, so environment or food safety doesn't seem like it would be an actual reason,
That's an assertion, but is it true? Bt [grain] produces poison. Perhaps the poison is still present in the edible rice, but not the edible corn? I don't know, but there may be other reasons, perhaps it's because corn is so low in production, and not a traditional crop with widespread domestic use, so it's not a "health issue"? Just because one is banned and the other not doesn't mean that safety must not be a reason.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
It produces a poison in the same sense that chocolate and grapes are poisonous (don't feed those to your dog). The Bt protein has a very specific mode of action in certain insect pests, and does not impact humans. It is not a health concern, and has been used in organic food production for decades before suddenly becoming controversial once genetic engineering got involved.
Also, that a plant produces a poison is not an alarming thing. In fact, it is ubiquitous. Chemical defenses are found throughout the plant kingdom, including in crop plants. Things like solanine in potatoes, or glucosinolates in broccoli, or even caffeine in coffee and tea (note that they are produced respectively in the seeds and leaves, two things a plant might want to defend...that humans like them for it is kind of an evolutionary plot twist) all have insecticidal properties. Anti-GMO groups love to be alarmist over the fact that some GMOs produce an additional insecticide (yes, one more, even non-GMO corn is going to have things like maysin in it) but in and of itself is not alarming. It's just preying on the ignorance of those who do now know just how many natural pesticides we consume daily.
Re: Wow (Score:1)
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But has this been tested on humans?
Nope, but neither have a lot of things that present no reason to be suspicious of. Show me a long term multi-generational study on Wi-Fi exposure. You probably can't. Does that implicate Wi-Fi as potentially dangerous? Not unless I can provide a legitimate reason as to why one would be necessary, which I can't. Yeah, people go 'Ahh, no human study and they're feeding it to us!' but you know what, that's grasping for straws, implying there is a difference that requires study where none exists. Now, yo
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It is not a health concern, and has been used in organic food production for decades before suddenly becoming controversial once genetic engineering got involved.
The difference is that Bt used to be applied topically, and in a relatively short while biologically breaks down so you don't ingest it.
In contrast, Bt corn produces the chemicals internally. The chemicals get ingested intact where before they never were. As a result entire populations of people test positive for contagion of Bt that never wer
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And I'm betting you are not very risk-averse and Vegas loves when you pay them a visit.
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They probably will, but only because of the way the granted monopoly control to certain corporation(s). There's nothing wrong with the basic idea of GMO foods. There's a lot wrong with allowing that kind of centralization of power.
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(or whatever the Chinese version of lobbying is, they probably just call it bribery).
Interesting. A language with less redundancy must be more efficient.
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Keep dreaming. Whatever the reason behind this, you can be damn well sure it has nothing to the with the Chinese government going all goody-two-shoes and wanting to act in the best interest of its citizens.
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That's not going "goody two-shoes", that's preventing the creation of rival centers of power. Possibly not enough of the investors were top party members....or were on the losing end of a power struggle.
That said, there's no reason to believe that the Chinese government doesn't occasionally act to protect their citizens. Sometimes the US government does. (Sorry, that's a bit cynical beyond the evidence.)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
What an idiotic comment. The CPC didn't authorise putting melamine in milk or cadmium in toys. Both were illegal and the perpetrators of both were brought to justice. I don't know the details of cadmium laced toys, but the ring leaders of the melamine doped milk scandal were put to death.
Your comment is as stupid as blaming the US congress for the Union Carbide disaster.
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Sufficiently embarrassing the party can get one executed.
The party needing a scapegoat can get one executed.
Having an organ needed elsewhere can get one executed.
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I don't read Chinese anymore, but I can tell you with certainty that deliberate mass homocide is a capital offense in China and was before the incident in question. They were not simply trumped up and executed by decree.
China enforcing their own laws is the very opposite of corruption. There is a huge amount of corruption and lawlessness in China, and the CPC admits as much and recognises it as a problem in need of a solution (most of the corruption is at local levels of government and in private companies)
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"Considering this is the country that put melamine in milk"
The directors of the company that did this were executed. In the US, they would get a bonus of $10M for increased profits in the short term and then a fine of $1M.
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And they would leave the company with a $25M golden parachute. Because we're a meritocracy.
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Why do you hate job creators?
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering this is the country that put melamine in milk and cadmium in toys, this speaks volumes.
I would like to know their official justification.
China - the country as a whole or its government - can not be held responsible for crimes committed by private companies or individuals. In fact, these things happened because there was not enough governmental oversight - IOW too much freedom, rather than too little. This is what used to happen in the West, when companies were similarly unrestrained by legislation; things like adding chalk to bread and water to milk. Regulation is not all bad.
As for their official justification, they don't owe us any, but it seems likely that they are worried about the behaviour of the GM companies. Although GM holds huge potential in terms of nutrition, there are many things that give cause for concern: patented genes that spread to neighboring fields, genes that provide restitence to weed-killers spreading to wild species, modifications that hinder the production of viable seeds, so the farmers have to buy new GM seed from the producers rather than growing part of their harvest on next year, etc etc. I'm sure GM would be welcome in most countries if it was not for the companies producing them.
Another thing is that the Chinese are fully capable of developing or buying the technology themselves - so why should they allow in American companies that are only intent on siphoning off as much profit as possible to their share holders?
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patented genes that spread to neighboring fields
All genes do. If you are referring to the 'people getting sued' over it thing, look into it further. No one has ever been sued for simply being cross pollinated, and give China's general stance on IP of any kind, I highly doubt any company would have a chance of successfully suing in China.
genes that provide restitence to weed-killers spreading to wild species
To my knowledge there has never been any documented example of the herbicide tolerant gene jumping between GMO crops and weeds. There has, however, been selective pressure on weed populations that has resulted in the e
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No one has ever been sued for simply being cross pollinated
http://www.dailytech.com/Monsanto+Defeats+Small+Farmers+in+Critical+Bioethics+Class+Action+Suit/article24118.htm
That was the only one I knew offhand, so maybe there is more here than what we know publicly...
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That's referring to the OSGATA vs Monsanto case. It basically went like this:
Plaintiff: We want to sue Monsanto before they sue us over cross pollination.
Judge: Can you prove they do that?
Plaintiff: Well, no, but what does that matter?
Judge: Case dismissed.
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Plaintiff: We want to sue Monsanto before they sue us over cross pollination.
Judge: Can you prove they do that?
Plaintiff: Well, no
Should have said Monsanto v. Schmeiser.
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The case where Schmeiser knowingly and intentionally selected for transgenic traits, pretended it was all a big coincidence, then got caught? The OSGATA case could have referenced the Schmeiser case if it actually demonstrated what they were claiming, but they could not because it does not. Again, no one got sued for cross pollination.
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Monsanto Canada v. Schmeiser [wikipedia.org]
This might be a better example.
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Remember the Star Trek episode with all the alternative universes where the Borg were taking over and one frantic Riker in a burning Enterprise pleading that he couldn't go back, it's horrible? That is how potato farming in the South would be without herbicides. We harvest spring potatoes in May just as weed growth hits full stride. Wrestling potatoes out of weed choked soil makes fighting the Borg look like a picnic. As a young man forty years ago we just fought the war but no one wants to go back. Today t
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Indeed. It's not a policy problem or law problem, it's simply about enforcement.
Go watch a traffic cop at a busy intersection in China. He'll see about 10 traffic violations a minute. He can get to one. Doing that day in and day out conditions them to only go after the one that was seriously dangerous (as opposed to just plain dangerous).
Most Chinese cops* are straight up good people tasked with keeping the place safe. But think about the ratio of police to civilians, it's simply impossible to enforce like
Re: Wow (Score:3, Informative)
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This is what used to happen in the West, when companies were similarly unrestrained by legislation
Maple Leaf Meats. Deepwater Horizon. Exxon Valdez. Mount Polly Mine. Tepco.
I'd say that the East and the West do a fairly shitty job of enforcing regulation. You can have all the legislation you want but lack of enforcement or monitoring = fail. The West would like to point fingers at China but frankly we've been chasing profits at the expense of health+safety just as much.
Re: Wow (Score:1)
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Considering this is the country that put melamine in milk and cadmium in toys, this speaks volumes.
I would like to know their official justification.
Considering what they did to the people they caught - who were putting melamine in mile and cadmium in toys - how the fuck did you get modded "insightful" (was there no tag for "irredeemably stupid"?).
Could be the pesticide lobby which has killed it (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the info @ http://www.plosone.org/article... [plosone.org]
The GMO rice requires much less application of pesticide than the non GMO counterparts (2 applications versus 5)
If the GMO rice is approved then the pesticide industry in China (both local / international vendors) will stand to lose a lot of sales
It could be their lobby which had killed the GMO rice
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Correct. Instead of a lobby that everybody can potentially be aware of, you just pay the fine to the politician directly.
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No corruption in the Chinese government? Either you're a troll or a party member.
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Note that GP said, less corrupt, not no corruption.
It is quite possible to be less corrupt that the US while still having some considerable corruption left.
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Possible? Sure. Probable? No. That country's government is a cancerous polyp on the anus of its constituents.
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The Chinese government remembers the opium wars, and exploitation of China over profits, and disregard for their welfare in it. What do you think would happen with GMO plants that you don't own, and not only in the intellectual property sense, where it could be pirated, but you don't own it because it's not fertile seed, and you have to keep going back to the original manufacturer for a survival, after he successfully convinced you to get rid of all seeds able to produce fertile seeds themselves, so you no
It means that China has their own version now (Score:5, Informative)
So get out, Monsanto, you dirty capitalist pigs!
Seriously, though, this means little. China will use their own knockoff version now and market it, as well.
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If so, I wonder if this is related to Chinese spies stealing US corn [cnn.com]?
Re:It means that China has their own version now (Score:4, Interesting)
If so, I wonder if this is related to Chinese spies stealing US corn [cnn.com]
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They stole it twice??
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They're very sneaky.
Off topic (Score:3, Informative)
I don't want to be another complainer, but this site is begging me to stop visiting. I am not very happy.
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Holy crap, I turned off ad block. I didn't see any full page ads, but a bunch of other moving ads.
Yikes, I certainly wouldn't come here if I had to look at those ads.
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I don't want to be another complainer, but this site is begging me to stop visiting. I am not very happy.
There's a town nearby that is behaving similar to Slashdot '14. They have a tax shortfall, so they raise taxes, and people move out. This creates a tax shortfall so, GOTO 1.
The property values have literally fallen in half in the past decade, while other area towns' properties have maintained or slightly increased, and there are many abandoned properties now (with associated problems).
Slashdot will se
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With AdBlock and NoScript you don't see any of that crap. X10 pretty much started it in the late 90's and it's pretty much gone downhill ever since.
When I first started using those tools I wanted to only block the bad actors, but I quickly found that pretty much everybody was bad to some degree. Now with malware attacks through served ads I don't understand why anyone wouldn't be using these tools.
Checking the "reward" box from SlashDot to turn off ads doesn't change a thing that I see.
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" Just now I was redirected to a full page ad"
So you're admitting you still have no adblocker installed? Then don't expect pitty. My old mother need my help to install things like that, if you\re on Shalsdot you're expected to be able to do that yourself.
fear (Score:5, Interesting)
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Public skepticism about GMO's has been growing in China and the government there is extremely concerned with anything that can enrage popular discontent.
Just because it's no longer legal to grow genetically modified foods in China doesn't mean that Chinese corporations won't use them. Making GM seeds illegal cuts out a lot of red tape for both the government and the companies, gives China plausible deniability if things go badly in the future, and also gives the government a way to research China's own GMO crops that will somehow be different from the dangerous Western-created GMO products.
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Just because it's no longer legal to grow genetically modified foods in China doesn't mean that Chinese corporations won't use them.
Yea, but the CEOs risk execution if they do.
The Chinese Government doesn't fuck around with multi-year trials and then a bullshit penalty.
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Another Tienanmen Square would be a complete disaster with severe repercussions for the government.
I agree with you, but I think such a happening is highly unlikely, despite the fact that there are many Chinese citizens who aren't really happy with their government. Here's the reason. Did you know that the Chinese constitution has the PLA swearing to protect the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Think about that. Their job is to protect the CCP, not the nation or the citizens but the CCP. What this means, in my opinion as an outside observer (I have never lived in China, but I have visited there severa
Better to starve I guess? (Score:1)
Just because they currently can feed people doesn't mean that will last. There will be droughts, infestations, population increases, and more events that can be helped by GMOs. Of course China seems to have no problem destroying the environment with massive amounts of chemicals whose usage could be drastically reduced with proper science. The Chinese government seems to place a low value on an human life so maybe this is just their own sick version of population control.
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Don't worry. China will be able to feed their population, no matter what. The question is whether you will be if they're pressed to hoover up the food around the globe. You'd be amazed if you knew just HOW much purchasing power the Chinese government has and how willing it is to avoid any kind of protests.
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A lot of Africa would disagree with that last part. Though it's kinda unfair to blame them, after all we force them to it.
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Are you affiliated with monsanto by any chance? You sound like it.
Genetic manipulating is fun and all, but its efficacy in the long run compared to the rest of our box'o'tricks is still very much out there. Like everything it has its downsides along with the upsides. For example that it's really hard to keep properly contained. It's a good racket for the rightsholders to the "genetic IP" of the stuff, though. Such parties' goodwill is not something I'd like to have to depend upon if I had to feed 1.4mrd peo
Re:Better to starve I guess? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh.
There are many GMOs that do different things. People always talk about herbicides resistant because it sound scary. oooOOOooohhh.
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Re:Better to starve I guess? (Score:5, Informative)
It produces Bt, which is toxic to certain orders of insects, not to humans. And before someone comes along and says that it is still toxic, remember that gapes and chocolate are toxic to dogs, and dogs are a lot more closely related to humans than lepidopterans.
Oh, and every plant produces insecticides anyway. It's only alarming if you don't know much about plant biochemistry. Give something that can't swat back at the trillions of things out there trying to eat them a few hundred million years to come up with defenses and they develop things chemical defenses, like caffeine (yep, it has insecticidal properties, ever wonder why coffee evolved to have it right in it's seeds?), piperine (a yummy insecticide, turns out black pepper's original plan was to not have things eat its offspring), maysin (found even in your non-GMO corn) solanine (tomatoes and potatoes, don't eat this) and falcarinol (found in carrot a neurotoxin in high enough quantities).
Re:Better to starve I guess? (Score:4, Interesting)
You forgot two of the best-known ones: nicotine (tobacco) and capsasin (hot peppers).
Plants are pretty much natural chemical weapons factories, as far as insects go. That's why swapping those "toxins" around isn't necessarily going to do any harm to humans, depending on the choice of toxin (nicotine would be a problem, but capsasin wouldn't be).
There are also other GM techniques that would be of great benefit that have nothing to do with toxins, such as the attempt to generate a version of rice with the C4 photosynthetic system instead of the C3, which would increase yields significantly if successful.
Re:Better to starve I guess? (Score:4, Interesting)
It produces Bt, which is toxic to certain orders of insects, not to humans.
The problem isn't killing off a few humans. Plenty more where they came from. Disrupting ecosystems due to unintended consequences could be far more destructive.
E.g. Transfer natural insecticide "X" from plant Q to plant P, insect A (that had never encountered plant Q) eats P and accumulates X; insect B eats insect A and dies from X, is no longer around to eat insect C, which swarms and displaces insect D, which had an essential role in pollenating crop S...
Of course, X could get transferred from plant Q to P naturally or by old-fangled horticulture - but this will happen gradually, even horticulture will probably take decades, giving ecosystems time to adapt, but GM can make the transfer and roll out the GMO around the world within a few years. Plus, with GM, X might come from a plant from another continent, a seaweed, a jellyfish...
Now, if we could only be sure that the firms making GMO crops were painstakingly exploring all possible ecological side effects, and would scrap a new product at the first hint of any possible problem on a "better safe than sorry" basis, then the benefits of GMO might outweigh the risks. Unfortunately, these are probably the same people who thought that putting diseased sheeps' brains into cattle feed was a good idea, who are resisting attempts to ban neonicatinoids until its absolutely 100% proven beyond all doubt that they're killing bees, and think a 1m strip of ploughed land around a GMO trial field will prevent cross-pollenation.
Plus, as others have pointed out, the problems of food supply are caused by poor infrastructure, overpopulation, growing high-value crops for 1st-world markets instead of food and over-reliance on single crops. These are not generally helped by increasing yields in the already-overproducing rich nations who can afford to buy GMOs.
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Disrupting ecosystems due to unintended consequences could be far more destructive.
This is agriculture. We're producing food for billions of people on a very large chunk of the earth's land, I'd say the environmental disruption thing has already happened. The question is no longer about causing environmental harm, it is about minimizing it. Could Bt crops have negative environmental impacts? Wrong question, the issue is if they are superior to spraying insecticides.
Your hypothetical about gene transfer, if you were referring to a jump from a GE crop to related wild species, that is so
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11:32 am
It produces a poison in the same sense that chocolate and grapes are poisonous (don't feed those to your dog). The Bt protein has a very specific mode of action in certain insect pests, and does not impact humans. It is not a health concern, and has been used in organic food production for decades before suddenly becoming controversial once genetic engineering got involved. Also, that a plant produces a poison is not an alarming thing. In fact, it is ubiquitous. Chemical defenses are found throughout the plant kingdom, including in crop plants. Things like solanine in potatoes, or glucosinolates in broccoli, or even caffeine in coffee and tea (note that they are produced respectively in the seeds and leaves, two things a plant might want to defend...that humans like them for it is kind of an evolutionary plot twist) all have insecticidal properties. Anti-GMO groups love to be alarmist over the fact that some GMOs produce an additional insecticide (yes, one more, even non-GMO corn is going to have things like maysin in it) but in and of itself is not alarming. It's just preying on the ignorance of those who do now know just how many natural pesticides we consume daily.
10:54 am
It produces Bt, which is toxic to certain orders of insects, not to humans. And before someone comes along and says that it is still toxic, remember that gapes and chocolate are toxic to dogs, and dogs are a lot more closely related to humans than lepidopterans. Oh, and every plant produces insecticides anyway. It's only alarming if you don't know much about plant biochemistry. Give something that can't swat back at the trillions of things out there trying to eat them a few hundred million years to come up with defenses and they develop things chemical defenses, like caffeine (yep, it has insecticidal properties, ever wonder why coffee evolved to have it right in it's seeds?), piperine (a yummy insecticide, turns out black pepper's original plan was to not have things eat its offspring), maysin (found even in your non-GMO corn) solanine (tomatoes and potatoes, don't eat this) and falcarinol (found in carrot a neurotoxin in high enough quantities).
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Hm, I guess that is a good question.
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A Slashdotter caught making an extensive post from memory because it's a concept he understands all by himself, rather than cutting and pasting from Moonchild's EcoBlog? Burn the witch!
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See the error in your logic?
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And that really is annoying, because people assume that it is a case of herbicide tolerant GMOs vs some ideal hypothetical where weeds are never a problem, when in reality it is herbicide tolerant GMOs vs. other weed control methods, including harsher herbicides and soil damaging tillage. Giving the choice between the realistic options, I'll take the herbicide tolerant crops any day.
Then you see people point to herbicide resistant weeds as evidence that they are a bad thing, but that's trying to have your
simple economics (Score:1)
The answer is easy and sad (Score:1)
The answer to this is very easy. It is cheaper and quicker to steal the information from the U.S. and other countries than to reproduce the 'wheel'.
high food costs will suck up excess capital (Score:1)
China has a growing middle class, and a growing class of perpetually single men. They need to stop the middle class from becoming so affluent so quickly (where do you park 400 million cars?), and they need to find jobs for the millions of sad horny guys who could easily become revolutionaries. If the cost of food rises a few percent here and there it bleeds excess capital out of the system, inconveniences a few on the long tail, but as a whole (remember, China thinks long-term, and like a single organis
Very wise indeed (Score:2)
In stark contrast to Western nations, China is largely ruled by qualified engineers and technicians. They presumably understand the insanity of radically undermining the technology that feeds most of the world's human beings: agriculture. Any experimentation with agriculture should be done with extreme caution, and as far as possible contained so it is reversible.
Less important, but also worth considering: do we really want a world where one or two vast bloated Western corporations literally own the food th
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The idea that one or two corporations will own the food supply is an insane paranoic delusion. Already many of the key traits used in GMO foods are off-patent and in the public domain.
Round-up ready soybeans, the most successful GMO trait comes off patent in 2015.
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Kraft is a large company, but it has DOZENS of equal sized or larger competitors in the markets it serves. For example in the beverages segment Snapple is bigger than they are. In cheese Mondelez is three times bigger. And so on.
Unilever is hardly a food company at all. It sells 10 times more personal care products (soap etc) than it does food.
Don't confuse diversification with market share. Two very different things.
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"...proven and documented cases of specific harm caused by GM "food"."
Which do not actually exist. Care to cite any?
So someone didn't pay their bribes on time? (Score:2)
I know... (Score:1)
...somebody forgot to mail their bribe check to the appropriate official. Or perhaps a competitor mailed a bigger check.
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Dude, being a ruler in China essentially means being above the law. Why bother with petty, complicated things like putting CEOs in that bribe you when you can simply appropriate public money as you see fit?
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While I know the situation has improved markedly since the cold war, I highly doubt China has any serious checks and balances to prevent government corruption. I mean fuck, they have the world's largest firewall which is specifically intended to halt free speech. If you think the NSA is secretive, you know little. Unlike the NSA, the Chinese government not only has the authority to spy on your thoughts, but it also has the authority to bend them to its own will.
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The firewall, I think even the Chinese government knows it's ineffective, and it certainly knows people can get around it easily enough.
As for "bend them to its will", no government can do that. It can suppress, and the Chinese government can do that quite well. But it knows well enough that if it suppresses too much, there would rebellion.
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It can suppress, and the Chinese government can do that quite well. But it knows well enough that if it suppresses too much, there would rebellion.
What counts as too much then? Because this doesn't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I mean seriously are you sympathetic of the Chinese government or something? You'd very well have to be to believe what you just said.
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There have been other protests and troubles since Tiananmen, and they have been largely avoiding another incident. Even the mess with the Uighurs right now. Where do you see the tanks rolling in? Do you realize parts of the country continue to open up in terms of economics AND freedom? Why did you ignore my example of Bo Xilai?
And speaking of Tiananmen, do you even understand
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That is the reason.
Not every GMO contains nicatoids (engineers would know that). There are still some kids in China who could use yellow rice, and they definitely could export it to their neighbors.
Monsanto deserves a firey death for setting back non-psychopathic GMO's by 30 years or more.
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Golden rice mostly solves a problem of outsider interference without actually resolving the problem. The main reason why it's even an issue is that the IMF pressured those people to only grow cash crops with little consideration paid for the malnutrition that resulted. GMOs don't really solve that problem, they just mean that now those people are going to be dependent upon GMOs that may or may not fuck up their other crops and may or may not be as affordable in the future.
Re:Nicatoids and bees (Score:4, Informative)
Golden rice is OPEN SOURCE. Monsanto and its lawyers are nowhere in sight. And no, golden rice has no magical effects on other species around it.
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While Golden Rice is not related to Monsanto, it's my understanding that the right to use it free of patent restrictions is limited, though I don't remember the exact limitations.
N.B.: Open Source doesn't mean free of patent restrictions. It doesn't even mean free of copyright restrictions. It just means that you can read the source code.
Re:Nicatoids and bees (Score:4, Informative)
Not every GMO contains nicatoids
No GMO crop is modified to produce neonicotinoids, although some anti-GMO people have tried to conflate these separate issues because GMO crops, like non-GMO crops, may be sprayed with them.
Monsanto deserves a firey death for setting back non-psychopathic GMO's by 30 years or more.
I do not believe this is Monsanto's fault. The mainstream opposition to genetic engineering started with the Flavr Savr tomato, which was released before Monsanto released any GE crops. The blame lies with activist/interest groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Navdanya, Organic Consumer's Association, ect. and other groups that saw genetic engineering as an opportunity to further their own social, political, or financial interests. Those 'psychopathic' GMOs you mention are insect resistant crops (reduced insecticide use), herbicide tolerant (sounds bad, actually results in lower environmental impact via the substitution of harsher herbicides and the promotion of no-till agriculture) and virus resistant crops, with drought tolerant corn recently approved (no independent data on its impact yet though).
Consider this; do you really think the same people who lie about university, NGO, and publicly developed GE crops are going to be honest about Monsanto? These anti-GMO groups aren't just opposing Monsanto's crops, they're opposing, vandalizing, and slandering all GE crops. Golden Rice, BioCassava, Bangladeshi Bt eggplant, Rainbow papaya, HoneySweet plum, CSIRO's low GI wheat (destroyed by anti-science thugs), INRA's disease resistant grape rootstock (also destroyed), Rothamsted's insect repelling wheat, VIB's cisgenic potatoes (also destroyed), ect. All publicly developed, all opposed (or destroyed) by anti-GMO groups. Put Monsanto's blame where it is due, but this one is not on them.
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Wish I had mod points for you. I get so sick of the Monsanto bashing on /. sometimes. They're treated even more unfairly than Microsoft here.
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You mean like wheat, a hybrid of three species, and strawberries, another hybrid?
Or corn, bred to be so radically different from its ancestral teosinte that most people wouldn't even recognize it?
Or carrots, which were not orange until humans bred them to be that way?
Or cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale, and Brussel's sprouts, which are all the same species with various genetic mutations dramatically altering their form?
Or apples, which are selected from somatic mutations and grafted onto root stocks?
Or citrus, which is altered through selecting radiation induced mutations?
Or pluots, which had to have their embryos cut out of the parent plant and cultured in vitro because they would have never developed naturally?
Or seedless watermelons, which are bred from chemically induced chromosome doubled watermelons?
Or tomatoes, which have genes introgessed from other wild species?
Oh, you're just referring to the thing you knew was unnatural, not all the things you were utterly clueless about. Well, since it would be such a bother to admit your initial premise and driving belief are completely inane, I'll wait while you move the goalpost to attempt to justify your irrationality.
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No, actually: not in the least bit like any of those. Like grafting in genes from entirely different species, without the slightest idea (or any way of finding out) what the effects will be in the long term.
But that doesn't matter, does it? To those whose only reality is profit, there is no future beyond the current quarter.
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Right on schedule the moving goalpost away from 'genetically changing a plant is bad' to 'the way I don't like is different therefore bad'. If you note, you'll see that everything I mentioned are actually all quite different. Various types of somatic and induced mutations, selective breeding, biotech facilitate wide crossing/embryo rescue, artificial chromosome alteration...very different from genetic engineering, where a single well known gene is inserted. Why not lump genetic engineering in with everything else and select the chromosomal duplication to be the pariah? After all, that is also an entirely different thing, which I don't think is particularly meaningful, but means about as much as your argument. What I personally do is both more and less extreme than transgenics, depending on how you want to view it. The lumping of everything as 'conventional breeding' to make a dichotomy between it and genetic engineering is a very simplistic view.
without the slightest idea (or any way of finding out) what the effects will be in the long term.
Fallacy number two, the straw man. Do you really think the scientific community, which overwhelmingly supports GE crops (don't even try to deny this), does not pause to consider such things? Perhaps you could explain your long term fears in less vague terms?
But that doesn't matter, does it? To those whose only reality is profit, there is no future beyond the current quarter.
Sorry, the corporate card has no bearing on scientific topics. Save it for politics.
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"Sorry, the corporate card has no bearing on scientific topics. Save it for politics".
You don't sound stupid, so you must be cynical. It goes without saying that no scientific results can possibly be trusted without a clear understanding of ALL corporate influence and funding behind them. Witness, to take just one example of hundreds, the current advocacy of statins by panels of scientists most of whom have received huge sums of money from the corporations that manufacture statins.
"Do you really think the s
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You don't sound stupid
He doesn't, but you do. Sorry man, you've gotten off the rails and don't understand science.
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