Environmentalist Admits He Peddled Anti-Science AntiGM Myths

[PainRack]

I would also believe that some organic produce are also just a bit more fresh than non organic products.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Biologists Perspective on GMOs, Organic and Conventional Farming

GMOs are awesome in principle. They have a lot of promise for reducing our reliance on High Input Agricultural Methods. Chemical fertilizers, artificial growth hormones, high water input, pesticide saturation. Within a functional regulatory framework (which we do not have in the US. You Europeans do though. I envy you) GMOs can reduce or even eliminate these problems--and yes, they are problems.

Chemical fertilizers are bad, we take that nitrogen and phosphorus from minerals or synthesize them using waste-ridden industrial processes, then oversaturate the soil (because in order to get agricultural plants at the density we want nutrients cannot be limiting their growth). This does a few really bad things. First, the runoff enters are water systems and pollutes rivers and lakes, then proceeds to create dead zones in the oceans. The second thing it does is saturates the soil itself with minerals as they accumulate, causing the loss of arable top soil. This makes our farm land gradually less and less suitable for farming over time. Some plants are much more efficient at using nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. We can modify our crops to incorporate those novel metabolic pathways and reduce our reliance on having to inject the soil with liquid ammonia and can instead go back to using mulches (in fact, we can even use water retention basins and algal growth to farm our own mulch material--which has the benefit of rejuvenating top soil. We could also pasture cattle on the same land post-harvest and fertilize using the dung of healthy (read: not infected with pathogenic E. Coli strains as a result of corn feeding) cows and sheep.

High water input drains our water supplies, and as the population grows, that will become increasingly critical. Aquifers in the american midwest are already at the point where sinkholes are forming where the subterranean water pressure is no longer sufficient. Farms in the american west--which never should have been growing cotton and cabbage in the first place--are under tight water restrictions because the rivers that feed them are bone dry. With GMOs, we can make drought resistant plants.

Pesticides... Dont get me started on Pesticides. We eat plants that have been covered in Endocrine Disruptors that sex-reverse frogs and cause reproductive problems and cancer in mice three generations after exposure, at exposure levels orders of magnitude lower than what is permitted in our drinking water. To say nothing of the ecological problems, human health problems are on the table here, and very very real. You dont fuck up endocrine pathways without some sort of knock-down effect. Those are just the herbicides. Organophosphate insecticides are REALLY bad. They are nerve toxins. Do you want to eat neurotoxins? Do you want to breath down wind of neurotoxins? Huge ecological problems as a result of these and other insecticides not only lead to damage to native food webs (they are not target specific at all), but also have caused the mass-collapse of bee hives that we use to fertilize at least 30% of our crops. With GMOs, we can engineer plants to produce their own pesticides, both in the form of allelochemicals that inhibit competition by weed species without damaging human health or creating runoff into rivers, and in inseciticides like species-specific ecdysone that causes premature and lethal molting in insects that eat the crop plants.

And then there are artificial growth hormones in cattle. Yeah, they are not actually safe for human consumption. Go ahead. Eat some growth hormone. Add a new input into the complicated regulatory pathways that keep you healthy. Body builders use growth hormones in a carefully regulated way and even then suffer side effects. We just drink the stuff in our milk. Great idea. In western countries, IIRC, the US is the only one that allows them because the FDA is a Monsanto subsidiary. There is a reason for this. With GMOs, we can make cows produce more muscle mass via messing with their own regulatory genes in a way that wont survive digestion in humans
(There is a traditionally-bred cow variant that does exactly this. It is a defective copy of the gene that tells skeletal muscle in cows to stop growing)

GMOs can do all of this, and much much more. But they have not. We have technology. We know how to do everything I just described. Why have we not done these things? There are two reasons.

1) The Organic/Not Organic dichotomy. Something is either organic and uses GMOs, Pesticides and high fertilizer input, or it is not.
2) This permits a pre-existing market incentive on the part of companies like Monsanto to be perpetuated. Permit me to explain.

Why would Monsanto engineer and sell a plant that reduces the demand for the herbicides they manufacture and sell? It is better for them to instead create a plant like Roundup Ready Soy that is resistant to Roundup (a pesticide that in addition to being a nerve toxin in vertebrates kills monocot plants--including soy), so that farmers have an incentive to spray (and thus buy) more Roundup.

What we need is a third option. We need a "Responsibly Farmed" label, werein the use of GMOs--and a reduction or elimination of chemical pesticides and high-input techniques--is trumpeted. Preferably, these GMOs would be engineered and licensed by public entities such as land-grant universities, using public funds. Out in the Public Domain so that farmers dont have to worry about Monsanto Shark-Lawyers. We need to bring agricultural scientists, entomologists, and geneticists into a large partnership for the public good, rather than for private profits. In order to do this, we also need functioning Conflict of Interest rules within the FDA and EPA, because as it is, both agencies are revolving doors for industry executives that no longer act in the public interest.

Do that, and we can actually solve the problems of modern agriculture. Dont, and we will fuck ourselves up hard-core in the medium to long term.