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  4. ‘Instead of bashing companies that are trying to save lives’…..

    Jeez. How COULD he ? ! Neil – what are you thinking ! Whose side are you on, man ! Certainly not the Genetically Modified Angels one.

  6. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. And this is one of Owen Paterson’s times, it would seem. GM crops are very widely grown because farmers *choose* to do so. They make that choice because of the savings they make by using less agrochemicals. Which is, you might think, good for the environment.

    Sadly, the faith-based beliefs of NGOs are helping slow the benefits that will accrue to farmers in the developing world. Poor old Neil is lined up with the baddies on this one.

    • I think, probably, that a lot of anti Monsanto-ilk sentiment is generated because they now *own* varieties of plants. A bit like when Tesco move in, close all your local shops and then, when they’re the only game in town, dictate what you can and can’t buy without driving to the Waitrose three market towns away.
      Mind you, The free market what brought us the new Neil Young album, so it clearly has its limitations.

      • There’s nothing new about people having rights over plant varieties, GM or non-GM. Look for yourself: http://www.upov.int/portal/index.html.en
        And this is a Good Thing. If a company or individual puts effort into creating a new variety, which is more resistant to disease or whatever, then – as with creating music – isn’t it right that they should get a return on their effort? Not least because it encourages people to continue to breed further, better varieties.

    • Come off it Lando. The sum total of human understanding of the ecosphere surrounding arable crops, even after all this time, amounts to diddly-squat in the greater scheme of things. We know enough to muck about at a genetic level with disease resistance and so on, but we know naff all about the long term downstream effects of introducing new genetic material into a plant population and doing so in a gung-ho enthusiastically en masse fashion; let’s trial this in a couple of fields and then roll it out to the whole of Kansas! Yay! The desire to do this stuff is predicated on making a buck, not on feeding people or saving on fertiliser. The REAL underlying problem is that there are simply too many people being born. If we are serious, as a species, about tackling that, then let’s get on and do it. Otherwise we can all carry on hiding behind the corporately funded genetic engineers and bury our heads in the sand. We’re brilliant at that.

      • Well, good luck with persuading people to stop reproducing. And not only are there more people, they want what we have – a varied diet, including meat. All this adds up to pressure on land. The reality is that if we do not increase yields and/or the range of land that can be used for agriculture, people will starve.

        To put one a major tool for crop improvement beyond use, simply because a few artsgrads go all jazz hands whenever it’s mentioned, is just bonkers. Fortunately, this isn’t the case in most of the world. It is true in most (but not all) of the EU – which isn’t a big deal – and also in developing countries where European artsgrad-run NGOs have an influence – which certainly is a big deal.

        • Dunno about the artsgrads going jazz hands, that sounds like lazy stereotyping, but this BSc in Ecology is deeply sceptical, to the extent that thinking about this stuff gives me the jazz nads.

        • ‘Good luck with that’ sums up the attitude that’s destroying the planet. We need to change and fast, and yes, we don’t need luck, but more importantly we’ll need a change in attitude, priorities, and education too.

  7. What are the -proven- ecologicallly damaging effects of GM? I’m not particularly well-up on agriculture, being a townie of limited education who’s glad not to have a garden to toil in.

    A lot of anti-GM sentiment has been whipped-up in the UK and Europe. It seems to me that -that- is exactly what it mostly is.
    Sentiment. Am I wrong?

    Getting disease-resistance into the world’s food production can only be a good thing, it seems to me. If GM can do this without creating economic or biological problems, I’m all for it.

    My main objection against some current GM research is the restrictive copyrighting of the genes produced, by Agri-corporations whose interests are probably not beneficial but far more focussed on control and profit . Copyright holders and their political lobbyists currently seem far too focussed on extending their “rights” further and further into the future as each year passes and this is certainly a very valid objection to GM.

    But are there any real scientific reasons to curtail properly-controlled GM research? Perhaps someone in the know can point me towards them.

    • The scientific consensus is that GM is not harmful. It’s a more solid consensus than for climate change – and ignored by much the same people who get outraged about ‘climate change deniers’. That’s the thing about science and evidence – it doesn’t just apply to the things we like.

        • The jury’s still out on whether banning DDT was worth the loss of control of malaria. I think you’ll find though that there was no ‘consensus’ on thalidomide – never released in the US, I believe.

          Those two entirely dissimilar and irrelevant things aside, there’s a good reason for the consensus on GM; solid evidence and lots of it.

          Not only is there no evidence of ill effects from GM crops, there’s no theoretical basis for thinking there might be. Plant genomes are, to say the least, pretty plastic – there’s constant movement. The relatively small changes involved in GM varieties are just background noise. It’s kind of ironic that ‘traditional’ plant breeding includes all sorts of uncharacterised and uncontrolled mutation effects, with nary a peep from the ‘hand-weave your own placenta’ brigade.

      • Your consensus, and that backed by research funded by the GMO corporations in the interest of profit first and last, not that of those who oppose it for very sound reasons.

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