Michel

While visiting Zaheerabad I found women save 57 types of Millets. If one type of crop fails, others provide food, and they practice mixed cropping, not mono. Biodiversity is key to our survival.

Michel: we do not know how the natural biodiversity will be affected. The Green revolution has already caused a decline in availability of rice seed varieties from 100,000+ [some claim 200,000, others claim 500,000 seed varieties] IRRI claims they have released 4500. In India about 50 varieties are commercially grown. What happens to the seed varieties if heirloom seeds are contaminated with say Liberty Link [Bayers’ properietary] or any alien protein. Where do farmers get diverse seed to ensure food security? Would GURT not destroy nature’s biodiversity?

Two, about 30-40% of foods we eat are raw or partially cooked. Especially veggies, sprouts, salads, etc. Animal trials show adverse health effects [Arpad Pusztai, Irina Ermakova, and others] including lesions and cancerous growth in vital organs. When [not if] our foods are contaminated, it will probably change the food culture everywhere.

Today we depend upon 15-20 species for most of our foods; in the 19th C we had option to chose from over 150,000.

The basic issue is this: the corporations are altering the natural genetic make up without any concern for the long term consequences but in the hope that their proprietary genes will eventually contaminate our food system and then they would claim the life form as their own.

Kind regards
Arun

> My point is: would it be different, if GMO where part of an
> open commons, not part of corporate profitmaking. So if we
> assume open and participative science, not under the control
> of privatizing companies, would that make GMO different?
>
> Imagine for a moment Monsanto was not there, and GMO
> investigations are practiced by farmer-scientists … does
> that change anything?
>
> Michel
>
Hi Michel,

I am less sure of my answer, as far as your question is
concerned, but here it is anyway:

There are three main issues against genetic engineering today:
– the safety issue
– the control/ownership of life issue
– consumer choice issue

I will cover these from the last to the first.

Whether GE is done by corporate monopolists, a public institution
(as part of a commons), or by individual working in the kitchen
or backyard lab — they will be novel foods and therefore must
be differentiated (through mandatory labelling, for instance)
from natural foods that humans have coevolved with over the
centuries. This is a consumer right issue. The burden and cost
of this differentiation must be borne by those who introduce
these novel foods, and not by traditional producers —
the “polluter pays” principle.

Control/ownership can be established in three major ways (often,
they are used in combination): 1) through law, using the patent
system in the case of most GE products; 2) through technology,
using some form of technological locks like hybrid technology,
or genetic-use restriction technologies (DRM in the
life-sciences); and through financial restrictions, when the
resources and investments required master the technology as so
huge that only a few (corporations or governments) have the
means to do so. Your hypothetical question may resolve one or
two of these methods, perhaps all three, but the details remain
to be worked out.

Finally, the safety issue. Among our technology options, there
are a few technologies that seem, at this time, to be BEYOND
HUMAN SCALE. One example is nuclear power, which produces deadly
radioactive wastes with half-lives in the order of thousands,
tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of years.
Clearly, given the human lifetime of less than a hundred years,
the satisfactory management of such wastes is beyond human
scale. This is why I am against nuclear power, unless it is at
least a hundred million kilometers away from my own backyard.

I will argue that GE may, at this time, belong to this class of
technologies which are beyond human scale, because it is next to
impossible to control the spread of a GE virus, bacterium or
other microorganisms, or even macro-sized living material like
pollen, especially since these modified organisms can reproduce
themselves, mutate and evolve.

I have also, at one time or another, imagined some positive uses
of GE. My favorite is an inedible broad-leafed indoor plant
engineered for photolumiscent leaves, which would give off just
enough light at night so we don’t have to rely on light bulbs,
lamps etc. Unfortunately, the potential for GE to create
pathogens, intentionally or otherwise, is so great that I
believe it should be seen, like nuclear technology, as beyond
human scale, and therefore to be for the laboratory only and not
for field release or commercial deployment. Bio-mimicry, which
would utilize those amazing biological features (aside from
reproduction), in non-living materials, might be a safer way to
go (photoluminiscent wall-papers?).

As a final argument, let me compare genetic engineering with
software development. Genetic modification mimics hand-coded
software modification, the equivalent of modifying a few lines
of code in a million-line software system. If we can do it with
software, we can also do it with DNA, right? But there’s a huge
difference. Most software are well-understood, well-documented,
well-structured for modification, and are NOT SELF-MODIFYING.
Often, if a software is not well-understood, poorly-documented,
poorly structured (spaghetti code), or is self-modifying, it is
better to junk the system altogether and start from scratch. Or
if you absolutely must modify such a system, you must assume
that you will create various side-effects (“bugs”) from any
modification. Genomes are very poorly understood at this time,
the designer did not leave any documentation, genetic logic does
not at all follow the usual tenets of programming for
maintainability, and if course, they are self-modifying. Those
of us who have actually done software maintenance can almost say
with certainty that genetic modification will create bugs in the
genome.

While genetic engineers imagine themselves to be mimicking
software modification, software engineers have also mimicked
natural evolution, with better results. Genetic algorithms have
been used in software development, and the resulting products
are also supposedly more robust and resilient than hand-coded
software. However, evolved software via genetic algorithms do
not produce “clean” code, the way it is defined in software
engineering. The resulting code is also extremely difficult to
understand, and its logic very often not at all apparent. This is
very important: if you want to improve software generated
using genetic algorithms, you do not modify individual lines of
code. Instead, you rerun the genetic algorithm. This is the
equivalent of conventional breeding. So the experience of
software development through genetic algorithms teaches us that
conventional breeding is better than genetic engineering! It
will produce fewer bugs, and is therefore safer.

1. Organic agriculture (the traditional, non-chemical, sustainable variety of food production) has shown over scores of centuries that it is quite capable of feeding mankind. The propaganda that we “need genetic modification” to feed the hungry is a recently developed strategy of large corporations to capture the lucrative food market.

2. Genetic modification is a very sloppy process, a hit-and-miss approach, which leads to changes in the structure of organisms that are neither intended nor are they detected. The insertion of genes is literally a “shotgun” method, where genetic fragments are shot at DNA and are randomly incorporated at different sites of the target DNA. No exact prediction is possible of the outcome. Genetic modification carries great risk because of the unintended nature of many of the changes that are brought about by random insertion of genes.

3. While the seeds used in traditional agriculture are a commons, GM varieties are property of the company that develops and patents the variation.

4. GM varieties are majorly engineered to be resistant to commonly used herbicides, leading to a ‘circolo vizioso’ of ever more herbicide use, which in turn leads to the development of resistant weeds. So in the end, farmers are buying more herbicides, poisoning more of the environment, and producing less food than with traditional varieties. No GM variety has been engineered to produce more yield and none have proven to yield better harvests than their common ancestors.

GM is the very antithesis to open source, commons-oriented and self-reliant food production. The only reason GM can survive at all is because the industries developing these varieties have convinced governments to support them by export subsidies and by special breaks on labeling and safety. There is no need for GM and there is no way consumers would buy them if they were not imposed without labeling and supported by government largesse. Much of the GM production ends up as “food aid”, subsidized by governments of developed countries, sent to developing countries. The result, in addition to unknown health effects, is a destruction of local agricultural capability as farmers cannot compete against subsidized products. (Not all subsidized agricultural production is GM, but a good part of it is).

Do we really want to put our food security into the hands of corporations such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Dupont? I do not think so.

There is no need for genetic modification. All we need is give people the tools and means to grow their own food (organic agriculture). Organic plots have been shown to yield more abundant harvests than those of chemical agriculture, including the genetically modified kind.

Should we really run into a shortage in the future, it wont’ be because we have not adopted GM.

Just as an example: All we need to look into is a new way of farming the seas. Plankton is the most nutritious and most ubiquitously available source of proteins (it’s the food of the whales, which are the largest and one of the most long lived mammalian species) and plankton can be developed into a sustainable source of food with little investment and little environmental impact, quite the contrary of genetic modification.

“There are several points I’d like to raise in response to the
article. Developing these points fully will take a long article,
so I will just be brief:

1. Organic food has proven its healthful effect over centuries of
use, and this has been confirmed by modern consumers of organic
food. On the other hand, genetically-engineered food is so novel
that we’ve had very little time to assess its health impact. The
organic movement therefore rightly insists on strict standards
that exclude any GM ingredient in organic foods. And those who
market it have tried to make sure we cannot effectively assess
the impact by opposing the mandatory labelling of GM food. But
the few studies which have been done (the Russian feeding study
on GM soya and the Austrian feeding study on Bt corn) already
reveal the harm GM food can cause on smaller mammals. The few
scientists who do independent studies like these are often
persecuted by the chemical/GM industry, unfortunately. The Obama
administration promised adopt the mandatory labelling of GMOs.
Expect the GM industry to fight this to death, because that will
be the end of their business.

2. The article makes a big issue out of the cost of organic food.
This cost is due to a regulatory system designed to make organic
foods expensive and chemical/GM foods cheap, by forcing organic
foods to shoulder all the costs of differentiating the organic
category from the chemical/GM category. In fact, since organic
practice is the natural default, and chemical/GM is the
synthetic exception, a fair regulatory system would put the
burden of identifying themselves on chemical/GM foods. This
means that we should have a system of mandatory labelling of
GM/chemically-sprayed foods: they should bear the burden of the
cost of recording, testing, labelling, and ensuring they can be
distinguished from the naturally, organically-grown, in
accordance with the “polluter pays” principle. If this were the
case, the cost structure of the food industry will shift in
favor of organics.

By the way, the Obama administration offers $50 million for
organic farming. It is a good start, but that is less that $1
million per state of the U.S., a pittance compared to the
subsidies that the GM/chemical food industry has been getting.

3. GM food cannot even feed the U.S., how can it feed the world?
In 2006, around 10% of American adults and 17% of children
suffered from occasional involuntary hunger, despite the
aggressive introduction of GM crops in the U.S. (Food Research
and Action Center, “Hunger and Food Insecurity in the United
States,”
http://www.frac.org/html/hunger_in_the_us/hunger_index.html) “Feeding
the world” is just an excuse.

4. The real reason for GM, gene patents, and modern hybrids is
control of the seed and food supply by a few giant monopolies.
These developments are in effect a declaration of war against
farmers in a global battle for the food supply of the world. The
movement against GM is part of the movement to keep our seeds
and our foods free from corporate monopolies. We must regain
control of our food supply.”