In reality, RoundUp is a very safe-to-humans product when used according to the directions.
Yep. Those farmers are just "drowning" their crops in RoundUp.
You think "organic" farmers aren't using pesticides? You think "natural" pesticides are less toxic than synthetic? Natural is not a synonym for safe and synthetic is not a synonym for dangerous. In reality, RoundUp is a very safe-to-humans product when used according to the directions.
As a gardener, I'm a proponent of heritage seed crops and open pollinated varieties that will breed true from saved seed. This allows me to grow quality food crops year after year from saved seed stock.
Concerning GMO and hybrid food crops, the seed stocks are all controlled by corporations with patents on their genetic handywork; you cannot save seed from GMO crops because it will either be sterile, or will also not breed true to the original plant; so you have to purchase new seed year after year after year to maintain that food crop. This is fine and dandy while that corporation continues to sell and produce that seed, but what happens when they no longer do so and all your saved seed from that crop is worthless?
Beyond that, I have general concerns about genetic manipulation of plant genome where genes from entirely different kingdom of life are introduced. We've seen this in food crops such as corn and adding genes from bacteria to produce a corn that provides it's own built in pesticide. I worry about potential long term consequences to our health and food supply in general. This is a new level of genetic manipulation well beyond traditional cross breeding and trait selection practices that have been used for thousands of years.
However I am not a scientist and I must trust them and the organizations that they work for that they have the best interest of humanity in mind when producing these food crops. I am at their mercy, as are all of us. For the greater good, as it were. How much faith do you have in Monsanto's altruistic nature?
Controlled lab environments != the real world.
So I'm sure it should then be easy to point out all the well-done studies that show how toxic RoundUp is in the residual amounts of that might remain on food. To my knowledge, RoundUp is a safe and effective pesticide.
Bill Nye was on NPR (don't laugh). He has researched it. There are no studies that show that GMOs are bad for you. The scientific community largely agrees with this. Bill Nye has a different concern. How do you prove that GMOs don't have a negative effect on the environment where a food chain could collapse because some insect can no longer consume it's primary food source because it is a GMO?
Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat people. It’s not that we need more food. It’s that we need to manage our food system better.
As a gardener, I'm a proponent of heritage seed crops and open pollinated varieties that will breed true from saved seed. This allows me to grow quality food crops year after year from saved seed stock.
Concerning GMO and hybrid food crops, the seed stocks are all controlled by corporations with patents on their genetic handywork; you cannot save seed from GMO crops because it will either be sterile, or will also not breed true to the original plant; so you have to purchase new seed year after year after year to maintain that food crop. This is fine and dandy while that corporation continues to sell and produce that seed, but what happens when they no longer do so and all your saved seed from that crop is worthless?
Beyond that, I have general concerns about genetic manipulation of plant genome where genes from entirely different kingdom of life are introduced. We've seen this in food crops such as corn and adding genes from bacteria to produce a corn that provides it's own built in pesticide. I worry about potential long term consequences to our health and food supply in general. This is a new level of genetic manipulation well beyond traditional cross breeding and trait selection practices that have been used for thousands of years.
However I am not a scientist and I must trust them and the organizations that they work for that they have the best interest of humanity in mind when producing these food crops. I am at their mercy, as are all of us. For the greater good, as it were. How much faith do you have in Monsanto's altruistic nature?
Pesticide free farming is not impossible, but it requires a lot more work and crop selection to varieties that grow best in that area. But most farms, organic or otherwise choose not to do this.
as our world population keeps growing, we need to increase the amount of food we can produce off of our limited land. GMO allows us to do this.
My concern is not about the safety of food but what happens when transgenic DNA eventually gets into the ecosystem at large. Pollen isn't too particular about which way the wind blows. This hasn't seemed to have gotten much attention, but knock on wood it won't be an issue. Find a healthy American Chestnut and knock on that. Kudzu you can find that easily enough but that's not wood, so that won't work. The point is that we manipulate the environment either accidentally with zebra mussels or dutch elm disease and chestnut blight and with intentional introduction of "beneficial" organisms like kudzu.
We absolutely suck at anticipating ecological consequences of our actions and I don't see we're doing much better now.
Unless you are a Monarch Butterfly which will probably wind up on the endangered species list soon.
This ^
We don't really know the long term effects on many things. Most places do short term limited trials then decide the $ is worth is so lets go.
Bill Nye is saying, lets not worry about the $ but more the possible long term effects but his pleas are being ignored because $ wins every time.
And if it causes a tremendous ecological collapse, then what? What would be more beneficial is to have safe and effective contraception used worldwide. We're at 7 billion and heading toward 12. It isn't too little food, it's too many mouths consuming too many resources and not just food. I'm finding it hard to believe that what we call our modern lifestyle could be sustained with a global population of more than a billion, and perhaps substantially less.
So I'm sure it should then be easy to point out all the well-done studies that show how toxic RoundUp is in the residual amounts of that might remain on food. To my knowledge, RoundUp is a safe and effective pesticide.
as our world population keeps growing, we need to increase the amount of food we can produce off of our limited land. GMO allows us to do this.
Roundup isn't a pesticide, which just goes to show the depth of your knowledge. It's an herbicide.
It's not on the food, it's in it. It's being sprayed on growing crops to control weeds, sprayed on root crops before harvest to kill the above-ground plant, used in orchards in place of mowing grass, used to clear fields prior to planting.
And if it causes a tremendous ecological collapse, then what? What would be more beneficial is to have safe and effective contraception used worldwide. We're at 7 billion and heading toward 12. It isn't too little food, it's too many mouths consuming too many resources and not just food. I'm finding it hard to believe that what we call our modern lifestyle could be sustained with a global population of more than a billion, and perhaps substantially less.
Saving seeds on a hybrid would be pointless. The following generation of plants will usually have a lower fitness than the original hybrid, because you'll be playing genetic roulette with regards to which genes go to the seeds. Many farmers are also not in the business of saving seeds. There are lots of seed companies and lots of "off patent" or unpatented seed varieties available. They are free to choose those if they want. Also, I doubt the plants would be sterile - the terminator gene that Monsanto created was never used in a commercial product.
But the other side of your argument boils down to: We've been selectively breeding stuff for generations, which can randomly mix an entire genome between two plants, and that's okay, but if we specifically insert a gene of what we want, then stop the presses.
There can be all sorts of side-effects from 'naturally selecting' traits. Just look at the case of the poison potato. Bred for blight resistance, however, it ended up also having more solanine, a toxic compound found in the nightshade family of plants (which the potato is a member of). Selecting the desired traits isn't the be-all-end-all of farming. Now we can do things more precisely and make products better (eg: Golden Rice, for vitamin A deficient parts of the worlds, more nutrious and higher-yield cassava, a staple crop of sub-Saharan Africa...).
Monsanto hardly has a stranglehold on the market. Lots of other companies (eg: Syngenta, Bayer Agriculture, Dow, DuPont, BASF, Simplot, and other smaller players) all play a part of the agriculture market. It would hardly be in Monsanto's interests to kill their customers with toxic foods. Am I completely trusting of them? No. But they also have large regulatory hurdles to overcome when bringing any of their genetically modified products to market.
The only thing that has dropped our carbon footprint in the last 200 years was the great depression and the great recession. As long as people are consuming all this BS at mass rates we just slowly contribute to entropy. Enjoy fresh water while you can, in a few more decades it's all going to be treated sewer water. Already a few plants in Australia and around the world are already doing it.Technological advances and/or warfare ensure that the human race continues.
If we truly approach a Malthusian catastrophe you can bet it will be a very violent and tumultuous era. Fortunately, I doubt that happens in our lifetimes.
Farmers used to save seed and replant from the same seed stock over and over again. But crops like corn are so easily crossbred that GMO seed from your neighbor will cross pollinate with your heritage stock and now you have a poor hybrid stock and potential lawsuit litigation from the corporation who holds the GMO patent if your seed stock tests positive for their intellectual property...so the practice of saving seed stock in large scale farming is abandoned. Heritage seed stock is now maintained by a small group of individuals and organizations determined to keep those crops available.
Technological advances and/or warfare ensure that the human race continues.
If we truly approach a Malthusian catastrophe you can bet it will be a very violent and tumultuous era. Fortunately, I doubt that happens in our lifetimes.
When has such a lawsuit ever materialized? Corn pollen doesn't travel very far either.
Oh, like this link:
Myth 2: Monsanto will sue you for growing their patented GMOs if traces of those GMOs entered your fields through wind-blown pollen.
This is the idea that I see most often. A group of organic farmers, in fact, recently sued Monsanto, asserting that GMOs might contaminate their crops and then Monsanto might accuse them of patent infringement. The farmers couldn't cite a single instance in which this had happened, though, and the judge dismissed the case.
The idea, however, is inspired by a real-world event. Back in 1999, Monsanto sued a Canadian canola farmer, Percy Schmeiser, for growing the company's Roundup-tolerant canola without paying any royalty or "technology fee." Schmeiser had never bought seeds from Monsanto, so those canola plants clearly came from somewhere else. But where?
Canola pollen can move for miles, carried by insects or the wind. Schmeiser testified that this must have been the cause, or GMO canola might have blown into his field from a passing truck. Monsanto said that this was implausible, because their tests showed that about 95 percent of Schmeiser's canola contained Monsanto's Roundup resistance gene, and it's impossible to get such high levels through stray pollen or scattered seeds. However, there's lots of confusion about these tests. Other samples, tested by other people, showed lower concentrations of Roundup resistance — but still over 50 percent of the crop.
Schmeiser had an explanation. As an experiment, he'd actually sprayed Roundup on about three acres of the field that was closest to a neighbor's Roundup Ready canola. Many plants survived the spraying, showing that they contained Monsanto's resistance gene — and when Schmeiser's hired hand harvested the field, months later, he kept seed from that part of the field and used it for planting the next year.
This convinced the judge that Schmeiser intentionally planted Roundup Ready canola. Schmeiser appealed. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Schmeiser had violated Monsanto's patent, but had obtained no benefit by doing so, so he didn't owe Monsanto any money. (For more details on all this, you can read the judge's decision. Schmeiser's site contains other documents.)
So why is this a myth? It's certainly true that Monsanto has been going after farmers whom the company suspects of using GMO seeds without paying royalties. And there are plenty of cases — including Schmeiser's — in which the company has overreached, engaged in raw intimidation, and made accusations that turned out not to be backed up by evidence.
But as far as I can tell, Monsanto has never sued anybody over trace amounts of GMOs that were introduced into fields simply through cross-pollination. (The company asserts, in fact, that it will pay to remove any of its GMOs from fields where they don't belong.) If you know of any case where this actually happened, please let me know.
Oh, like this link:
Top 5 myths of Genetically modified seeds, busted.
Maybe you were thinking of something else?