Monsanto: Good, Bad or Ugly?

[Luka Petrovic]

Despite having very little media coverage a relatively large demonstration called "March against Monsanto" occurred across the world in 50 countries with protests against monsanto in many cities both large and small. Do you think Monsanto and its work in genetic modification are problematic, dangerous or are perfectly justifiable and in fact beneficial?

[haydenj96]

GMOs are safe and really actually a good thing. The way Monsanto goes about it, however, just isn't right.

Edited May 30, 2013 by haydenj96

[Sandwich]

GM foods have the potential to fix the whole world food crisis, of which there is a significant amount and will in the future become even more significant, especially if global warming continues and previously temperate places become either a lot hotter, a lot wetter or a lot colder.

I think there's definitely a lot of reflex "IT WILL MELT OUR BRAINS AND OUR BABIES" stuff about GM. At the end of the day, you're just giving plants genetic qualities from other plants and animals ...which we also eat. So, I really don't have much to say about that. If a plant can be altered to have a higher tolerance for heat/water shortage and therefore create a crop they can grow in places of drought and save thousands dying from hunger, excellent. If a plant can be altered to contain a naturally occurring vitamin and stop people suffering blindness and so on from vitamin deficiency, excellent.

I don't think that the great revolution should come from pesticides. At all. Making plants pesticide resistant is very logical and DOES increase crop yields but does encourage further unrestrained spraying of pesticides which are ultimately harmful to the environment. To me, that's not the route we should be going down. On the other hand I think people would be surprised to find out what happens to their food and how many pesticides and so on are already used on normal crops which they don't have protest marches against. Especially in the US where food irradiation is extremely common practice, I bet if it were introduced today people would be having tantrums and all those people who have cancer who also happen to have eaten irradiated food would be posting their anecdotal stories of how that cabbage proved to be their demise. Why? Radiation is a scary word and it doesn't sound very natural (which it isn't) and radiation CAN poison people, so - it must be the devil itself. IMO a lot of the health and safety fears about GM foods are basically just a lot of fearful people with great imaginations. If you take a naturally occurring enzyme from one plant and introduce it into the DNA of another plant so it too can produce that enzyme, you're going to have a plant that makes an enzyme. Not a mutant cancer machine-on-a-plate.

[Luka Petrovic]

GM foods have the potential to fix the whole world food crisis, of which there is a significant amount and will in the future become even more significant, especially if global warming continues and previously temperate places become either a lot hotter, a lot wetter or a lot colder.

I think there's definitely a lot of reflex "IT WILL MELT OUR BRAINS AND OUR BABIES" stuff about GM. At the end of the day, you're just giving plants genetic qualities from other plants and animals ...which we also eat. So, I really don't have much to say about that. If a plant can be altered to have a higher tolerance for heat/water shortage and therefore create a crop they can grow in places of drought and save thousands dying from hunger, excellent. If a plant can be altered to contain a naturally occurring vitamin and stop people suffering blindness and so on from vitamin deficiency, excellent.

I don't think that the great revolution should come from pesticides. At all. Making plants pesticide resistant is very logical and DOES increase crop yields but does encourage further unrestrained spraying of pesticides which are ultimately harmful to the environment. To me, that's not the route we should be going down. On the other hand I think people would be surprised to find out what happens to their food and how many pesticides and so on are already used on normal crops which they don't have protest marches against. Especially in the US where food irradiation is extremely common practice, I bet if it were introduced today people would be having tantrums and all those people who have cancer who also happen to have eaten irradiated food would be posting their anecdotal stories of how that cabbage proved to be their demise. Why? Radiation is a scary word and it doesn't sound very natural (which it isn't) and radiation CAN poison people, so - it must be the devil itself. IMO a lot of the health and safety fears about GM foods are basically just a lot of fearful people with great imaginations. If you take a naturally occurring enzyme from one plant and introduce it into the DNA of another plant so it too can produce that enzyme, you're going to have a plant that makes an enzyme. Not a mutant cancer machine-on-a-plate.

But what if the solution isn't something in a lab such as Genetic modification, irradiation or chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Perhaps us trying to use any of these "solutions" are solving symptoms of the actual problem of unsustainable large scale farming. Living in Ontario most of our fruit and vegetables which don't store well or don't grow well en masse in a greenhouse come from California (we have local apples, ottos, carrots and onions year round). The Carbon footprint is massive as firstly mass farming is very energy intensive, especially when you factor in the use of chemical fertilizers derived from petroleum. But in this scenario you add in the factor of them having to be driven almost 4,000 km thats a lot of waste. So you talk about GMO's being a solution in regards to global warming, they actually seem to be a quick fix.

And dempending on the level of radiation, it actually may be more natural than GMO foods, we encounter radiation everyday, and its actually necessary in small amounts. That being said I cannot speak for the people who put plutonium on our lettuce, I didn't even know about that until now so I won't pretend I did!

As well the science of "equivalency" Monsanto uses to justify not testing its products. basically saying if its safe to eat in one plant or animal, it must be safe to eat when put in another is science that came out in the 1960's. I wasn't around back then, but that was the era when doctors would smoke while doing a check up on a pregnant mother. Times have changed and so has our understanding of genetics. They just use the convenient old science, which goodness knows when you put big scientific words in people believe it. Its the modern equivalent of a medieval peasant listening to a mass in latin!

Also most allergies are caused by proteins, and a lot of genetic modification has to do with adding "novel" proteins to a plant. The United States is by far one of the largest consumers of GMO's. Funny enough it also has an exponentially higher amount of peanut allergies than other countries, as well peanuts are a source of protein and area popular crop to genetically modify. Coincidence?

Even when the additional genes are not problematic, say Monsanto is 100% correct putting edible or safe genes into another organism is totally alright, well you are forgetting about the delivery system which is a virus. As we all know a virus is not your bodies friend, and its happened more than once where a virus has not acted the way we thought it would! So I'm not sure...

As well the talk of GMO's being hardier and needling less pesticides isn't necessarily true in practice, seems that Monsanto has actually made plants that are more resilient to pesticides so they can spray on more. More pesticides of their own brand of course!

[Sandwich]

But what if the solution isn't something in a lab such as Genetic modification, irradiation or chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Perhaps us trying to use any of these "solutions" are solving symptoms of the actual problem of unsustainable large scale farming. Living in Ontario most of our fruit and vegetables which don't store well or don't grow well en masse in a greenhouse come from California (we have local apples, ottos, carrots and onions year round). The Carbon footprint is massive as firstly mass farming is very energy intensive, especially when you factor in the use of chemical fertilizers derived from petroleum. But in this scenario you add in the factor of them having to be driven almost 4,000 km thats a lot of waste. So you talk about GMO's being a solution in regards to global warming, they actually seem to be a quick fix.

And dempending on the level of radiation, it actually may be more natural than GMO foods, we encounter radiation everyday, and its actually necessary in small amounts. That being said I cannot speak for the people who put plutonium on our lettuce, I didn't even know about that until now so I won't pretend I did!

As well the science of "equivalency" Monsanto uses to justify not testing its products. basically saying if its safe to eat in one plant or animal, it must be safe to eat when put in another is science that came out in the 1960's. I wasn't around back then, but that was the era when doctors would smoke while doing a check up on a pregnant mother. Times have changed and so has our understanding of genetics. They just use the convenient old science, which goodness knows when you put big scientific words in people believe it. Its the modern equivalent of a medieval peasant listening to a mass in latin!

Also most allergies are caused by proteins, and a lot of genetic modification has to do with adding "novel" proteins to a plant. The United States is by far one of the largest consumers of GMO's. Funny enough it also has an exponentially higher amount of peanut allergies than other countries, as well peanuts are a source of protein and area popular crop to genetically modify. Coincidence?

Even when the additional genes are not problematic, say Monsanto is 100% correct putting edible or safe genes into another organism is totally alright, well you are forgetting about the delivery system which is a virus. As we all know a virus is not your bodies friend, and its happened more than once where a virus has not acted the way we thought it would! So I'm not sure...

As well the talk of GMO's being hardier and needling less pesticides isn't necessarily true in practice, seems that Monsanto has actually made plants that are more resilient to pesticides so they can spray on more. More pesticides of their own brand of course!

I don't quite get your first point. Yeah it's bad that all our foods have a big carbon footprint. Ironically GM might be a way in which we could reduce carbon footprints by engineering plants to survive in different environments, so you could indeed grow vegetables and so on in Canada.

As for the 'science of equivalency' or whatever you want to call it, that's not a 'science'. It's just a fact. It's also why they test GM foods. Comparing it with a doctor smoking whilst looking after a pregnant woman in the 1960's, I don't even understand why you wrote that. Believe it or not, GM is a modern day science reported in top genetics papers and with top geneticists working on it. GM has applications not just in food but in medicine, healthcare and industry. Our understanding of genetics in this day and age (and not the 1960s) is what has allowed us to produce these things, it's not some sort of backwards info from a dodgy looking man down a side street.

And re: the peanut thing then yes, coincidence. Nobody knows why rates of peanut allergy are rising so quickly in the developing world. Theories include the hygiene hypothesis but even that isn't really a decent explanation, in my view. It leaves much to be desired. In the UK we have hardly any GM foods and we also have high levels of allergy, and not just to peanuts. Just because some of these things are proteins it means absolutely nothing. Nobody has genetically modified peanuts! Being allergic to one thing doesn't make you allergic or more prone to be allergic to another except for a baseline genetic predisposition to allergy.

Putting genes into other cells with viruses is extremely common. Again, a bit like with the word 'radiation', the word 'virus' strikes fear into the hearts of people who haven't got a clue what they're on about. The viral vectors used are retroviruses which have had the replicative portions of their genomes removed and so cannot transfer on. They also cannot mutate as mutation requires a re-shuffling of genes and re-shuffling of genes requires replication. If it helps, exactly the same viruses are used in medical genetics for gene therapy in order to help replace or add genes into defective cells, and all of this is done directly into real people. The general consensus is that it's pretty damn safe.

The Monsanto thing is basically a reflex of the farmers. Monsanto have made a crop that is resistant to pesticides. This is great because it means that you can spray pesticides liberally over everything and ensure that you maximise your own crop whilst getting rid of all unwanted stuff. Now that you can do this without also harming your actual crop, farmers basically have no reason to exercise restraint in terms of spraying the pesticides. And in terms of resistance to pesticides, if you ran a company that made pesticides, would you really run your trial on somebody else's pesticides?? Yeah it works out nicely for Monsanto but it's really the farmers who are doing the spraying on more, nobody is making them do it: now they don't have to worry about killing their actual crop, they can go wild. Can you blame Monsanto for that when they're technically helping to maximise available resources and agriculture? Anyway, Monsanto HAVE made crops which are hardier in theory. As for needs less pesticides, that's never been anything to do with the hardiness of the crop and all to do with the rest of nature piling in and trying to displace it/eat it in some way before it's been gathered. It is now easier to kill that nature without also killing your crop. I personally don't think that pesticides is the answer because of all the negative effects on the rest of the environment and particularly with run-off and water, but it is AN answer.

[Luka Petrovic]

My first point was that I know for me, all GMOs would do, is allow crops which taste horrible (have you ever tried heirloom seed vegetables vs mass farming strains, no comparison) to safely travel to Ontario from California, which has a massive carbon footprint. Meanwhile there are non-GMO local initiatives that are relatively less damaging to the environment and actually are of a higher quality (taste better), but can't compete with mass-farming (which is really the problem with our food these days, and why you have to mess with the genes of something thats already been perfected by the best geneticist, NATURE). I don't want tomatoes that can grow in December, its called a green house haha, or a lows tunnel, high tunnel polytarp system. GMOs are unnecessary... Not to mention they don't work! In India Cotton crops were doing well for a few years after adopting GMO cotton to kill BollWorms, a crop destroying insect. But now crops are getting worse and worse every year, as the bugs have developed a resistance. Monsanto to date has now created over 500 versions of the cotton seed to try and fight the bugs, meanwhile to crop yields have now become lower than those before they started GMO cotton. Does this sound like a solution for the issues of farming and the world's well-being, or a solution to line the pockets of executives with a never ending cycle of profit making. Indian farmers have killed themselves over these poor crops yields, leaving them unable to sustain themselves. This is't the first steps to some experiment which will lead to great thing, an experiment where the snags need to be smoothed out, its utterly failed in completing the of what we need it to do, make farming sustainable.

Well okay thats true, is it possible that allergies arise from different issues in different countries? If its so hard to pin-point the source. GMOs in the US, something else in England...

In regards to the virus, yeas that is true. The only claim I could say is that its too much power for someone. But thats ridiculous and I'd be back
ing myself into a corner as you've said it has already been done and if anyone wanted to make us consumerist zombies they already would have 9and its easier to do that without GMOs anyway!).

I agree with that as well, pesticides are not the answer, and this aggravates it as farmers can put on larger quantities of harsher pesticides which may not hurt the plant, but they will likely be hurtful towards those that consume that food. Even if you wash it its difficult to remove all of it. How do you remove all the pesticides in say strawberries or mushrooms?

[T-Bear]

GM foods have the potential to fix the whole world food crisis, of which there is a significant amount and will in the future become even more significant, especially if global warming continues and previously temperate places become either a lot hotter, a lot wetter or a lot colder.

I think there's definitely a lot of reflex "IT WILL MELT OUR BRAINS AND OUR BABIES" stuff about GM. At the end of the day, you're just giving plants genetic qualities from other plants and animals ...which we also eat. So, I really don't have much to say about that. If a plant can be altered to have a higher tolerance for heat/water shortage and therefore create a crop they can grow in places of drought and save thousands dying from hunger, excellent. If a plant can be altered to contain a naturally occurring vitamin and stop people suffering blindness and so on from vitamin deficiency, excellent.

I don't think that the great revolution should come from pesticides. At all. Making plants pesticide resistant is very logical and DOES increase crop yields but does encourage further unrestrained spraying of pesticides which are ultimately harmful to the environment. To me, that's not the route we should be going down. On the other hand I think people would be surprised to find out what happens to their food and how many pesticides and so on are already used on normal crops which they don't have protest marches against. Especially in the US where food irradiation is extremely common practice, I bet if it were introduced today people would be having tantrums and all those people who have cancer who also happen to have eaten irradiated food would be posting their anecdotal stories of how that cabbage proved to be their demise. Why? Radiation is a scary word and it doesn't sound very natural (which it isn't) and radiation CAN poison people, so - it must be the devil itself. IMO a lot of the health and safety fears about GM foods are basically just a lot of fearful people with great imaginations. If you take a naturally occurring enzyme from one plant and introduce it into the DNA of another plant so it too can produce that enzyme, you're going to have a plant that makes an enzyme. Not a mutant cancer machine-on-a-plate.

The problem is not that there isn't produced enough food. The problem is that we don't distribute food properly. In the United States for example, 50% of the produced food is trashed.

Also radiation is natural. We are constantly exposed to radioactive radiation from the ground and space.

[theboro76]

I dont think we can fully know that GM is doing to our foods, until we wait, and see the results over a period of time. Personally I think that it would be unlikely to do anything, but we can not know this for certain until we do more test and see the effects of it on socity.

Also one of the problems with organisations like montano is the way they treat farmers. Rather than allowing farmers to reuse seeds from previous years or use seeds that have been dropped by the plants they make them buy a new batch, every single year, meaning that if they have a genetically good crop one year the next then they lose this genetically superior batch. I also think that if we change our eating habbits (eat seasonally and what we can be realistically expected to grow in our area, with in reason) then we would be able to divide up food more enenly and not have the problem of some countries wasting food and others having a serious lak of food. I dont think GM will solve this by itself.

[Luka Petrovic]

I dont think we can fully know that GM is doing to our foods, until we wait, and see the results over a period of time. Personally I think that it would be unlikely to do anything, but we can not know this for certain until we do more test and see the effects of it on socity.

Also one of the problems with organisations like montano is the way they treat farmers. Rather than allowing farmers to reuse seeds from previous years or use seeds that have been dropped by the plants they make them buy a new batch, every single year, meaning that if they have a genetically good crop one year the next then they lose this genetically superior batch. I also think that if we change our eating habbits (eat seasonally and what we can be realistically expected to grow in our area, with in reason) then we would be able to divide up food more enenly and not have the problem of some countries wasting food and others having a serious lak of food. I dont think GM will solve this by itself.

There is some pretty good evidence both for GMO's being safe and not safe so its hard to tell because of that. But what is so hard about labelling GMO food so consumers know? Why are they so against it if they have nothing to hide? People argue " Well its such a hassle and its so costly to relabel things and put in these regulations, just eat it." That was what people were saying in the 1960's when nutritional labelling got started. "people won't eat things that they ate before once they get scared off by the sodium, fat or whatever content." So I find it rather suspicious that they are against the labelling...

Yes Monsanto is rather iressponsible with farmers and their false promises and expectations they set out.

[theboro76]

There is some pretty good evidence both for GMO's being safe and not safe so its hard to tell because of that. But what is so hard about labelling GMO food so consumers know? Why are they so against it if they have nothing to hide? People argue " Well its such a hassle and its so costly to relabel things and put in these regulations, just eat it." That was what people were saying in the 1960's when nutritional labelling got started. "people won't eat things that they ate before once they get scared off by the sodium, fat or whatever content." So I find it rather suspicious that they are against the labelling...

I agree completely. I dont think it would be at all hard to do; one sentence "made from GM products". Can it really be that hard? As you said we did with nutrition and we do it for allergies. It might cost companies money, in lost revenue, but they can then respond by not using GM or dropping their prices to lower than non-GM products (which they should be anyway). I know people who dont know about the POTENTIAL risks of GM, don't care, or dont believe there is anything to worry about; they will still buy it.

[Luka Petrovic]

There is some pretty good evidence both for GMO's being safe and not safe so its hard to tell because of that. But what is so hard about labelling GMO food so consumers know? Why are they so against it if they have nothing to hide? People argue " Well its such a hassle and its so costly to relabel things and put in these regulations, just eat it." That was what people were saying in the 1960's when nutritional labelling got started. "people won't eat things that they ate before once they get scared off by the sodium, fat or whatever content." So I find it rather suspicious that they are against the labelling...

I agree completely. I dont think it would be at all hard to do; one sentence "made from GM products". Can it really be that hard? As you said we did with nutrition and we do it for allergies. It might cost companies money, in lost revenue, but they can then respond by not using GM or dropping their prices to lower than non-GM products (which they should be anyway). I know people who dont know about the POTENTIAL risks of GM, don't care, or dont believe there is anything to worry about; they will still buy it.

I'm of the opinion that GMO's are just a s small problem within the greater web of issues plaguing mass scale farming. It really is unsustainable firstly because it relies so heavily of petroleum products, we could't output food on such a large scale before petrol, even coal powered steam engines were too clunky and slow...

The otehr issues include the amount of grazing land needed for all the meat we eat, how they have to pump these animals full of anti-biotics just so they can survive, feed chickens arsenic so that their meat is pink... Oh fun fact for you, Tilapia (the fish) is often farmed alongside chickens, or should I say below chickens. Farmers will raise the Tilapia in a tank over which the chickens are housed with a mesh floor, the chickens do their business and well the Tilapia eat it... Best invest in a pond and have your own crappie or panfish haha.

So yeah food is really messed up, thats just the tip of the iceberg... Currently I'm researching options for small scale farming, local, etc... If one large farm can produce so much food, why couldn't a large number of sustainable smaller farms both rural and urban produce the same amount? This is something we have to think of quickly as farming land is quickly being asphalted over for the outdated idea of a suburb Back when a dime could get you a Gallon (3.8 litres) of Gasoline... We have a challenging future ahead of us as young people inheriting the responsibility of taking care of this planet.