Are we too hard on GMO's(genetically modified organisms)?

Whadaya mean "we?"

GMO's have never really been the top turd on the pile of crap that I choose to worry about......

 

agree; there is somewhat a paranoia about GMO and nuclear plant spill radiation in masses, not always justified but sometime it is. In reality the chemistry should be more of the concern, with all chemicals used in every possible way from industrial to agricultural, household, medical, plastics, etc.

 

GMO can be done correctly. That's not to say that it will always be done correctly.

A few things may go right, but many things can go wrong.

It's a Pandora's box.

 

Based on the cite, that was done around 1945 by selectively breeding wheat strains. I don't think your example is a GMO. Any more than a hybrid tomato is a GMO, or saving the seeds from the highest-yielding fill-in-the-blank in your garden creates a GMO. I think GMO requires tinkering with the genes more directly, inserting genes into an organism that it could not otherwise possess. Not that that definition is hard-and-fast -- nature does a lot of odd things from time to time -- but that's the gist of it.

I'm an economist, by the way. Those Freakonomics guys fall into the category of often wrong but never in doubt. They have a good eye for what's entertaining but you need to fact-check them.

I'm pretty sure they said something just-plain-stupid about solar cells causing more warming than they eliminate. Clearly didn't even reach for the back of an envelope. Yeah, discussion here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/

OK, they didn't themselves come up with the argument, they just prominently quoted it in one of their books. Not an excuse. But clearly demonstrates a need to check what they assert.

 

Any of the artificial selection methods cause genetic modification. Borlaug used aggressive back crossing to insert multiple resistant genes. This is getting very far from the wild type. There is nothing natural about selective breeding of chickens so that their breasts are so heavy they can not walk. Its all about the use of the technology. Borlaug did a good job of choosing appropriate genes and was a geneticist. His work might have been easier using GMO methods. Making bad choices is also easier using GMO methods, but as seen by the dust bowl and great china famine, very bad agricultural decisions are typically made without anything genetically modified. Maybe I should let the man speak for himself.

My own position is skeptical. I see huge potential for GMO foods, but want to be slow and careful. The same is true for other selective breeding of plants and animals.

 

Take a look at what is actually available for GMO seed. Most of it is NOT designed to prevent people from starving. In theory, the techniques could be used to improve the world, in general they are not so used. Even so, it is phenomenally dangerous at a conceptual level, and due caution is required.

Take a look at the actions of the companies behind the GMOs.

The real measure, to my mind, of progress in the whole act of feeding the humans on this planet, is to reduce the TOTAL number of people starving. There are a BILLION people starving in the world today. Agriculture in the Middle Ages did better than that. The Paris system (1800s) fed more people per acre than any agricultural system since.

 

I agree caution is required, but our entire agricultural practice needs some large modification. GMO tomatoes and cantaloupes spoil slower so their is less waste. GMO corn and cotton are resistant to certain pests so less dangerous pesticides are used. There are too many large areas of single crops, which farming methods require a great deal of fertilizer and pesticides.

There are good corporate citizens and bad corporate citizens. To me the giant dead zone in the gulf stemming mainly from fertilizer and pesticides used for ethanol corn production makes ADM a much worse corporate citizens than those doing GMO.

Well Borlaug, who's research was funded mainly by DuPoint and Texas A&M (publicly funded state university) railed against the politics which prevented starving people from receiving GMO food from the united states. It is a large distortion that the agriculture in the middle ages was better. A much higher percentage of the population was hurt or died from malnutrition. Crop yields per acre have steadily increased each century, but politics often mean that bad decisions are made and many starve. The great leap forward is the biggest example of a famine caused by politics.

 

How fortunate then, that I didn't say that.

Why is the percentage of starving, the moral benchmark? I think the number of suffering is a much metric.

 

We're no were near hard enough on GMO crops.

Right now, they seem to be working. In a few decades, we'll have superpests that know how to beat today's GMOs. Just like antibiotics, they're great until they selectively breed for the really bad players.

The real problem is monoculture crops and the loss of biodiversity. GMOs are just the current escalation of monoculture.

 

Its hard to not think today is the worst time in the world from that vantage. Its hard for crop failures or political famines to hurt the same number of people when there are 300 million people compared to 6 billion today. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. I may actually agree with you. I am only saying the world has learned a great deal about food production since the middle ages and can handle drought, disease, and pests in better matters. We can do much better though. The bulk of the bad agricultural practices have nothing to do with GMO. Certainly we should choose plants for cultivation more carefully. Last friday one of my friends proudly chopped down some invasive plants from the park. These spread to starve out the natural species because people plant them in their yards because they are "pretty" even though they spread.

The pests resistant genes are naturally occuring and transfered to other plants. These have little chance to breed super pests. That risk is from heavy pesticide use not GMO. Roundup is a toxic herbicide and is used on fields with and without gmo crop. It is sprayed on fields before for planting and sidewalks. The problem is the round up not plants engineered to allow it to be sprayed again after the plants start growing.

Large fields of single crops and heavy use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are the big problems. I'm sure we can agree with that. GMO plants often take over from other species and become invasive. They have that risk. It is crazy our court system has allowed manufactures to sue farmers whose crops have been invaded by gmo plants.

 

With a monoculture of plants that are genetically modified to express a pesticide, it represents a huge concentration of biomass (i.e. a tasty treat) for anything that wishes to eat it, if only they could.

Now by man's doing, we have a huge concentration of genetically identical plants. Now granted there is a virtual fence guarding this prize from the pest (the gene that is making pesticide). However nature's locksmith is randomly cutting many keys to gain access to it. Once that key is by random chance found, it will forever unlock the gate. The key will be copied many times rendering the defense useless.

 

The problem is that when everything is Roundup Ready, only Roundup tolerant pests will survive. The Darwin effect means that those survivors, however few, will multiply to become the new dominant pests. Roundup tolerant GMO (and GMO polluted) seeds will no longer have an advantage. GMO is rather like nuclear. Enjoy today for tomorrow you'll be paying for yesterday's shortcuts.

 

Let's look at BT corn as it was the one mentioned by the Borlaug (the nobel winner in the OP).


The modification targets one specific pest, and is the same toxin in organic pesticide for this borer.
Bt Corn & European Corn Borer
Having this toxin in the corn and other plants can reduce the use of this or other pesticides.

This would indeed be bad. But in this specific case if the farmer follows the rules non bt corn would be planted by bt corn. This would get rid of most of the evolutionary selection for bt resistant borers. Farmers may cheat though and not follow the rules, but they may also spray much larger amounts of general pesticides which will cause more problems. Getting borers that are resistant to bt does not mean they are resistant to other pesticides.

Well that is indeed a pickle, as farmers and gardenors and city officials spread large amounts of round-up and its generic equivalance on non roundup soil. Getting rid of the round up is the problem and solution. Certainly I would agree that less round up and round up ready plants with other control of weeds would be preferable.

 

Just to provide a minor correction

Roundup (glyphosate) is an herbicide (not pesticide) that kills most plants. It disrupts a plant-specific metabolic pathway to prevent certain essential amino acids from being synthesized. Animals use another method to synthesize amino acids, hence it is not in anyway poisonous to us if used in small concentrations (supposedly). A tiny amount of roundup can kill a whole plant.

Roundup ready plants have the roundup-resistant gene (from a bacteria) inserted into the plant (Corn, Wheat, Soy, etc.). Now farmers can spray their whole fields with roundup and kill competitive weeds, but not their roundup-ready crops. This is cheaper than using other methods of preventing/removing weeds.

#1) The overuse of roundup causes selection pressure that favors naturally resistant plants, which is already occurring.

#2) The roundup-ready gene could escape into the wild somehow.

It's not really a disaster, unless the resulting resistant plant is highly invasive and difficult to eradicate. Think something along the lines of poison ivy.

 

Short term it appears to be cheaper. Long term it looks like a disaster.

Superweeds.

Escape? They're planting thousands of acres of the stuff. You can't have an organic farm next to a roundup-ready farm because the wind and/or pollinators spread the pollen. The previously organic farm becomes polluted with the GMO genes, making the crop no longer organic. The farmer can no longer charge the organic premium. Then the Monsanto security squad comes visiting, and discovers their GMO genes in a crop that didn't pay the licensing fee. The farmer gets hauled into court for stealing the seed. It has already happened.

One of the things that happens with true monocrop (no weeds at all) is that beneficial insects lose their food source. For example, the monarch butterfly is becoming endangered because roundup is killing off milkweed that they need. Monarchs are pollinators, although we could probably live without them. Pesticides and monoculture are a disaster for bees, and living without them is going to be a real disaster. Bees transfer pollen from plant to plant, and without them the alternative is to have people using small brushes transferring pollen between plants. Any idea how much corn would cost with human pollinators?

A good crop requires a healthy supply of pollinators. Kill off the bees and it doesn't matter how few weeds there are, there isn't going to be any crop.

 

Along with reducing cost, there are also environmental benefits. It makes non-till farming more feasible. Heavy plowing and tilling lead to the Dustbowl, and is still a source of soil erosion.

The debate is muddy. I agree we should be more cautious with some types of modifications. Corporations have too much power here also, but that extends beyond agriculture.

Or kudzu, but that doesn't really need our help to shake off Round-up. We were perfectly capable of screwing up the environment before GMO crops became a scare word.

 

Monsanto-Resistant Weeds Take Root, Raising Food Prices | Fast Company

 

I think one of the differences between non-GMO and GMO's are that non-GMOs will tend to revert back to their non-human selected forms, once the unnatural human selection process ceases to exist.

If it the man made version were truly superior in the natural setting, natural selection would have selected for it. Actually the man made version is only superior in the man made setting.

The genes in the non-GM organism were already present in the species' genome, and if allowed to return to its previous natural setting, natural selection will cause the gene's prevalence to be present in the environment at roughly the same proportion as before. It attains the equilibrium that was present before.

The same can not be said for GM organisms because a gene was artificially inserted into the genome. Thus the man-made version can be superior in the prior natural habitat/setting, thus setting up an invasive species.

One caveat is that we know that a species is usually in balance in its natural habitat, but can become invasive if introduced to a new habitat without the natural checks and balances on its population.