It's how they made America dumb again. Trust me I live here. People voted for trump and the electoral college put him in office.
Some issues will always arise with GMO crops, but at the moment, it's all we have outside of mass introduction of urban greenhouses taking over derelict/neglected warehouse buildings from our industrial past.
Another thing which needs to be looked into is GMO trees. If we can make trees that grow faster, we can really go places.
I wish the video had gone more into the business-side of GMO's, which is really the meaty part of the issue. Whether crops are "natural" or not doesn't mean shit when we have a growing population that will starve without super-crops - the real issue is the potential impact of leaving only a few mega-corporations making business of it all, and in control of the worldwide food supply.
I literally, and I mean LITERALLY just walked back into my office from a talk where the speaker was saying how bad GMOs are for you, and this is the first thing I see on my sub list.
I am very confused now.
[QUOTE=Squad1993;52032777]I literally, and I mean LITERALLY just walked back into my office from a talk where the speaker was saying how bad GMOs are for you, and this is the first thing I see on my sub list.
I am very confused now.[/QUOTE]
So...like...what were their points on how "GMO bad" exactly?
Most of the garbage you'll come across online is "It just aint right!" or "it'll mutate [B][I]your[/I][/B] genes!!".
[QUOTE=hexpunK;52032805]So...like...what were their points on how "GMO bad" exactly?
Most of the garbage you'll come across online is "It just aint right!" or "it'll mutate [B][I]your[/I][/B] genes!!".[/QUOTE]
I don't want my food to be copyrighted
[QUOTE=Ott;52032842]I don't want my food to be copyrighted[/QUOTE]
That's a business thing, sure. Valid complaint too (but at the same time researching which genes you fuck with to do what takes a lot of time and money, so some protections might be preferable).
But how is it bad [I]for you[/I], as in non-economically. At least, that's the idea of what they were complaining about in Squads speaker thing.
This video won't stop the flower children and intelligent independent thinkers from arguing about how GMO's are toxic and contain mind control applications.
kurzgesagt lately has been very pro-capitalism, the video about population growth was really weird and unsincere to me. he's probably ran out of subjects that are objective but some people don't understand, so he's delving into more opinionated stuff which is not doing very well.
[editline]30th March 2017[/editline]
the biggest problem with gmo's is how there's a literal [i]seed mafia[/i], many places in the world, including my country, you can not seed corn, even for your own use, that is not marked and made by some company
Yeah, we'll be lucky to get to the point where we have to address business issues with GMO crops. First we need the public to not be so afraid of them
I like the idea of super trees that can convert more carbon dioxide into oxygen to reverse greenhouse effects. That's fucking awesome.
thanks earth for creating us, now we're gonna recreate you :v:
[QUOTE=343N;52034344]thanks earth for creating us, now we're gonna recreate you :v:[/QUOTE]
As my gf was taking me to the Orange County airport the other day I saw these facades on the sides of the interstate, maybe up to 50 or so feet tall, looking like diagonally weathered rock. The grassy hills behind them just abruptly end like you've cut them with a hot knife and glued the rocky facade on there. Really struck me and make me think a lot about how we've recreated the earth, especially after just having finished reading Ringworld.
I wonder whether these built-in pesticides could eventually lead to similar problems that we're currently exhibiting with antibiotics resistance. Especially if only one or two top-performing strains of a given plant go mainstream and an pest immune to its pesticides could cause global damage.
Just spitballing tho, with globalization being what it is we may already have stats on reduced diversity that don't support my what-if.
[QUOTE=Ott;52032842]I don't want my food to be copyrighted[/QUOTE]
Well you can say goodbye to ANY company investing in GMO research then.
[QUOTE=Ott;52032842]I don't want my food to be copyrighted[/QUOTE]
Unless you're self sustained, or only buy from local farmers markets, your food is already copyrighted bub
No chain restaurants for you
[QUOTE=Egevened;52032953]kurzgesagt lately has been very pro-capitalism, the video about population growth was really weird and unsincere to me. he's probably ran out of subjects that are objective but some people don't understand, so he's delving into more opinionated stuff which is not doing very well.
[editline]30th March 2017[/editline]
the biggest problem with gmo's is how there's a literal [i]seed mafia[/i], many places in the world, including my country, you can not seed corn, even for your own use, that is not marked and made by some company[/QUOTE]
Also the fact that small farmers in the United States can get fucked over by large corporations who just so happen to find their GM variety crop growing in their field that they don't have the rights to.
[editline]30th March 2017[/editline]
I wish I had a bigger understanding of agriculture in the United States, but GMOs definitely present a problem in terms of how companies can easily monopolize all the food you eat.
Comparing GMO agriculture and old fashioned agriculture as alternatives to each other is very shortsighted
They both have their unique problems that need to be tackled independently.
Ordinary agriculture has problems such as over-exploitation and pesticide use.
GMO agriculture has problems such as corporate exploitation and modified organisms mixing with local ecosystems.
Still GMOs hold amazing potential for advancement and in either case the adverse effects of agriculture must be controlled.
It's not about capitalism, it's about requiring an infrastructure that can provide for the number of humans we have. A lot of what Kurzgesagt does is preach about how to do these things right, with a human and environmental centric focus.
I took an entire writing course on the US's food industry from corporations to farmers markets to hunting for your own food. The biggest thing that I learned is that if we invested in creating polyculture farms we could increase our yields while using less land and save the environment at the same time (but it's not quite as cheap so it doesn't get done). He hints at this towards the end. There are farms that already implement these solutions. It's straightforward simple shit like growing multiple crops, growing larger bushes or small trees around your farmland, keeping a variety of animals on the farm, etc. It's starting to gain traction too as it becomes more and more lucrative.
[QUOTE=hexpunK;52032805]So...like...what were their points on how "GMO bad" exactly?
Most of the garbage you'll come across online is "It just aint right!" or "it'll mutate [B][I]your[/I][/B] genes!!".[/QUOTE]
tbh I wasn't listening because the speaker promised us lunch and only brought a salad bowl.
[QUOTE=Im Crimson;52032532]I wish the video had gone more into the business-side of GMO's, which is really the meaty part of the issue. Whether crops are "natural" or not doesn't mean shit when we have a growing population that will starve without super-crops - the real issue is the potential impact of leaving only a few mega-corporations making business of it all, and in control of the worldwide food supply.[/QUOTE]
That's the actual reason why I try to buy non-gmo products.
[QUOTE=Squad1993;52034868]tbh I wasn't listening because the speaker promised us lunch and only brought a salad bowl.[/QUOTE]
That's not right. You don't make a promise like that and then just bring salad. Evil. Pure evil.
[QUOTE=hexpunK;52034958]That's not right. You don't make a promise like that and then just bring salad. Evil. Pure evil.[/QUOTE]
99% chance its GMO lettuce too
[QUOTE=Marik Bentusi;52034433]I wonder whether these built-in pesticides could eventually lead to similar problems that we're currently exhibiting with antibiotics resistance. Especially if only one or two top-performing strains of a given plant go mainstream and an pest immune to its pesticides could cause global damage.
Just spitballing tho, with globalization being what it is we may already have stats on reduced diversity that don't support my what-if.[/QUOTE]
Actually, it's rather interesting because this isn't a problem in this case. Antibiotic resistance is caused by two main reasons, non complete courses of treatment and insufficient doses. Both of these leave some of the offending pathogen alive at the end of treatment course. Those bacteria survived to the end because they genes which inhibited or delayed the action of the antibiotics. This gives rise to drug resistant bacteria.
The nice thing about BT crops is that neither of these problems exist due to the simple nature of insects. They'll start eating and keep eating until they get the lethal dose and simply die. The effective dose is extremely small, so there's no worries there. You'd have to rely on sheer random mutation to overcome this particular problem, and that's really not going to happen.
Sorry, but even a cursory search for "pesticide resistance gmo" comes up with several articles about how poor use of modified crops - both poorly directed and through negligence - is breeding pests resistant to these techniques.
I believe in the technology - but I don't believe in the companies selling it to ensure correct use, and I don't believe that the farmers trying to maximise their returns will follow the necessary steps to prevent pest adaptation.
(Mosanto keeps cropping up as being especially culpable of only looking after its own profits in this regard)
[QUOTE=Mobon1;52034541]Also the fact that small farmers in the United States can get fucked over by large corporations who just so happen to find their GM variety crop growing in their field that they don't have the rights to.[/quote]
this is a myth
Interesting that this comes up now, I followed a course on sustainable farming a few days ago. It wasn't specifically about GMOs, but a lot of issues with our current, industrialized agriculture also apply to them.
The main issue is the incompatibility between the needs of individual economic agents and the needs of the environment: A crop is part of the larger ecosystem that surrounds it, and the more adapted to its environment it is (and there are a [I]lot[/I] of different environments), the more it thrives. But designing breeds costs a lot, thus companies seek to design a one-size-fits-all breed to maximize profits, which is diametrically opposed to what an optimally fit breed is supposed to be.
"Super-breeds" that are optimal in all and every situation are impossible to create: Depending on the environment either one characteristic or it's opposite is the best if you want to maximize success rate. For instance, in areas where aphids are the main threat to crops, you want your wheat crops to be "hairy" so that the aphid can't reach the plant itself and suck it off. On the other hand, in an area rife with caterpillars, you want your wheat to be as smooth as possible so that butterfly eggs don't stick to it. There are a myriad of other factors that may require the crop to have specific defense mechanisms that may be incompatible with one another. Accounting for those environmental factors isn't too hard for a local farmer, since artificially selecting the healthiest crops automatically results in tailoring the breed for it's environment. That's not the case for GMOs which require considerable investments, and unless it becomes cost-effective enough that every other farmer can design his own breed in his garage, the variety of GMO breeds is going to remain limited. To make up for these limitations (and also because it's much easier to certify them that way), GMOs and other designed breeds are optimised to be functional in a "vacuum", rather than in relation to it's environment, which means you have to reproduce this "vacuum" in the field, implying usage of pesticides, fungicides and antibiotics, the effects of which aren't really a mystery (pesticides and fungicides have drastic effects on health, are suspected to reduce life expectancy of those exposed to it by up to 10 years, and destroy biodiversity including keystones species like bees, intensive use of antibiotics creates resistant bacteria...) There's also the problem of lack of crop diversity making crops more vulnerable to disease, threatening the stability of food supply.
About the belief that GMOs could solve world hunger, this seems misguided to me. The main reason for world hunger is bad redistribution of food. An average human being needs the equivalent of 200kg of cereals per year. Globally, we produce enough cereals to supply every person on Earth with 330kg per year. The reason behind this bad redistribution is poverty and overconsumption of meat which is far less calory efficient than vegetables. Poor people in developing countries don't make enough money to provide their family with a sufficient amount of food. GMO companies are actively contributing to that imbalance by making developing farmers dependant on their supply rather than self-sufficient, and hindering development by fucking with copyrights and repressing use of certain seeds. Another cause of this lack of development is the disloyal competition from the developed countries side. A single farmer in Europe produces 1000 times the amount of food a single farmer in Africa does, and the globalisation of crop prices makes it basically impossible for African farmers to live off the money they make out of it.
About crop productivity, you want to make the ratio of annual food production per unit of arable area as high as possible. To raise that ratio, GMOs are not the ideal solution for the aforementioned reasons, you rather need to do a little bit of engineering:
- You want plants to cover the maximum amount of area exposed to sunlight, every square meter of naked earth reduces your overall efficiency. This means that the space your lone crop leaves empty while it grows is wasted sunlight. To make up for this, you can use crops that grow in different seasons, so that while one is still in it's early stages of growth, the remaining space is occupied by another which is fully matured.
- You want photosynthesis to occur for the longest amount of time possible. Photosynthesis requires both sunlight and sufficient humidity to operate: this means that growing plants outside of their respective regions is counter-productive. For instance, growing corn under a continental climate is not efficient since corn is designed to grow in tropical conditions : Photosynthesis occurs when the weather is both hot and humid, something that rarely happens in mainland Europe. Of course you can irrigate it yourself, but that's wasting a resource that is only going to become more scarce as time goes on.
When it comes to the soil, plants mainly require three things to grow :
-Proper soil porosity so that it can take roots easily. This is the stated goal of plowing. However, research shows that this actually destroys the humus layer (another resource plants use) on top of not actually offering optimal porosity. A proper alternative is to plant trees, which "dig" small tunnels with their roots and then leave them open when they die, and letting worms do their work.
-Proper nitrates concentration. This is currently done through synthesized fertilizers, which are costly to produce. However, legumes such as soy naturally synthesize nitrates by using the nitrogen abundantly present in the air. Sowing those in your field ensures that the soil is properly supplied with nitrates at little to no cost.
-Mineral elements, mainly phosphorus. Currently phosphorus is mined before being integrated in fertilizers. It is a non-renewable resource which will eventually run out. You can ensure that it remains in the humus layer, though, through certain fungi that hijack tree roots to reach deep into the ground and grab the phosphorus before it reaches the ground water, then transfer part of it to the tree which will bring it back to the surface through it's dead leaves.
-Carbon, this can be easily provided by mixing hay with animal waste, creating manure by trapping carbon (which has the added benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions)
As you can see, there's still quite a lot of progress to be made before we have no choice but to micromanage every aspect of every single crop breed through GMOs. No system is isolated and you need to think about its integration in the environment as much as the system's own characteristics. The main error here is creating an innovative technique (GMOs) and trying to find a way to implement it instead of clearly defining the problem and looking for it's solution. The only drawback of sustainable farming techniques is that it makes automation trickier (since you have multiple types of crop in the same field), thus you need more manpower to produce food this way. But in our current, high unemployment situation, this seems more like a solution than a problem to me.
[QUOTE=Squad1993;52032777]I literally, and I mean LITERALLY just walked back into my office from a talk where the speaker was saying how bad GMOs are for you, and this is the first thing I see on my sub list.
I am very confused now.[/QUOTE]
A. If you've ever eaten a banana or yellow corn you've eaten GMOs. And unless you're allergic to corn or bananas you've probably never been so much as slightly sick from them.
[editline]31st March 2017[/editline]
[QUOTE=Destroyox;52034942]That's the actual reason why I try to buy non-gmo products.[/QUOTE]
So I guess you don't eat yellow corn or bananas at all then? You're missing out.
All this anti-GMO sentiment actually puts more power into the hands of companies like Monsanto. All these protests and activism make it hard to other people to start up their own gene-technology companies, allowing all the market share to be concentrated into a few companies that can afford to fight and lobby. We're really not doing anything to promote competition that'll force companies like Monsanto to be edge because let's be realistic, GMO crops are here to stay.
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