Stop Bashing G.M.O. Foods, More Than 100 Nobel Laureates Say

[Hif]

Did I say I thought all children of farmers become farmers? No. But there's really no reason that farming job has to continue to exist, any more than any other job that gets eliminated through automation or other market forces. Why do we want to protect farmers from job elimination when we don't protect factory workers, secretaries, or soon drivers from market forces? In my industry, we use maybe only 20% of the jughounds we used to use. Why should farming be protected more than these others?

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And yet people keep buying the GMO seed, because it's better. If that subsidy lets them do whatever they want, why would they even care about their efficiency?

If they don't care about efficiency why would they buy better seeds? Also who said the seeds are better? The companies that sell them?

[Bauglir]

What are the patents on?

This really seems like the core of the argument - not safety, not efficiency, just an egalitarian leveling impulse. Yes?

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Have you considered the possibility that improved efficiency would abrogate the need for these large subsidies?

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This is not quite what I learned in economics.

Dammit I made the mistake of looking. I am aware of normal economics. Farming can be a different beast. If the middle man who buys from the farmer sets the price lower what does the farmer do? Go to another person? Ok but the majority of the buyers are usually close to each other in price. Hold on to his product? Take tomatoes for example. For shipping and storage purposes they actually pick tomatoes green with just a hint of blush coming into them. When they get put on the trucks going to the store they get gassed with methane if I recall correctly which starts the reddening process. It's so they last longer but why they don't taste like real tomatoes. Ok back to point. So that green tomato with a hint of blush has what, a 3 week lifespan, maybe 1.5 weeks to start the transportaion process so that it doesn't get damaged in rout because the last 1.5 weeks even though the tomato is fine it won't transport worth shit. So the farmer lets the tomatoes rot in his storage? The middle man is the price man. If he can make more he will. There are even price men( now this for a fact) that will offer say 10 cents more a watermelon then when the truckload gets there say well I don't have them sold so I can only pay 30 cents less then what I offered. What do you do. Ship them back on your dime? Take the less money? Say unload in his parking lot and let the damn thing rot? Farmers can be hit by the hairs depending on their crop

[Wildtree]

The labor argument is pointless.
We already (in Europe) have an overproduction of farm goods.
Now you would think that this is a good thing for the consumer? Yeah, well, fuck off.. It isn't.
The government buys the overproduction with the tax money.
Now, since the government isn't exactly (contrary to what some people believe) a welfare cow that allows to get milked, somehow those costs appear on the end products again.
Resulting in say Germany has what we call a butter mountain and milk lake. Thousands of tons of unused butter stored.
But instead of having dirt cheap butter in the stores - because overproduction - shit's still been expensive.
A few numbers to showcase that:
In 2003 the EU stored 223.000 tons of butter, and 193.00 tons of milk powder that was overproduction.
It's now gladly gone. They've managed to adjust.
Why would we return to such problem situation?
Plus, if the farmers efficiency goes up, so would the output. Which leads to higher subsidies, which leads to higher consumer prices.

And what about that time they'd safe?
Well what about it? Shall we flood the job market with part time workers from the farming industry?
Even IF that was possible, since there's only so much manhours available, it would put other people out of work.
So, best scenario, the farmer can go about and bang his woman more often. That's about the most pleasurable thing now.
Nope, that argument just isn't holding up here, imo.

[Spectral]

Dammit I made the mistake of looking. I am aware of normal economics. Farming can be a different beast. If the middle man who buys from the farmer sets the price lower what does the farmer do? Go to another person? Ok but the majority of the buyers are usually close to each other in price. Hold on to his product? Take tomatoes for example. For shipping and storage purposes they actually pick tomatoes green with just a hint of blush coming into them. When they get put on the trucks going to the store they get gassed with methane if I recall correctly which starts the reddening process. It's so they last longer but why they don't taste like real tomatoes. Ok back to point. So that green tomato with a hint of blush has what, a 3 week lifespan, maybe 1.5 weeks to start the transportaion process so that it doesn't get damaged in rout because the last 1.5 weeks even though the tomato is fine it won't transport worth shit. So the farmer lets the tomatoes rot in his storage? The middle man is the price man. If he can make more he will. There are even price men( now this for a fact) that will offer say 10 cents more a watermelon then when the truckload gets there say well I don't have them sold so I can only pay 30 cents less then what I offered. What do you do. Ship them back on your dime? Take the less money? Say unload in his parking lot and let the damn thing rot? Farmers can be hit by the hairs depending on their crop

There's a lot of anecdote and hypothetical in here.

If middle markets are non-competitive, let's solve the problem of cartels rather than coming up with odd anti-efficiency, anti-market policies to drive costs higher.

[Thunderball]

Wouldn't greater efficiency in crops make food prices go down thereby helping to resolve World Hunger? Or are people in the EU only concerned about themselves?

There is no World Hunger. Developed nations are grossly overproducing food. Even if food is free in Europe it wont become free, cheap or affordable in Africa simply because you have ship it, and shipping food is expensive and difficult. Local producers in Africa (even if they had sufficient land to farm and didnt have any other threats to their business) simply cannon afford GMO seeds.

[Spectral]

The labor argument is pointless.
We already (in Europe) have an overproduction of farm goods.
Now you would think that this is a good thing for the consumer? Yeah, well, fuck off.. It isn't.
The government buys the overproduction with the tax money.
Now, since the government isn't exactly (contrary to what some people believe) a welfare cow that allows to get milked, somehow those costs appear on the end products again.
Resulting in say Germany has what we call a butter mountain and milk lake. Thousands of tons of unused butter stored.
But instead of having dirt cheap butter in the stores - because overproduction - shit's still been expensive.
A few numbers to showcase that:
In 2003 the EU stored 223.000 tons of butter, and 193.00 tons of milk powder that was overproduction.
It's now gladly gone. They've managed to adjust.
Why would we return to such problem situation?
Plus, if the farmers efficiency goes up, so would the output. Which leads to higher subsidies, which leads to higher consumer prices.

And what about that time they'd safe?
Well what about it? Shall we flood the job market with part time workers from the farming industry?
Even IF that was possible, since there's only so much manhours available, it would put other people out of work.
So, best scenario, the farmer can go about and bang his woman more often. That's about the most pleasurable thing now.
Nope, that argument just isn't holding up here, imo.

I find it odd that the proposed solution here is for government to inhibit production rather than suggesting that maybe governments shouldn't be encouraging over-production in the first place.

[Bauglir]

Which happened with our selective breeding over the years. Just look at corn.

Selective breeding is usually done in sterile greenhouses now where if even one bee gets in they scrap everything bleach it and start over because they won't know what was pollinated. Things like watermelons outside of greenhouses you can put a styrofoam cup over each bloom bc the bees won't crawl up the inside of the cup to pollinate as long as you cover it before it's ready for pollination. Things like growing an actual crop of wheat or corn for consumption no way to completely prevent crosspollination

[Thunderball]

I find it odd that the proposed solution here is for government to inhibit production rather than suggesting that maybe governments shouldn't be encouraging over-production in the first place.

Huge umemployment is far worse for any country than overproduction of anything. It goes for every adequately developed country.

[Bauglir]

There's a lot of anecdote and hypothetical in here.

If middle markets are non-competitive, let's solve the problem of cartels rather than coming up with odd anti-efficiency, anti-market policies to drive costs higher.

Hehe. Yeah believe it's hypothetical and anecdotal. Obviously you come from a farming family right?

[Reeve]

The labor argument is pointless.
We already (in Europe) have an overproduction of farm goods.
Now you would think that this is a good thing for the consumer? Yeah, well, fuck off.. It isn't.
The government buys the overproduction with the tax money.
Now, since the government isn't exactly (contrary to what some people believe) a welfare cow that allows to get milked, somehow those costs appear on the end products again.
Resulting in say Germany has what we call a butter mountain and milk lake. Thousands of tons of unused butter stored.
But instead of having dirt cheap butter in the stores - because overproduction - shit's still been expensive.
A few numbers to showcase that:
In 2003 the EU stored 223.000 tons of butter, and 193.00 tons of milk powder that was overproduction.
It's now gladly gone. They've managed to adjust.
Why would we return to such problem situation?
Plus, if the farmers efficiency goes up, so would the output. Which leads to higher subsidies, which leads to higher consumer prices.

And what about that time they'd safe?
Well what about it? Shall we flood the job market with part time workers from the farming industry?
Even IF that was possible, since there's only so much manhours available, it would put other people out of work.
So, best scenario, the farmer can go about and bang his woman more often. That's about the most pleasurable thing now.
Nope, that argument just isn't holding up here, imo.

So stop subsidizing it, and maybe some of those dairies producing too much milk and butter will go out of business or change their products. Voila, no more overproduction. Now you can use that land for different products or purposes that are actually adding value to the economy instead of producing worthless mountains of butter.

[Bauglir]

I find it odd that the proposed solution here is for government to inhibit production rather than suggesting that maybe governments shouldn't be encouraging over-production in the first place.

Government already prohibits production in the us. They pay people to not farm certain plots of land because it will drop prices

[Wildtree]

I find it odd that the proposed solution here is for government to inhibit production rather than suggesting that maybe governments shouldn't be encouraging over-production in the first place.

The alternative is farmers reducing the output.
That means farmers falling off the cliffs with their incomes.
Which in return AGAIN costs the government, because now they've got to get paid unemployment coverage.
And at the same time the agriculture dies off. Which then makes you dependent on importing the goods.
And the LAST thing you want is dependent on the import of the most essential goods, food.

[Spectral]

Hehe. Yeah believe it's hypothetical and anecdotal. Obviously you come from a farming family right?

Yes. I came from a family that had a farm that was primarily vineyards, but had some other agriculture as well. I grew up working on other local farms throwing hay around, shoveling, etc.

I don't think this background would actually be a sufficient set of experience to ignore basic economics though.

[Wildtree]

So stop subsidizing it,

Cannot, reasons given are in the reply to spectral.

[Deleted]

More than 100 Nobel laureates have a message for Greenpeace:

What do you need to do to be a Nobel laureates? It is ironic if they are all economists and have no background in biology or ethics.

[Mongo42]

Others have stated eloquently what I was going to say about overproduction, subsidies, and the oversimplification that some people have that "world hunger" could be "fixed" by growing more food. The issue is distribution, not production. It's like saying we should bottle more water because people in some parts of the world don't have clean water to drink. Who's going to pay to transport it to them?

A personal observation. Pro-GMO people say that we have been selectively breeding wheat for a long time, and compare that to genetically modifying wheat. Some people say that we've been eating the same wheat for centuries, so why should people suddenly be sensitive to wheat products? "Gluten" or "FODMAPS". Seems a contradiction to me.

The worst zealotry, the worst extremism in the world at this point isn't even the Islamic State. It is the mindless worship of science by those desperate to appear more intelligent than they actually are. It blinds them to flawed studies and skewed observations made for the sake of funding and general profits. Just one example of far too many. One study showed that loss of bone density was not the result of consumption of colas, but rather an absence of dairy in the diet, which ignored the fact that many people around the world did not raise cattle nor consume dairy in any way for thousands of years. Yet many would hold this up as science proving something is harmless because its something they enjoy overindulging in.

And for something GMO specific, there are studies where the test group of rats were fed GMOs treated with Roundup, and the control group was fed... GMOs treated with Roundup.

http://gmwatch.org/news/latest-news/...cides-and-gmos

In the new study, eleven out of 13 of the diets were found to contain GMOs. This is of concern because these standard feeds are commonly used to test the safety of GMOs in the 90-day rodent feeding trials demanded by the EU regulatory system.

One of these diets, from the Purina company, was used in a 90-day rat feeding study by DuPont authors, which could be used to obtain regulatory approval of a GMO Roundup-tolerant canola variety. The study concluded that the GM canola was as safe as the non-GM canola, based on the lack of differences between the group fed the GM canola and the control group fed non-GM canola. Yet the new study found that the Purina feed contained around 12.8% GM soy and 35.6% GM maize – and was not even labelled as GM.

The new study also found that the feed contained residues of glyphosate and AMPA (the main metabolite or breakdown product of glyphosate). So although the control rats were not eating the GM canola under test, they were eating other GMOs with the same glyphosate-tolerant trait, as well as residues of the pesticide that the GMOs are grown with. In other words, the study did not compare rats fed a GM diet with rats fed a non-GM diet, but rats fed one type of GMO plus pesticides with rats fed similar GMOs plus pesticides.

[Bauglir]

Yes. I came from a family that had a farm that was primarily vineyards, but had some other agriculture as well. I grew up working on other local farms throwing hay around, shoveling, etc.

I don't think this background would actually be a sufficient set of experience to ignore basic economics though.

First vineyards are a different animal than base crops like peanuts corn wheat cotton tomatoes watermelons etc. there is a lot of money in vineyards (presuming wine grapes?)per acre compared with others. Basic economics you say, when the buyer controls the price on a perishable product like tomatoes watermelons or sweet corn for "fresh consumption" there's not a whole lot you can do when the buyers are setting the prices.

[Bauglir]

Uh, no. That's how it has been done recently but in the past it was never done in sterile conditions. And if you go back far enough it was simply done in the wild by planting and nurturing the seeds from plants that produced the best produce.

Uhhhhh dur tu dur. Yeah I know hence why I said "NOW" in my post. The person you quoting was talking about now also not 50 or 100 years ago. The way I talked about was utilized in the 90's also. So yeah what was being done 50 years ago doesn't have any affect on gmos crossing today

[Bauglir]

Right, gmos crossing today happens because they get released into the wild after they're done making their desired strain. Same way shit happened 50 years ago, just on a smaller scale(to a degree) because they're not having the pollen from every strain they create(and they create a lot) in the wild.

You are still not understanding the point of the post by the person you originally replied to. Non-gmo x non-gmo = non-gmo hybrid
Non-gmo x gmo= gmo hybrid. That person doesn't like gmo, therefore why would that person want gmo non gmo crosses??? In a cross the resulting "child" has characteristics of BOTH parents

[anon5123]

I didn't fearmonger. I said what my position is.

And your position is fearmongering because you don't fully understand what GMOs are.

Some random fuckwad on the internet

Seems I'm not going to change your mind anyways, so to the ignore list you go.