The reality is that Monsanto sues farmers when they take Roundup-Ready crops, plant them, and then use Roundup on those crops. You can't do that innocently; if you spray Roundup on non-Monsanto crops, you kill the crop.
If there's a case where Monsanto sued a farmer simply for having Roundup-Ready seeds or plants on their farms, I haven't seen it, and I've (a) looked and (b) asked around a lot.
If you just mean that patent enforcement is inherently scummy and antagonistic, well, I have no snappy response for that. Although again note that the problem with software patents is that you can implement some obvious piece of functionality and get sued by someone with a ridiculous patent. Like I said, nobody accidentally uses the whole Roundup system on a farm.
http://www.damemagazine.com/2013/04/03/monsanto-six-truths-a...
But the Monsanto stuff is a highly technical issue, and neither Michael Pollan nor Eric Schlosser appear to have much expertise in them. There is a lot of GMO FUD. I would not assume that none of it leaked into the movie.
(ASU because it's across the street from my house)
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/f/food-inc-script...
Several people in the farm industry are interviewed. Their statements are not questioned or further investigated by the filmmakers.
Well then finally we can all agree that Monsanto is detrimental to the development of GMOs. No one is claiming that Monsanto is "waiting for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields", so that might explain why you can't find any evidence of it.
What people do have a problem with, is a patent troll and a litigious one at that. That's what Monsanto is and there are plenty of cases to prove it:
http://www.nature.com/news/monsanto-may-lose-gm-soya-royalti...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Schmeiser#Schmeiser_v._Mo...
(Others have pointed out that no, Monsanto does not control the whole industry. But they are by far the dominant player.)
Overuse of Antibiotics, Pesticides, Herbicides and Fungicides are the stuff that create our allergies and poison bees too. Birds eat those poisoned bees, I really don't know how far this goes down the rabbit hole, but I'm worried.
While this is obvious hyperbole, I agree with your general sentiment. In fact, GMOs, perhaps more-so than any other modern technology, have an unprecedented potential to save billions of lives. Golden Rice alone could save the lives of one million children every year.
As a biochem major, GMOs are something I'm passionate about, and it really aggravates me when I see armchair scientists (read: people who watched a youtube video) decrying them as dangerous and calling for their banning. I would say these people are partially to blame for the regulatory nightmare that Golden Rice advocates are facing, meanwhile one million children go blind and die terrible deaths each year from vitamin A deficiency.
Potential, yes; but not with massive financial interests behind it. In a world where shiploads of wheat are held back in order to game the wheat market, things need to change before GMOs can cure 3rd world hunger.
I've read that GMOs have to be bought anew for every season because the harvested crops can't be used as seeds. Is that actually true?
"Today, hybrid seed production is predominant in agriculture and home gardening, and is one of the main contributing factors to the dramatic rise in agricultural output during the last half of the 20th century. In the US, the commercial market was launched in the 1920s, with the first hybrid maize. All of the hybrid seeds planted by the farmer will be the same hybrid while the seeds from the hybrids planted will not consistently have the desired characteristics. This is why hybrid seed is constantly repurchased by growers for each planting season." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed
This is not necessarily true in every case. pvnick mentioned Golden Rice. The Co-inventor of the genetically engineered, vitamin-A-rich strain of rice Potrykus has spearheaded an effort to have golden rice distributed for free to poor farmers. This required several companies which had intellectual property rights to the results of Beyer's research to license it for free. In fact, Monsanto was one of the first companies to grant free licenses. If the substinence farmer doesn't make more than $10,000 per year, he is freed from paying any royalities. The farmers are even permitted to keep and replant the seeds.
This is in the specific case of Golden Rice. Maybe somebody can jump in and tell a horrific Monsanto story.
Of course, even GM crops can not protect from all causes of crop failure. But blaming them on every cause of failure is wrong.
It's analogous to US students getting into a pickle by accepting large student loans and then finding no jobs in their field. But if they don't take the risk they may lose to those who took the risk. They'd almost all be better off if the student loans weren't available.
http://grist.org/news/supreme-court-hands-a-big-win-to-monsa...
[1] http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/why-does-monsanto-su...
Yes it means you get to pay more (in some cases a lot more) for your bread. It also means that farmers make more money and enable them to sell their wheat _now_ when they need the money and not after they have been foreclosed and it puts a price floor on the market for wheat, insuring that the crops we need to prevent starvation will not rot on the fields.
I'm from France and we have to take a course on that at one point in university.
IIRC Monsanto launched several products without testing them and was later forced to stop selling them since they were tested dangerous for health. Seeing that they weren't really testing their products and using biased studies sometimes, Europe just decided to make a lot of laws about testing before using GMOs.
IMO a technology as important as GMOs should never be in the hands of a private company motivated by money and share holders. It should be in the hands of an international association (like the UN).
The fact is that we don't know what GMOs can do to you. They might be safe, they might not be. It has to be different in every single case, since in every single case, you're talking about different combinations of DNA. Can that possibly be dangerous in a particular case? It sure can. Both directly and indirectly.
Once completely organic chicken breast becomes as unattainably expensive as beluga cavier I think you'll find nobody gives a shit how the cheap stuff is produced.
Even if GM produced a plant that was truly superior and healthier in every way, there's no good way to trust it. There are too many instances of "oops, what we thought was good for you is actually bad for you" or "oops, we thought we could improve nature but we made it worse" to trust GMO, at least for the next fifty years or so. The plant that seems truly superior and healthier might end up killing enough insects or otherwise affecting them such to be worse all things considered.
Im modern mind "evolution" has became synonymous to "natural" in the quality of "it has no nasty science in it so it has to be good". In fact, neither "natural" nor "evolution" has nothing good in it - nature is impersonal, immoral and unimaginably cruel, viewed from our point of view. And if the science can do something to correct it - it is great.
For example, sweeter apples we enjoy now appeared in the last couple of centuries, and the US varieties in the last century alone, before that apples were mainly used to make cider or applejack. A couple of hundreds of years is nothing for the evolution.
Search for: "Pests are adapting to genetically modified crops in unexpected ways, researchers have discovered. The findings underscore the importance of closely monitoring and countering pest resistance to biotech crops." That sounds like another "oops, we did it again" in the making to me.
>>> What you support is a matter of what seems trustworthy.
This is exactly the problem - the support becomes political and relies not on what is actually better but on whose lobbyists are better and whose PR campaign is more successful. This venerable tradition started a long time ago, with Edison's shenanigans[1] to give him edge over the competitors. The story of DDT is another example - while the scientific basis for the book that destroyed the DDT - Silent Spring - remain shaky[2] and the ban ended up costing millions of lives of malaria victims, it is still considered an example of how science is going to doom us all. Another example is the continuing PR battle between sugar lobby and corn lobby. Initially, corn lobby was winning - that's why HFCS is called "high fructose" - because once fructose was good and glucose was bad, so the marketing term emphasized the good part, even though some varieties of HFCS have less fructose than table sugar, and commonly used one has only very slightly more [3]. Due to this and as the effect of the insanely high sugar tariffs, US industry switched from sugar to HFCS. Now the tide has turned and HFCS is becoming the bane of our age. And now the corn lobby wants to go back to "corn sugar", but so far they weren't allowed to. Corn guys though did another number in "biofuels", so even if they lose the HFCS thing, they have other victories in their belt.
This is all to say "what seems trustworthy" is a very poor guide, since most information you'd see in popular press is probably worthless. And decisions made by politicians are probably based on random factors having nothing to do with actual merits of proposed solutions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents [2] http://reason.com/archives/2002/06/12/silent-spring-at-40 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup#Produc...
GMOs can have a staggering amount of benefits to this world. But to say that they are safe across the board is extremely dishonest. We simply can't see all the long-term consequences of the new forms of life that we ingest. With enough knowledge, we can theoretically do whatever we want with DNA, including make cells in apples produce prions that eventually cause Alzheimer's. And we can do so accidentally.
I wouldn't be surprised if there'd be much less opposition to it. If you're opposed to labeling now, it looks like you're trying to cover something up or sneak something past the public.
I just realized... maybe the problem isn't that the Monsanto PR machine is deceiving everyone about GMO food. Maybe the problem is that Monsanto sucks at PR, bad. They certainly suck at modern PR. The kind of PR-firm tactics that they use to try to explain themselves to the public come off as smarmy and disingenuous to anyone under 40.
Rule #1 of modern PR: if you assume that your audience are idiots, they will realize this instantly and assume that you are a lying sack of you-know-what. I know I can smell a talking-down-to-me PR flack writeup a mile away, and stuff like that makes me feel like I'm eight years old and my gym teacher is telling me this is what people do when they love each other.
That's why I think this story is great news for the general population. It will hopefully push Monsanto to change its lobbying practices. It should, in my opinion, take some years to really educate (not propagandize) the people instead of spending the millions on a couple of political lobbies. It would have a longer lasting effect. And if they're not willing to educate the people because their product really is a health hazard, so be it!
People don't need to become experts on any particular food innovation to have a very good chance of serving their best interests in opposing it. The people have been continuously misled about health risks.
If GMO saves a million children it will next need to save ten million children, and then a hundred million and so on, until it fails and then there will be greater suffering. Culture and religion are the root cause of the problem; it's better addressed from that angle.
Are you advocating population control by starving off the poor?
There is plenty of factual basis to the claim that we're borrowing against our future to feed the current population.
We never observed the thing that were predicted above, despite the claim that it always happens. We didn't even observe the "fall" you claim to be happening right now. No evidence for it exists except for repeated claims of impending doom, usually accompanied by sermons to repent and sacrifice to whatever favorite pseudo-deity the would be prophet happens to believe in. I have nothing against faith, but this particular faith wouldn't be my choice.
> Instead I think we're just stupid that way.
That's culture and religion. Both could change to promote smarter sustainability.
The data suggests that it is hyperbole to say that Monsanto owns the market, but judging by the CR4 and HHI - standard economics measures for concentration of market power - it's fair to say that the GMO market is very concentrated, and that Monsanto leads the pack by a significant margin.