electric said:
But chances are in their favor that it won't, chances are that it won't provide any more risk to people than conventional agriculture.
They are not taking those chances - they are imposing them on other people, for their own profit.
electric said:
But chances are in their favor that it won't, chances are that it won't provide any more risk to people than conventional agriculture.
If it provides even the same risks that modern, well-established conventional agriculture has provided in its dealings with new things, it will kill half the population of a second world Asian or European country sometime in the next fifty years.
If it provides the risks that conventional agriculture provided in its early days, it will do far worse than that.
If it is allowed to run the kinds of new risks obvious from its nature and the utterly stupid, heedless arrogance of its louder proponents, it is capable of destroying modern civilizations. That's not very likely, but it is possible. Stuff that reproduces itself exponentially has lots of interesting capabilities, even without the backing of powerful economic entities.
electric said:
It has never before been used in such a way that it will create resistant pests. It will soon be ineffective.
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Total bullshit, its use period will put evolutionary pressure on making resistant pests.
Spot application is quite different, in its evolutionary pressure, from saturation of an environment - which is childishly irresponsible; indefensible politically, economically, or ecologically. And that is not bullshit.
Corporations willing to behave like that cannot be trusted with their own oversight, in matters carrying these kinds of community risks.
electric said:
Nope, no study has been done to try to correlate potatoes with anything,
Thousands of years of experience provide very good information on such things. Better than most studies. The people who eat potatoes as their traditional staple, who developed and bred potatoes as food, eat them with special clays used as a coating on the skin, for example. Others peel them, routinely. Potatoes are bred and handled to have much lower levels of these alkaloids than a wild crop wrongly handled. Almost certainly many people, especially children, sickened or died during the discovery of the benefits of such practices.
electric said:
Bugs like Killer bees, cane toads, Purple Loosestrife? All follies of conventional agriculture
Not so limited to special category - bugs as in computer programs, glitches in the system. Like salt infusion in irrigated land, or disease vulnerability from reduction in genetic diversity of food crops, or famine from international currency fluctuations in agricultural landscapes newly devoted to Monsanto's idea of farming.
And those you mention are all mild, easily handled inconveniences, compared with the problems worked out in the past, when traditional agriculture was developing its traditions.
electric said:
That's not the question. The question is what to do in the time before such regulation or testing is even possible, let alone implemented.
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Lobby for such regulations?
Or as the biker says when beating you up - write your congressman. Typical asshole comment, from people profiting by the abuse of others.
Why is it that the current state of ignorance, and the risks of such ignorance, are so hard for people to recognize?
Marie Curie died of radiation poisoning, from what she didn't know about a new thing, within the time scale in which these idiots want to replace the planet's food supply and agricultural practices with some tricks they invented for their own profit, operating with stuff they know nothing about.