billy said:
OK, You forced me to do a brief search. I trust SCIENTIFIC STUDIES reported in the Guardian newspaper, National Academies of Science, and National Geographic etc for dozens of other peer-reviewed articles included in first quote below more than your or other individual opinions.
It's not a matter of who you trust, it's a matter of whether you are paying attention.
None of your links and quotes there support your contentions over mine, and several if read carefully support mine over yours (they are among the sources of my opinions, after all, so their agreement is not strange). The yield comparisons you present, for example, are not from per acre accounts matching comparable varieties comparably farmed - when that is done, the normal 5-15% cost in yield from the plant expression of these large blocks of inserted code is obvious and acknowledged and not at all mysterious. Neither are they long term - partly for the very good reason that this new stuff hasn't been around long enough for long term observation, and partly because things like pesticide resistance or drought vulnerability or economic disaster tend to show up after a few years, and the corporate interests financing these studies don't want to record that kind of stuff.
This is obvious upon reading them - you would have no trouble noticing such matters yourself, if you tried.
And you keep posting stuff like this:
Before I join your efforts to ban GM food, despite their many well established benefits and lack of even a single well documented death caused by GM foods, I´ll ask you to join me in efforts to outlaw the growing and sale of that known killer of many: non-GM peanuts
The personal jab is unworthy, OK? And you are wrong, blatantly and repeatedly: I do not and never have advocated banning GM foods, the weasel wording about "well documented death" should make you stop and think rather than assert, the GM peanuts that are supposed to be non-allergenic do not yet exist on the market and may never pan out -> and that is one of my major points, repeated over and over: the naive proponents of GM are overlooking the reality of what is actually happening, the real life doings of Monsanto et al, in favor of a potential and a possible future of wonderful benefits that nobody is denying but which does not yet exist and is not the problem here.
Do I even need to repost the famous incident in which Brazil nut allergen was engineered into soybeans and actually got to retail - when caught, which was by accident and not by any of the corporate scientists or regulatory watchdogs, the beans had to be recalled from feed stores and other retail outlets where they had been shipped. No one knows whether anyone died from that - they didn't get it all back, and it would have been lethal to anyone with a severe peanut allergy, but there was no "well documented death". Just another example of the reality so far of GM, this peanut allergy business - the potential is wonderful, what's happened so far is not so good.
And continuing, like this:
billy said:
The *** link also states there has been for nearly two decades, the opportunity for GM foods to kill many people as follows:
" Most people in the United States don't realize that they've been eating genetically engineered foods since the mid-1990s. More than 60 percent of all processed foods on U.S. supermarket shelves—including pizza, chips, cookies, ice cream, salad dressing, corn syrup, and baking powder—contain ingredients from engineered soybeans, corn, or canola. In the past decade or so, the biotech plants that go into these processed foods have leaped from hothouse oddities to crops planted on a massive scale..."
I use canola as it seems to be the healthiest mix of oils, but know it is GM modified from the poisonous rape seed
Never mind the slippery deflection of my arguments into a narrowly defined food safety argument, although it's irritating - we'll just ride with that a minute: So if you actually read what's written there we have less than ten years of widespread consumption of GM food products to look at, and that's lumping each different genetic modification in dozens of different plants consumed in hundreds of different ways by all kinds of people (from drought resistance to herbicide sequestration to pesticide expression, from oil to condiment to raw whole plant eating, from pregnant women and high-calorie children to immune compromised elderly), into one undifferentiated lump. That solidly supports my "opinion" above. Not yours. The stuff is new, untested, unfamiliar, therefore unsafe. That's just ordinary common sense, based on your posted documentation.
In other words, you appear to be taking unwarranted implications from your cursory and obviously unconsidered linkage, rather than attending to the actual content. Here's another:
I use canola as it seems to be the healthiest mix of oils, but know it is GM modified from the poisonous rape seed.
That almost sounds as though you think the GM modification is what made it non-poisonous. That would be untrue - the plant was never very poisonous (if at all, the matter is uncertain and the plant had been consumed by the needy for centuries) originally, the oil even less so, and even the potential for poisoning (along with the disagreeable flavors and high acid content of the original plant) were bred out in the 1970s by Canadian agricultural researchers at a public university using standard varietal crossing and backcrossing means (other improvements in nutrition and cultivation were made at that time, as well). The GM stuff came much later, and was for disease and drought resistance, not edibility or nutrition. The GM stuff does not benefit you the consumer in the least - although you do run some extra risk now, from lack of experience with the effects of the engineered code insertions (all the varietals used in the 1970s crosses were familiar).
Just to emphasize: the Vitamin A rice is in beta - it might work, it might not, it's one of those potentials that GM proponents prefer to dwell on while 90% of the US soybean crop is handed over to two or three corporate friendly GM clones that pack themselves with herbicide complex. Meanwhile Golden Rice is being promoted partly in lieu of promoting whole grain ("brown") rice consumption, used for leverage on local farming economics and politics, and developed partly in lieu of standard
or modified breeding of more nutritious but unpatentable landraces of rice - part of the nutrient problem with rice is a widespread polycultural bias favoring white rice, and a yield bias favoring a couple of varieties hit on as better suited to industrial agriculture. That bias in promotion and development is certainly - if statistics mean anything - killing people, but not in any "well documented" way.
And so forth. This is not rocket science - the risks are obvious, not arcane hidden things; the research into them is not rich and public and well distributed but sparse and concealed and glossed over; the people dominating the public discussion are actively promoting what is clearly a corporate profit center and primarily agribusiness benefit, only incidentally and potentially a public good, only by good fortune even reasonably safe.