russ said:
The first part is a fact, but intentionally misapplied to the second part, which together yield an intentionally misleading message. A lie. And an obvious one. And one you repeated over and over in a thread about a year ago. Again: farmers aren't idiots. They know their business and they don't grow GMO crops for no reason. They grow GMO crops because they yield more and make them more money.
If I recall correctly, the last time you posted that troll shit, I responded as follows:1) Making more money in the short run is not the same thing as increasing yield in the long run (how many times do you have to be reminded of that?) 2) Farmers, especially Third World farmers, have been victims of corporate power and various economic pressures, as well as outright scams, in the past - and the commercial forces behind GMOs are quite powerful. It's not that farmers are idiots, it's that their choices are not always free. There's a reason 90% of US farmers have gone out of business in the past century, and it's not that they were idiots.
Targeted Third World farmers right now often have little access to modern agricultural methods and resources except through GMOs (the GMO marketers package their seeds with politically arranged deals on land, fertilizer, and financing, combined with the threat of competition and exclusion from those, in places and among people more vulnerable than even the American farmers who were dragooned accordingly) - and the contrast between the early gains from GMO adoption and the former pre-industrial era methods is what the claims of great benefits from GMOs have been based on.
And that, unlike my posting, is actually dishonest.
russ said:
GMOs enable use of more/harsher pesticides/herbicides,
Not in general. The only currently marketed GM that even approximates that is the glyphosate resistance one - there is no pesticide equivalent - and it encourages the use of a less harsh herbicide (which it is destroying) so that this
which reduces losses, hence increasing net yields.
is only true in invalid comparisons (with failure to use other means of reducing loss, different seeds, failure to average over time, etc etc etc). In valid comparisons, it reduces cost per unit yield in the short run, and that's its advantage. That is a considerable advantage, but it's not an increase in net yield over the otherwise possible.
russ said:
The yield gains from using GMOs cannot be achieved without the GMOs.
That is not true. In the first place, you are lumping "GMOs" - like almost all naive promoters of these things, you end up making assertions that are not just false but impossible; in the second, nothing achieved by the pesticide and herbicide G manipulations cannot be achieved in other ways. So a net yield gain of 5 - 15% is available by using those means and non-engineered but otherwise identical seeds, as far as we have evidence.
russ said:
And the other side of the coin is that using a GMO crop without changing your farming to take advantage of what it does for you won't produce higher yields -- that's the side of the coin that you are using out of context to intentionally mislead about the [lack of] benefit of GMO crops.
I have never used that fact for anything. I accused GMO promoters of using invalid comparisons with incommensurable farming methods to claim yield advantages for GMOs that belong instead to modern farming methods in general, and that accusation is accurate.
billvon said:
Not if you go back far enough. We planted seeds and hoped they grew.
Are you seriously using comparisons with stone age pre-agricultural landscape manipulation in your defense of GMOs?
billvon said:
GMO's result in cheaper crops. More expensive crops mean poor people starve, since they cannot afford food.
Fertilizer, efficient machinery, modern seed varieties, transportation and marketing infrastructure, storage and processing facilities, financing, result in cheaper food. GMOs? Some help, some don't.
billvon said:
Keep in mind that many genetic mods REDUCE the use of insecticides by making the plant less attractive to pests.
For example? Remember that expressing an insecticide in the tissue of every plant across an entire landscape all the time is the opposite of "reducing the use of insecticides".
billvon said:
Agreed. Eventually tolerance will be evolved in diseases, insects and weeds, and the utility of current GMO's will decline.
"Eventually" is five or ten years.
billion said:
At which point you'd logically create new ones.
As the example of antibiotics demonstrates, it ain't that easy. Nobody has any idea what could be used to replace Bt insecticide varieties in an engineered plant, for example - or as a topical insecticide with that degree of safety in human exposure, its use before Monsanto got hold of it and began to ruin it. When it's gone the way of Penicillin and DDT, like them its replacements are almost certainly going to be comparitively dangerous and expensive and disappointing. And that cost - that loss to the public resources and welfare - will not be borne by the corporate entities that are profiting while imposing it.