The LiquidLegends Lounge - Page 568

GMO issues is a wide umbrella that surrounds a few issues. In this post I'll try to talk about the issues of safety, labeling, efficacy, production, and sustainability, although often indirectly.

Generally speaking, it's first important to understand that there is in almost all cases a very large divide between frontier-pushing scientific research and practice. An easy example is that even under the paradigm of Western biomedicine, clinical practice is often very far removed from the latest scientific publications. Agriculture is no different, and food production in America and Canada typically follows and reflects the latest trends in machinery more closely than it follows/reflects the latest information from, say, soil sciences.

This means that in practice, there is a very large difference between the latest in GMO technology, and the actual production of genetically modified produce. Many arguments about "GMOs" as a whole only actually concern themselves with one of these two fields, and often people who are arguing about GMOs are talking about different things completely.

Regarding the latest in GMO technology... it's more or less failed to live up to expectations. The hype and potential are there, but as someone (ticklish I think it was?) said it's much more difficult than people expect. There is no reason to believe that the quality of being genetically modified in and of itself causes harm to humans / causes a food to become less healthy or safe for consumption. We do not currently have reason to believe that the methodology being used in genetic manipulation would cause such things either. There are no published studies that demonstrate a strong link between genetically modified food and health decline over long periods of time, nor are there any studies that demonstrate that the food is safe over long periods of time, primarily because the requisite scale of time has not yet occurred. It is wholly possible for us to fuck something up and create and distribute a produce that causes harm over a long period of time, and while there is no reason to believe that this would happen it is also true that our ability to test these things to the extent that good science requires is outpaced by the demand for production, so this is a very real possibility regardless of how improbable it is.

tl;dr: They're almost certainly safe, but it's possible for mistakes to happen. Also they're not as cool as everyone thinks.

In terms of agricultural practice, GMO produce has been very successful. This obviously varies from individual crop to individual crop, but generally speaking, the most successful GMO crops have been those with modifications that make agricultural production easier, and GMO crops with modifications that focus on achieving specific nutritional qualities or whatever have not been nearly as successful. So, in and of themselves, when people say something like "GMO crops are probably healthier for you because of GMO stuff" then they're not right. They're not wrong either though. A huge factor in what makes agricultural production easier is a lower reliance of various sprays (herbicides, insecticides, etc) which while most often are generally regarded as safe for human consumption are often sketchy at possessing that quality. Generally speaking, the less amount of sprays the better (unless ofc the sprays would've done something like removing various pathogens such as ecoli), so in this sense GMO crops can often be considered indirectly 'healthier'.

tl;dr: Most significant benefit of GMO produce so far is decreased reliance on spraying.

Regarding sprays / organic farming though: A lot of the importance of organic farming (which for the record I do not practice on my farm) comes from environmental/sustainability factors and is not related to health factors. Hipsters just associate it with health due to lack of chemicals which is based on a bad understanding of general science. Despite not being healthier, I don't encourage anyone to have the opinion that organic farming is useless or anything like that, since in terms of agricultural techniques it is a style that is very sustainable (although not the most sustainable, but that's a different topic really). However, organic legal regulations are completely disconnected from theoretical organic farming practices. This varies from region to region, but as a general heads up "Canadian certified organic (CCO)" is complete BS and doesn't mean that the crop was grown using organic principles nor does it mean that the crop was grown in Canada, although the only test conducted that I'm aware of found that ~75% of supermarket CCO produce still possessed both of those qualities. My understanding is that USDA certified organic is significantly more meaningful as a label, and that traditionally Canada's organic market has largely been a backdoor for the American market.

tl;dr: Organic farming is cool but organic labels are often useless - learn your labels (if you care).

Labels obviously matter a lot and consumers/citypeople are pretty stupid, so I don't like the idea of needing to label things as "GMO", although retaining the legal ability to label something as "GMO free" is definitely legit, as people should defs be allowed to opt out of the like 0.0005% (arbitrarily low number) chance of major fuckup. However, based on my experience with and extensive knowledge of historical and contemporary food labeling, I would say there is no reason to be optimistic about this being handled in a meaningful manner by corporations or governments.

Outside of consumption-based qualities, there are actually some very good reasons to be skeptical of GMO crops. The current major paradigm in Western agriculture is monoculture, which is the idea of growing a lot of one thing in one place. Monoculture has many benefits, such as the enabling of machines that enable agriculture on a massive scale that is otherwise not possible, but it also has some large flaws, some of which GMO crops exacerbate into a larger issue than is currently / was previously the case. The most well known is probably the idea of "super pests" - in a monocultural system biodiversity and natural competition are reduced to such a degree that singular pests can dominate entire systems in a manner that they otherwise cannot, and through becoming immune to various contemporary methods of being killed off a pest can assert itself to a degree that we simply cannot control. In terms of GMO technologies, this primarily concerns weeds (bugs are more an issue of sprays, which is partially curtailed by GMO-reduced reliance on sprays). At the national level, pigweed and some varieties of millet have already become a large concern due to their ability to dominate monocultural corn growth. They're not completely system-destroying, as we can currently simply use a larger amount of stronger sprays than was previously needed (which is in and of itself a problem), but the potential is there.

Outside of agricultural practice, there's also corporate practice. To be blunt, although many of Monsanto's products range from pretty decent to great, Monsanto is really shitty in terms of it's corporate practice and poses a massive threat to agricultural sustainability in America and Canada. Outside of north america, Monsanto becomes even more dangerous, as the corporation has the potential to dominate entire agricultural spheres in countries on the less wealthy end of global capitalism.

In terms of sustainable agricultural practice, GMO crops are a toss-up. In some ways they're better and in some ways they're worse. Hypothetical reduced chemical spray / synthetic fertilizer reliance is a huge benefit since we have to mine for the materials to make those things, although due to super-pests this is turning out to not be the case and instead requires the synthesis of new technologies. A semi-popular GMO crop is a variety of corn that gets turned into biofuel slightly easier than regular corn at the expense of becoming unusable as a food for human consumption. This seems like a good use, but due to corporate people having more power over the land than farmers, in practice this actually results in a large amount of agricultural land being diverted away from food production and into biofuel production, which has debatable value but is generally considered a threat to food security, particularly in the context of international production. Additionally, many GMO crops produced so far have the benefit of excelling at what they're designed to do, but only in a very limited context. This means they require different/more care than non-GMO crops (ex corn that produces larger cobs but requires significantly more nitrogen to grow at all) which often reinforces unsustainable patterns of conventional western agriculture (ex reliance on synthetic nitrogen-based fertilizers). Essentially, we're just trading problems that we've spent a long time figuring out and have a partial understanding of for problems that we don't have a particularly good understanding of.

tl;dr: Even if you don't hate/fear GMOs, it's reasonable to hate/fear super-pests, the Monsanto corporation, and uncertain futures, particularly if you're in or care about an area that would be affected by these issues to a larger degree (ex developing countries, agrarian areas).

So overall the politicians talking about "hurr durr labels vs science" really have a poor understanding of the issue at hand, and I don't think they can reconcile the various camps without a stronger understanding of why there is a divide.