Ah yes. Too much power in the hands of the corporations.

Imagine walking into an apothocary in 1800. The local pharmacist, like your farmer, made his own compounds from simple ingredients. Opium, arsenic, mercury, a host of dubious and inneffective plant derivitives… None of it worked, except the opiates, but still no evil corporations dominating the industry and forcing pharmacists to buy their vastly superior products.

I think the EU should ban all products made by the handful of evil corporations dominating the pharmaceudical industry today and return to those simpler times.

Same for the handful of corporations that produce your vehicles, cell phones, televisions, fuel and energy, the computers and software we are using right now, the tractor your farmer uses… Think about how many things in your life are supplied by some sort of self supporting cottage industry as you imagine agriculture to be. Its gonna be a short list.

What a bunch of spoiled children you all are. You have never watched your plants die in the field knowing that your family will likely starve this winter. You would not survive one week outside of your pampered existance without some product made in an industry dominated by a handful of corporations “forcing” you to buy their products.

DDT! Global Warming! GM foods!

Yeah notice in all those cases its the poor Africans and Asians who end up dead. You will be fine.

Spindok

You are wrong on every count:

Not all Republicans are opposed to stem cell research, even from still-borne fetuses, only the super religious ones. Alas, these are the only Republicans willing to run for office and subject themselves to the malicious, dishonest, and relentless invective spewed by people like you.

Whether or not global warming is happening is a HUGE red herring dragged across the path of scientific discussions. It DOES NOT MATTER IN THE SLIGHTEST! What does matter is whether or not it is caused by man-made CO2 emissions. Here there is conclusive proof that that is NOT the case. There was a great article on that very issue published here a few days ago. I don’t know how to search the archives, if you do, look it up. What you want to do is force us back to the pre-industrial era, which can only feed 1 billion people or less. How are you going to justify killing 5 billion men, women, and children? It’s not the Republicans, but you Democrats who will “Kill us all!”

There is no, repeat, no; no, no, no chance that GM foodstuffs will effect human DNA (i.e., cause illness and mutations in human cells). That’s complete utter nonsense. There is, probably, no greater difference between human DNA and yogurt bacteria DNA, yet most every Green on the planet swears by yogurt. Nobody has mutated from it yet. Do your insane ideas come from the propaganda the liberal grammar school teachers are teaching now?

Now I have personal experience. I am a city boy, but I do grow tomatoes in my back yard. I buy hybrid plants (for all I know, GM products) from the local mega-agri-business (Wal-Mart). Specifically, I buy “Sweet 100’s”, a small cherry tomato that does produce 100s of the sweetest most favorable tomatoes I have ever eaten, at least when fertilized with Miracle Grow commercial fertilizer, which also must be purchased at Wal-Mart. Last year I decided to save the budget-busting $5.00 and grow my tomatoes from the previous year’s seeds. What I got then were “Sour 25’s” and I had to buy my tomatoes from the other local mega-agri-business, Ralph’s Supermarket. Serves me right, huh? Screw natural, organic foodstuffs!

I don’t think Ian Thorpe knows as much as he thinks he does. It sounds like he’s using generalizations to buttress his arguments.
Having personal experience in the Midwest agriculture industry, I’ll try to answer your questions. Agri-business, such as Monsanto/Dekalb/Asgrow or Dupont/Pioneer don’t have their own fertilizer brand. Usually farmers buy fertilizer at their local co-ops.

If you decide to plant roundup ready corn, then you need to use roundup as a herbicide. if you use a herbicide resistant seed then you don’t have to cultivate during the season which saves your fields from erosion.

farmers i do business with never sign multi-year seed corn/bean contracts with monsanto or pioneer. so if your crop doesn’t do well with monsanto one year, you can either complain to the monsanto seed dealer and he might give you a discount on seed the next year or you can switch to pioneer or one of the many other kinds of seed corn/beans.

nobody i have ever heard of saves the seed they combine from the previous year to plant again. one reason is if your using a GMO then its against the law. there are always stories every year of no account farmers doing this somewhere in the US but they always get prosecuted and fined. another reason is that seed corn/beans can come pretreated before you put it in the planter with different chemicals so you lose out if you use last year’s crop as untreated seed.

hopefully i covered all your concerns Bill N.

JackT:

its not that republicans are against stem cell technology, they are against embryonic stem cell research using embryonic stem cell harvested from fetuses/eggs. I’m all for using adult stem cells and now, if you read popular science which from your tirade i doubt you do, you would know theres now a way to use skin cells and turn them into stem cells. saying that republicans are against all stem cell technology is both unequivocally false and unerringly stupid since you obviously have no idea what stem cell technology is.

Your civil response to my not-so-civil comment points out the immense superiority of civil discourse to the other kind. The anonymous nature of the internet encourages people to log in, drop a stink bomb, and slink away. This rarely leads to anything worthwhile. I shall try to follow your example:

Your comment fails to answer my question: In what way does mega-agri-business force farmers to use their products (plural)? Granted, it’s not just the seed, but the fertilizer and probably a good many other products besides. However, can’t I still say “No, thanks”? Even if I am a communist peasant working the land without any say in how that is to be done, that only bumps the decision up the chain of command. Somebody can still say no.

Suppose I am a farmer and am sold a bill of goods by Monsanto. I buy their hideously expensive products (plural) and thus generate a huge profit for the mega-corporation. I farm my land with these products. I don’t like the results. Can’t I revert back to my old seed the next year? To answer “No” to that question requires one of the following:

1) The expense of the Monsanto “experiment” bankrupts me and I am forced to give my land to the corporation to pay my debts.

2) The use of the man-made products ruins the land, which will now grow only Monsanto’s plants.

3) The crop is inferior to the old one. For example, the grain lacks vitamins or contains some toxin, or the cotton is weak and cannot be spun into thread, so that nobody will buy my products and/or it results in mass malnutrition.

4) I didn’t save any old seed and can’t acquire any from my neighbors or the local co-operative.

Do you have any evidence that one or more of the above occur? The mere fact that a huge, rich, greedy monopoly has a product that is vastly superior and insists on selling that product at a huge profit does not, in and of itself, make the company or the product bad. If I make $100 farming my land the old way and $200 with Monsanto’s products, which cost me $50, am I not still making $50 more with Monsanto? How is that bad? What’s more relevant, why can’t I revert to the old way anytime I choose?

As for the assertion that man-made mutations are different from natural ones, that just isn’t so. A mutation is a mutation, whether it comes about from cosmic rays, benz (alpha) pyrene (from a fire), or deliberate manipulation in a lab. When you eat a bunch of mutated DNA from a dish of GM corn, that DNA is broken down to its elements in your gut, just like any other. You don’t start growing corn in your intestine. Your DNA is unaffected. The only possible damage is to the corn plant, in which case it never makes it to market. The idea that natural selection will eliminate a non-viable mutation is quite true. The idea that natural selection will not eliminate a non-viable mutation if that mutation is man-made, is bizarre. It is certainly not true. A deleterious (bad) mutation (whatever caused it) that results in a dead plant is eliminated at once. One that results in an inferior plant is eliminated by the human as bad for business. So, how, exactly, are man-made mutations worse than natural ones?

There is quite a bit of documentation on the plants that predated modern food crops. When humans domesticated food plants, they learned to select the plants with the most desirable characteristics and save some of that seed for the next season. Keep doing that for a thousand years and the crops will bare little resemblance to the original.

The use of genetically modified crops does not mean that open pollinated seeds will suddenly vanish from the planet. As far as I know, no farmer is banned from using heirloom seed. They seem to have a larger following than even 20 years ago.

Particularly when corn is grown as a biofuel, I’m all for engineering it to use a minimum of space, chemicals and water.

“It is also correct to say that modrn agriculture depends on selective breeding of crop species. The pro GM lobby undermine themselves however by trying to pretend genetic modification is no different to selective breeding. Nature will abort unviable seed thus only viable strains will be produced by selective breeding. GM overrides that natural selection process to allow the creation of mutant strains.”

You appear to not know about ionizing radiation and chemical mutagenesis breeding. Literally thousands of crop varieties have been created by these un-natural methods which kill the vast majority of seeds exposed. A tiny fraction of the seeds exposed to either chemicals or ionizing radiation survive and then these seeds afre screened for new traits. we have never known anything about the genetic chnages to these crops. This compared to GE crops which has extensive knowledge of the genes involved, locations, expression patterns etc. Genetically engineering of crops are by far the most precise method ever used by man and certainly far more is known about each and every GE crop compared to the thousands of commercial varieties made with random mutagenesis breeding.

The zero tolerence regulations for adventitious presense of GM content from the organic industry is a non-starter as such restrictive regulations do not exist for any other crop. It is impossible without absolutely no GM crops being grown. I find the world needs to debate how a group that represent about 2% of the food grown dictate rules for the other 98% of the world food producers. Rediculous. The IFOAM does not advocate any testing for GM content and as far as I know there is no such set limit on what level of GM adventitious presense would revoke organic status. Further I am unaware of any organic certification anywhere being revoked for GM content. This during the past decade of unprecedented growth of both GM crops and organic crops. It is also interesting that GURT crops would eliminate a significant portion of the adventitious “problem” for the organic industry. This seems to be why they scream so loudly about it. It is my opinion the organic industry is very afraid of any technology that will alleviate or eliminate their boogeyman arguments about GM crops and food. After all a significant amount of their marketing is based on pushing fear of other cropping methods.