Unmasking the GMO ‘Humanitarian’ Narrative

[Judi Lynn]

November 13, 2015
Unmasking the GMO ‘Humanitarian’ Narrative

by Colin Todhunter

Genetically modified (GM) crops are going to feed the world. Not only that, supporters of GM technology say it will produce better yields than non-GM crops, increase farmers’ incomes, lead to less chemical inputs, be better suited to climatic changes, is safe for human consumption and will save the lives of millions. Sections of the pro-GMO lobby are modern-day evangelists who denounce, often with a hefty dose of bigoted zeal, anyone who questions their claims and self-proclaimed humanitarian motives.

But their claims do not stack up. Even if some of their assertions about GMOs (GM organisms) appear to be credible, they are often based on generalisations, selective data or questionable research and thus convey a distorted picture. The claims made about GMOs resemble a house of cards that rest on some very fraudulent foundations indeed (see ‘Altered Genes and Twisted Truth’ by Steven Druker).

The fact that many of the pro-GMO lobby spend a good deal of their time attacking and smearing critics and flagging up the technology’s alleged virtues while ignoring certain important issues says much about their priorities.

If they care about farmers so much, indeed if they value food security, choice and democracy so much – as they frequently claim to – why do they not spend their time and energy highlighting and challenging the practices of some of the corporations that are behind the GM project and which have adversely impacted so many across the world?

For instance, consider the following.

1) There is a massive spike in cancer cases in Argentina which is strongly associated with glyphosate-based herbicides – a massive earner for agribusiness. Not only that but throughout South America smallholders and indigenous peoples are being driven from their lands as a result of a corporate takeover aimed at expanding this type of (GM) chemical-intensive agriculture. The outcome has been described as ecocide and genocide.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/13/unmasking-the-gmo-humanitarian-narrative/

[NNadir]

1. Pure garbage. There are people going blind for a lack of vitamin A in their diet because of...

...ignorance about golden rice. Genetic modification has been going on for billions of years. It's called evolution.

I am increasingly disturbed by the growth of contempt for science in my party. If both major parties in this country wallow in scientific ignorance, it does not bode well for the future of our country and we are sure to join the third worlders who are in fact the major benefactors of this technology.

For full disclosure, my sixteen year old son, an honor student, is considering a career in either agroscience or materials Science and I couldn't possibly be prouder than his focus on serving humanity, although I worry a great deal about how ignorance will impact not only him in his career but also how such ignorance will impact all of his contemporaries.

These are horrible times when ignorance gets such rote and unenlightened support.

[cprise]

2. It tickles my heart to see pro-nukes reach for the kind of fallacies

for which coal moguls, weather presenters and certain "statisticians" are known.

If genetic engineering were the same thing as evolution, then the special terms and tools that define it would not be necessary in the first place and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Wall St. would not have to keep sinking money into their futuristic cash cow, either.

Now, tell us how "climate change happens all the time anyway" and how "carbon dioxide is good for plants" and how "people are dying because of our weak response in the Middle East". Better yet... "man is a part of nature" therefore anything we do is "natural" and so we have no responsibility for anything we do to the biosphere.

[NNadir]

3. It would be rather impossible to explain genetics either to a...

...creationist or to an anti-nuke anti-GMO type.

Now tell me, what "special tools" do you imagine are involved in genetic engineering? Maybe, since you're ranting on the subject, you can inform us which "special tools" to which you object.

Maybe you can inform us of your depth of scientific understanding of molecular biology by offering a commentary on this relatively recent review in the primary scientific literature: Nature Reviews Genetics 13, 283-296 (April 2012)

Do you object to the modification of E. Coli to make cancer drugs, like, um, say Herceptin? Do you know what Herceptin is? It's mode of action? How would you like to explain to a child who loses his mother to breast cancer because Herceptin is a "GMO" product that you're so fucking smart that you just knew his mother had to die because you object to "special tools."

Have you ever eaten a single food that was prepared by using the "special tool" called a harvester, or do you still live as a hunter-gatherer?

How about special tools involved in planting corn, for example? If human beings went extinct, how many varieties of modern corn, corn developed and grown since the early 17th century would survive?

Maybe you'd be interested in telling us all about your profound understanding of the work of Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintoch.

Here, let me help you: Barbara McClintock and the Discovery of Jumping Genes (Transposons)

Don't know anything about corn biology? How about wheat? How many dumb anti-GMO types know anything about the genetic history of wheat?

Let's turn to more modern issues beyond the development, by breeding, of maize into corn.

Why did the American Soybean crop not collapse during the recent continental scale drought? How many dumb anti-nukes would have given a rat's ass about farmers had the soybean crop collapsed? How many would have looked away from their silly and toxic dreams about electric cars to care about the cost of foods, including soybeans, for impoverished people had that crop collapsed, as surely it would have done in the same drought in 1995?

Do you know anything at all about the subject of plant genetics, or may we add this to the list of things that anti-nukes discuss about which they know nothing?

I would note that an anti-nuke is hardly a person to lecture anyone anywhere at any time on the subject of climate change. By definition the word "anti-nuke" describes a person who hates, for no rational reason, the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free primary energy.

I have yet to meet a single anti-nuke, not one, who knows what the word "fallacy" actually means.

For the record, irrespective of the drooling nonsense oozing endlessly out of the collective mouths of insufferable anti-science philistines, I have spent the last two decades reading extensively on the topic of climate change and certainly need not apologize to any damn fool about my level of knowledge of the subject. One of the preeminent scientific writers on the topic of climate change published, not too long ago, one of the most widely read papers, in one of the highest impact environmental journals on the topic of climate change and how to address it. I cite it frequently, knowing full well that there is not one dangerous dumb-assed anti-nuke who has ever opened a science book or journal:

Here, for the benefit of any more stupid people who hate science because they don't know any, it is again: Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895

Do you know who Jim Hansen is? No? As clueless on this topic as on Barbara McClintoch?

Every single anti-nuke reveals deep, abiding, evidence of how much damage a lack of education - the proper word for this condition being "ignorance" - can do.

When confronting these people and their special ignorance, one wonders whether they know they are wearing the intellectual equivalent of a "kick me" sign on their fat asses. I suspect that they simply don't know. Any subject that requires a modicum of intellect is probably way out of their reaches.

Rather than drooling all the time, these people might better spend their time taking remedial science courses as some school offering such things. But this is unlikely. They seem to enjoy being ignorant, and to wear their ignorance as badges of pride.

So be it. There's nothing I can do about it, clearly. The same damn fools who were here spewing this nonsense ten years ago - 310 billion tons of carbon dioxide ago - are here today.

Have a nice evening.

[cprise]

4. There is no hypocrisy in being choosy about technologies

particularly if certain technologies are based on the idea of self-reproducing systems having fail-safe genes that are "perfect".

Uh huh. And who gives a f*ck about one person's cure infecting other people's bodies and causing side-effects? Who cares that the world doesn't revolve around Genentech and that their viral products may someday interact with other GE microbes.

And -- once more with feeling because Monsanto's irresponsible behavior wasn't a big enough warning -- lets ignore the effects evolution has on organisms! Yay!

This is another industry that is trying to shut-out regulation and ethics.

We've already been through this techno-utopian circus with nuclear and even more so with chemistry (oh yes... 'Everything is chemicals!' A lovely fallacy employed by stripping a term of its context, a PR tactic that would make Phillip Morris proud.) Those fields are dominated by rent-seeking profit and today have more in common with engineering than science. Their tendency to mis-manage risks is predictable, almost like clockwork, and they revel in the act of regulatory capture. After seeing what Exxon have done with their own chemical and climatological expertise (hired other experts to create a smokescreen against the former) -- and no doubt there is more to see -- I wouldn't trust these industries and their monopolistic tendencies as far as I could throw them.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled blowhard insinuating the planet can't make enough Vitamin A without genetic engineering (though I'd translate that as: Cannot make enough food waste without extractive agriculture... the only reason to deprive people of Vitamin A is economics).

Also, maybe readers would like to try some of this (its a fun if scary read):
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/22/bio-hack-vaginas-problem-silicon-valley

[NNadir]

5. QED. And I quote...

Last edited Fri Nov 20, 2015, 07:49 AM - Edit history (1)

... "And who gives a f*ck about one person's cure infecting other people's bodies and causing side-effects?"

...quod erat demonstrandum...which proves was what had to be proved.

I certainly know that the ignorant don't give a fuck. Every word that drools out of their mouths proves it, and I know many hard working scientists who get demoralized by ignorance, but who somehow, since they do give a fuck, soldier on.

The ignorant, snarling and cursing thugs of little or no depth, do not know how to build things, but seek only to destroy that which they are incompetent to understand, probably because they resent anyone who can do what they cannot do themselves.

What's particularly cute here is the misogyny, applicable in this case, the sort of thing that pretty typical among dumb people.

I had no idea that you ate the contents of bioreactors, and that you know thousands of people who have been exposed to E. Coli engineered to produce Herceptin. As this would come as a surprise to the millions of highly educated scientists involved in making this cure for breast cancer possible, maybe you should submit a paper to Nature Genetics entitled, " A lovely fallacy employed by stripping a term of its context, a PR tactic that would make Phillip Morris proud," to describe this science. I'm sure the editors of the journal will be very impressed.

I would note for any asshole carrying on about Phillip Morris, that my own father was killed by lung cancer derived from the products of...Phillip Morris. Now as it happens, via genetically modified organisms, bevacizumab can be manufactured on a large scale, allowing some lung cancer patients to survive, including those who get lung cancer from the coal, oil and gas that's burned because dumb people hate nuclear energy. Since I know the pain of losing someone to lung cancer, I am certainly glad that bevacizumab exists, and I wish that they'd understood genetics like this while my old man was choking to death on his own blood.

Basically, dumb people, as always, make the world less safe while carrying on with a misplaced sense of self-nobility, self-nobility that only can be sustained by, again, the ignorant.

Dumb shits...

Have a nicer evening than those people about whom you don't give a fuck, including those who happen to have HER2+ breast cancer, some of whom are happy, and have families that are happy, husbands, children, mothers and fathers who are happy that Herceptin exists..

[cprise]

6. No, sir, the burden of proof is on the manufacturer. n/t