Reply #100: Golden rice is a canard [View All]

[IrateCitizen]

Here's just one article I found, but if you do an internet search for "golden rice", you'll find dozens.
http://www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/2001/04/04042001/rice_42868.asp?site=email

And in this statement you're pretty well contradicting yourself:
It's like medicine. If someone develops a new treatment for malaria, does that mean more people die from malaria? Nope. It means that the people who can't afford it are still up the creek. That's capitalism for you. Now, there's plenty of stuff getting around that helps poor people get the medicine they need, on humanitarian reasons. Same thing with GM. Monsanto's bending backwards to make sure that the people who need what they've got get it.

On one hand, you say that poor people not having access to medicines is a sad by-product of capitalism. On the other hand, you present a corporation, Monsanto, as being interested in philanthropy in the third world.

Monsanto is a corporation, the perfect embodiment of modern capitalism. It is a single-minded machine whose sites are set on maximizing profits and opening up markets. Monsanto is not in Europe out of the goodness of their heart. They are there to open up markets and extract profit from those markets.

What do subsistence farmers have to fear? Ever hear of a thing called the TRIPS agreement? It stands for "Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights". One of the things that the biotech industry has been fighting for is the right to patent life forms. What that could mean is that they could hold the patent to the seeds being used by subsistence farmers. The subsistence farmers could not save seeds, because that would be patent infringement. They would have to buy new seeds each and every year.

That hardly seems a boon to subsistence farmers, does it?