Guest post: Some of the more common misconceptions about GMOs
Guest post by James Garnett, from a Facebook post inspired by yet another GMO fray on a friend’s wall.
This is off the cuff and not super organized, but I want to hit some of the more common misconceptions.
1. Monsanto does not “ruin farmers with lawsuits”. In the last ~20 years, Monsanto has gone to court only 11 times, in cases of overt lawbreaking. Moreover, the juries have found in Monsanto’s favor every single time.
2. Exactly one farmer was sued for replanting patented seeds in a lawsuit brought by Monsanto: Canadian Percy Schmeiser. He lost the case after being caught in an outright lie about his practices. However, the court awarded no damages to Monsanto because—bizarrely—Schmeiser didn’t even use herbicides on his herbicide-resistant plants grown from the patent-protected seeds.
3.. Monsanto does not preclude farmers from replanting seed from the previous year’s crop; nature, common sense, and financial reality do. Plants grown from the seed of F1 hybrids of the type that Monsanto sells do not grow true, and so the resulting crop cannot be sold. Anyone who has ever replanted their own seeds from hybrid plants knows this, even backyard gardeners.
4. Even if a farmer were confused enough today to want to replant the seeds grown from RoundUp Ready seed stock, Monsanto would not sue them–because the patent on that technology has expired.
5. Seed patents are not new. “Traditional” seeds as well as GMO seeds are covered by patents, and have been ever since people began experimenting with hybrids of any kind at all.
6. Farmers are not required to buy and plant patented seeds. There are plenty of seeds not under patent that they can use, including many sold by Monsanto.
7. The overwhelming majority of commercial large-scale farmers have no problems with Monsanto seed/technology contracts, because they ensure consistency and fairness.
8. Monsanto contracts do not require farmers to purchase their herbicides.
9. The infamous “Monsanto Terminator Seeds” don’t exist.
10. No farmer has ever been sued by Monsanto for “the wind blowing patented seeds” into their fields from a neighbor’s patented-seed crop or a passing truck.
11. Monsanto’s policies have not resulted in “thousands of Indian farmers committing suicide.”
12. Lateral gene transfer already happens in nature all the time. There are snake gene sequences in the bovine genetic code, for example.
13. GMO crops result in less pesticide use.
14. GMO crops have not been shown to cause allergies, cancers, or other health problems, despite thousands of studies over the last ~30 years. The scientific consensus is that GMO crops are no more or less risky than conventional crops.
15. If you say “GMO crops are not proven safe!”, then you fundamentally misunderstand how science works. Statistical studies do not “prove something safe”, they attempt to demonstrate specific correlations. That is, science of this kind does not generally demonstrate the _absence_ of something, but rather the _presence_ of something*. Consider the example of tobacco: did the many tobacco studies of the 20th century list all the conditions that tobacco use DOESN’T cause, or did they establish correlations between tobacco use and cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, and COPD? (*Scientists reading this, yes, I know, that’s not strictly true. Hence the use of the word “generally”.)
16. GMO labeling laws do not work, if by “work” we mean “inform consumers about the presence of proteins derived from GMO crops in the food they are buying”. There is no active law on the books, or proposed bill in the works, that will inform you via a label that you’re about to consume GMO-derived food. The reason for this is political: in order to get these bills to a vote, too many exceptions must be incorporated into the bills, e.g. packaged foods must be labelled, but not prepared foods. Political special interests will always preclude these labels from having any real meaning.
Ugh yes, I am so tired of these GMO sceptics and their scaremongering and creationist style apologetics.
Short of engineering a cancer fruit (yes, I would do that because SCIENCE) there’s nothing particular to fear. I actually use that as an example to the “skeptic” types.
The Guest Post shows the discussion of GMO’s is certainly not one-dimensional.
Points 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (Seeds)
Some farmers are sensitive generally to what they see as encroachment on individual farmer’s rights regarding seeds (http://www.nfuontario.ca/wpr/bill-c-18-a-tool-for-global-seed-companies-to-pry-yet-more-money-from-the-farmers-pocket/ inter alia).
Point 8 (Monsanto contracts)
May need clarification whether the advantage of GMO plants depends in part on their resistance to Monsanto herbicides, whether the plants and herbicides go hand in hand to be effective.
Point 10 (blowing patented seeds)
Similar concerns continue to be raised (e.g. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/09/24/gmo-alfalfa.aspx inter alia).
Points 14, 15 (science and health concerns)
Don’t know if well designed long term (i.e. lifetime) control studies have been done (on pigs, humans or other suitable subjects). Point 15 illustrates the issues. Point 12 is relevant. There are natural transgenic processes. Indeed the incorporation of mitochondria into cells which allowed emergence of the current architecture for respiration and photosynthesis may have been from a natural transgenic process. The evolution of bacterial viral immune systems using natural gene editing is the foundation of CRISPR technology.
Point 16 (labeling)
Some attempt in Vermont (www.leg.state.vt.us/docs/2014/acts/act120.pdf) and in the U.S. Senate (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/us-senate-passes-gm-food-labeling-bill) recently. Point 16 shows it’s complicated.
Before continuing further I must reveal a bias (undoubtedly in addition to several biases already evident above). I have some interests in common with Vandana Shiva’s earlier academic work, presently have colleagues who did know her at that time and were favourably impressed and, although I have never had any interaction with her, we did get degrees at different times in different fields from the same alma mater. Of course this does not mean that her opinions in other areas deserve comparable regard but it does mean that I have a bias in my opinion of her intelligence.
Point 11 (Vandana Shiva)
Is there a concern that the discussion of GMO’s can become less objective and more polemical and personal? (Michael Specter, Seeds of Doubt, New Yorker, August 18, 2014) On both sides?
Enough about capitalist business practices, socialist concerns of some farmer organizations: the question as always is cui bono (“special interests”). I think the real nut is the potential importance of GMO crops for the food supply affected by climate change of a growing human population, some might say over population, which was not discussed in the Guest Post, perhaps because it was understood. This raises broader questions. Philosophical questions?
On the lighter side (if it is allowed to lower the temperature of the discussion a little) is Atwood’s hilarious description of the GMO-perfected human male in Chapter 74 of The Year of the Flood. Recall the magic wands of http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2016/the-same-magic-wand-that-made-her-valuable/.
There are a number of issues here most of which are completely irrelevant to what I take to be the central issue, namely: “Are GMO crops unsafe or otherwise undesirable merely in virtue of them being GMO crops?” I think the answer to that has to be “no” even though one could no doubt deliberately engineer a strain of wheat, say, that contained various carcinogens.
I think there are definite problems with so-called intellectual property rights, but these are not confined to Monsanto or to seed suppliers in general and have nothing to do with whether GMO crops are safe. There are also problems with how the international seed market works, but these predate the emergence of GMO crops and the existence of Monsanto and again are nothing to do with whether GMO crops are safe. I don’t think it is helpful to list allegations about Monsanto’s business practices as myths about GMO. Even if they were all true it would say precisely nothing about the safety of the technology.
A few thoughts, Bernard.
1) Who cares what you take to be the “central issue”, if it’s unrelated? I mean, besides you. The post was not about that. I think that your first paragraph pretty much said that. So, okay. Your point is that you want to say stuff that is not part of the issues raised here? Alright. Can’t you do that on your own blog?
2) The post was not about the “safety of the technology” or rebutting arguments along those lines.
3) Rebutting statements about the business practices of Monsanto IS useful. So maybe it says nothing about the technology–so what? Rebutting lies is always a good thing. The post is not about showing how GMO stuff is rainbows and unicorns, it’s about pointing out misconceptions.
Note the title of the post that Ophelia chose.
Most of these are completely fair assessments. I disagree with the logic presented in #16 (though my personal preference would be to have GMO foods labeled “Better thanks to SCIENCE!”, but that’s just me)–it feels like circular reasoning to say that we shouldn’t try to label foods accurately because we can’t get a law through that would label foods accurately.
Freemage, I see it differently. It’s a burden of proof question, and the burden of proof should lie with those who propose labeling GMO foods. They haven’t met that burden of proof, yet people are speaking as if they have. As if it were obvious and well-established that we should label GMO foods, and the only question is how to do it. Cart before the horse and all that.
#3 John Wasson
And yet farmers are faced with the fact that these seeds are more cost effective than what I would call ‘natrual GMO’ crops*. Here is an account from one such land owner, with the following paragraph being particularly relevant:
“I’m not going to settle the GMO debate* here, but what I see is a farming technique that takes a bit less than half as much work and fuel, half as much wear on the gear, no soil runoff or loss of topsoil and – in return – comes with higher seed cost and the cost of 20 gal of roundup/acre.”
So, increased efficiency for increased cost. A trade-off for sure, yet most willingly farmers take it.
They don’t. For example, the most common genetic modification used is to make a crop resistant to the herbicide Roundup, and so the crop is dubbed Roundup Ready Corn / Wheat / etc. However, Roundup is a very simple herbicide and has been out of patent for many years; the generic term for the molecule is glyphosate and any manufacturer can sell it.
Points 14 and 15 show that the medical case against gene manipulation is in the same boat as the the allegations that mobile phones cause cancer: the allegations have been made for years, studies have been done, yet no relationship has ever been found. And lacking evidence for either claim, I see no reason to discontinue using either.
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*Because ALL crops have been modified by humans for thousands of years. Most of agricultural history involved selective breeding, then by hybridisation (see: green revolution, Norman Borlaug), and now most recently through direct gene manipulation. All of these are artificial (i.e. human assisted) genetic modification, and I consider it misleading to append ‘GMO’ to only a subset of genetically modified organisms, as it implies that the others are not GMO.
Many people may know about e.g. Borlaug and so know that GMO is only applied to a subset, but many do not, and unscrupulous campaigners happily exploit this, demonising the very concept of genetic modification as a means of arguing against only a subset of that.