Something as important as the world’s agricultural future
107 Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging Greenpeace to stop fighting GMOs.
The letter asks Greenpeace to cease its efforts to block introduction of a genetically engineered strain of rice that supporters say could reduce Vitamin-A deficiencies causing blindness and death in children in the developing world.
“We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against ‘GMOs’ in general and Golden Rice in particular,” the letter states.
The letter campaign was organized by Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs and, with Phillip Sharp, the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of genetic sequences known as introns. The campaign has a website, supportprecisionagriculture.org, that includes a running list of the signatories, and the group plans to hold a news conference Thursday morning at the National Press Club in Washington.
“We’re scientists. We understand the logic of science. It’s easy to see what Greenpeace is doing is damaging and is anti-science,” Roberts told The Washington Post. “Greenpeace initially, and then some of their allies, deliberately went out of their way to scare people. It was a way for them to raise money for their cause.”
If that’s why they’re doing it I hope they’re ashamed of themselves…but then they didn’t seem to feel much shame about stomping on the Nazca lines last year.
Nobel laureate Randy Schekman, a cell biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Post, “I find it surprising that groups that are very supportive of science when it comes to global climate change, or even, for the most part, in the appreciation of the value of vaccination in preventing human disease, yet can be so dismissive of the general views of scientists when it comes to something as important as the world’s agricultural future.”
Oh well, it’s only food. I’m sure 7 billion people can easily find something for lunch.
Of course they can, they just need to go to their local farmers’ market and buy all the fresh, local, organic fruits and vegetables they’ll ever need at $10/lb.
Greenpeace frequently makes me want to swear. They’re frequently anti-science, they lie, their direct action (which, on the whole, I believe in, at least in principle) is regularly destructive and dangerous.
Golden rice could do a great deal of good. It would be nice, as Vandana Shiva and his ilk suggest, to provide umpoverished children with other foodstuffs to combat the dietary deficiency but that means changing the whole social system.That would probably be a good idea – let’s get on that – but in the meantime let’s work with the fact that for poor families rice is the bulk of what they eat and producing a more nutritious strain will keep them and their children alive and healthy while Shiva and his friends work out how to provide and distribute the yams, leafy veg and fruit that they say will do the job instead. Oh, wait, they’re not campaigning for that are they? Just against GMOs.
Oh, Christ on a bike. Greepeace is pathetic. Standing on the Nazca lines. Trying to stop golden rice. At the rate they’re going, they’re going to give environmentalism a bad name.
As I’ve said before, I’m not remotely in favor of RoundUp-Resistant GMOs, which is over 70% of all GMOs, mostly soybeans, some cotton I think, because of environmental consequences and a whole series of downstream effects.
But if you care at all about the science, golden rice is the shining halo poster child of Good GMOs.
What is wrong with these people?
This reminds me of a family conversation years ago. My elderly, ailing father needed someone around on a regular basis to take care of him, specifically to prepare meals, since he could not drive to get to the grocery store. My sister and I both needed to be out of town, and we were discussing our options with him, and he suggested that he could take care of himself, which prompted my sister to ask “what will you do about food?”. His response was “I know how to open the refrigerator!”—at which she laughed and asked him “how do you think that food gets in there?” In effect, he had an emotional need to think of himself as being self sufficient (as we all do), and I think that need skewed his ability to reason.
My suspicion is that this same thing happens a lot, namely that emotional responses cause otherwise sensible people to cling to illogical arguments. I’m no psychology expert, just another person on the internet speculating about something he has absolutely no clue about, though. GMO’s certainly do elicit strong emotions. When the recent GMO-labeling initiative was being proposed here in Washington state and signatures were being collected for it, an angry signature collector actually followed after me, screaming at me, after I refused to sign in favor of putting the initiative on the ballot. He was really, really angry. It was as if I were the WORST PERSON ON EARTH in his mind.
Yes that how the food gets in the fridge question – never underestimate. I’ve been noticing lately how sprawling Seattle is in that way – so many parts of so many neighborhoods are a long long walk from any grocery store, often including a steep hill or maybe two. Magnolia, for instance, the big peninsula west of here, has just two and both are in the valley between Mag’s 2 steep hills. No place for non-drivers.
We get so used to easy access to food we forget how tenuous it is, and non-existent for many people.
Can we please stop this? I am in favor of GMOs, but I am not in favor of such blatant dishonesty. I utilize the farmer’s market myself, frequently. I never have paid $10 a pound for anything. In fact, the food at my farmer’s market is cheaper than the grocery store. I pay about half the price for eggs, meat runs about 80% of the cost of the grocery store, and vegetables anywhere from 10% to 75% of the cost of the grocery store, depending on the vegetable and depending on the season.
In addition, I am supporting local farmers, the money stays in my town working for the people of my town rather than being slogged away in a bank somewhere in Bentonville, AR (or in some off-shore tax haven) and being used to lobby Congress to get rid of public schools.
While I am in favor of GMOs, I don’t think the right answer is dissing the food people buy from their farmer’s market, often cheaper because there is no need for processing, shipping, or a middle man. The main problem is that you can’t use food stamps or credit there (though I think there are some in larger cities where you can – I know Oklahoma City had something like that about 20 years ago).
The whole conversation around food borders on fanatical. Agriculture is a problem area environmentally, and we should be using GMOs to allow us to feed people without destroying the environment to do it. Unfortunately, we are right now using it just to increase the way we have always done things, and because both sides have dug in their heels and made it a totally, absolutely, pure 100% thing, we can’t even have the proper conversation around it. We have to spout nonsensical “facts” that can be easily disputed by a tiny, one hour fact checking session. I know, because I have had my students doing it for 8 years now, and neither side has the moral high ground here.
Don’t hurt the pro-GMO argument by lying (or being careless, whichever is the case).
It’s being hyperbolic, not specifically lazy… perhaps I should’ve selected specific yuppie catering stores instead.
At our farmer’s market everything is more expensive than it would be in the local supermarket because most of it is “organic” and marketed as such. Maybe elsewhere it’s rosier, but here we’ve had to fight the yuppies to keep local agriculture and agricultural research going just cuz the Richie Riches find GMOs icky…
Blood Knight, a lot of our farmer’s market bills itself as “organic” also. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have many yuppies here?
And our co-op also is cheaper, though most people may not realize that since you tend to buy in larger quantities there, so you put out a larger sum up front. Most people don’t stop to think how long something lasts, only how much they paid when they bought it. I struggle with my students all the time when calculating food prices; they want to include the price of an entire dozen eggs and an entire gallon of milk in the cost of a pan of cornbread because they had to pay that price to get the eggs or the milk. Never mind that the remaining eggs and milk will be used later in something else. Just another problem with the sloppy math so many people favor. My mother knew better, and she barely made it through high school.