Genetically Modified Crops Quotes

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.

some people who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that current food production can sustain world food needs even for the 8 billion people who are projected to inhabit the planet in 2030. This will hold even with anticipated increases in meat consumption, and without adding genetically modified crops.

History is a treadmill turned by rising human numbers. Today GM crops are being marketed as the only means of avoiding mass starvation. They are unlikely to improve the lives of peasant farmers ; but they may well enable them to survive in greater numbers.

On the left, the antiscience tends to extend worries about health and the environment into areas that are not supported by the evidence, claiming nevertheless that, as in Silent Spring, there are hidden dangers to our environment, our health, or our spirits. Examples include the ideas that cell phones cause brain cancer; that Wi-Fi and other electromagnetic fields cause cancer, birth defects, or allergies; that vaccines cause autism; that genetically modified crops are unsafe to eat; and that fluoride in water is unsafe to drink.

Science is a time machine, and it goes both ways. We are able to predict our future with increasing certainty. Our ability to act in response to these predictions will ultimately determine our fate. Science and reason make the darkness visible. I worry that lack of investment in science and a retreat from reason may prevent us from seeing further, or delay our reaction to what we see, making a meaningful response impossible. There are no simple fixes. Our civilisation is complex, our global political system is inadequate, our internal differences of opinion are deep-seated. I’d bet you think you’re absolutely right about some things and virtually everyone else is an idiot. Climate Change? Europe? God? America? The Monarchy? Same-sex Marriage? Abortion? Big Business? Nationalism? The United Nations? The Bank Bailout? Tax Rates? Genetically Modified Crops? Eating Meat? Football? X Factor or Strictly? The way forward is to understand and accept that there are many opinions, but only one human civilisation, only one Nature, and only one science. The collective goal of ensuring that there is never less than one human civilisation must surely override our personal prejudices. At least we have come far enough in 40,800 years to be able to state the obvious, and this is a necessary first step.

According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola. If woodpeckers and pandas enjoy celebrity status on the endangered-species list (dubious though such fame may be), food crops are the forgotten commoners. We're losing them as fast as we're losing rain forests. An enormous factor in this loss has been the new idea of plant varieties as patentable properties, rather than God's gifts to humanity or whatever the arrangement was previously felt to be, for all of prior history.

Right now we’re enjoying first generation GE crops; soon we’ll have versions that can grow in drought conditions, in saline conditions, crops that are nutritionally fortified, that act as medicines, that increase yields and lower the use for pesticides, herbicides, and fossil fuels. The best designs will do many of these things at once. The Gates Foundation–led effort BioCassava Plus aims to take cassava, one of the world’s largest staple crops, fortify it with protein, vitamins A and E, iron, and zinc; lower its natural cyanide content, make it virus resistant, and storable for two weeks (instead of one day). By 2020, this one genetically modified crop could radically improve the health of the 250 million people for whom it is a daily meal.

In ancient agricultural societies, most religions revolved not around metaphysical questions and the afterlife, but around the very mundane issue of increasing agricultural output. Thus the Old Testament God never promises any rewards or punishments after death. He instead tells the people of Israel that ‘If you carefully observe the commands that I’m giving you [. . .] then I will send rain on the land in its season [. . .] and you’ll gather grain, wine, and oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your livestock, and you’ll eat and be satisfied. Be careful! Otherwise, your hearts will deceive you and you will turn away to serve other gods and worship them. The wrath of God will burn against you so that he will restrain the heavens and it won’t rain. The ground won’t yield its produce and you’ll be swiftly destroyed from the good land that the Lord is about to give you’ (Deuteronomy 11:13–17). Scientists today can do much better than the Old Testament God. Thanks to artificial fertilisers, industrial insecticides and genetically modified crops, agricultural production nowadays outstrips the highest expectations ancient farmers had of their gods. And the parched state of Israel no longer fears that some angry deity will restrain the heavens and stop all rain – for the Israelis have recently built a huge desalination plant on the shores of the Mediterranean, so they can now get all their drinking water from the sea.

THEY ARE NOT NEWS In the south of India, at the Nallamada hospital, a failed suicide revives. Around his bed, smiles from the ones who brought him back to life. The survivor eyes them and says: “What are you expecting, a thank-you? I owed a hundred thousand rupees. Now I’m also going to owe for four days in the hospital. Some favor you imbeciles did me.” We hear a lot about suicide bombers. The media blather on about them every day. But we hear nothing about suicide farmers. According to official figures, India’s farmers have been killing themselves steadily, at a rate of a thousand a month since the end of the twentieth century. Many suicide farmers die from drinking the pesticides for which they cannot pay. The market drives them into debt, then unpayable debt drives them into the grave. They spend more and more, earn less and less. They buy at penthouse prices and sell at bargain-basement markdowns. They are held hostage by the foreign chemical industry, by imported seeds, by genetically modified crops. Once upon a time, India worked to eat. Now India works to be eaten.

All the food we eat—every grain of rice and kernel of corn—has been genetically modified. None of it was here before mankind learned to cultivate crops. The question isn’t whether our food has been modified, but how. —Michael Specter

On March 28, 2013, President Barack Obama signed the short-term spending bill HR 933 into law to prevent the government from shutting down. Discreetly slipped inside the bill, however, was an additional rider—section 735, dubbed the Farmer Assurance Provision.   Environmental activists had their own nickname for it: the “Monsanto Protection Act.” Outraged, they argued that the rider—which had been written by Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), in collaboration with Monsanto itself[1]—would provide big agribusiness with immunity from judicial oversight. In effect, it would allow the US Department of Agriculture to approve of the planting of genetically modified crops even if the judiciary had declared them unsafe.

The Psychopathology of CCD What am I doing tomorrow? Don’t ask me. Just follow the dance of my double helix, its sinuous spiral twisting like an impetuous nursery of stars on a collision course with the child care nebula. Maybe you can read my palm pilot for my schedule -- I’m just a drone serving the queen bee, serving some other queen, in some master plan unknown to me, possibly unknown even to the Omniscient Beeing, no longer smug in Her certainty, her kids rooting for the teat of extinction, thirsty, hungry, wet and gone clubbing all night. I can’t handle the stress anymore, pesticides, cell phone radiation, genetically modified crops, a Starbucks on every other block, global warming, gay marriage and now this economic crisis. Fuck it! I’m not going back to the hive. I’ve flying to Bali and opening up a yoga/dance studio with an organic café. “Wait! I’m coming with you.” “Me too!

One wonders whether Rachel Carson would have been as adamant against the use of genetically modified Bt crops as many environmentalists have been in more recent times. Moreover, given the book’s ambivalence over the use of chemical pesticides, it raises the question of how far she would have traveled on this branch of the Other Road that she herself pointed out.

The modern American lifestyle is a main risk factor for leaky gut.   Analysis Leaky gut is far more prevalent in the United States than in Europe. A culture of convenience has found its way into much of the American diet. The US food industry produces packaged and processed foods that rarely spoil and produce that is engineered to be shipped over long distances but not to be nutritious. It uses insecticides that ease farming but put toxins into food. Its genetically modified crops allow companies to feed millions while generating herbicide-resistant weeds. The American diet is mainly composed of processed foods. About 70 percent of the food people in the United States eat is processed. [6]

genetically modified grains typically contain higher levels of agglutinins to help protect industrial crops from pests. Wheat

Therefore, we must invest in research that allows us to grow more healthy food and transport it more effectively. And please make no mistake: that includes accepting genetically modified crops, those engineered to include a trait in the plant that doesn’t occur in its wild form, such as resistance to insects, tolerance to drought, greater vitamin A production, or more efficient use of sunlight to convert CO2 to sugar—as an absolutely necessary part of our food future. With more efficient plants, we could feed up to 200 million additional people, just from plants grown in the US Midwest. 33 These crops have gotten a bad rap for being “unnatural,” although many people who hold this view don’t recognize that most of the food we think of as “natural” has already been subject to significant genetic manipulation. The ears of corn you see at the grocery store look nothing like the wild plant from which modern corn came; over the course of nine thousand years, the spindly finger-length grass known as teosinte was cultivated to evolve larger cobs and more rows of plump, soft, sugary kernels, a process of modification that significantly altered the plant’s genome.34 The apples we’ve grown accustomed to eating have a bit more resemblance to their small, wild ancestors, but good luck finding one of those ancestors; they have been nearly wiped off the planet, and that’s no great loss to our diet, since the biggest genetic contributor to modern apples, Malus sylvestris, is so tart it’s darn near inedible.

Unlike the campaigns against DDT, nuclear power, and genetically modified crops – but very much like the eugenics movement – the global warming cause is universal enough to serve as the basis of a pseudo-religion. This potential is the subject of remarks by the movement’s leaders themselves.

The power of the negative media around the food industry drives my mind to enact a Woody Allen-ish skit whenever faced with a restaurant menu. For instance, beef translates to “mad cow disease,” chicken morphs into “avian flu,” fish reconstitutes to “mercury poisoning,” and vegetarian option becomes “genetically modified crops.” I am unsure what to pick, and moreover who I can trust when my selection is made.

Antiscience advocates on the left could be just as vicious as the right’s climate deniers when scientists pointed out that their ideas that cell phones cause brain cancer, vaccines cause autism, genetically modified crops are unhealthy to eat, and similar notions were not supported by the evidence.