Letters to the Editor
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It won't just be Monsanto
It won't just be Monsanto pressuring the government to shrink the size of refuges. Keep in mind, in the short run, these refuges will be less productive. Farmers themselves have all kinds of incentive to hope their neighbor will plant those refuges, but that they themselves get to plant the BT-plants. If it were your farm, why would you want to plant anything other than the most productive, most resistant plants? Many farmers are on the edge, gambling with their livelihood. Every. Single. Year. (Full disclosure: I'm the son of farmers, and many of my cousins still farm). If you're gambling that way, wouldn't you want to stack the deck with the most productive plants?
The government always has to take the collective's best interests to heart, rather than individuals. It's true for farming. It's true for fishing. It's too bad that more often than not the government takes the loudest voices to heart, not the collective.
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I've Already Run Screaming For The Hills
...seriously. We are all doomed. Thanks for pointing out another Sign of the End.
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These Biotech MORONS will KILL US ALL!!!!
The only way we can save ourselves is to make each and every person involved in the manufacture of chimeras or mods that produce harmful results LIABLE for MONETARY DAMAGES caused by their mischief.
But first we would have to get rid of congress since CORPORATE BRIBES, are more important than screwing up the entire ecosystem.
All those bees dying off? Shouldn't Monsanto be held liable? Put them out of business and maybe the other nutjobs will stop and think for once.
The last episode of the ABC show Dinosaurs may be exactly what our future holds. One last straw and then we are screwed.
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I never cease to be amazed ...
... at how willing companies are to poison their own wells just to make this quarter's bottom line look better.
Nobody is surprised that pests evolve resistance to pesticides. When this happens to a GM-produced pesticide, the GM crop that produces that pesticide loses value. The GM crop can lose all value if such resistance becomes widespread: The farmer might as well plant plain old non-GM crops.
I'd think that Monsanto would want to extend the lifetime of products created by their research efforts, but instead they work to obsolete these products by encouraging overuse.
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Monsanto are a bunch of dicks
Man, I've been pissed at that company since the early 90s. Their cavalier and reckless, profit-driven strong-arming forays into biotech are amazing. What bugs me most (pun not intended!) is their drive to patent living organisms, their race to commodify everything they can find, and I see the whole Bt thing as part of their pyramid scheme.
You start with an organism you had nothing to do with creating to begin with, and then you genetically twiddle it, creating a product that now belongs to you -- what was common has become property. Then you force that product on the market despite the lack of demand for it, with a mix of sky-high promises and bare-knuckled attacks against naysayers, and then as Nature evolves workarounds for your product, then you come out with the next line of crops, roll them out as the "fix" for the "problem" you created to begin with.
The further removed from unmodified crops we get, the more the biotech firms like it, because it's kind of like an enclosure of the commons -- that's not corn; that's Corn(tm) -- it belongs to Monsanto. That's not soy; that's Soy(tm)! And they're working hard to be sure that they maintain proprietary domination over the farmers who use their products.
I think the biotch firms are highly motivated to crowd out the non-GMO crops across the board, so that their products became the "new normal," the new baseline. It's a mad power grab, and something that is occurring under people's noses and on their dinner plates.
It's that mercantile drive to co-opt everybody's food (and their mendacious way of slipping it into the food market without people knowing about it) that angers me perhaps even more than the hypothetical risks associated with GMO products.
Fuck Monsanto, in other words.
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is the model good
I always wonder about thses models we read about. They are just spreadsheets in essence; putting in assumptions and out come the answers. Suppose instead of just neutralizing some genetic toxin, some insect evolved to actually use it as an advantage. How would anyone ever predict exactly what that advantage might be?
I presume the increase in resistent bugs in a population is non-linear over time. Even recessive mutations dominate non-linearaly if they have survival value. Once the curve gets past the elbow, look out. The fact that the first mutants appear later than predicted does not mean they won't dominate faster than predicted. (If the model can be wrong about first appearance, then it certainly can be wrong about rate of dominance.) Ain't that just great???
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Do these people...
...have a supply of untainted food and water concealed somewhere that they can pull out when the rest of us are dead?
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Oh no you've caught the po-mo "we" disease too
But when the debate is whether corporate pressure on the EPA might result in the decreasing efficacy of refuge set-asides, and thus hasten the evolution of superpowered cotton-munching caterpillars, that's where we start to get fascinated.
We think that unless we are the Queen of England, or have genuine multiple personalities, calling ourselves "we" is a pretentious academic habit that should have died with the nineties -- but unfortunately lives on in people who graduated from college back then.
It's not self-involvement to admit that our column is only written by one person.
If it's not written by one person, then put the other people who wrote the column with you in the byline.
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Monsanto is rotten to the core
Monsanto does not care about the development of superbugs; this just means they can sell more of their next-generation transgenic crops. If small farms fail as a result, they could care less. Family farmers whose fields were contaminated by Monsanto's GM crops have been sued by Monsanto, as well as small dairies that labeled their products as rBGH-free. Some more of their "accomplishments" include development of "terminator technology" (sterile plants that cannot produce seeds, so that farmers must buy more each year), the commercialization of rBGH hormone use in milk, and the creation of at least 93 Superfund sites. For a better idea of how deep Monsanto's corruption runs, look them up on the Pesticide Action Network of North America
(http://www.panna.org/resources/caia/corpProfilesMonsanto)
and the Organic Consumers Association (http://www.organicconsumers.org/monlink.cfm).
No shouting matches here, just cold truth.