Jeffrey Smith admits GMO labeling was never his goal

[Humanist_Activist]

34. Ahh, finally, some claims that need unpacking!

[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left:1em; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius:0.4615em; box-shadow:-1px -1px 3px #999999 inset;"]RoundUp Ready 2 crops are already ineffective, since many of the weeds have become tolerant to it. This requires more and more applications and locks the farmers into a paradigm that is near unsustainable for them. With the increases in temperatures, there will be more virulent strains of weeds that will overcome the current applications, so this methodology is deeply flawed.

I will say that herbicide resistance in weed plants is a concern, and effective alternatives should always be researched and developed.

[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left:1em; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius:0.4615em; box-shadow:-1px -1px 3px #999999 inset;"]From a biosciences part, the human body has been raised to eat local foods, so folks raised for a ten millennia on British isle foods differ from folks who have eaten North American foods for 16,000 years. To Brits and most all Europeaners, corn is quasi-toxic since it is not an indigenous food, introduced only 400 years ago.

This one is just wrong, on so many different levels, first off, if you want to turn back the clock to before the Columbian Exchange, good luck with that. Beyond that, everything in this paragraph is wrong, we evolved on junk diets where variety was the key to survival, not hyper localized food sources with intolerances to foods outside such local sources. If that were true, our ancestors would have gone extinct a million years ago. We actually have the marks in our bodies of our varied, extreme omnivore diets, we are trichromatic, to pick out a large variety of plants to eat, we have developed tolerances, more so than most animals, to alcohol, lactose, and many other food sources etc. The very shape of our bodies, the reason we sweat rather than pant is to run down animals that may be faster than us in sprints, but can never compare to us in marathons.


[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left:1em; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius:0.4615em; box-shadow:-1px -1px 3px #999999 inset;"]When you alter the genetic composition of crops, especially when animal strains are embedded in plant crops, it creates foods that are unknown to the human body. While consumable, like HFCS, there are issues with the processing of them within the body that might take many decades to surface. Unfortunately, most of the the university research labs and corporate biological labs in the US are partly funded by BigAg and BigPhRMA, so their studies always seem to create either confusion, like FOX News does to world events, or supports the corporations almost 100% of the time. Now, as a betting person who sees so many pharmaceuticals fail when rushed into service, this seems to contrast the peer science results from the many studies that preceded their approval.

Right off the bat, the first sentence is factually wrong, I don't know what you mean by strains, but the fact is the proteins coded are NOT completely novel to human consumption, even when sourced from other kingdoms, such as animals, fungi, bacteria, etc. Genetic engineering does not create novel proteins on its own, at most it may introduce a protein into a food that didn't have it before, but considering the source genetic material is usually a plant or animal we already consume safely that produces the same protein, that doesn't make a food that is unknown to the human body.

As to your second sentence, it's been widely known since the 1970s that overconsumption of sugars, including fructose, can possibly develop problems with obesity and type 2 diabetes, along with a host of health problems. The reason for the focus on HFCS is because corn is the cheapest(due to subsidies) source for fructose, and it's a widely used sweetener. Sucrose is not really any better, at least at the levels that Americans consume sugar. Too much of anything can be damaging, this is a classic example of that.

And, of course, you go straight to the "science is corrupted" by big money gambit, which you have devolved into a conspiracy theory.

Roundup is a safe herbicide because it's been tested as being safer than most other herbicides by every independent test you can think of on the planet.

[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left:1em; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius:0.4615em; box-shadow:-1px -1px 3px #999999 inset;"]The slow, and sometimes suspicious cross pollination that occurs on farms slowly decreases the variety of plants, which exposes the food crops to a catastrophic event, if some blight were to target specific GMO crops. Biodiversity has always been the key to survival of species. What's worse is that Pioneer is going around to over 100 countries and working out free seed programs, especially targeting poor countries. The people kill off their legacy crops and then seed their fields with the hybrids that require repurchasing each cycle, since the farmer then loses the ability to use 10% of their seed crop to replant. This effectively creates a poverty condition for developing countries, as the US and EU floods their markets with crops 1/4th the price of local farmers to put them out of business and monopolize the industry... all while World Bank and the UN claims to support and help grow these regions.

This has been a problem since the Green Revolution and predates GMOs by decades, the question is, do you want a few billion people to die off so we can go back to pre-industrial farming? While monocultures are a problem, hybrids and the consistency of the crop dramatically increases yield per acre, which means less land needs to be used to feed people, which helps preserve existing ecosystems. There are always trade offs.