No, mass starvation would not ensue from having to fight weeds using mechanical means. It would take more work and more fuel, but it is eminently doable if the need is there. Especially if the change would be gradual.
Making do without artificial fertilizer would be a lot harder.
Increased work and fuel means increased costs, increased costs means increased prices, increased prices means less food available for purchase by those on the margins, less food means starvation.
No, not regardless of magnitude. But anything that have a large impact on food prices will decrease the ability of poor people to pay for it. It’s not rocket science.
Price increases due to disruption of Ukrainian grain shipments from the war substantially threatened African food stability.
Despite their being plenty of capacity elsewhere because the smaller redirects of trucking into the European markets crashed prices enough that it led to protests in Poland and discontent elsewhere (though probably with significant Russian psyops involvement).
Perhaps if herbicides weren't viable, more work would've gone into developing the mechanical alternatives and we'd have had solar-powered machines removing weeds from fields.
I don't think that is the only alternative. If the end goal is to preserve life for humans, completely nuking the soil into a wasteland, treating it with carcinogens and then allowing a company to genetically modify seeds and copyright them is a pretty bad and short sighted strategy.
Allowing a known carcinogen to make crops "easier to harvest" has to do with profit margin not food supply. People literally use this to kill dandelions in their yards. I have known many people who have died from cancer. I have eaten dandelions, while bitter, are actually healthy. A good start would be to work with nature instead of trying to out engineer it.
If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
You both have premises that are too far apart to debate productively; what you're really debating is naturalism vs. technology, scale vs. degrowth, humanism vs. environmentalism. All worthwhile philosophical debates, but you won't get anywhere sniping at each other about them.
> If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
Yes. That is literally exactly what we're doing. You can't sustain the current human population without fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels. Half the people on the planet would die.
If we don't want half the planet to die, we need pesticides. So do you choose a pesticide that's more harmful, or less? If you said "less", then you want glyphosate.
That people would be on the whole less healthy had glyphosate not been on the market, because other herbicides, all of which were and are in common use, are worse.
From an environmental perspective you are probably right. One of the nice things is that glyphosate, unlike most herbicides, is broken down quickly by soil bacteria.
The longer term issue is evolved weed resistance due to its over use with "Roundup Ready" crops and for end of the season dry down.
I think the fears about glyphosate resistance owes too much to antibiotic resistance, but I am not really sure it makes sense.
I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to develop resistances over time.
And ... so what? The value of a weedkiller like glyphosate is using it to kill a lot of weeds in wide-scale agriculture. If the weeds develop a resistance to it, and we stop using it because it's no longer effective, we're not really in a worse position than if we never used it at all. It's not like there are some really bad weeds we need to save it to be able to combat.
I have no idea why this is downvoted because it's exactly right. Unlike antibiotic resistance where the consequences can be measured in human lives, it just doesn't matter for weed killers: and the iteration time on new compounds is much faster.
It's also inevitable: there are weeds which have substantially changed their appearance to more closely resemble crops as an adaptive strategy just to human driven control measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
Which is a problem which mechanical weed control measures will exacerbate probably in bizarre ways (e.g. the weed is no longer selecting against the human vision system but instead a machine vision model)
Edit: though probably worth noting that encouraging weeds to compete against a machine vision model opens up interesting possibilities - e.g. encoding a failure mode for something which the active model can't spot, then running it competitively against a model trained to sport the adaptation and then switching back over when your hit rate falls below a certain level - trap the weed in a controlled local minima. You can't replace human image recognition and new compounds are hard, but updating software is easy.
It's a matter of when, not if, and that _when_ was more than a decade ago. Round-up resistant Kochia (a weed) has spread across Western Canada and was first observed in 2011. Pretty difficult stuff to get out of your field once it takes root.
As for solutions, I agree with you that there's no single clean solution to mitigate resistance. But it seems like some weeds' reproduction paths are better suited for resistance than others (Kochia produces tens of thousands of seeds and spread similar to tumbleweeds, so there's a lot of potential for mixing and genetic diversity relative to other weeds).
The one I'm seeing now for crops (along with GMO crops to resist it) is Liberty, generic name glufosinate. What's interesting about it is that it's a natural product (although obtained in bulk by synthesis) produced by several species of Streptomyces soil bacteria.
It's striking how many of these "product safety" cases are decided in the court of public opinion, independent of actual scientific merit. The case of DDT was pretty interesting. More recently, we have microplastics - no one has really shown they're dangerous to humans, but there's enough hand-waving that "everyone knows" they're killing us. And aspartame, etc...
Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people spray their lawns with. I don't think we should - the worst you get on a typical suburban lawn if you mow but don't spray are dandelions and clover - but it's probably not giving you cancer. As for food... again, there are far worse, more persistent pesticides that escape this kind of scrutiny.
Worth noting here that the trier of fact in this case mostly agrees with you about this stuff; the issue is that the state statutes in question created strict liability conditions for failure to comply with warning label regimes. The plaintiff brought substantive charges about Roundup to the case, and the jury rejected them.
We hand some log droughts here about 10 years ago where you were not allowed to water the lawn at all.
I would have expected a single dominate weed to take over, but instead, if I let the grass grow for 6-8 weeks in summer I get this amazing field of different knee length plants. And it alive with bee's and butterflies.
Well I don't know of people claiming that microplastics are "killing us", there are dozens of papers that implicate microplastics in negative health effects from hearts to intestines, to sperm.
There are a lot of studies that find correlations, and then are studies like this one that show that the direct introduction of microplastics alters cell functions negatively:
I think at this point we should stop talking about how "there's no data" or "no studies" and "no one has shown" and graduate to "oh, maybe should figure out the extent of the damage."
Microplastic pollution is a global problem amongst a whole host of global pollution problems. We'd do well to try to figure out how bad it is, because it isn't going away. Oh, and we should probably work on fixing all of our pollution problems, especially cumulative ones like this.
I understood that article as there being many bad studies on how much plastics are in our body. But I find it highly unlikely there isn't any plastic in my body, from my toothbrush or chewing gum or water bottle or that old black plastic spatula I fry my eggs with or the air that pushes all kinds of particles into me etc. etc.
And studies like your parent comment's https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12692081/ make it seem likely that they could have some negative effect. So I'm not worried about it, but I also find it a good idea to be cautious (maybe I'll avoid heating food in plastic containers) and for there to be more research into it.
People are usually spraying broadleaf herbicides on their lawn like 2,4-D to control things like dandelions and yard plantains. Glyphosate just kills everything. Personally I only use it very selectively on poison ivy.
As is so often the case for controversies before the Supreme Court, this case isn't so much about glyphosate as it is about the interface between federal and state law.
Since 1991, the EPA has held that glyphosate is not carcinogenic; it was (at the time) categorized "Group E", which means that not only is there not evidence for it being carcinogenic, but that there is material evidence that it is not. Later, IARC (in a decision that was controversial among global public health agencies) listed glyphosate as a 2A probable carcinogen, alongside red meat, potatoes, deep fryer oil, and a slew of scary chemicals that includes many other insecticides and herbicides.
States like California enacted labeling-law regimes that key in part off IARC's classification, which meant that in those states Roundup products required labeling. Monsanto/Bayer lost civil cases based on failure to label.
That's the domain-specific stuff. What the court likely cares about is the preemption doctrine. In a variety of different situations, competing state and federal statutes are by explicit or implicit preemption rules. In many cases, federal preemption is a result of bargains with industry: for instance, we got programs like Energy Star after negotiations where industry (and the states dependent on those industries) made concessions to the federal government in exchange for exemptions from state regulation, which is why there's controversy over local municipal ordinances that attempt to ban gas ranges (apropos nothing, but: combustion products of gas ranges: also IARC carcinogens).
There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
For those people it's worth knowing that the civil liability Monsanto/Bayer is trying to avoid here is approximately the same as the reason Jays Potato Chips bags sometimes have "Not For Sale In California" labeling. Nobody has declared that Roundup is categorically unsafe. Some states have declared that you have to label it the same way you would a gas station or Disneyland ride.
The best-reasoned criticism of glyphosate is that it disrupts the gut biome (this is a fact). I suspect that many "gluten allergies" are actually gut biome problems from glyphosate-desiccated wheat.
Anything that reaches the gut intact disrupts (ie: manipulates, interacts with, alters, stimulates or suppresses, selects) the gut biome. I'm not pushing back on you except to say that as a mechanistic axiomatic claim of harm, it's missing most of the evidence. You could be right, but you could also be wrong; what you've said so far can't possibly be dispositive.
The mechanism of action of glyphosate inhibits several important amino acid production processes in the gut. I'm simplifying here, but not having glyphosate in the food supply would be a good thing for the gut, and the science agrees on this.
Glyphosate for field prep also doesn't really come through in food, it's much worse with the pre-harvest desiccation.
You are inferring from our crude understanding of processes in general. Evidence is more specific.
Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets? This is amenable to natural experiments where one country bans it on a specific date and the neighbor does not.
> Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets?
That's a rather sneaky way to invert the issue. It's fishing for random luck when you ask for more and harder to obtain evidence given existing facts pointing to possible harm. A single study that doesn't show harm doesn't refute those that do.
You have to provide hard evidence that glyphosate (or another non-essential ingredient) does not cause adverse effects, and thoroughly explain the differences with the studies that show the opposite - until you do that, any in-vitro or other studies that show harmful effects count against the use of the product and you cannot ask for more evidence, you can only accept the remedies.
In this case, the appropriate remedies can be different: banning it altogether, limiting it to specific usage (e.g. no pre-harvest spraying), labeling using LARGE PRINT and scary language or some combination of the above.
You can't even get smoked fish accepted through precautionary-principle logic like that. This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
Smoked fish is a side, wheat is a staple. Degree matters.
If 90% of the raw food at the grocery were 'processed' in the same way that a smoked fish, or a french fry was, I think we'd have very valid reasons to be displeased with many of the myriad problems that come with that.
First, no it isn't, not in the cultures where it's believed to cause stomach cancer. Second: at the point where you're talking about distinguishing public policy based on whether something is a "side dish" or not, I think we've left the realm of plausibility and entered a wonderful new land I call "the voivodeship of special pleading".
> You can't even get smoked fish accepted through precautionary-principle logic like that.
No, you really can't do that without breaking the Code of Federal Regulations. Smoked products must be labeled "smoked" in addition to many other requirements, and that despite the distinctive stink that self-labels these products. Even the font size is specified to be no smaller than the letters for the kind of meat on the label.
The real issue is why there's no such requirement for glyphosate, having it would be a good starting point.
> This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
I don't think all potato chips deserve, or have, such warnings but some might. Regardless, there might be specific regulations that are over the top and I don't mind admitting or discussing such cases but glyphosate isn't among them.
Here's a decent one: 13% of the UK reports gluten intolerance symptoms, and only 7% of Germany does. The UK allows pre-harvest glyphosate desiccation, Germany doesn't. I would be happy to bet that the trend continues past my quick Google search.
AFAIK the preponderance of the evidence is that most "gluten sensitivity" is actually just a FODMAP sensitivity, which also interacts with the gut biome.
FODMAP stands for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. FODMAPs generate gas as side effect of being fermented in the gut. Most people just pass this gas, but for some people, usually people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), it can be very uncomfortable and amplify their other IBS problems.
People who are suffering from pain and bloating with no obvious cause may be advised to go on a low-FODMAP diet for a few weeks to see if their symptoms go away.
The Wikipedia page for it is pretty good. Basically, there are a number of short-chain carbohydrates that tend to pass through the small intestine (where nutrients are digested and absorbed into the bloodstream) and reach the large intestine (where water is removed). Bacteria in the large intestine eat these nutrients (fermentation). In some people, this causes intestinal distress. (Bloating, gas, discomfort, watery stool, etc.) It's not clear why this only affects some people.
You hear a lot about it because a large subset of people have discovered that a low-FODMAP diet relieves their torment of intestinal distress.
I will never understand this bizarre obsession with gut flora. We don't know what is normal, what is a beneficial ratio or when a change happens if that is good or bad thing. No one besides the people who study these things should be much attention to gut microbiomes. We just don't have enough information to let this be an influence on decision making.
By itself, it's simply an argument that proves too much. Anything you ingest impacts your gut flora. There can be gut microbiome hypos about glyphosate! But you have to actually have them; you can't stop at "it impacts gut flora".
Well, I didn't intend that as a conversation-ender, but it is true. This particular substance inhibits a particular function of certain gut flora that seems important. I think it's safe to call that significant.
What "particular function" is that? If it's "the part that influences neurological function", you don't have a complete argument. If you can't be specific about this, your argument falls apart, because almost everything we eat potentially "inhibits" (or accelerates) different areas of our gut flora.
I'm not trying to make a complete argument, I'm trying to raise a flag. This issue is not well-studied and has very large corporate sponsors who would like to keep selling Roundup-Ready™ crops. One particular measurable function is inhibition of the shikamate pathway in many different bacteria (the majority of the volume of your gut flora is affected).
I understand that this is the realm of crunchy weirdos, but thinking holistically doesn't mean you need to lobotomize yourself.
Here's another paper examining some brain effects of chronic gut inflammation, which could be reasonably inferred as a potential consequence of long-term glyphosate exposure: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10661239/
You haven't raised a flag! You've observed (and cited a paper that shows in mouse models under relatively high human dosages) that glyphosate can impact certain gut bacteria species. That's plausible! But all sorts of things do that, and you haven't presented evidence that connects that to an adverse human health outcome. In particular: you haven't cited a source showing glyphosate is causative of gut inflammation.
"It impacts the gut biome" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for these arguments; if it were, you could knock down all sorts of things, including specific diets (and most abrupt changes in diet).
Call it (pun intended) a smell test. I have cited a study that shows biomarkers of gut inflammation strongly correlated with glyphosate exposure. Perhaps you should have read it.
I have raised a flag. Lowering your exposure to a novel chemical agent that directly impacts a massive and poorly-understood symbiotic system within the body isn't a bad response. Glyphosate exposure certainly isn't beneficial, so I'll treat it like Pascal's wager: avoiding this has more upside than downside.
Your comment seems a little flippant honestly. I know what "disrupted" is, trust me. I developed a gluten sensitivity about 10 years ago but only figured it out 5 years ago. "Healthy" is "feels healthy" and "doesn't die young", that is pretty simple.
It sounds like you think this is about hypothetical and marginal health benefits but people have very acute and immediate physical (and cognitive) issues because of disrupted gut biome that are objectively improved by cutting out, in particular, gluten. This isn't just some weird obession.
Gluten intolerance is a real thing but I don't think that necessarily means that your gut flora is damaged or whatever. Plenty of people are lactose intolerant, and their gut flora is fine, they're just lactose intolerant.
I don't think you could solve gluten intolerance but just improving your gut microbiome, so they're probably not related.
Why are you narrowly focusing on gluten intolerance when this line of comments appears to be denying whether gut biome is worth caring about due to having impacts on health?
Because the parent used their anecdote of gluten intolerance to explain why caring about the gut microbiome matters. But traditional gluten intolerances are not related to the gut microbiome.
We also don't really understand why things like a FODMAP diet work. It's not that feeding your gut bacteria is bad, it's actually pretty good. But for some people it's bad, and they get symptoms they attribute to gluten intolerance.
Legumes, onions, whole grain etc that are high FODMAP are good for you. Fiber is good for you, it lowers your risk of metabolic diseases and helps your digestion. But, for some people, it's bad for their digestion. That's weird.
So all that is to say that, while gut bacteria matters, it varies person to person and we can't definitely say what food is good for the microbiome and what isn't.
I think the interesting point as evidenced by the fecal transplant therapy is that it's not "the" microbiome, it's "your" microbiome. Maybe some people have bad (C. difficile) or incompatible (various E. coli strains) microbiomes and need a microbiome hard reboot.
> Could be FODMAP + IBS or maybe some other sensitivity.
Seems extremely unlikely. Of someone is eliminating gluten they from their diet they usually aren't also eliminating dairy, legumes, and other high-fodmap foods; gluten-free is restrictive enough already.
The only other sensitivity I could think of in which this makes sense is wheat sensitivity (but not other gluten containing grains which are less common).
“I don’t understand it well enough in my opinion so we shouldn’t care about it”?
I’m pretty sure there’s hundreds of things we rightly understood are detrimental centuries before we knew how it worked. Aka pretty much everything bad before 1900.
Changing your diet disrupts the gut biome. When I started eating bran flakes it massively disrupted my gut biome. Should I be alarmed? Or are you slipping a double standard in there, perhaps from the naturalistic fallacy?
Maybe you should see if you adjust to the bran flakes, cut them out if you don't improve, and see if there's a difference? All sorts of things can disrupt gut biomes, and I think ancestral diets are an interesting area of study. Gut inflammation is absolutely rampant.
People who have gluten allergies have a legitimate disease, typically celiac disease.
Being tired after eating bread or whatever is not a gluten allergy, that's just how food works. A lot of people claim to have gluten allergies but no, you would know for sure if you had a gluten allergy.
"Glyphosate complexation to aluminium(III). An equilibrium and structural study in solution using potentiometry, multinuclear NMR, ATR–FTIR, ESI-MS and DFT calculations"
I think that this will be material to me in the sense in which it resolves some questions about whether Oak Park, the ultra-blue inner-ring suburb suburb in which I live, can ban gas ranges, which I enjoy cooking on. I guess I think Bayer has the better case here.
In the message board controversy over glyphosate itself, I don't think this case has much to say. The state labeling regime was either preempted or not; that's a technicality of state and federal statutory evaluation. If the labeling regime is enforceable, it doesn't much matter whether it was about IARC classification or midichlorian counts. Strict liability is strict liability.
The substantive part of this case, whether glyphosate is an inherently dangerous or flawed product, was resolved by the trier of fact in favor of Monsanto.
A simpler way to say all of this: "the safety of glyphosate is not before this court".
> whether glyphosate is an inherently dangerous or flawed product, was resolved by the trier of fact in favor of Monsanto.
You: "Courtrooms are the appropriate final venue to determine if something is inherently dangerous, using the word inherently purposefully, as I do not misuse words, as long as the result is something I agree with."
> Oak Park, the ultra-blue inner-ring suburb suburb in which I live, can ban gas ranges, which I enjoy cooking on
I guess this is why you and I write on random social media forums instead of getting elected.
In the past several years I've proposed, help draft, and gotten passed one law (making us the first municipality in Illinois with an anti-surveillance ordinance), co-wrote our municipality's police general order on ALPRs limiting them to violent crime, and created the transparency regime that allowed us to cancel our Flock contract. I've spent the last 3 years working on eliminating single family zoning, which we are likely to accomplish in just a couple months. I've funded and run two campaigns, one of which succeeded. I'm an appointed commissioner in the muni.
I got all of this done by... posting on random forums.
haha look i'll vote for you if you run for something, but you've run a campaign, you'll agree: all the activism in the world, and the people who win student council elections have won more elections than you and i have
I'm not interested in running for office; I'm very interested in helping other people run. My theory of change doesn't involve me holding office. In fact: my theory of change is heavily dependent on posting comments! It seems to be working out for me.
> There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically modified glyphosate tolerant soybeans and corn, they’re mostly fed to animals anyways.
Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
Essentially turning
> You wouldn't download a car
into
> You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop.
Which is obviously absurd.
So while GM has enabled some pretty good things, it also comes with the same sort of intellectual property baggage that plagues many different areas of society, which on the face of it make some sense, but always seem to skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life, squeezing from those who have less to begin with.
I don't think the case law supports this argument that farmers got roped into subscription crops. Farmers use this system because it has value, and is economically superior to the systems that preceded it (or they don't use it).
There is a problem though. If you opt out of it and just use seeds without any IP and your neighbor uses IP seeds and some of the seeds are blowing into your field from your neighbour you risk trouble.
Source that it is legal to keep the profits and the plants from a patented crop that can’t be prove you have intentionally planted it there? As far as I understand Montosanto claims it would always belong to them no matter how the seed ended up there.
There is absolutely no case law suggesting it is illegal to harvest and keep accidentally cross contaminated seed. Seeing as farming seeds is default legal there would need to be precedent otherwise for such an act to be illegal.
There is patent law. Patent law says you can't do the patented thing without the license. Growing the seeds is patented. So you can't grow them without license. This may be so obvious that it never needed to become a notable precedent-setting case.
Nice of you to axiomatically rederive patent law for us, but this is false. You cannot be sued simply for allowing seeds that blew onto your land grow.
Feel free to cite the case they've brought where they claim that!
They have sued farmers for innocently acquiring their seeds (through the wind or whatever) and then spraying their crops with Roundup (ie: using the whole system).
I worded it so carefully to not have an argument, just for illustration, but...
Yes, you are correct, and you are not contradicting me: This is a system that makes sense on the surface.
It's economically superior to pay some more money to a seed supplier to get a better yield on my fields.
But this economic advantage is captured by the seed supplier after all farmers moved to this new system where you are no longer able to rely on the previous' harvest seeds. Once everyone is on the economically superior system, the seed supplier can start capturing more of the value that is created by farming.
The point here is that Monsanto creates a superior yield in a crop. All your farmer peers move to use it, and now you have to too or get priced out of the market.
hence:
> skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life.
> skew
The word "farmers" is doing some heavy lifting here - might be some multinational, might be a small family making a living.
The point is not that the market is pricing out inefficient farms, the point is that it turns a millennia old practice on it's head and using government force to enable monopolies to remove competition.
Farmers use it because their time horizon is 1-5 years, but the government monopoly on seeds is more like 20 years.
It's skewed.
Easy to disagree and argue with these points, but the original question was why there are people opposed to GMOs and while GMOs are not the only patented organisms they are the most obvious for people to have concerns over the economics
I find the objection to patents on GMO plants to be completely indefensible.
If there was ever an area where patents are justified and necessary, this is it. This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.
Objection to patents on GMO plants is just a way to object to GMO plants themselves without coming out and saying so directly.
> This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.
Isn't that a massive societal benefit vs rent seeking though?
Yes, yes, let's imagine automated turbo communism where all inventions can be made outside the free market.
Here in the real world, private firms are the source of things like this. Roundup Ready soybeans involved cooperation from multiple private firms that contributed various elements.
> Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
They don't get roped into anything. They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost. Further, at least part of the reasoning for not allowing replanting is to avoid genetic deviation in future generations of crop.
> They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost.
That is correct. They are so much better ( and I am in awe of that technology) that outside of some niches (depending on the crop) as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them. But now your farmer-timeframe of a few years is up against a 20 year artificial monopoly in the form of a patent. And all your peers are facing the same situation. This isn't a situation where you can just decide to do whatever you want.
You suddenly find yourself dependent on a third party that knows your situation exactly and will try to extract the most amount of value from you - trying to capture your profit while keeping you healthy enough to keep being a customer.
> Right up until someone else makes a better product.
Yes. A different seed supplier. My point isn't that it's morally wrong to make a better product. My point is that the way it's set up is that those who are in the position to make a better patented-product are in an unbalancedly better position towards the people who use the product to create something as fundamentally important as food.
The major important gmo patents are expiring close to it. If that is your argument it isn't relevant. There are new patents but they are not hard to work around.
>Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
The thing is, that existed for like 100 years before GMOs were a thing. Basically no one saves seeds to reuse and didn't even prior to GMOs. The whole "poor farmers can't save their seeds" thing is propaganda from the organics industry that gets repeated by people who don't understand modern (or even semi-modern) works.
A 22 caliber is safer than a 40 caliber. But, I still wouldn’t a hole made in me from either.
Making do without artificial fertilizer would be a lot harder.
Despite their being plenty of capacity elsewhere because the smaller redirects of trucking into the European markets crashed prices enough that it led to protests in Poland and discontent elsewhere (though probably with significant Russian psyops involvement).
So no, it is not a very significant factor.
Allowing a known carcinogen to make crops "easier to harvest" has to do with profit margin not food supply. People literally use this to kill dandelions in their yards. I have known many people who have died from cancer. I have eaten dandelions, while bitter, are actually healthy. A good start would be to work with nature instead of trying to out engineer it.
If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
Yes. That is literally exactly what we're doing. You can't sustain the current human population without fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels. Half the people on the planet would die.
If we don't want half the planet to die, we need pesticides. So do you choose a pesticide that's more harmful, or less? If you said "less", then you want glyphosate.
It's not a complicated argument.
The longer term issue is evolved weed resistance due to its over use with "Roundup Ready" crops and for end of the season dry down.
I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to develop resistances over time.
And ... so what? The value of a weedkiller like glyphosate is using it to kill a lot of weeds in wide-scale agriculture. If the weeds develop a resistance to it, and we stop using it because it's no longer effective, we're not really in a worse position than if we never used it at all. It's not like there are some really bad weeds we need to save it to be able to combat.
It's also inevitable: there are weeds which have substantially changed their appearance to more closely resemble crops as an adaptive strategy just to human driven control measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
Which is a problem which mechanical weed control measures will exacerbate probably in bizarre ways (e.g. the weed is no longer selecting against the human vision system but instead a machine vision model)
Edit: though probably worth noting that encouraging weeds to compete against a machine vision model opens up interesting possibilities - e.g. encoding a failure mode for something which the active model can't spot, then running it competitively against a model trained to sport the adaptation and then switching back over when your hit rate falls below a certain level - trap the weed in a controlled local minima. You can't replace human image recognition and new compounds are hard, but updating software is easy.
As for solutions, I agree with you that there's no single clean solution to mitigate resistance. But it seems like some weeds' reproduction paths are better suited for resistance than others (Kochia produces tens of thousands of seeds and spread similar to tumbleweeds, so there's a lot of potential for mixing and genetic diversity relative to other weeds).
https://saskpulse.com/resources/kochia-resistance-update-res...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glufosinate
Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people spray their lawns with. I don't think we should - the worst you get on a typical suburban lawn if you mow but don't spray are dandelions and clover - but it's probably not giving you cancer. As for food... again, there are far worse, more persistent pesticides that escape this kind of scrutiny.
I also get a lot of morning glory AKA bindweed that kills my grass. But spraying doesn't really help with that anyway, so :shrug:.
I would have expected a single dominate weed to take over, but instead, if I let the grass grow for 6-8 weeks in summer I get this amazing field of different knee length plants. And it alive with bee's and butterflies.
I much prefer it to lawn.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2309822
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c09524
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c03924
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...
There are a lot of studies that find correlations, and then are studies like this one that show that the direct introduction of microplastics alters cell functions negatively:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12692081/
I think at this point we should stop talking about how "there's no data" or "no studies" and "no one has shown" and graduate to "oh, maybe should figure out the extent of the damage."
Microplastic pollution is a global problem amongst a whole host of global pollution problems. We'd do well to try to figure out how bad it is, because it isn't going away. Oh, and we should probably work on fixing all of our pollution problems, especially cumulative ones like this.
(This is a summary of a Nature Matters Arising article).
>Scientists Tracking the Microplastic Pollution Just Realized They Were Measuring Their Own Lab Gloves
thing. Which was quite entertaining. Reminds me of my own abilities as an experimental scientist.
(https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/environmental-issues/scie...)
Glyphosate kills grass, so I would not recommend this unless you are planning to reseed from scratch (or replace the grass with something else).
Are there "Roundup Ready" grass seeds?
Since 1991, the EPA has held that glyphosate is not carcinogenic; it was (at the time) categorized "Group E", which means that not only is there not evidence for it being carcinogenic, but that there is material evidence that it is not. Later, IARC (in a decision that was controversial among global public health agencies) listed glyphosate as a 2A probable carcinogen, alongside red meat, potatoes, deep fryer oil, and a slew of scary chemicals that includes many other insecticides and herbicides.
States like California enacted labeling-law regimes that key in part off IARC's classification, which meant that in those states Roundup products required labeling. Monsanto/Bayer lost civil cases based on failure to label.
That's the domain-specific stuff. What the court likely cares about is the preemption doctrine. In a variety of different situations, competing state and federal statutes are by explicit or implicit preemption rules. In many cases, federal preemption is a result of bargains with industry: for instance, we got programs like Energy Star after negotiations where industry (and the states dependent on those industries) made concessions to the federal government in exchange for exemptions from state regulation, which is why there's controversy over local municipal ordinances that attempt to ban gas ranges (apropos nothing, but: combustion products of gas ranges: also IARC carcinogens).
There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
For those people it's worth knowing that the civil liability Monsanto/Bayer is trying to avoid here is approximately the same as the reason Jays Potato Chips bags sometimes have "Not For Sale In California" labeling. Nobody has declared that Roundup is categorically unsafe. Some states have declared that you have to label it the same way you would a gas station or Disneyland ride.
Glyphosate for field prep also doesn't really come through in food, it's much worse with the pre-harvest desiccation.
Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets? This is amenable to natural experiments where one country bans it on a specific date and the neighbor does not.
That's a rather sneaky way to invert the issue. It's fishing for random luck when you ask for more and harder to obtain evidence given existing facts pointing to possible harm. A single study that doesn't show harm doesn't refute those that do.
You have to provide hard evidence that glyphosate (or another non-essential ingredient) does not cause adverse effects, and thoroughly explain the differences with the studies that show the opposite - until you do that, any in-vitro or other studies that show harmful effects count against the use of the product and you cannot ask for more evidence, you can only accept the remedies.
In this case, the appropriate remedies can be different: banning it altogether, limiting it to specific usage (e.g. no pre-harvest spraying), labeling using LARGE PRINT and scary language or some combination of the above.
If 90% of the raw food at the grocery were 'processed' in the same way that a smoked fish, or a french fry was, I think we'd have very valid reasons to be displeased with many of the myriad problems that come with that.
No, you really can't do that without breaking the Code of Federal Regulations. Smoked products must be labeled "smoked" in addition to many other requirements, and that despite the distinctive stink that self-labels these products. Even the font size is specified to be no smaller than the letters for the kind of meat on the label.
The real issue is why there's no such requirement for glyphosate, having it would be a good starting point.
> This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
I don't think all potato chips deserve, or have, such warnings but some might. Regardless, there might be specific regulations that are over the top and I don't mind admitting or discussing such cases but glyphosate isn't among them.
People who are suffering from pain and bloating with no obvious cause may be advised to go on a low-FODMAP diet for a few weeks to see if their symptoms go away.
You hear a lot about it because a large subset of people have discovered that a low-FODMAP diet relieves their torment of intestinal distress.
Here's a decent paper that shows an adverse effect: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10330715/
I understand that this is the realm of crunchy weirdos, but thinking holistically doesn't mean you need to lobotomize yourself.
Here's another paper examining some brain effects of chronic gut inflammation, which could be reasonably inferred as a potential consequence of long-term glyphosate exposure: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10661239/
"It impacts the gut biome" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for these arguments; if it were, you could knock down all sorts of things, including specific diets (and most abrupt changes in diet).
I have raised a flag. Lowering your exposure to a novel chemical agent that directly impacts a massive and poorly-understood symbiotic system within the body isn't a bad response. Glyphosate exposure certainly isn't beneficial, so I'll treat it like Pascal's wager: avoiding this has more upside than downside.
It sounds like you think this is about hypothetical and marginal health benefits but people have very acute and immediate physical (and cognitive) issues because of disrupted gut biome that are objectively improved by cutting out, in particular, gluten. This isn't just some weird obession.
I don't think you could solve gluten intolerance but just improving your gut microbiome, so they're probably not related.
Other gluten intolerance is probably not gluten, gluten is just a close enough proxy. Could be FODMAP + IBS or maybe some other sensitivity.
We also don't really understand why things like a FODMAP diet work. It's not that feeding your gut bacteria is bad, it's actually pretty good. But for some people it's bad, and they get symptoms they attribute to gluten intolerance.
Legumes, onions, whole grain etc that are high FODMAP are good for you. Fiber is good for you, it lowers your risk of metabolic diseases and helps your digestion. But, for some people, it's bad for their digestion. That's weird.
So all that is to say that, while gut bacteria matters, it varies person to person and we can't definitely say what food is good for the microbiome and what isn't.
Seems extremely unlikely. Of someone is eliminating gluten they from their diet they usually aren't also eliminating dairy, legumes, and other high-fodmap foods; gluten-free is restrictive enough already.
The only other sensitivity I could think of in which this makes sense is wheat sensitivity (but not other gluten containing grains which are less common).
I’m pretty sure there’s hundreds of things we rightly understood are detrimental centuries before we knew how it worked. Aka pretty much everything bad before 1900.
Being tired after eating bread or whatever is not a gluten allergy, that's just how food works. A lot of people claim to have gluten allergies but no, you would know for sure if you had a gluten allergy.
There are numerous studies that show glyphosate binds with aluminum and other metals, having negative impacts on public health.
"Aluminum and Glyphosate Can Synergistically Induce Pineal Gland Pathology: Connection to Gut Dysbiosis and Neurological Disease"
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=53106
"Glyphosate, a chelating agent—relevant for ecological risk assessment?"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823954/
"Glyphosate complexation to aluminium(III). An equilibrium and structural study in solution using potentiometry, multinuclear NMR, ATR–FTIR, ESI-MS and DFT calculations"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01620...
In the message board controversy over glyphosate itself, I don't think this case has much to say. The state labeling regime was either preempted or not; that's a technicality of state and federal statutory evaluation. If the labeling regime is enforceable, it doesn't much matter whether it was about IARC classification or midichlorian counts. Strict liability is strict liability.
The substantive part of this case, whether glyphosate is an inherently dangerous or flawed product, was resolved by the trier of fact in favor of Monsanto.
A simpler way to say all of this: "the safety of glyphosate is not before this court".
You: "Courtrooms are the appropriate final venue to determine if something is inherently dangerous, using the word inherently purposefully, as I do not misuse words, as long as the result is something I agree with."
> Oak Park, the ultra-blue inner-ring suburb suburb in which I live, can ban gas ranges, which I enjoy cooking on
I guess this is why you and I write on random social media forums instead of getting elected.
I got all of this done by... posting on random forums.
I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically modified glyphosate tolerant soybeans and corn, they’re mostly fed to animals anyways.
Crossbreeding plants is genetic modification.
Essentially turning
> You wouldn't download a car
into
> You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop.
Which is obviously absurd.
So while GM has enabled some pretty good things, it also comes with the same sort of intellectual property baggage that plagues many different areas of society, which on the face of it make some sense, but always seem to skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life, squeezing from those who have less to begin with.
They have sued farmers for innocently acquiring their seeds (through the wind or whatever) and then spraying their crops with Roundup (ie: using the whole system).
Yes, you are correct, and you are not contradicting me: This is a system that makes sense on the surface. It's economically superior to pay some more money to a seed supplier to get a better yield on my fields.
But this economic advantage is captured by the seed supplier after all farmers moved to this new system where you are no longer able to rely on the previous' harvest seeds. Once everyone is on the economically superior system, the seed supplier can start capturing more of the value that is created by farming.
The point here is that Monsanto creates a superior yield in a crop. All your farmer peers move to use it, and now you have to too or get priced out of the market.
hence: > skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life. > skew
The word "farmers" is doing some heavy lifting here - might be some multinational, might be a small family making a living.
The point is not that the market is pricing out inefficient farms, the point is that it turns a millennia old practice on it's head and using government force to enable monopolies to remove competition.
Farmers use it because their time horizon is 1-5 years, but the government monopoly on seeds is more like 20 years.
It's skewed.
Easy to disagree and argue with these points, but the original question was why there are people opposed to GMOs and while GMOs are not the only patented organisms they are the most obvious for people to have concerns over the economics
If there was ever an area where patents are justified and necessary, this is it. This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.
Objection to patents on GMO plants is just a way to object to GMO plants themselves without coming out and saying so directly.
Isn't that a massive societal benefit vs rent seeking though?
If we have to get the seeds from expensive R&D that wouldn't occur without patent protection, then no.
Why not?
It's literally a self replicating system. Trying to control that for rent seeking purposes seems pretty unethical.
(rolls eyes)
Because if no one does the R&D to create the seeds they WON'T EXIST.
I would have thought that was 100% obvious, but apparently not!
Sure. If no-one does the R&D.
Perhaps if rent seeking is the mechanism for getting there, then it's better off if they don't? :)
Here in the real world, private firms are the source of things like this. Roundup Ready soybeans involved cooperation from multiple private firms that contributed various elements.
They don't get roped into anything. They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost. Further, at least part of the reasoning for not allowing replanting is to avoid genetic deviation in future generations of crop.
That is correct. They are so much better ( and I am in awe of that technology) that outside of some niches (depending on the crop) as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them. But now your farmer-timeframe of a few years is up against a 20 year artificial monopoly in the form of a patent. And all your peers are facing the same situation. This isn't a situation where you can just decide to do whatever you want.
You suddenly find yourself dependent on a third party that knows your situation exactly and will try to extract the most amount of value from you - trying to capture your profit while keeping you healthy enough to keep being a customer.
This skews towards the seed supplier.
Yes, because it's a good product.
Farmer's can't afford not to use tractors or artificial irrigation either.
It's not sinister to develop a product that is better than the competition.
> This skews towards the seed supplier.
Right up until someone else makes a better product.
Yes. A different seed supplier. My point isn't that it's morally wrong to make a better product. My point is that the way it's set up is that those who are in the position to make a better patented-product are in an unbalancedly better position towards the people who use the product to create something as fundamentally important as food.
The entire argument is stupid, only bad/hobby farmers plant their own seed.
The thing is, that existed for like 100 years before GMOs were a thing. Basically no one saves seeds to reuse and didn't even prior to GMOs. The whole "poor farmers can't save their seeds" thing is propaganda from the organics industry that gets repeated by people who don't understand modern (or even semi-modern) works.