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How about a culture war outside the traditional red/blue conflicts for a change?
The Guardian ("I read it for the math problems") reports on the decision by a court in the Philippines to ban golden rice, a GMO plant designed to combat vitamin A deficiency. The NGO arguing for a ban (aside local farmers) was Greenpeace.
[https://www.supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-letter_rjr.html](168 Nobel laureates) have called on Greenpeace to stop campaigning against golden rice in 2016. Here is a discussion on EA forums.
Now historically, I have not been vehemently opposed to Greenpeace. When I was a kid in the 1990s, they were protesting French above-ground nuclear weapon testing, which seems fair enough. While pro-NPP myself, I think there are solid arguments to be made for opposing nuclear power (like proliferation risk and long-term disposal of used-up fuel elements), but I can't understand why you would target NPP before you would target fossil fuel power generation.
The steelman of the Greenpeace argument would be that allowing patent-encumbered GMOs will be a foot in the door for pushing more GMOs on rural farmers which will eventually result with Monsanto owning the small farmers. The situation for GMOs is not unlike the situation for software: expensive to develop, but cheap to copy. As a free-software advocate, I very much would prefer outcomes where the companies who develop the software/GMOs do not end up with a stranglehold on the end users due to copyright or (even worse) patent laws.
At least for software there exist alternatives like FLOSS. From reading the FAQ of golden rice, it looks like they could not develop their product without using technologies patented by biotech companies, so they got to them to agree to waive licences for farmers who make less than 10k$ per year, which is their target audience. This is still far from ideal (better would be a blanket free licence for golden rice, or constraining biopatents so much that you do not have to ask Japanese Tobacco to licence your rice plant, or perhaps abolishing them altogether), but does not seem like a terrible deal -- especially if you have a local court system which is rather pro small farmers.
So my conclusion is that Greenpeace's opposition is unreasonable and they have been become one of these organizations who advocates for policies which are deeply unpopular (like PETA, or "always believe the woman" groups) in the wider population as members race to signal how committed they are to their cause.
I’m with the ban for the same reason that GreenPeace is. Not only are we burdening these small farmers with patent law (and I’m not sure if Golden Rice has terminator genes that prevent replanting saved seed) but because of the potential for cross pollination, you can’t really make it optional. If my rice is pollinated by Golden rice, I now have the patented genes in my rice, and unless there are strong laws to the contrary (which I doubt) Monsanto can easily collect royalties from people who never chose to grow Golden Rice in the first place, and worse are not allowed to save seed (as the permits to grow that rice requires you to buy the seed every year). In a lawful democracy like America or various European countries, it’s difficult but at least possible to build in protection for small farmers. I doubt it would be so in a developing country with a much higher corruption index.
Golden rice was developed by a non-profit in collaboration with universities. It doesn't have terminator genes (indeed, no crop with terminator genes has ever been sold, the technology was essentially abandoned in the early 2000s).
It does include patented genes, but patent law is national, not international. Only 12 of the patents are applicable outside of America, and all 12 have been waived by their owners. Any farmer who buys golden rice seeds can replant them forever.
Greenpeace isn't opposed to Golden Rice because they're worried about farmers' welfare. They're opposed to it because of their knee-jerk technophobia.
Not sure if there's some terminological M&B going on here with 'Terminator', but lots and lots of commercially bred seed produces sterile plants?
Basically any lawn grass you buy will not reproduce from seed, and as pertains to Montsanto -- the 'Roundup Ready' portfolio is also like this. (and I think that Montsanto does/did market them 'Terminator' for this reason?)
While (as the chosen name indicates!) this was indeed developed in the 90s, AFAIK it's deliberate (to prevent the RR crops from hybridizing with other plants, producing RR weeds (which would be Very Bad for the no-till agriculture model) -- and an ongoing feature of RR seeds?
Conventional sterile or non-true-breeding hybrids aren't based on "terminator" genes. Roundup Ready plants are also not based on "terminator" genes (and they DO crossbreed, which has been the basis of several lawsuits cementing Monsanto's bad reputation)
Well I know -- but the point (as with much of the GMO discussion) not whether you arrive at the endpoint by conventional methods of modifying the genome (ie selective breeding I guess) or scary gene insertion (with scary names!) -- it's that the seed is sterile so small-time farmers are forced to buy seed every year instead of saving their own.
(TBH the hybridization concern seems like a pretty good reason to include such a gene to me -- RR weeds would have a much larger impact on global agriculture than bankrupting some farmers in India, and the sterility gene (by its nature!) seems unlikely to leak into wild genomes?)
That hybrids are sterile or don't breed true is more of a side effect of the process than a deliberate thing; I believe that most staple crop cultivars were not hybrids when the whole controversy with terminator genes started.
Plants are kinda promiscuous but they aren't so promiscuous as for crops to crossbreed with weeds in most cases. So you don't get roundup-ready weeds from crossbreeding with roundup-ready crops. Unfortunately you do get glyphosate-resistant weeds through normal mutation and (not-so-natural) selection, and we already have.
To be clear it's not something I'm losing sleep over -- just that it seems like a legitimate thing for people designing novel organisms to be worried about, and I'd rather that they worry about it than not. (It would be better if they didn't name their GMO projects after robot assassins though)
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