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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.
Monsanto hasn't even been a thing for the last 6 years (seriously, they wound up in 2018). You'd expect the greens to have noticed by now...
You are technically correct. However, Monsanto was acquired by the pharma giant Bayer, who decided to discontinue the Monsanto brand. If instead they had gone bankrupt or be acquired by a company which imposed a drastically different business model, things would be different, but this looks to me like an acquisition followed by a corporate rebranding while keeping the same business practices.
In a similar vein, I will continue to say "acquired by Google/Facebook" instead of "acquired by Alphabet/Meta", "posted on twitter" instead of "posted on X", "addicted to heroin" (which is a trademark which has not been used for almost a century) instead of "addicted to diacetylmorphine", "Blackwater" instead of "academi" and so on.
Bayer is going to go bankrupt because of Monsanto; they’ve lost like 80% of their value since 2016 because of Americans suing them for Roundup unknowingly potentially causing cancer and the settlements could be tens of billions. Of course now people are getting scared that if the Roundup business collapses farmers will have to buy weed killer from China, where the manufacturers are safely immune from that kind of frivolity.
Is there any good evidence of the harm of glyphosate in reasonable quantities? I haven't done a literature review myself, but I've seen reports of questionable research on the "causes harm" side, but also that it's anecdotally safer than most of the alternatives.
No, but American courts are notorious for handing out ruinous fines to foreign corporations for spurious reasons.
And then the same Americans howl loudly when the EU fines American tech companies large amounts for minor mistakes (not saying the EU are justified in what they do, but sauce for the goose and all that).
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