[xenocyon]

I'm paying close attention to the direction that (my native) India takes w.r.t. GM food crops, which have so far been illegal.

Background: India went from colonialism-induced massive serial famines to self-sufficiency and then some, while entirely eschewing GM foods. (NB: this doesn't mean there is no malnutrition in India, where inequalities are rife, but it means that the country as a whole is able to produce more than needed. The causes of hunger are non-intuitive; for e.g. the dumping of cheap foods is more likely to cause hunger than solve it, as hunger stems from poverty which stems from economic disablement - which is caused by dumping cheap foods.)

Now, the Green Revolution did result in a loss of biodiversity (among other problems) but without creating the kind of monocultures you see in the US. For example, there are still numerous varieties of rice in India, especially locally variated.

Despite this, the Indian government has been increasingly warming over recent years to introducing GM foods (which is largely a solution in search of a problem, in the Indian context). The threat from GM foods is almost always misunderstood. It is not about the individual health effects of eating GM foods; it is about the largescale replacement of a system where farmers own their biodiverse seed, with a top down monocultural approach that essentially makes farmers franchisees of a massive corporate behemoth and eliminates biodiversity, putting all eggs in one basket.

[asdff]

Countries that eschew genetic modification of foodstocks will see famine in the next century. Traditional breeding techniques to introduce favorable traits simply do not work fast enough to keep up with changing ecological conditions in a changing climate. It's often too costly to waste acreage screening for favorable phenotypes after making a cross between two species in effort to couple favorable phenotypes from both (this is the traditional method to develop new cultivars, most of what we plant today are hybrids). Genetic modification is a shortcut that ultimately saves the farmer time, money, water, and land to achieve the same end result of an elite cultivar.

What happens after with licensing and other legal issues is a fault of policymakers rather than any fault of this inherent lifesaving technology.

[ImaCake]

I am not convinced this is actually true. GMOs in practice tend to be the introduction of a foreign gene into an organism. Breeding is different; you shuffle ~1 million small effect size variants around and see if you can get a combination that has a bigger effect size. This sounds inefficient, but done right it can have spectacular effects (i.e the green revolution).

I also don’t think we have pushed the limits of breeding yet. It is only in the last decade that genotyping tech has become cheap enough to employ it for a breeding program. Combine that big data analysis with breeding and I bet you can produce some spectacular results within 1 or 2 generations.

I think the massive advantages of shuffling a million variants 1000 times is why GMOs are transgenics and not modifications of the existing genome. Traditional breeding is just so much better at this.

[saiya-jin]

On paper, you are absolutely right. But we don't live in theoretical world, rather in one where corporations like Monsanto will use any technology available to extract as much profit from everybody as possible.

Even if it means doing highly amoral stuff and tightly coupling crops enhanced for mass, immunity to pests and diseases with things like inability to breed, so farmers have to keep buying their seeds.

Its not hard to see why everybody has issues with this - not many want to be slaves with the very thing that our lives depend on to company thats extremely greedy from the start. GMs without those traits, having just weaknesses adressed might be much better sell for poor countries.

Rich countries like Europe will react when its time to react, no need to freak out now when as you describe serious issues will be present in next century. Crops can be changed pretty fast if there is strong enough motivation and one has enough cash.

[goatlover]

Can't the Indian government promote it's own agricultural companies and ban Monsanto products? That would allow Indian GM crops without worrying about some other country's corporation making Indian farmers dependent. Prohibiting GM foods sounds like handicapping countries if the concern is merely becoming dependent on other countries.

[pphysch]

Doable, sure. But that is precisely how one gets labeled an "authoritarian regime" by Western capitalists.

[jpollock]

Not authoritarian, but it does tend to run up against free trade agreements where offshore products and companies need to be given equivalent treatment.

However, I don't think India has many FTAs, and probably few of them include agricultural products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bilateral_free-trade_a...

[pphysch]

If not authoritarian, do you have any counterexamples of "authoritarian" countries that do have a FTA with Washington?

[siliconunit]

I think there are a lot of misconceptions about GM crops, most people think they are modified to be resist/repel vast types of insects/pests and what not, this is in average not the case and very complex to implement, what they are really engineered for is simply to be very resistant to specific pesticides, very easy to control/predict as you have to target only the few chemicals that you spray. Unfortunately we all know what this means... tenfold increase of pesticides and faster destruction of the environment. Not to say that there aren't GM modifications in that direction, but it's not the norm.

[infogulch]

I agree in general that GM is mostly a shortcut to a similar selective breeding that humans have been doing since pre-history, and banning it altogether is short sighted and reactionary. That said I think there is space for debate over which phenotypes are bred into our food, and how some phenotypes enable drastic changes in how our food is harvested and processed. For example, the use of glyphostate as an essential component in weed control and harvesting of wheat is enabled by transferring phenotypes from very different organisms that would be impossible using natural breeding techniques. And note that this and similar modifications are now IP owned by the people who did it, and they have a vested interest in getting everyone to use it (by force if necessary) irregardless of the obvious looming health questions that arise.

[m0zg]

> Countries that eschew genetic modification of foodstocks will see famine in the next century

Even if we were to agree that GM crops help with that (which is debatable), I don't see how there'd be any "famine" seeing that they can change policy anytime in the future if they see problematic trends, and do the same thing they do with drugs - ignore US patents and start making their own GM seeds.

Note as well that I'm not against genetic engineering per se, and I do not believe the consumption of most GM foods is harmful to one's health. But the way GE is currently done, the problems of monoculture and security of the food supply are very, very real, for the same reason why we only have the shitty varieties of bananas now - the better kind got wiped out by disease.

It doesn't have to be this way. There's nothing preventing Big Agriculture from introducing more diverse seed varieties. It's just less profitable than making monocultures that can be wiped out by a single strain of a single disease.

[ch4s3]

> it is about the largescale replacement of a system where farmers own their biodiverse seed with a top down monocultural approach that essentially makes farmers franchisees of a massive corporate behemoth and eliminates biodiversity, putting all eggs in one basket.

No one is out there forcing people to switch to GM crops when those seeds become available. Now the business model of large agriculture in the US isn't necessarily the one you would want to import, but GM crops could happily coexist in a country's agricultural mix along side traditional crops. You could probably even tweak some of your traditional seeds domestically to be more pest/drought resistant, give those seeds out, and call it a win.

It could be a really useful tech if people deployed it responsibly.

[chuckee]

> No one is out there forcing people to switch to GM crops when those seeds become available.

Just like if steroids became legal in sports, no-one would be forcing top athletes to take them. If you want to maintain food sovereignty, you can't ignore market forces.

[ch4s3]

> food sovereignty

This always seems like a really squishy concept. What does culturally appropriate food mean? It seems like an ultra-conservative and condescending concept. Why should people in the global south let a Quixote Belgian farming movement trap them in agrarian poverty?

A nation state a large, and well educated as India could surely develop its own domestic GMO tech and deploy it in a way that their citizens approve of via their democratic system of government. They developed their own pharmaceutical manufacturing industry which is the largest in any developing nation, so why not this? Are GMO seeds any more unnatural than statins or artificial insulin?

[chuckee]

I have no idea what "culturally appropriate food" has to do with this. Food sovereignty means a nation is not dependent on foreign entities for their food supply (or if they are for some elements, e.g. tractors, they can easily find someone else to buy them from). It has nothing to do with culture, and does not prevent India from growing non-local crops - or trading for them.

As for banning (foreign-made) GMOs trapping people in poverty, that's debatable at best. There's considerable evidence that unrestricted free trade hinders economic development [1], by keeping countries from developing their own industries. Every country that has climbed out of poverty so far, has done so without GMOs (granted because they were not widespread at the time, but the same should still be possible today) - and without unrestricted free trade [2].

The comparison with pharmaceuticals is apt. For one, pharmaceuticals don't displace anything, so there is no existing local industry harmed by their import (prior to developing local pharma industry). And if India developed their own GMO industry, you are correct, using those GMOs would not harm their food sovereignty. Of course issues with loss of crop biodiversity and farmers becoming dependent on a single giant (albeit Indian) corporation would remain, but at least viewed on a national level, sovereignty would not be harmed, even if individual farmers would still lose some independence. But at least the entities they became dependent on would be within their democratic reach.

And regarding how natural GMOs vs. pharmaceuticals are - I was not making an appeal to nature, so that is irrelevant. For the sake of argument, lets say they are equally unnatural.

[1] https://fpif.org/kicking_away_the_ladder_the_real_history_of...

[2] "... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." - James K. Galbraith, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

[ch4s3]

> I have no idea what "culturally appropriate food" has to do with this.

It's literally part of the initial declaration from the first global forum on food sovereignty. It's their thing, not something I made up.

> As for banning (foreign-made) GMOs trapping people in poverty, that's debatable at best.

That's not what I meant, I was criticizing the food sovereignty movements assumptions about small scale agriculture. Small scale agriculture basically always means poverty, and people rarely choose it freely. India's agricultural policies absolutely trap people in poverty now.

> For one, pharmaceuticals don't displace anything

There's a very large industry of traditional medicine in India that would probably beg to differ. Not that this quibble matters.

> Of course issues with loss of crop biodiversity and farmers becoming dependent on a single giant (albeit Indian) corporation would remain,

There's no reason you could produce a wide variety of slightly modified seeds that are 1 to 1 replacements for what people are growing. You could even spin this out of universities and establish regional seed banks.

> none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules.

That has nothing to do with banning a technology.

[Retric]

Market forces heavily push GM crops when you let them enter the market without labeling laws.

[whimsicalism]

Market forces in this instance meaning cheaper food for people, just so we're clear.

[chuckee]

Becoming dependent on a foreign corporation for your food supply will cost you far more in the long run.

[panta]

I wonder if a lock-in phenomenon could take place at some point in the future, where non-GM varieties become a no-go and the GM ones get very expensive?

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

GM crops can produce more yield in worse conditions. As the climate changes, humanity will become increasingly dependent on these crops for survival. And yes, at that point we will be locked in, in the same way we are locked into many other technological advances that make our lives possible. However I don’t expect that will ever make the GM crops more expensive than non-GM, since the land that is capable of growing non-GM will only become more of a rare luxury.

[spywaregorilla]

cheaper food, with the long tail risk that a single crop vulnerability to a new disease destroys all of it without warning

[asdff]

Why is that not an issue with traditional crops? At least with GM crops if there is a known blight you can introduce traits that confer resistance to said blight in a much faster process than attempting to cross a high yielding and blight resistant strain and getting both favorable phenotypes in your crops. Especially with crops where it can take years for the progeny to reach maturity to even assess the phenotypes of the hybrids.

[Retric]

GM crops have significantly less genetic diversity simply as a result of how their created and sold. This isn’t a new problem, but fixing it significantly slows time to market.

As to using GM to add blight resistance, that’s not always an option. Cavendish bananas for example are at massive risk from Panama disease TR4 and have been for years.

[AdamN]

Yes. That is why in the US people are so malnourished - eating the cheapest possible food day in day out.

That price also does not include externalities (eg. the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by Iowa fertilizer runoff is not accounted for in the price of the food produced).

[jonahbenton]

Putting out a request for someone with knowledge of IP dynamics in this space to weigh in. My understanding is that nothing is "forced" but adoption of IP-protected seed has substantial downstream effects and risks, and that there is no real "happy coexistence." Looking to be educated...

[throw63738]

GM modified seeds can not be usually replanted after harvest. Sometimes they need proprietary fertiliser.

Genetic sequences are patented. There was a case where GM seeds spread to neighbours, and Monsato sued neighbour...

It is horror show similar to software patents.

[ch4s3]

> Monsato sued neighbour

That's not what happened at all. Even NPR calls that claim bogus[1]. That said, they do some other things that are a bit unsavory.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/to...

[gremloni]

The only thing wrong with GM food is the propriety nonsense around it.

[fredgrott]

a question, could the nation of Indian start their onw GM food and make the IP of them free to everyone as an free-access solution for farmers?

[mistrial9]

LOL - Bayer-Monsanto looking at you!