>Although NAFTA was heralded by the U.S. government for reducing barriers to trade, as The Counter previously reported, the pact devastated rural economies in Mexico, flooding the market with cheap, government-subsidized U.S. corn and gutting domestic corn prices by nearly 70 percent. This shift led an estimated 2 million farmworkers to abandon the countryside to seek work in big cities or across the border in the United States.
>On December 31, 2020, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed a decree that could enable Mexican farmers to reclaim their livelihoods within their home country. The order calls for the phase-out by 2024 of two pillars of American agribusiness: glyphosate and genetically engineered (GE) corn
The problem that US corn grown using high yielding strains is too cheap, so the solution is to ban growing high yielding strains domestically? I'm not sure how that's going to work.
The google translated version says nothing about banning genetically engineered corn, just banning glyphosate? The second order effect is that nobody buys RR corn seed, since you wouldn't bother spending more for it if you can't then use glyphosate to knock down weeds. But that's only for corn grown in-country. All the media coverage seems to think it's banning corn imports, which I believe would require repealing NAFTA.
One issue with Corn in México is that we have hundreds of different varieties of corn (including those fancy coloured corn used for tortillas). Introducing High yield GMO corn without taking care if the local varieties could decimate the biodiversity of the region.
It isn't sweet corn, which is essentially a mutation variety from hundreds of years ago eaten like a vegetable instead of a grain.
All field corn (dent corn, lots of names) is perfectly edible. There are varieties with different characteristics like protein, oil, or starch content, or varieties grown to grind up and feed the whole plant to animals.
Regulation approves only certain genetics and grain millers will have certain approved varieties that mill well, and in general lots of extra care must be taken for human food corn. Ultimately though, it is extremely similar to all other corn.
Unless I'm mistaken, I think this misconception arises from people not realizing that a lot of corn is actually intended to become flour, not to be eaten off of the cob like sweet corn. So yes, these corns aren't edible when rolled in butter at a barbecue, but they do grind into flour just fine to become other things.
I think the parent meant ‘not palatable’ instead of ‘not edible’, it’s an understandable mistake for someone who’s rarely, or never, experienced edible but not palatable food.
I don't think it would require repealing NAFTA. I don't know the legal details of NAFTA (or whatever it is called today). But usually, what free trade agreements do is forcing countries not to advantage local companies over foreign ones among the parties of the agreement. So I suppose if Mexico bans corn imports from the US, it will be against NAFTA. If it bans all genetically-engineered corn whether they are produced in Mexico or US or Canada, that will be OK. If most US corn is GE, then they effectively ban corn imports from the US without banning corn imports.
I hate to say this... but, why are you commenting if you don't know the legal details of NAFTA? The legal details of NAFTA are thorny, often surprising, and extremely relevant to this issue. Just search for the case history of the "tantamount to expropriation" phrase from NAFTA, and the crazy way these court cases have played out over the years under NAFTA.
NAFTA is practically the poster child for "trade deals with weird language, that should probably have never been approved by congress, with far-reaching consequences."
I'm expecting commenters to contribute to topics when they have something relevant to say, rather than make guesses in the dark in fields they're not familiar with. If someone's comfortable making guesses about whether something will turn out to be struck down by NAFTA, but doesn't know anything about NAFTA other than the fact that it's a trade deal... well, aren't the details of NAFTA explicitly what's important to answering the question here?
And wouldn't someone with a passing familiarity with NAFTA at least know about the "tantamount to appropriation" clause? I know this much, and that's just from a half-remembered required social studies class I took in public high school in the US, some twenty-odd years ago.
I’ve found on most topics I know something, the top comment is usually a random guess in the dark. They don’t know what they’re talking about and actively harm understanding of the issue. The standard HN top comment will have no grounding in facts but will simply assume the worst intent possible of everyone involved. This cynicism is mistaken for wisdom.
Of course I see a lot of wisdom on HN threads discussing subjects I’m not familiar with … but only because I can’t tell the difference between cynicism and wisdom in those cases.
You’re frustrated that someone would comment on a thorny legal issue while having no understanding of the law or knowledge of the specifics of NAFTA. But that’s how it is on every thread not related to software. See the hundreds of threads where software engineers suddenly became expert epidemiologists overnight for an example of this phenomenon.
I’m not sure what the alternative is. Certainly it isn’t just keeping quiet and not discussing anything we’re not experts in. Maybe sometimes it’s ok to speculate just for fun.
Your reasoning about the cynicism of HN while being cynical is kind of amazing in a good, humorous way. Not sure if intended, but appreciated nonetheless.
> The standard HN top comment will have no grounding in facts but will simply assume the worst intent possible of everyone involved. This cynicism is mistaken for wisdom.
The last decades of politics have shown all over the world that modern politicians act primarily on the whims of those who line their pockets, which is way too often contrary to the best solutions for their constituents or the ability of the planet to support human life.
That cynicism, itself a symptom of the erosion of trust in democracy, as well as populist tendencies, doesn't come from nothing.
If somebody say something that is wrong and another person correct it, we all learn something.
I think there is nothing wrong with saying your thing, if you do it in a humble way and you don't pretend to be an expert. It's called having a conversation.
If they declare themselves an expert on NAFTA before commenting would that satisfy your requirements? You sound silly. Everyone please check-in with klodolph before commenting.
Personally, I'd just prefer people assert less often what they don't know to be true with a good degree of confidence. I'm including myself in this goal. I'm trying to say, "Why would ...?" rather than, "I don't think ...", especially when my basis for thinking a certain thing is shaky.
Seems like a reasonable assumption to me. A trade agreement doesn't compel a country to accept literally anything that a trading partner wants to export. For instance Mexico couldn't force the US to import cocaine since obviously that's illegal. Mexico is just saying GM corn is banned internally and externally.
Many trade deals contain a catalogue of legal and illegal substances under the deal, often with the requirement to make not-yet-legal ones legal under the deal.
NAFTA was replaced last year with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). I don't believe it goes into full effect until 2025-26. It's basically the same as NAFTA, though.
I’m not an expert but it’s my understanding that the deal is more detailed then that and less about not favoring foreign companies and more about getting one big negotiation done all at once for a large number of industries.
Articles 5th and 6th mention genetically modified corn.
>Artículo Quinto.- Las Secretarías de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, de Salud, y de Agricultura y Desarrollo Rural, así como el Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, a más tardar en el primer semestre del año 2023, promoverán las reformas de los ordenamientos jurídicos aplicables para evitar el uso de glifosato como sustancia activa de agroquímicos y de maíz genéticamente modificado en México.
At the end: "...to avoid the use of glyphosate as active substance in agrochemicals and genetically modified corn in Mexico"
In Art. 6:
> revocarán y se abstendrán de otorgar permisos de liberación al ambiente de semillas de maíz genéticamente modificado.
"... will revoke and abstain from granting permits to release into the environment genetically modified corn seeds"
FWIW it only contains corn syrup because it's cheaper than cane sugar. If corn wasn't so cheap, you'd just eat an equivalent amount of cane sugar instead.
Are they that different? I thought the major difference was that the disaccharide in cane sugar was split in corn syrup, which happens very quickly in your digestion anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM - the main gist of it is cane sugar is 50/50 sucrose and fructose while HFCS contains much more fructose which is harder for the body to digest/make use of as it requires being broke down or something and its hard on the liver ect. that video goes way into depth about it if your interested.
> The basic tariff for importing direct consumption sugar into the EU is €419 per tonne. So, every tonne of sugar imported from a non-EU country costs an extra €419. Raw sugar imported into the EU is to be further refined into white sugar attracts a tariff of €339 per tonne.
remember when we had those toilet paper shortages and other essential shortages due to minor supply chain disruptions during the early stages of the COVID pandemic?
now imagine that it was actual food shortages because we outsourced farming for short term profit, food subsidies are a national security issue. Outsourcing food production to maximize(short-term) economic efficiency is exactly the type of short sighted decision that has resulted in China taking over global manufacturing
Corn based ethanol would like a word. Also, it’s ironic to me that subsidized industrial monoculture has a number of insecurity producing effects:
1. Topsoil loss
2. Mismanagement of surface water and subsurface reserves
3. Centralization and consolidation, decimating rural communities which would be producing more labor intensive food in a crisis
4. Lower biodiversity, increased risk of catastrophic loss
5. The whole system relies on global trade to make useful food anyway
If national security were the actual driving force, farm policy would look a lot different.
Thanks… but I do. My state is responsible for more than 1/3 of the total nutrient entering the Gulf of Mexico, and our major city recently tried and failed to sue counties to the north for making their water cost prohibitive to treat.
What exactly don’t you think I know about farming practices? I personally know both commodity farmers and sustainable vegetable farmers.
I agree with the benefits of crop subsidization, however the subsidies on corn are way beyond national security. Corn is a very robust crop that grows in nearly any conditions and has limited nutritional value, subsidies need to be spread out among more varied and vulnerable crops. We should also be focusing them on more sustainable farming techniques that don't deplete the topsoil.
I used to not like farm subsidies, but the free market tends to plan for supply shocks poorly, and the cost of shortages is incredibly high, so I don't mind paying farmers to overproduce food.
The problem is that the government tells you to produce a limited selection of crops. Then subsidy farmers will try to optimize the crap out of the subsidies. It's ok for food security but now all the food processing companies will try to use the subsidized crops everywhere because they are much cheaper.
Do you have a source for this? I believe you, but there are multiple ways of parsing that sentence, and a source would clarify things.
One reading (87% of gross income) is obviously problematic, and another (87% of profit) is exactly what you'd expect to get if you add almost any subsidy to a previously low-margin activity.
Absolutely, but depending on how you do it, you can cause less market distortions - what I've seen subsidies do locally is make farmers do things that would be unprofitable instead of searching for what's profitable for them (eg. planting sub-optimal crops because they know they get subsidies, prevent small inefficient farmers from going bust effectively becoming a welfare program that prevents more efficient farming, etc.)
Having a functioning farm sector a food reserve is sooooo much better than having any amount of food in storage. You can only store so much, it won't last long given the huge amount needed every day. Disruptions that last years rather than weeks or months look more likely now than in the past century.
That can be generalized and of course is not limited to farming.
Maybe on the US level it makes sense, but I live in a small country and I hear this argument a lot and it makes 0 sense :
a) our agricultural sector isn't diverse or strong enough anyway, if we get cut off from imports we are fucked even with subsidies
b) ramping up basic agriculture doesn't seem that hard, as in that's an easier crisis scenario to handle
c) on the market if global food prices jumped (has happened in the past) the subsidized farmers were quick to export to richer markets at a higher price, I believe US also saw similar price jump effects when China was affected by pork shortages IIRC
Best case scenario is government just increases the emergency supplies they already have to cover the period it would take the production to ramp up
> Maybe on the US level it makes sense, but I live in a small country
In case you missed it, this entire discussion here is about the US situation. The "U.S:" even is in the article's subtitle (once you click on the article) and the US and NAFTA are all over the article and this discussion.
The country talked about as the one subsidizing their products, leading to the problem elsewhere, is not Mexico. Not sure what you were reading here. It's the USA.
And apparently, see the current topic, Mexico too thinks having a functioning farming sector is more important than having access to the cheapest goods. Other wise they would welcome that the US pays for them being able to import the products more cheaply because of the subsidies.
So, given that, I'm not sure why you think pointing to Mexico refutes my point?
> [...] but the free market tends to plan for supply shocks poorly, [...]
Well, when you ban people from raising prices when they prepared for an emergency better than others, that tends to disincentives preparing for emergencies.
(And, yes, the US and many state ban raising prices whenever they declare emergencies.)
That might sound appealing, but economics isn't with you here.
In addition, the farmland in eg the US isn't going away, just because you drop subsidies and tariffs from corn. People will just grow something else there, when corn isn't as profitable anymore.
The dream would be for that energy to come from renewable electricity, so I think it's still a viable fuel to consider for the future as a holdover fuel for the enormous internal combustion engine fleet the world has. We can't immediately convert everyone to electric, so a good holdover might be making renewable fuels more viable.
I intend to keep my car in operation for a long time, as a car for motorsport, so I converted it to E85 for performance and long term robustness of fuel supply. My guess is that as petroleum and diesel fuels go out of fashion, only niche consumers will need combustion fuels, and that will be motorsport and ethanol blends. Companies can already make ethanol racing blends work financially, so I expect it to stick around.
Not currently but I still use the car once a week, we have an all year driving season so I just inspect the lines occasionally and I haven't seen any erosion yet. I think I would run unleaded through it if I had to store it for 6+ months though.
There are two statements here that you are getting mixed up.
Ethanol absorbs moisture. You cannot store gas that contains ethanol for as long as you can non ethanol gas. If you are putting your car in storage, it is prudent to flush out the ethanol. This can be as simple as running the tank down and filling up with regular gas, and then driving more so the lines don't have ethanol gas anymore.
Ethanol attacks rubber compounds in a different method than gasoline. You need to have special lines to run E85 gas. I presume he switched it out himself. Not sure what else is involved in the conversion.
Yep that's all correct, there were a few lines that needed to be replaced with E85 rated lines, it wasn't a big task though.
For my setup I have an ethanol content sensor so I can run regular and ethanol based fuels, and I upgraded my fuel pump and injectors, as you need about twice as much fuel volume per combustion compared to regular unleaded.
To answer the "Why" of the parent post, typically it's because you can get more power out of a vehicle with ethanol.
The reason you can get more power out of ethanol fuels, is because the aforementioned increased volume of fuel cools the combustion temperature. Ethanol brings some of it's own oxygen, hence why you can combust that extra fuel without adding more air.
Lowering combustion temperatures reduces the tendency for an engine to "knock" or "ping". Knocking is when the flame front is uneven, which gives a poorly timed and high peak pressure combustion that can lead to catastrophic failure.
Most turbocharged or supercharged engines are "knock limited" meaning you could produce more power if you could eliminate the risk of knocking. This only gets worse as turbo/superchargers increase intake air temperatures, which increases combustion temperature, increasing the tendency to knock. So by using ethanol fuels, you decrease combustion temperatures and get back the ability to push the engine further using other parameters.
The GE corn is specifically engineered to be tolerant of glyphosate. That way you can spray it all over the fields and it kills the nutrient stealing weeds and not the corn. It seems their goal is to get rid of the GE corn and outlawing glyphosate to reduce the demand for the GE corn is a big part of the process.
So, non-glyphosate herbicides aren't really relevant to the goals of the program.
No, my point is that if the problem is cheap imports of ready-to-eat corn is the problem, then only banning glyphosate itself will do nothing to stem that. If it's banned alongside GMO corn imports, that's a different matter.
> So the solution is to ban growing high yielding strains domestically? I'm not sure how that's going to work.
The answer is in the headline: it's a decree from a populist. It might sound good to voters, but might even be harmful when it faces economic realities.
You can use broad leaf herbicides on corn. Also modern tech spot treats at planting. Some farmers do this already. I don’t think everyone is growing pioneer.
This is just my impression, so do tell me if I'm incorrect, but I always got the impression that those North American countries like Mexico and USA rely a bit too much on corn, to the detriment of a more diverse set of crops. Renewable fuel? Corn. Cattle food? Corn. Staple carb? Corn. Sweetener? Corn.
Aren't they putting too many eggs in the same basket?
The staple native grain of Europe is wheat, rice in Asia, and corn in the Americas.
At least that's the historical context. Today, the reason why America produces so much corn is because of government subsidies, and so she can always feed herself if WWIII ever breaks out and all the borders shut down (unlike many modern first world nations).
As if the farmland would just go away, if the subsidies would go away?
> The staple native grain of Europe is wheat, rice in Asia, and corn in the Americas.
Not sure what you mean by native? The predecessor of wheat was native to some parts of the Middle East, but until recently you couldn't even grow that stuff well in eg most parts of Germany. (Hence Germany's enduring love affair with rye bread.)
Rice only grows in some parts of Asia. (Eg Northern China relies on other grains.)
All those crops are human interventions in their wide spread, they aren't native to entire continents.
> In the late Roman Empire in Europe the most important crops were bread wheat in Italy and barley in northern Europe and the Balkans. Near the Mediterranean Sea viticulture and olives were important. Rye and oats were only slowly becoming major crops.[1]
The article does mention Rye was important and the most common crop in the Northernmost regions and in France. Due to its winter tolerance.
You can grow wheat in Germany, but it's not as good for wheat as Italy.
So eg you can't really economically grow the durum wheat you need for (non-egg) pasta.
Yes, barley and rye grow just fine. Potatoes, too. But they are a New World import. Germans love potatoes. (Just like Chinese cuisine loves peanuts. Another New World import.)
And, of course, Germany has different regions. Some parts are warm enough for wine, others not so much.
I'm not too familiar with other places but historically rice wasn't the staple in South Asia. Even in South India, it was something that rich people ate.
As a result of government policies, rice monoculture ended up replacing the the diversity of grains that people actually consumed.
Its been a staple food for thousands of years. At least in Mexico the whole cuisine revolves around it. Same as Asia and rice. All the other uses such as fuel and sweetner is because its subsidized, doubt it would be used so much if it wasn't.
Do you live in the US? I would not say corn is a staple carb (not counting HFCS, but as a direct food replacing bread or rice) for most people. It is consumed directly as a vegetable (sweet corn) and as a staple in the form of cornbread, tortillas, and other cornmeal-based products but I would bet those don’t even form a plurality of starchy carb sources in the American diet, compared to wheat-based carbs like bread or even potatoes. It could be different in Mexico where corn tortillas are more commonly consumed, but in the US I don’t think corn is actually a common staple carb (again, not counting HFCS) at all.
You may wonder why I don’t count HFCS- that’s because it’s a sweetener composed of simple sugars whereas most staple carb sources are starches. It’s very common in processed foods, which Americans and Mexicans unfortunately consume way too much of, but is not exactly a staple most people have or use in their home cooking.
No; I'm from South America. In fact I was mentally comparing MX+USA with the situation here, it depends a lot on the specific region but usually there's a plurality of staple carbs (wheat, rice, potato, corn, yucca...). Cattle food, sugar and renewable fuel are taken up by other crops (soy and sugar cane).
>I would bet those don’t even form a plurality of starchy carb sources in the American diet
That's good. I was mildly concerned about the situation because others mentioned corn farms subsidised by the government - relying too much on them for food would be risky, in the case of a plague.
It does get disproportionate subsidies. But part of it could be simple risk aversion, corn is a very robust crop. Wheat can be destroyed in conditions where corn will prosper and much of the US can get fairly extreme weather.
I thought the main health problem with GMO crops (other than overzealous IP management and such) wasn’t even that they’re engineered - it’s that we engineer them to deal with heavy pesticide usage, proceed do so in a way that it’s impossible to clean out, and then consume that food.
(and the insect apocalypse, but that’s an indirect effect on human health)
The resistance tends to last only a few generations before the pest population evolves past it.
In areas where BT-Maize gets planted, Corn Ear Worm has been observed to evolve resistances in as few as 5 or 6 generations. You might think you've deployed a pest-free plant, but in reality all you've done is deploy an evolutionary pressure on the target population, and nature has had like 800-million years' practise out-evolving bad shit happening.
Viewed in a systems light, the whole notion is little more than a grift; at best a temporary solution that takes longer to develop than ecosystems take to out-evolve.
"By 2018, farmers were spending an average of $23.58 per hectare on insecticide — 37% more than the pre-Bt levels." https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-twisted-trajector... Unfortunately the field isn't a lab, and making it look like a lab is very resource-intensive and environmentally damaging. "The cost of ignoring ‘desi’ varieties for decades has been high for India."
This said, using alternative pesticides like copper sulfate used by some of the "organic" food production can be as bad if not worse for the environment and humans.
Just a reminder that while we don't know precisely what combination of GMO, Round Up, or excessive pesticide and fertiliser is causing the insect apocalypse, there _is_ a global insect apocalypse.
EU agriculture is also pesticide and insecticide heavy and only getting worse lately. Another problem (in Eastern Europe) is the use of banned chemicals, usually imported from Turkey or China. How do I know?
1. I used to keep bees for ~20 years. Saw a gradual decline in population ~5 years ago and now they are all dead. Same for most of the people in my community, except a few of them that do kind of "industrial" beekeeping, which requires lots of attention and is not feasible for a hobbyist.
2. When I asked some of the smaller farmers in the area why this is happening, they told be about the illegal imports that many are doing to stay competitive.
3. Tried complaining to authorities several times in the past. Whether out of negligence or corruption, they simply don't care.
Lots of non-GMO and Organic farmers use stuff that's just as bad as round up. They're kidding themselves if they don't think they are. Nature is full of quite deadly chemicals not made by man, but the "eco farmers" complete ignore that and act like "natural" pesticides are safer than man-made ones.
I'd guess that that monoculture, pesticides and fertiliser make up the bulk of the insect problem.
However, in terms of potential for unforeseen catastrophe, I'd leave GMO in the list. Our understanding of how small genetic changes can affect ecosystems in unintended ways is far, far from thorough. W don't even understand how small genetic changes affect us, never mind a biome filled with biomes.
Catastrophe is probably too strong a word, but I agree with the main idea here. The folks worried about human health effects are barking up the wrong tree. The risks (if there are any) are probably ecological, not medical.
Round Up is a defoliant, it's unlikely to have anything to do with an insect apocalypse.
Also while Round Up is probably (over)used, particularly in corn harvesting where it's sprayed to ease harvest and thus is more likely to end up in food products, in normal use it seems to be as safe as a chemical can be. Banning it is very likely to result in other chemicals being used, and they're unlikely to be as safe.
Ah yes, because insects have nothing to do with leaves... And glyphosate is the only chemical in it.
Wait, neither of those are actually true, are they?
Let's have a goo at the top three search results for "round up effect on insects"...
> "The chemical compound glyphosate, the world's most widely used herbicide, can weaken the immune systems of insects, suggests a study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health"
> "The active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, does not affect insects in the same way it impacts plants, but it does kill insects, either directly -- as in the case of a small number of honeybees in Monsanto's research -- or as a consequence of killing weeds."
> "Glyphosate—the most widely used herbicide globally—inhibits melanin production, which could have wide-ranging implications in the health of many organisms, including insects. ... Glyphosate also increased the burden of the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum in A"
This doesn't seem like such an "unlikely" candidate to be playing a role to me.
It's not a defoliant. It's a systemic herbicide. It kills all plants through to the roots. It's not used to ease harvesting, it's used to kill all the other plants in the environment around the plant that has been engineered for resistance, to boost yields.
The harm to insects comes primarily from the lack of biodiversity and lack of flowering plants.
That article is overflowing with problems big enough to drive an apocalypse through.
It's a Gish-gallop of codswallop.
It's laughable, and I scorn the author with all my heart. He's a stooge.
Since it's rude to say things like that without examples - and I resent you for making me spend more time on that article - he says things like:
> While Sánchez-Bayo was claiming that “almost half of the [world’s insect] species are rapidly declining,” the data documented declines for about 2,900 species, a tiny fraction (less than one-10th of one percent) of the insect species on Earth.
Jeeze, he only documented a decline in _2,900_ of the insect species on Earth. How could he not document all 3 billion +, what a lazy guy [/s].
Seriously?!
In the next paragraphs, you can see how differently he treats research that supports his view, praising it's author's for "welcoming criticism", even though their paper was criticised for the very same issues and more.
At times he criticizes researchers for not using more data, at times he admits that more data is needed, and then he says that there's "no evidence" of decline based on one study that he admits was widely criticised - for the same issues, and more, as he berated Sánchez-Bayo for.
I had a quick look at this guy's Twitter and he's abusing Greenpeace and organic farming, while defending the use of pesticides and in particular glyphosate.
SO I LOOKED INTO THAT, AND GUESS WHAT:
"Jon Entine is the founder and executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, a key partner in Monsanto's public relations efforts to ..."
How has the science evolved on GMOs? I think it's pretty horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient to some sort of vendor lock-in to a giant agribusiness, but what about modifying a plant to be more drought or pest resistant?
Vendor lock-in is due to hybrid vigor, not due to GM technology.
Many modern crops are high-yielding due to hybrid vigor, when you cross two distantly related cultivars their offspring will outperform their parents. However that vigor disappears on self-crossing, so you can't reuse your own seeds. That's why the seed company has a license to print money, they have to keep on remaking these hybrids. Farmers can do that themselves which is where seed co-ops come from, but these usually don't have the internal cultivars that the seed companies use to remake the hybrids. Could be that parent A has a useful resistance and B has the high yielding variety, and both parents themselves were made in a long breeding process.
This goes back to the 1900s but had its big breakthrough with Norman Borlaug's green revolution in the 60s. He crossed Japanese dwarf wheat and Mexican 'regular' wheat to get smaller high-yielding varieties he had to keep on remaking. There was no GM involved.
There's also a safety benefit. It's plausible that these hybrids would substantially outcompete the local flora and you'd have a landscape of corn and beans.
I don't know the veracity of this, but when I've seen concerns about this raised, usually it's mentioned that something that pours so much energy into the edible part for no reproductive benefit would have a hard time outcompeting something that doesn't do this.
> It's plausible that these hybrids would substantially outcompete the local flora
This is absolutely not plausible. It's also not plausible that high-yield broiler chicken would outcompete local birds, and it's not plausible that high-yield cows would outcompete local moose, elk and deer.
It is interesting that with animals, people intuitively usually understand that high yield food producing breeds would not outcompete anything in the wild nature. But with plants, people are ready to believe scifi horror movie stories.
Yes, it's evolved significantly. For example, plants expressing a Snf7-targeting double-stranded RNA to control western corn root worm are now commercialised. dsRNA does not have the toxicity issues associated with many synthetic and organic insecticides, and is far more specific (so doesn't impact on beneficial species). There are no additional applications of anything required for the effect.
> I think it's pretty horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient
Last time I looked, Monsanto was not using terminator genes and promising they would never use terminator genes while the green press was running stories that were precision-engineered to give you the impression that Monsanto was using terminator genes.
Has that changed? Did Monsanto start actually using terminator genes? Or is the story still, uhh... "speculative"?
Whether glyphosate causes cancer or not, there is much less doubt that it has a harmful impact on insect populations and on aquatic wildlife from runoff. Hundreds of thousands of tons of glyphosate soaking into the ground and into the water table, reaching our rivers and lakes, year after year. How can it be safe?
You can say likewise about any other pesticide on that basis.. but I do wonder where the "hundreds of thousands of tonnes" comes from. My farm applies 540 grams of glyphosate per acre on our soybean crop each season.. if that is applied to every acre of farmland in the USA that would be 500mt of glyphosate. So you believe that a majority of the acres in the USA have at least 540g/ac applied and that a majority of that glyphosate is not metabolized by plants but is mobile in runoff?
I would be extremely interested in the research that validates that because it is not consistent with my experience.
Glyphosphate has a pretty short persistence in the environment. It breaks down relatively quickly. It has a half-life in the environment from as little as 15 days to a couple of months.
One of the significant problems with earlier pesticides and herbicides where the chemical in question would stay in the environment for decades (DDT, an insecticide, had a half life of 10-15 years and tended to accumulate in biological tissues). Glyphosphate is also not very acutely toxic.
I would have to eat an entire pound of pure glyphosphate to have a 50% chance of survival. (I consume many things every day much more toxic)
There are some questions about long term carcinogens but the signal there is not particularly strong.
As opposed to some other, especially older agricultural chemicals, many of which got their start as actual chemical weapons used in war.
Can you get pure glyphosphate? Yes, but it requires a license. It comes in about a 50/50 mixture with water usually.
It is much too difficult to distribute the pure substance in such small quantities so it is diluted with water to varying degrees (down to a few percent concentration) for safety, accuracy, and to avoid burning plants with unavoidable variations in application.
A small amount of a attractant is also added so the chemical better applies to leaves and doesn't just bead up and drip off onto the soil.
I believe you have to do some minor training and get a like certification, but yes, it comes in about a fifty percent concentrated solution with water. The LD50 of that solution is about a quart as far as I can determine.
The point of the example is that it is not acutely toxic unless you ingest a sizable amount while dealing with concentrations only available to certified farmers. The lethal amounts come up to around how much you would apply to half an acre of cropland.
> Whether glyphosate causes cancer or not, there is much less doubt that it has a harmful impact on insect populations and on aquatic wildlife from runoff.
It's actually not glyphosate that can be harmful to aquatic animals. It's the accompanying surfactants, added to help glyphosate to enter the plants. You put too much of any kind of surfactant (basically, a soap. A chemical that lowers the surface tension of water) to a small volume of water, and it will be harmful to aquatic life.
"Their" being the "Glyphosate Renewal Group", which requested the renewal and had to present studies that covered its safety. To sum those 11,000 pages up: the GRG investigated itself and found no problems, the EU trusts that these findings are accurate.
Glyphosate has demonstrated a very significant potential to impact gut microbiome. Imbalance in the gut biota has been linked to an extraordinary number of negative health conditions, including many cancers as well as modern epidemics such as obesity, depression and auto-immune illness. For example, glyphosate has been specifically linked to Celiac's, which is increasing significantly in prevalence.
I don't know if I'd be so quick to call it 'safe.' It requires an infinite number of experiments to prove any chemical is perfectly safe. It requires only a few to demonstrate the opposite.
Yes, this whole narrative that farmers are idiots and that the agricultural industrial complex is manipulating us is both extremely popular here on HN and highly offensive.
If farmers don't want to grow GMO/glyphosate resistant crops they have options, I personally grow mostly non-GMO crops and make plenty of money doing it. Basic economics applies to GMOs like like it applies to microchips or flip-flops and the capital owners (in this case land owners) have agency in this process.
> what Canadian grain imports have anything to do with glyphosate?
You want wheat (and other grains) to be dry before harvest. Harvesting when wet increases losses due mold growth. Wet stems cause sticking and blocking in the harvest machinery. In many countries it's common to apply a defoliant: You kill or half-kill the foliage of the crop plants, and wait a small number of days, so grains and stems get drier before the harvest.
This use of glyphosate has nothing to do GMOs (there is no GMO wheat in markets anywhere). In a small number of countries, it's forbidden to use chemicals (plant poisons) to force desiccation.
Yeah, in oats now the harvest is managed in terms of if a pre-harvest desiccant was applied crops are binned and handled separately.
I dislike this being spelled out in terms of "increasing yield" as it is actually more about managing quality. Pre-harvest applications of glyphosate are mostly a thing of the past in wheat anyway, the varieties dry down better now - it was mostly a artifact of the Canadian transition from drying crops in windrows to leaving them stand. The genetics have caught up now.
You can engineer “round-up resistant” crop seed and then nuke the field leaving only your crop as survivor. In this context it is, but yes it is otherwise not.
So if the farmers didn't grow glysophate resistant corn instead they would grow non-GMO wheat and spray it with "selective" herbicides that kill wild oats and broadleaf plants over those acres and society would be better.. how exactly?
Roundup is a lot cheaper than Axial Extreme + MCPA or Velocity M3 or Tandem or Rexade.. and, TBH, Roundup isn't tha good at killing a lot of the weeds that those other products kill very well. It's just not as simple as you might think.
There are several varieties of insect-resistance traits, multiple brands of herbicide resistance (off the top of my head there’s Roundup Ready and Liberty Link), drought resistance, and several more. I was last deeply interested around 2008 so my knowledge is stale.
Watching the path-dependent nature of technology is fascinating. It seems Monsanto has largely given up on GMOs, due to public backlash, just as crispr and the like are set to make the whole endeavor a lot more precise. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2014/01/monsanto-gmo-techno...
The hot new thing these days (as I understand it, I am not a farmer) is precision ag - better use of maps, sensors, drones, robotics, etc to make better use of resources and better target chemical application. Bayer’s marketing site is probably a good place to get the farmer’s perspective: https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/innovations/data-science/d...
I don't think "Monsanto" has given up on GMOs, now they are Bayer and they sell a lot of GMO products.
The article linked does highlight a very important point without really enlightening readers about the history, GMOs were never about higher yields. Higher yields have always come from conventional plant breeding. The common misconception is that plant genomes are simple and we can manipulate them at will but the truth is that plant genomes are way, way more complex than animal genomes and we mostly have no idea how plants work.
GMO's are about specific pathways that we can understand that dictate the reactions is specific conditions, very narrow manipulations of a plant's metabolism, that we mostly discovered by accident.
The incredibly complex genomes of plants coupled with the incredible variety of plants out there to cultivate means that it will take a giant leap of technology geared towards understanding plant genomes that will in turn allow the effective application of technologies like CRISPR for manipulating plant genomes.. and that is decades away at best. I hope to live to see it!!
>what about modifying a plant to be more drought or pest resistant?
This is mostly done with breeding and hybridization as opposed to genetic engineering, though there have been some transgenics where anti-pest genes from other organisms have been spliced into corn.
There have been more herbicide resistance genetics recently.
Glyphosate resistant genetically engineered corn is patented and only available from the inventor (Monsanto, now owned by Bayer) of glyphosate (Round Up) herbicide. Spraying a field of glyphosate resistant GE corn with glyphosate kills the weeds and leaves the corn which improves yield since weeds use nutrients and moisture.
To put it mildly, Monsanto has been very aggressive at enforcing their patents.
> Spraying a field of glyphosate resistant GE corn with glyphosate kills the weeds and leaves the corn which improves yield since weeds use nutrients and moisture.
So the vendor lock-in is that... it's a better product? If that's what your idea of "vendor lock-in" is I can totally get behind that.
I don’t know of any non-hobby farms that keep seeds. Saving seeds on mass scale is difficult, and requires specialist equipment. Many commercial seeds are pre-treating with fungicides and/or starter fertilizer as well, which is often worth paying the premium for. As you mentioned, some non-GMO plants (hybrids - common with corn, wheat, cotton) don’t produce good seed anyways.
Which is why in Europe they have created a system for protection of rights to modified plants outside of the realm of patents and copyright definitions. See https://cpvo.europa.eu/en
CPVO is just an EU agency coordinating plant breeder's rights at the EU level. But plant breeder's rights are nothing new. The way you describe CPVO as something new and sinister, is quite dishonest.
This is what everyone was complaining about over a decade ago, it's no longer true...and has actually rarely ever been true. There have only been a few cases which of course people (people that wrongly think GMOs are dangerous despite every study saying it's not) grappled onto. Unfortunately people's ignorance/stupidity on GMOs has infamously cost lives due to nutritional problems (but of course not in the West where these lies originated.)
Nice usual GMO propanganda, but no.
Look at the social impact of GMOs in India (suicide), the environmental impact overall which is quite negative.
GMOs itself might be safe for consumption, but the amount of pesticide required for those stupid roundup ready crops is definitely not.
World nutrition? Nature already provides all the elements for it, GMOs won't solve wealth distribution problems.
In addition to what the sibling comment says about the patents expiring, that’s also not really lock in. You can switch to another vendor anytime - just because you used RR product once doesn’t mean you have to use it forever.
>On December 31, 2020, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed a decree that could enable Mexican farmers to reclaim their livelihoods within their home country. The order calls for the phase-out by 2024 of two pillars of American agribusiness: glyphosate and genetically engineered (GE) corn
The problem that US corn grown using high yielding strains is too cheap, so the solution is to ban growing high yielding strains domestically? I'm not sure how that's going to work.
The actual text of the decree is here: https://www.dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5609365&fecha...
The google translated version says nothing about banning genetically engineered corn, just banning glyphosate? The second order effect is that nobody buys RR corn seed, since you wouldn't bother spending more for it if you can't then use glyphosate to knock down weeds. But that's only for corn grown in-country. All the media coverage seems to think it's banning corn imports, which I believe would require repealing NAFTA.