Yes. They are. They should be accompanied by demoralizing and staunch “America is not ok with that” type of speak to minimize the number of people that need to be killed, but you guys on the left really f’d that up for us, didn’t you? Whining like a child about how the GTMO detainees aren’t being hugged enough, or that the terriorists captured in Iraq/Afghanistan don’t receive enough filet mignon is killing people. Killing our soldiers. Killing apostates. Killing random innocents.

Stop killing people, hippies! Support our troops. Support their mission.

http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=189169&Disp=0

Of course I’m sure this just illustrates the pervasive Asian cultural disregard for the sanctity of human life. But aside from the severity of the sentence, which may well be reduced, did any of the Johns-Manville execs who knowingly poisoned shipyard workers for over 50 years even get fined? As the world’s wealthiest nation, beneficiary of a ‘free’ continent because of the deaths of millions of native inhabitants by disease and war, what is our responsibility to the underdeveloped world? And I’m sorry, we’ve got ours, screw you, isn’t an answer… The US has been sucking up the raw materials of the rest of the world for a century and now we whine when others want what we take to be a birthright. The corporate giants that screw US consumers are already trying to screw the Chinese people too. Big Mac & BK are being sued for paying ‘part time’ workers less than minimum wage (‘They have minimum wage?’) in China right now. Know your enemy. I think globalization is a code word for mega corporate market protection but you’re foolish if you think China is the cause. The people who are behind globalization spent lots of time, money and military power trying to destroy the PRC and now they are making accommodations because it didn’t work.

http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=189169&Disp=0

What varieties recieve protection but GMO varieties? Yes, I had to sign the RR thingy and don’t and won;t save seed. No one here does that I know of though I heard of someone who got caught saving Clearfield rice.

But conventional varieties saved and sold, geez. Farmers who grow seed on the side still put ads on the front of the local advertizing rag, offering during planting season to sell seed rice — Ahrent, Banks, Francis, Wells, Cypress, all the stuff that is from *normal breeding* and not GMO. It’s been my understanding that seed not patented is resellable, though now the plant board comes to inspect what you save and, presumably, what you’d sell. Surely if this was illegal people wouldn’t advertize selling it.

The other stuff, it’s all just opinions and I can’t see much reason to pursue the debate. I would quibble with the argument that people are turning to organic food to avoid GMO’s. Organic food consumption has been rising in the 27 years I’ve been in this business; the first GMO’s only came out in the mid-90′s. What’s really accelerated organic sales has been the government’s certification program. Until 2000, there was no federal regulation of the organic label; USDA now recognizes certification agencies, which in turn give producers the authority to put the “Organic” logo on their products. Ironically, much of the recent growth has come as a result of the involvement of big corporations; the biggest organic dairy producer is now owned by the biggest overall dairy producer, Dean Foods, and WalMart has made a point of selling its organic produce at prices just a few cents above the price of conventionally grown product. This has brought protests from traditional organic producers, who complain WalMart is bringing in product from (wait for it) CHINA! (Bingo!) without adequate verification of its organic credentials.

Well, I *did* specify plausible liar-for-hire {g}.

wonder if there was another Great Leap Forward style famine in China (god forbid), now that the ChiComs are neoliberal darlings, how long it would take DeLong, Summers, Mankiw, Cowen, et al. to completely defend the famine as a some sort of ‘growing pain’ that is ‘depressing’ maybe, but also something to be tolerated and not nearly so bad in moral sum as the ‘China-bashing’ that anti-globalists and fair traders supposedly live to engage in.

I’m betting we’ll get the variant denial now being embraced by Repubs concerning Bush — it’s not that the neoliberals were wrong, it’s just that their ideas were not correctly understood and/or were not applied with sufficient rigor by China’s overlords. Although, barring the immanent bird flu pandemic, I’m afraid the operative word is not “if” but “when”…

Oh, I’m sure just such a position could be found in nearly the same sort of language on Samizdata or Hit and Run or any of the other god-awful Randroid sites out there. Also, the same sentiment — though highly euphemised, of course — could be found on some DeLong type site, or maybe by my nemesis-troll Grampaw.

Which reminds me, RE: China. I wonder if there was another Great Leap Forward style famine in China (god forbid), now that the ChiComs are neoliberal darlings, how long it would take DeLong, Summers, Mankiw, Cowen, et al. to completely defend the famine as a some sort of ‘growing pain’ that is ‘depressing’ maybe, but also something to be tolerated and not nearly so bad in moral sum as the ‘China-bashing’ that anti-globalists and fair traders supposedly live to engage in.

Though I know in my heart that Wendell Berry is right — the best way for everyone is if food was produced in the Amish way — I know that ain’t gonna happen. But it’s not reactionary per se to stop the production of GMOs. It’s not like it’s a moratorium put on every would-be Luther Burbank or George Washington Carver: research into breeding and uses of plants/commodities would go on. This is more like when it was demanded that DDT was banned — the cost of externalities was simply too high to allow it to be used. It’s more like when they stopped allowing the use of lead arsenate in cotton production — it was just too poisonous to be allowed.

I’ll repeat what every farmer knows — if anything, there’s *too much* grain out there. It’s not as if we *have* to have GMO foods or everyone will starve and die. There’s no hurry except for biotech companies to make money and institutions and structures be built so that the GMO model can continue to enrich biotech companies in pepetuity.

The conservative position wrt food is that it must be safe. The only way to guarantee THAT is to demand that traditional forms of breeding are followed and lots of variety is cultivated. you’re taking a chance to fuck all that up with GMOs and in a way that you *weren’t* taking a chance when the tractor replaced the draft horse as a field tool and urea replaced manure as fertiliser. This is not a ‘reaction against modernity’; it’s a specific revulsion to a dangerous, morally repugnant, and exploitative technology.

What constitutes ‘evidence’? The Greenpeace/Sierra Club types, who are fairly numerous, have always been against it. Now yuppies are against it: the boom in demand for organic foods is a direct repudiation of GMOs in plants and hormone doctoring in livestock. EU style shrillness is coming. More attention to food supply origins and method of production is inevitable with the recent Chinese mass-poisoning scandals. You are one The Jungle away from an outright rebellion and it may not even take that.

I can’t explain the Japanese acceptance, but I wonder if it’ll continue. They stopped taking our beef, after all.

No one shoudl care what Brazil and Argentina produce in the context of a ‘popular trend’. Brazilian and Argentinan soy is produced not via some grass roots decision-making by thousands of native farmers, but by what Bunge and Cargill (who own or controll much or maybe even most of that acreage) decide, implemented by often American farm managers (many of whom are former farmers themselves, put out of business by big agri in the USA), and physically tended by natives who are nothing but hired hands. What corporate farms in Argentina and Brazil do is simply what those corps would like to do here if they could get away with it. Seriously, fuck them.

You did mention brownbagging. Actually, I think it became illegal to sell saved seed to your neighbors in the late 80’s or early 90’s some time, but I don’t remember exactly.

That’s not true; only GMOs are proprietary. You can still plant conventional wheat or rice and save it and sell it.

What are the benefits? It enables individual farmers to grow a lot more crops.

No, it doesn’t. The whole point to Liberty Link rice and indeed RR beans is to make it where the farmer can grow the same crop OVER AND OVER without worrying about the weed problem crop rotation helps alleviate to some degree. You know exactly what causes infestations of red rice: rice grown on the same field year after year. Clearfield’s whole purposed was to better enable this practice. Incidentally, since the advent of RR soybeans, the spring crops normally farmed in my area has gone from 3 to 2: rice & soybeans and corn OR milo to rice and soybeans.

Agriculture, since its inception, has always undergone consolidation, fewer and larger, allowing more and more people other pursuits.

Other pursuits? Like destroying the family farm is a *favor*? Farms grwo food; food is different. People don’t *like* to eat food manufactured, they like it *grown*; they don’t want a factory producing what they eat, they want a person doing it because a person implies a human element of responsibility. Though it’s imperfect obviously (what if G.W. Bush ranched that cow that made your hamburger!?! It could have strychnine in it!), sociopathy is rare in humans (only about 25 percent of the population) but always the proudly held tendency of the corporation.

Of course those who farm/garden/ranch are conservative in the non-political sense — it’s one of the world’s oldest professions. Its very nature is a reverence for conservative things — seasonal lifestyle, tradition, home and hearth, yadd yadda yadda. Food is something where safety must come first, where decisions must be weighed heavily in favor of tradition because at least tradition is safe. Radicalism is wonderful in most contexts but not where the production of food is concerned.

Finally, the ‘other pursuits’ thing is just an awful euphemism when the American model of rural depopulation is applied to older cultures and societies in which population density and argiculutral intensification was always a problem that was subtlely and sometimes grimly but usually successfulyl dealt with. I wish sometimes I could beat that Grampaw troll on the head with a heavy anthropology text — something by Marvin Harris, maybe — that showed how peasant farmer societies functioned before such societies’ governments enabled the transnational corps to kick the peasants off their land. And where did those people go? Their ‘other pursuits’ have been found in the slums of Calcutta, Sao Paolo, Shanghai. So many people living in raw sewage and corrugated tin shacks in some god awful slum *used* to be on a peasant farm, and while they were terribly poor, they had a better diet, less exposure to poison and crime, and were their own masters in a way they aren’t now. *That’s* what consolidation and ‘effieciency’ and ‘freedom’ and the general glibertarian paradise of neolibralism has gained for those people. But, hey, if they’re really lucky, one day they might have a job in a sweatshop, and then maybe eventually they might be able to buy shitty food at Wal-Mart, so it’s all worth it. Just ask Brad DeLong.

I think they’d prefer their traditional pursuits. But then Bunge and Cargill and Monsanto couldn’t make as much money, and we can’t have that.

Given a choice, consumers will vote against GMOs with their pocketbooks. IIRC, McDonalds stopped buying “enhanced” potatoes because their french-fry sales suffered, and since McDs buys a considerable percentage of America’s potato crop, sales of GM potato stock dropped dramatically. But most consumers just don’t have the time to trace every component of our food purchases… ‘we’ have a vague idea that there’s ‘too much sugar’ in our daily diet, but not so many Americans know how much high-fructose corn syrup has been added to just about every bottled, boxed or bagged item in our grocery carts. And AMC/Cargill/Monsanto are very aware of the fact that if we did have a choice, we’d vote against them. Which is why so many dairy products now have labels saying “No BGH, not that there’s anything *wrong* with BGH of course”, because it’s cheaper to buy lobbyists to write laws making it illegal to tell people what they’re eating than it is to actually, you know, not sell garbage. And, as Jillian has pointed out, the gated-community classes can opt out of the worst of China’s generic poisoned products — although finding ‘high end’ brands like Nutro and Iams on the pet food recall list scared quite a few people here in the “better” Boston suburbs! — but the people who can least afford just a little liver or kidney damage are stuck with the Chinese imports and the generic supermarket brands.

The one place where I continue to disagree with you is consumer reaction to GMO’s. I don’t see any evidence of a consumer reaction against them in the United States. In Europe, yeah, but Japan takes almost all of our genetically altered crops; Argentina grows them, and Brazil is starting to, too. GMO cotton has turned the industry in India completely around; their yields have tripled. China would already have Bt rice out there if not for the Liberty Link incident, and the fact Greenpeace has found Chinese biotech rice in commercial supplies.

What are the benefits? It enables individual farmers to grow a lot more crops. Anybody who says that’s a bad thing is taking the position that farming the way it was done in their generation was optimum, and no further advances are necessary. Agriculture, since its inception, has always undergone consolidation, fewer and larger, allowing more and more people other pursuits. I don’t see a reason to draw a line in the sand and say, 1990, that’s the way it oughta be.

You did mention brownbagging. Actually, I think it became illegal to sell saved seed to your neighbors in the late 80′s or early 90′s some time, but I don’t remember exactly. When you buy genetically altered seed, you sign a contract saying you won’t even use the saved seed yourself. Monsanto et al spent a zillion dollars developing this stuff, as you pointed out, and they’ll be damned if someone’s going to get the technology for free. You can, at least, buy somebody else’s glyphosate; you don’t need Roundup.

I’m sure Cargill’s lobbyists have the funds ready for EFT the minute they can find a plausible enough liar-for-hire.

WHO would farm spring wheat? Where? You must mean in the hills, but, crap, that stuff is marginal anyway. My point is that it’s never been feasible to plant spring wheat on true cropland in Arkansas and has never been contemplated. Cotton, beans, rice, and even milo are just so much better choices. If they had a more amenable climate, people in the Northern plains would never plant the stuff in spring. They plant it because it’s about the only thing they can grow. Gahhh. Do what the local ecology dictates.

I know you can book wheat for 5.50 a bushel now, which is good, but isn’t assuming that spring wheat should be feasible jumping the gun a.. LOT?

What I’m getting at is that red rice and the occasional coffeebean or indigo seed are completely harmless. Yet there has always been a huge structural apparatus of remedies and disincentives for the farmer to (expensively) combat these weeds. When you haul your rice to the drier and get sampled, only a tiny bit of red rice results in a significant dock (which means, you get paid less on that load) and the detected presence of coffeebean and indigo means you’ll be lucky to get half-price — the dock on these foriegn matierals is catastrophic. All this supposedly to satisfy a 50′s Whitebread era consumer’s taste for PURE WHITE rice.

Ok, give the consumer what they want.

But consumers nowadays DONT WANT GMO food. Why isn’t THAT wish, if not ompletely granted, at least recognized?

Qui bono. Cosmetic ‘damage’ in the presence of red rice and coffeebean/indigo in one’s rice crop means that the farmer must buy expensive chemicals to combat the problem. True damage in the form of GMO material would, OTOH, mean that the farmer would plant cheap conventional varieties. The ‘right’ people, then, wouldn’t make money.

It’s all a scam. The pathetic part is, that like certian virtuous and poor religious people who vote Republican, many farmers effectively ‘vote’ against their own interests in taking up for the GMO-chemical complex that exploits them.

Whores? I guess so, guilty as charged. My company doesn’t own a printing press, so we’re not the “press”. However, you may have heard me.

You’re right about the A-B deal being unrelated to Liberty Link, except I know I read somewhere the damn stuff was farmed anyway in NW Missouri. Anyway, it’s not about each particular alien genetic trait, it’s about those traits finding their way into the ‘conventional’ genome.

You’ve refreshed my memory about the Clearfield thing — it was on again, off again and finally off.

To suggest Riceland’s policies are any different with the new guy in there than they were under Bell is ridiculous. When the LL problem emerged, Bell told me we should use the opportunity to try to overcome consumer and industry resistance to genetically altered rice, and stop trying to thwart what will undoubtedly eventually come to pass.

Look, I read the stuff they send out. I never saw anything in the newsletters by Richard Bell so vituperative and recalictrant RE: GMOs as what I’ve seen from Kennedy. Also, Kennedy sucks because he made the co-op stop taking wheat, which Richard Bell refused to do, sensibly enjoying what and when wheat income came into the co-op’s coffers. But three bad wheat years was excuse enough for Kennedy and now, well, you can always haul wheat to the river but the guys on the other side of the ridge are fucked.

we’ve been altering crops for millenia; we save the ones that naturally mutate with favorable traits, and in so doing artificially select our food supply. Gene splicing just provided a faster way to get it done. The biggest difference between genetically altered crops and those which naturally mutated in the field is the GMO’s are subject to much stricter testing and approval procedures.

No, no, no, no, emphatically no, my fellow Arkie. There is a qualitative difference, a huge one, between traditional techniques of plant breeding, done by trial and error and most of which occured in prehistory, than in the GMO thing where genes from an organism extremely unrelated to the plant in question are physically inserted into the DNA. And as for testing, well…

YUMMY!

PS – what on earth do you mean about that RR wheat thing? How is RR wheat going to help SR wheat farmers make some money? The only weed problem I’m familiar with in wheat around here is garlic, which has been a problem for years and whose remedy is Harmony, which has also been around for years. Now it’s true in some fields I’ve seen — especially those close to highways — that vetch or ryegrass can look unsightly, but I’ve never experienced a significant yeild loss from the stuff.

***

Incidentally, the same problem we have in the press wrt wingnuts, there is in the farm press wrt the GMO-chemicals industry. They’re all whores.

Find me one person who has said those words — other than in the context of creating a strawman, as you have. I bet you can’t.

You might find people who say that invading and occupying Iraq has created terrorists, and I think the truth of that statement has become pretty clear.

Invasion and occupation are not the only way to fight terrorism, are they? Can you think of other methods of fighting terrorism that might not require invasion, occupation and the destruction of innocent lives? Methods that might not create terrorists?

Because otherwise, I guess we’ll have to prepare for a new incursion into Guyana. You enlisting for that, Kevin?

“The research coming out on the dangers of Roundup Ready soybeans” you’ll have to point out to me; I’m unfamiliar with it. I don’t know how the EU yelling about finding an unapproved genetic trait in rice has anything to do with the matter; they have always accepted Roundup Ready soybeans. In recent years, they’ve also been approved genetically altered corn.

You’ve completely confused the Anheuser Busch issue. What they were complaining about was the plans by a California company to grow experimental rice impregnated with human genes. The company wants to mass produce drugs that can be used to treat diarrhea and other digestive maladies in infants. A-B’s complants caused Northwest Missouri State (the other side of the state; all the rice in Missouri is grown in the bootheel) to withdraw plans to host the company. The rice is going to be grown in Kansas, where the state government has enthusiastically welcomed the project.

USDA is still trying to figure out how the Liberty Link gene got into two rice varieties (Clearfield 131, a conventionally-bred, herbicide resistant rice, as well as Cheniere). Or else, they’ve figured it out and are unforthcoming with the information. All of this work, both on the varieties and on LL, was done at Louisiana State, so it seems pretty likely a little pollen got on some researcher’s clothes or shoes or something and he tracked it through the Cheniere and CL131 fields. Bayer Cropscience experimented with Liberty Link for about four years and abandoned it; from what I understand, it’s because it didn’t work–the rice wasn’t tolerant of Liberty herbicide. But you’re correct in that there’s enormous resistance to genetic alteration of food grains, far more so than of corn and oilseeds; Monsanto has Roundup Ready wheat and rice any time the industry wants it, and there’s an ongoing battle among wheat growers, some of whom want it so they can make some goddamn money growing spring wheat, and others who are fearful that foreign customers will stop buying US.

Dick Bell, by the way, is our current Agriculture Secretary here in Arkansas, and a corking good one he is. But he’s a holdover from the Huckabee regime, and I’m sure our current, Democratic governor will eventually want someone else in there. To suggest Riceland’s policies are any different with the new guy in there than they were under Bell is ridiculous. When the LL problem emerged, Bell told me we should use the opportunity to try to overcome consumer and industry resistance to genetically altered rice, and stop trying to thwart what will undoubtedly eventually come to pass. The genie is out of the bottle, and we’ll keep finding crops with unexpected lab-induced genetic traits.

And, here’s the usual reactionary saw–we’ve been altering crops for millenia; we save the ones that naturally mutate with favorable traits, and in so doing artificially select our food supply. Gene splicing just provided a faster way to get it done. The biggest difference between genetically altered crops and those which naturally mutated in the field is the GMO’s are subject to much stricter testing and approval procedures. If I found a Roundup Ready pumpkin in my patch, I could just save the seeds and sell it; if I produced one in a lab; it would take a decade to get to the market. I guess I’m a fucktard or an idiot sensible liberal or whatever, but these things have revolutionized agriculture in a way more favorable than not, and this is just the beginning.

I don’t understand why it’s such a hard concept to get. No system is perfect. Any and every system humans are going to come up with to distribute the fruit of our labor and the sweat of our brows is going to have flaws. It’s going to advantage some and disadvantage others. Once you accept this basic principle, you can start having serious discussions about who benefits and who is harmed, and try to come up with a system that benefits the most whilst harming the fewest, and not harming those that can least stand to be harmed.

Our current system does fine for the schmuck who can afford to buy Tom’s of Maine toothpaste at his local Wild Oats organic supermarket but screws the fuck out of the people who have to buy their personal hygiene supplies at the Dollar Plus store in Little Havana. Our current system does all right by the executives at Monsanto, but fixes it so that the farmer who actually farms (as opposed to “runs a farming corporation”) can’t save his seed from year to year.

Biotech – using science and technology to improve our agricultural processes – doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Biotech in our current system – where profit is king, and only those who are already advantaged get to decide what counts as “profit” – is rarely going to be of any help to anyone.

And I remain unconvinced about the satisfactory amount of genetic diversity in the crops currently under cultivation – both for the nightmare type scenarios I mentioned above (you’ll have to excuse me on that – I had hella weird nightmares all night long; something about Satan running a new “Survivor”-like reality show in Hell where you had to run up and down a stone staircase that revolved and would crush you if you stopped moving for too long. I really, really hate reality TV – can you tell?) but also for far more quotidian concerns – some of the stories I’ve heard about First world agricultural interventions in India and Africa are pretty monstrous.