Globalization is good for you!
Consumers were advised yesterday to discard all toothpaste made in China after federal health officials said they found Chinese-made toothpaste containing a poison used in some antifreeze in three locations: Miami, the Port of Los Angeles and Puerto Rico.
Although there are no reports of anyone being harmed by the toothpaste, the Food and Drug Administration warned that the Chinese products had a “low but meaningful risk of toxicity and injury� to children and people with kidney or liver disease.
The United States is the seventh country to find tainted Chinese toothpaste within its borders in recent weeks.
But hey, I’m sure the people paid to manufacture the toothpaste are working under slave labor conditions, so I guess it all evens out.
Uh, wait a minute…
We are the world.
Hell, you think that’s bad, I was reading the other day that it turns out fluoride is bad for the thyroid.
Paging General Ripper, General Ripper, please use the white courtesy phone in the lobby.
And of course there was this.
It’s the color-coordinated Red & Yellow Menace/Peril!!!
They own most of our debt, they’ve already poisoned our animal friends, now they’re trying to kill Americans who practice dental hygeine. I’m sending a letter to G. W. Bush demanding that we “spread freedom” to the slave labor camps of China!! We can worry about the Islam-O-Nazis next week.
Toxic toothpaste…
eColi in the lettuce…
Melamine in the dogfood….
Terrorists at JFK…
Polonium 210 in Litvinenko
Islamists in Lebanon…
Missiles in Gaza…
Arms race in Russia…
Nukes in North Korea…
Bombs in Baghdad….
Christian fascists in the White House…
Fear in the population…
Eliminationist fantasies on the right…
Everybody say it with me now…
FTW…
mikey
From Alexa Olesen of the AP:
Global buyer beware!
They were sweetening the toothpaste with glycol, the stuff that makes antifreeze such a danger for pets. Glycol is an alcohol, which makes it extremely similar chemically to sugars like corn syrup. It’s sweet and viscous, and, like other alcohols, it doesn’t freeze at normal human temperatures – which is the quality that makes it useful in antifreeze. It is one of the alcohols that mammalian bodies cannot digest – it’s like drinking kerosene, basically. It’ll make big, lumpy crystals in your kidneys.
But it’s really, really sweet, and it’s really, really cheap.
The melamine that ended up in the pet food got there via a similar process. The chemical structure of melamine is similar enough to digestible proteins that you could add it to the gluten used to make pet food and “up” the protein levels in it.
Except that the “protein” added to the gluten was horrendously poisonous. There’s also no way of knowing at this point if any of it has made its way into the human food supply.
If I were a really good person, I wouldn’t wish melamine spaghetti and glycol toothpaste on every supporter of globalization in this country.
Unfortunately, I’m a bitch.
We keep on allowing our belief in “free market competitiveness” to drive us straight down to the bottom and letting the fat cats at the top profit off of the misery it causes us. What’s it going to take for us to stand up and say “Enough”?
Ehhh, don’t worry about the “attack” on JFK, mikey. Pure fearmongering and credit taking, no real threat.
If there have been any real attacks stopped they haven’t told us, either for lack thereof or because of desire not to publicize the intended methods.
Eeeeet’s bullshit, man.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10409726
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10410111
A good read, and a good listen at NPR. Very worth checking out – especially the second link. Hope you aren’t too attached to your vitamins.
Eeeeet’s bullshit, man.
No shit! REALLY???
C’mon db, can you name one that wasn’t? It’s ALL bullshit. You don’t gotta convince me. Unfortunately, you DO need to convince the likes of lindsay graham and dianne feinstein. Christ…
mikey
Hope you aren’t too attached to your vitamins.
I’m actually pretty attached to my scotch. If it ends up fulla melamine, pufferfish and glycol, just let me guzzle it in peace.
I’ve said it in the past, but I’m really beginning to MEAN it. Gawd I feel sorry for anyone under 30. You are going to go through some very ugly, scary, nasty times. I’ll be wormfood. But call me if you need me, y’know?
mikey
Well, I dunno if I’d say this is “bullshit”, exactly……
It’s more like pointless fearmongering over a real threat, because although there are things we could do to vastly minimize the threat, we’re not gonna do ’em.
Prosit, y’all!
For the most part, the fbi is making these cases dishonestly. See, in most, if not all of these US terrorist cases, fbi UCs function as the “cell” leadership and recruiters.
These poor assholes, while in no way well meaning, were never a threat ’til somebody did the organizing for them. And that somebody keeps turning out to be law enforcement. Who won’t let them have REAL weapons, so they’re still not a threat. Sophisticated Marketing Communications Professionals know that the best advertising is editorial. Keep the narrative flowing….
It’s Sturm und drang. Nothing more…
mikey
Actually, this is the issue I have nightmares over, more than any other.
All it would take to wipe out the world’s maize supply is the evolution of the right kind of smut or rust – something to which our monocultured maize has no resistance. Or it’ll hit our wheat, or rice, or soy.
Granted, I’m only a biology dabbler, not a biology expert or anything, but it seems to me like the appearance of such a thing is a matter of when, not if.
And we’ll all starve.
Would you believe that people who know me in real life think I’m incredibly chipper, funny and upbeat? I don’t get it, either.
And if that’s good scotch you’re drinking, mikey, I’d love to share a glass with you.
Hell, if it’s just regular scotch, count me in. If we as a culture have decided to replay The Jungle for some unknown reason, I might as well do like the working class muckraking minds of the first time around did and drink a whole bunch.
Jillian and Mikey,
If you don’t take offense to someone tossing down tequila instead of scotch, I’d like to join you in your afternoon/evening libation. In the pacific time zone, the evening breeze is just beginning, and it was a hell of a long week.
Cheers!
It’s the total lack of regulation & massive corruption in China that is the problem. It’s hard to imagine the same activity happening in the US without the company being sued into pulp. (But I hear that the R’s want to change that.)
But China is the new Big Business model that R’s want to emulate. Corruption is OK if the Party does it.
Eh, maize. I used to argue with a guy who worked in one of those gene labs. *He* said the collecting of maize varieties has been ongoing and thorough, and is safely stored in a seed bank. I never really believed him, though, because I’ve read differently that because of NAFTA’s effect on the Mexican peasant farmer (you know, the people Gampaw says were starving — STARVING!! until they were allowed the privelige of working in a sweatshop). Those peasants controlled/used in aggregate something like 90 percent of the varieties of maize. Many of them have been kicked off their land (privatization! yay!) in favor of, uh, a new corporate farmer matrix.
Put simply, efficiency kills. It’s always the small farmer, the subsistence farmer, the dabbler, the individual or family farmer that ensures variety. But thanks to globalization’s monocultural tendencies, the ability of such people to survive is slim to none. Ironically, the only way what small farmers are left in America stay in business is because of the subsidies actually designed to benefit ADM, Cargill, Conagra, et al. — a trickle down or accidental effect. And of course in places like Mexico there are no subsidies and corps have taken control of local markets.
The only hope there is lays in consumer action. The EU is good at this; it being so anti-frankenfood has already had an effect on production here in America. The good news is that because of the EU’s backlash, the soy (Roundup Ready) and maize (bt) model may not take over American rice production. The bad news is that the rice genepool is already contaminated and who knows if it can be ‘cleansed’.
Buy organic if you can; buy local if you can. Only buy from the third world if it’s fair trade and some guarantees can be made wrt quality. Other purchases from the third world only enrich Bunge, Cargill, ADM, et al. and help facilitate their practice of buying up third world farm ground and making it into basically a factory. The third world farmer under those conditions is not a farmer in fact but actually a hired hand, working the ground he used to farm (yes, inefficiently) and own outright if not communally.
Oh, yeah, one more thing: I was of course against CAFTA, but knowing that it would pass, I consoled myself slightly when I read that it would stop the American sugar industry’s protectionism — and I’d finally be able to drink a real soda like when I was a kid. But, noooo. Still there is HFCS in every one.
I understand that you guys don’t want to buy things made in sweat shops, where people are often paid barely enough to survive on. But have you considered what their lives would be if they weren’t even paid that much (keep in mind they might go out of business if you boycotted them, leaving everyone unemployed)?
And China is a communist country, sharing the beliefs that you guys do! “Share the wealth”, “income redistribution”, all that garbage. How can you disparage them so by assuming they have slave labor conditions in their workplace?
This is hippie humor at it’s best. Complaining about a country who’s stated goal is just about identical with the liberal goddess Hilary(!)’s, yet all the while trying to institute the SAME reforms that got China to where it is today.
Too funny. Thanks for cheering me up. Sadly, no? Forget that noise. More like “Cheerfully. YES!”
Shut the fuck up Kevin.
You’ve passed annoying into fucking idiotic.
Yes, those poor gooks must have had a horrible life before we convinced their leadership to sell them out and destroy their native way of life.
Shithead.
“But have you considered what their lives would be if they weren’t even paid that much (keep in mind they might go out of business if you boycotted them, leaving everyone unemployed)?”
Yeah, it’s not like the Chinese had a functioning society for thousands of years or anything like that before we showed up.
Because wondering if what is good for multinational corporations is good for the common person is the exact same thing as Maoism. Thanks Kevin. As always you prove to be very enlightening and not the least tiresome. Don’t you have a lawn to mow?
Hillary the Maoist! Laughed? I coulda died…
Kev-o, Gary is back. We don’t need you. You’re free to go.
Agreed with Mobius. Inter-Nation food import/export has been around for thousands of years, it’s not the problem.
It sounds like China has now started to catch up to the US in terms of “Bottom Line Capitalism” It’s not about building a strong, well designed and properly infrastructure-ed company that will last for years. It’s about slashing over head, no matter the costs, and maximizing profits as hard as you can, then ride that puppy until it breaks apart, Dr. Strangelove style. Then repeat. Who cares if people get hurt, or the company goes under? It’s the companies’ responsibility, not yours; and you got your money already.
Wow, I completely forgot how we told china to “sell them out and destroy their native way of life” and they went for it. *sigh* I’m sickened, but not amazed at your derogatory name for the chinese… it’s part and parcel for the left to be racist while decrying how bad racism is. But to think that America has had ANYTHING to do with Chinese history (other than us freeing them from Japanese control) is as grandiose as anything Al Gore has ever said. Possibly (I said possibly) moreso.
Cut down on the swearing, huh? Hard as this might be for a liberal to believe, you’ll find that you can be much more articulate without them. It forces you to come up with an actual argument, instead of saying the likes of ‘screw you, your dumb. Poopyhead.”
Hippies, huh?
You hippies are the real racists! Us nazis just want to kill all you stoopid friggin’ hippies, see? You’re all a buncha commienazis!!!!!
You don’t even understand that if we don’t take care of our darkie slaves they’ll all die cuz darkies and chinamen only know how to work, eat, and fornicate.
You stoopid hippies are stoopid friggin’ hippies!!!!
Notice I don’t use the real “f-word” cuz mom would take away my Cheetos!!!
Kevin,
it’s saturday night. I’m a little sick, so I’m staying in. You, on the other hand, are trolling here for the second night in a row. This is how you spend your weekend evenings, working as hard as you possibly can to provoke people who, most likely, you agree with at heart, because……
seriously, why?
You’ve been practicing at it for months. It’s been a genuine effort on your part to develop your trolly persona. Are you truly this impotent?
Kevin does raise a fair point (albeit confrontationally) in saying that the command economies of — hey, cool realtime preview thing — that the command economies of states like the USSR do also tend to turn out shoddy & counterfeit products — of course, an unregulated capitalist economy will do just the same thing under the inexorable pressure to create inferior goods. The only real solution for it is to decrease demand, which nobody in a capitalist economy wants. In this specific case, if people didn’t have such damn sweet teeth that they demand sugar or sweetener in every freaking thing they put in their mouths, then a big part of the problem goes away. Overall it’s probably a good argument for green economics more than anything else.
Hey, did you guys know that they foiled a terrorist attack at JFK? Prolly not, since they aren’t discussing it on lefty sites. But guess what? The guys planning it… were muslims! Unexpected, huh? I mean, that’s a religion of peace!
It’s getting hard to figure out which random religion will create a terrorist. So far, each religion has created about the same amount, right?
I’m still pissed off about the Sack of Constantinople, myself.
For sure Kevin. Those Muslamo-nazis in the IRA sure liked warring the Jihad against the British. Same with the Tamils.
And, if you had happened to actually read the comments here, it was being discussed before you mentioned it. Thanks for playing…
Yeah, you stoopid hippies don’t realize that all hippies and terrorists are muslims! Just like Timothy McVeigh was a muslim, and Eric Rudolph was a muslim, and Hitler was a muslim too!!!111111!!!
Yeah, Gott mit Uns was all about that Allah you stoopid friggin’ hippies love.
Stoopid friggin’ hippies!
For more of the unnaturally perverse hippie-hatin’ stylings of the Kevvie-baby please visit http://blogiburton.blogspot.com/
Hey, Kev, have you ever thought about tackling any actual arguments that the “hippies” are making? You should try to find out what ‘hippies’ are really thinking. Rush Limbaugh is not a reliable source, and repeating his straw man arguments will just get you laughed at by the honest, decent people in this country.
Indeed, your grace. Rather than face the fact that islamocrazies are trying to kill us and willing to kill themselves in the process, it’s best to mention that the IRA liked to kill people (but weren’t so big on dying themselves) a few decades ago. Or the Tamil’s goal to kill all non Sri-Lankans! Frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t mention the Basque separatists. Because they are all threatening us equally in your opinion, right?
Even if you want to make silly moral relativisms, let’s agree to wipe all terrorism out! Can we do that? I propose that we start with the only one threatening America… Islamofascism. After that, you get to choose the next one. Agreed?
And after that, as thanks for letting me choose first, I agree to help you work on figuring out a way to cool down the sun to decrease global warmenizing. It’s win-win-win! A figurative handshake is all it takes to start the ball rolling. *hand extended* “Shake”, your grace?
Kevin, I’m actually intrigued… what do you propose to do exactly about islamofascism? (the worstest threat to our existence ever… worster than the Nazis, worster than those pesky Bolsheviks who could, you know, reduce the world to smouldering radioactive ruins) I mean really, what should we do? Honestly, if we listen to the hippies we won’t invade the entire middle east and create a genocide… and then where would we be exactly?
Conservatives have a plan to end the terrorism of Islamic extremism? Oh, you mean the debacle in Iraq. Kev, buddy, you need to talk to some of the guys who are over there, fighting and dying and accomplishing zilch for your paranoid delusions.
Kevin, the last post is idiotic considering the last real terrorist attack in america was at a planned parenthood in austin.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/27/27clinic.html
Or did islamofascists decide the best way to attack america was to impersonate fundie christians?
Hey, miker, don’t confuse a winger with the facts.
Watch him get all whiny and all PC as he starts clutching his pearls because somebody used a “bad word” and one person used a racist term way upthread.
Awright, just to make clear for anyone suffering from Kevinism, I hate asians. All of em. Billyuns un billyuns of em. Cause. Mhm.
“Kevin, I’m actually intrigued… what do you propose to do exactly about islamofascism? (the worstest threat to our existence ever… worster than the Nazis, worster than those pesky Bolsheviks who could, you know, reduce the world to smouldering radioactive ruins)”
Worcestershire sauce! Seriously though, this is where I will probably lose you. As you hopefully know, the bolsheviks could have killed us all, but not without dying in return. Praise to them that they were not willing to make that sacrifice. History tells us our new enemy doesn’t have such qualms.
So, when you ask ‘what do you propose to do exactly about islamofascism?’, my answer is simple, yet un-pc. Kill them. Kill those who won’t let others live their lives the way they want to (providing they are not hurting others). Kill those who PREACH militant jihad.
The other (democratic/liberal/peace at all cost) option of course is to submit to islam and watch our favorite women be subjected to that misogynistic cult’s rules. I’m kinda p*ssed at one woman (my wife totally ditched me tonight), but I’m not willing to to force the rest of them into such a horrific life in spite. I’m not even willing to let women from other nations suffer under this brutal ideology.
Can’t we take a stand together? We can’t, can we :(.
On second thought our army should invade jesusland to protect us from all those crazed christians.
‘Course you do! You’re liberal. Name-calling of the unknown is very typical from the left. Keep taking that Paxil, and suddenly, Asians will seem like the regular people that they are!
I feel like we’re making progress here.
Um, Kev, could you be a little more specific on this “submitting to Islam” thing you mentioned. I rather doubt anyone is suggesting anything that a decent, honest person could interpret as “submitting to Islam.” But then, you haven’t really done anything that would make anyone mistake you for an honest, decent, or clever, person.
AA was trolling atrios earlier. I wonder where she/he/it went after that?
Anyways, Let’s Rock!
Kevin, this is where you lose us. Are you seriously proposing to kill a billion or so muslims to protect us from the 10,000 or so individuals that would go to great lengths to conduct terrorist attacks? Especially when the only success they have ever had is to kill 0.001% of our population? I think I was in more danger of getting in an accident driving home today than I would ever be from an islamic terrorist. Your kind think this is a clash of civilizations, I think I will go to sleep now and not worry about it.
“Retarded Donut said,
Conservatives have a plan to end the terrorism of Islamic extremism? Oh, you mean the debacle in Iraq. Kev, buddy, you need to talk to some of the guys who are over there, fighting and dying and accomplishing zilch for your paranoid delusions.”
Oddly enough, I do. Thanks for mentioning it (gonna call you ‘donut[sp]’ because I don’t approve of your moniker). Donut, you could have easily said that, “the guys who are over there, fighting and dying and accomplishing zilch” during the battle for Iwo Jima, the battle for the Soloman Islands, the battle for Warsaw, etc. It could go either way. The good guys could win, or the bad ones. I’m mostly frustrated by the left’s support of the BAD GUYS winning. Being a hippie is one thing. Supporting despots and terrorism is quite another.
We’re at the point where hippieism becomes deadly. You are standing firmly on the side of the enemy, Mr. Donut.
miker, Kevin or whatever isn’t serious. It’s a troll. It lives under a bridge.
Awright, who wants to hook me up with that Greasemonkey script? Kev needs go walkies.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=sadly
Retarded Donut said,
“I rather doubt anyone is suggesting anything that a decent, honest person could interpret as “submitting to Islam.â€?
Gee, 0.5 billion women across the globe might disagree. But screw them, right? They’re just girls. See, this is EXACTLY what pisses me off about you hippies. You have neither the ability to see what damage your ridiculous statements will cause in the future, nor the ability to own up to it.
Selfish, selfish hippies. You disgust me.
Viel danks.
Hey, now would be a good time to talk about how you support some UN charter to protect women from the horror that is living in submission under the cruel hand of islam.
Or you could bash the ultra-free US. Your choice, hippie. I gotta say, I’m betting on you bashing freedom.
Gee, 0.5 billion women across the globe might disagree. But screw them, right? They’re just girls. See, this is EXACTLY what pisses me off about you hippies. You have neither the ability to see what damage your ridiculous statements will cause in the future, nor the ability to own up to it.
Selfish, selfish hippies. You disgust me.
P.S. Only whores serve frozen.
N the script works. Woohoo. Someone needs go walkies lots.
Once my brain is replaced with silicon chips all my boss will be saying is “I like pie!”
No, now would not be a good time to talk about how you support some UN charter to protect women from the horror that is living in submission under the cruel hand of islam.
I appreciate your civility Miker, but we both know I lost you guys when I suggested ‘retaliation’. Of course I’m not saying we should kill a billion muslims. I’m just saying we should kill all jihadists. And that is also a big number. I personally believe that if we concentrate killing on the jihadi imams, more people will survive. But I’m no military planner, so who knows?
Bad guys have to die, so us good guys can live. Can we agree on that? Or are you thinking that you can reason with people who think dying is the next best thing since sliced bread.
Hey, all good true Americans are gonna incinerate all the muslimofascists in nuclear hellfire so they can’t oppress the wimmin folk no more. Y’know, like in Iraqistan, we’ll just kill all those sandniggers–men, women, children, and babies–cuz we redneck racists really care about our wimmin and babies..except when we gotta kill em for their own good. You stoopid friggin’ (is my wife watching? she won’t let me do the awful dirty thing iffin she catches me swearing on the internets).
Stoopid friggin’ hippies!
Hehehehe
I get the humor in your link Bush’s boyfriend, can’t we work to fix this garbage? Or is this just politics?s
If it’s just politics, it’s sick and misogynistic, as most ‘progressive’ ideas are. Seriously, you guys suck. When MLK talked about a colorblind nation, he also meant sex-blind.
Again, can’t we band together and crush the destruction of women’s rights? Even if you are like me and think my wife’s an idiot, don’t you think they
Can we agree on that? Or are you thinking that you can reason with people who think dying is the next best thing since sliced bread.
should have the rights of any man? If so, you must be anti islam!
Guess you can tell when one of your hippie friends tries to impersonate me if she spells stupid ‘stoopid’.
Just a heads up for those who don’t want to be misinformed.
China combines the worst of communism and the worst of unregulated capitalism. These latest events – lethal pet food, lethal pharmaceuticals, lethal toothpaste – is the tip of the iceberg.
Yikes! Yet another faker, saying “Kevin said,
June 3, 2007 at 7:04
should have the rights of any man? If so, you must be anti islam!
”
Is this how the left quiets dissent? Apparently so 🙂 Good job! ‘Cept Screw you. Dissent is met with middle fingers. Come visit your protectors to see it live!
Fred Phelt, you make me very sad… yet I will continue keeping you safe! Weird, huh? Could you pray that I don’t die? Thanks in advance.
Buy organic if you can; buy local if you can.
and sign up for newsletters from the Organic Consumers Org. because there’s a shitload of bogus organic out there. Factory farms are cashing in on the organic market whilst selling the same old crap and labelling it organic.
The USDA does virtually no meat inspection and Bush wants to keep it that way.
Transparently snide greeting to group of people that don’t frequent this blog:
Weak-ass arguement beneath repudiation by anyone with a first-grade reading level.
Completely inept “threat” to destroy environment through unnecessarily long landscaping chores, which is probably a code for masturbation anyway.
Backhanded farewell, again to a group that probably wouldn’t be interested in this site if they hadn’t disappeared in the early 1970s
Lather, rinse, repeat
Please please please come to my website and fisk me please. I only use the google because I’m a cockmaster. I’m at http://blogiburton.blogspot.com/
I soooo want to be as important as G*dlstein and the Ace of Bacon and Play Doh!
Stoopid friggin’ hippies.
Hey, Kev,
Who’s bashing the US? You got some examples? Or do you just wanna keep on repeating your nonsensical, divisive trip?
Gee, 0.5 billion women across the globe might disagree. But screw them, right? They’re just girls. See, this is EXACTLY what pisses me off about you hippies. You have neither the ability to see what damage your ridiculous statements will cause in the future, nor the ability to own up to it.
Wow, this is some pretty blatant intellectual dishonesty that is so characteristic of conservatives that it is very hard to be nice to them. You should be ashamed of yourself for such a blatant display of conservatism’s failure to develop any ideas or arguments that honest, decent people could listen to.
You’re doing a really good job of showing everyone the true face of conservatism.
Thanks, Shoelimpy.
I mean Kevin.
donut, thanks in advance for letting people know that I’m the true face of conservatism. Feel free to call the subjugation of a half a billion women “blatant intellectual dishonesty”. Women suck anyway, right? They’re probably happy taking orders from their man. They LIKE to wear that nijab/burkha etc., huh? It’s practically independance to cover yourself from head to toe so as to not excite your male betters. Invigorating!
Sheesh, you’re ridiculous, donut. I hate hippies for their ignorance. You, Donut, are a hippie, in the most ridiculous sense. As if those half a billion women are free. You suck for even suggesting as much. You suck, ridiculous donut.
And with that, Im going to bed. I hope we all learned that the donut guy sucks.
‘Night!
Hey, Kev,
As soon as you want to respond to anything that I, or any liberal, really said, let us know.
And thanks for keeping your cherished civility.
Have a good night, annie.
I mean Kevin.
My wife won’t frig’ me cuz I’m such an insufferable asshole so I’m going to bed on the sofa in the basement with my Cheetos and Star Wars toys.
‘Night you friggin’ stupid(oooh I spelled it right that time!!!) hippies.
Kevin’s Right!
Fuck You, Hippies!
It occurs to me, for some reason, that if I wanted to set the agenda for other people to talk about, I would go about it by setting up my own blog, making the comments sufficiently stimulating to attract people and inspire them to create threads of on-topic commentary.
Tainted Chinese toothpaste.
I dunno. There’s just something about that phrase that appeals to me… try rolling it around in your mouth a bit…
Tainted…
Chineeeese…
tooooooooothpaaaaaste!!
Aaaahhhh!!1!1!!
Damn, but that’s a lot of freakin pie. I keep waiting for the other clown to get out the seltzer bottle. Pie all OVER the place. Oughta call this place Sadly, Pie!
mikey
Kevin is an idiot. I don’t know why people feel compelled to play with him – it’s just cruel.
Mencken, that report I linked to is about how those “gene banks” are hurting financially and not likely to make it. BTW, if you’re looking for “real” soda, wait until Passover and look for the Coca-Cola in the bottles with the yellow caps. That stuff is Kosher for Passover, which means it’s sweetened with sugar, not corn syrup. I don’t know if they stock it everywhere, but the last two places I’ve lived – Central New Jersey and Miami – have been chock full o’ Jews, so finding Peshach food is easy.
Loss of crop diversity is a serious, serious issue. Lack of adequte safety controls on commodities is another serious, serious issue. But it’s human nature to not take those issues as seriously as they deserve until something catastrophic happens. As a species, we are like the driver who runs around with no insurance, gambling on the slim likelihood that they’ll get into an accident – but causing horrendous consequences when they finally do.
It’s going to take government involvement to preserve those genetics, Jillian, because it’s contrary to the private sector’s interests. The reason we’ve seen most crop production center on a few varieties is because, quite simply, that’s most profitable for both the merchandiser and the farmer. And you can argue whether society has benefited from it, but US and world crop yields continue to climb, so it’s certainly made food and fiber more abundant. That’s the trade-off, I guess–steadily rising stockpiles in exchange for the risk we’ll see a pathogen emerge that’s specific to the bulk of our acreage of any one crop. I don’t know if the article deals with soybean rust, which is now in the US, but the University of Illinois is sifting through the 20,000 some soybean varieties in its germplasm bank now, looking for individuals that can resist the fungus. But the value of having a seedbank is for long-term research like that; you can’t expect farmers to plant 20,000 different varieties of soybeans. The cost of seed propagation would be prohibitive, and we would lose that precious, incremental gain in yields. Don’t forget, too; just because a crop is susceptible to a new disease doesn’t mean we don’t have the chemical means to control it. Rust showed up, so our farmers will have to spray for it; it makes soybeans more expensive to grow, but it certainly won’t wipe them out.
As long as we have a spray that works on the new crop contaminant, all is well and good. But are you willing to bet your life that a super-rust or a supersmut – one that doesn’t respond to current treatments – won’t arise?
Because that’s what we’re doing.
And I don’t expect one farmer to plant 20,000 different varieties of soybeans. But I wouldn’t mind seeing 200,000 farmers choosing between fifty and a hundred different varieties. It would be a step up from the single-genome, hybridized, can’t plant your seed next year, sell your firstborn to Monsanto to make ends meet seeds we’re currently working with.
It took hundreds of millions of years to develop the genetic diversity we currently see in our foodstuffs. At the rate we’re going, we will wipe that out in less than a thousand years. It’s hubris so shocking it would make the gods blush.
I’m not a backward, anti-science kook by any stretch of the imagination. I just really feel this is an area where our technology is outpacing our knowledge, and the stakes we are gambling for are way too high.
But you’re right – it’s profitable. And so is the glycol in the toothpaste that started this whole discussion. Some company in China looked at the maze of international trade and regulation governing food and drug safety and decided to gamble that the chances of them ever getting caught or facing consequences being really small. And they were right – it was a good gamble. They’ll probably never track down the point source for the glycol, and even if they do, the manufacturer probably won’t face any consequences. So it was a good business decision.
As long as you don’t know anyone in Miami with this toothpaste. As for me, living in Miami, teaching in an inner city school, and knowing this sort of toothpaste is usually sold in dollar stores – where a lot of my students shop – it’s a bit harder to be sanguine about it.
As long as “the bottom line” is equivalent to “profit” in all situations, every time, this will continue to happen. Doesn’t mean you have to be a socialist to be opposed to this stuff – but it does mean you have to recognize neoliberal economic policies for the batshittery they are.
I never said that, Mr. Cheney. There’s a big difference between laughing at a liberal’s inability to distinguish between minor evil and major evil, and tossing f-bombs at them.
Jillian, you’re silly. You are arguing that we should not treat plants with chemicals, because a disease might arise that is resistant to chemicals? That’s as silly as saying ‘we shouldn’t fight terrorism, because it creates terrorists!’ Oh wait, that’s exactly what you guys say on this side of the aisle, huh :(.
I don’t think it’s fair to equate Chinese sticking glycol in toothpastes with artificial genetic selection in crops. As Edmund Schlessel pointed out earlier in the discussion, Chinese “entrepreneurs” are following the path set earlier by some of their Soviet counterparts–they’re hellbent to ramp up production, and a few of them have decided to cut legal corners. The difference is China has become dependent upon its export industries, so the cheaters are poisoning us, not just their own people. And since Beijing is so dependent upon exports, the last thing they want is for customers to find this stuff in their products; that means new restrictions and duties and inspections and stuff. I don’t trust them to police it themselves, but I doubt they’re turning a blind eye to it; hell, they just sentenced the former head of their FDA to death!
50-100 soybean varieties? There are far more than that already on the market. I repeat, you’re asking that varieties that aren’t commercially viable be grown commercially. Seedbanks are for research. The point I was trying to make was, there may be about 20 or 30 or those cultivars out of 20,000 that are resistant in some way to rust, but until the next disease arrives, you don’t know which ones. You’re presenting some sort of science fiction concept where a new bug will affect all currently planted varieties and we won’t be able to stop it. It’s hard to see how planting a lot more varieties whose genetics are 99% the same will make a difference. Even if you find one or two that are resistant, it would take several years to build up supplies; then, of course, you’ve got an even bigger problem in that you’re trying to go strictly monocultural with that sole resistant variety. And, of course, the pathogen could mutate in that time. I can cite some credentials; I’ve been an agricultural reporter for 27 years. Yes, loss of diversity is a major concern, and as I said, we need to get government’s involved and not leave it to the private sector. But well stocked germplasm banks will not save us in the sort of doomsday scenario you present. I remain unconvinced it’s plausible.
Yikes, I completely agree with gjdodger! I apologize for it gj, since that’s a death sentence here. But it’s nice to see a voice of reason in print.
50-100 soybean varieties? Where? As someone who was sowing soybeans yesterday evening — and to my disgust, they were RR beans — I’d like to know where all these varieties are. Certainly they aren’t in the pipeline around here. I asked to buy conventional seeds this spring; all I could get were RR beans from Iowa.
Seedbanks are for research.
This is true, and what state university labs are made for. Still, wrt corn, the genepool is shallow in America; it’s deep in Mexico, where maize came from. It takes money and time to collect germplasm from extranational locations and such expenses haven’t been taken in appropriate compensation to the problems I mentioned in the previous comment.
One more thing — seedbanks are important for purposes of traditional breeding, as per your soybean rust example. And while traditional breeding is done by state unis, seed companies aren’t into it like they used to be — all their R&D now goes to genetic manipulation (not the same thing as traditional breeding no matter what sophists like to argue) a la RR technology.
The whole thing’s a mess. I’m seriously seriously considering growing something different (like watermelons, maybe) on my few acres.
***
The tide can be turned. When the EU found Liberty Link genes in imported rice, they raised hell about it loudly enough to get our attention. The research coming out on RR soy’s health dangers, if deseminated shrilly, can have an effect. For the first time ever, I’m hearing rich farmer’s wives complain about the crops their husbands grow (‘I’m not feeding that shit to our kids! grow something else!’). Also, the effectiveness of RR technology is diminishing. Three or so years ago I read in some industry publication that horseweed in Tennessee had developed immunity to round-up — sure enough, I’ve saw it with my own eyes here last year.
***
One more thing wrt genetic variety. Ten years ago, probably a quarter to half of local farmers not only saved their seed and some resold it. With the advent of patented genes, that became impossible and illegal. When I was a kid, one didn’t buy seed beans or wheat or rice from a seed company; if you bought it, you bought it from someone who grew it locally. All kinds of varieties to suit the varied soils around here. Well, no more.
***
Two years ago, I think it was, when biotech rice was being test plotted, Anheuser Busch raised hell at first. Budweiser is made with rice; A-B was understandably worried about the quality of their brew (no jokes by beer snobs, please). They threatened to not buy rice from MO or AR. But strings were pulled in MO, and A-B shut up…. and yep, the test-plotting went on, the frankenfood was grown and poof, now we have the conventional variety, Chenier, a short-stalked rice developed in LA, now contaminated with Liberty Link genes (this was what the EU found in imported rice, inspiring them to say, clean this shit out or we won’t be buying more).
Fun fact. Riceland Foods is not like Cargill, Bunge, et al. It is a co-op. For years, it was run honestly and capably by Richard Bell, who despite his Republicanism (he was an assistant in Earl Butz’s Department of Agriculture — yes, that Earl Butz of lurid ethnic joke infamy, and whose policies more than any other killed the family farm) was a decent executive. But Bell retired. And now the guy who runs Riceland is a — wait for it — former Monsanto exec.
Now RR beans are one thing — they are bad and some farmers are beginning to see them in a different light but the fact remains that they work very very well right now. OTOH, almost no farmer I know — save a tiny minority of greedy fucktards who have riced their ground to death, planting the same crop over and over and over until the field is completely contaminated with red rice (a natural rice variety that is actually good for you — better than white rice — but is cause for a huge pay cut at delivery on the specious grounds that, because it is darker than white rice, consumers mistake it for mouse droppings! No, really.) — wants biotech rice. Only the people who have a vested interest in the biotech industry, or people who want biotech on ideological grounds keep the frankenfood hits coming on that front.
In the several flamewars I’ve gotten into on the subject online, the only other people for biotech in principle are idiot sensible liberals who dream of making a crop — usually rice — into a genetic monster of a vitamin pill to save those poor third worlders who are dying by the bazillions for lack of B-12 or beta carotene or whatever. Of course, we are rich enough to simply give Flintstone’s and Centrums to everyone on earth, but what ‘innovation’ is there in that? What companies are gonna get rich from that? And what scientists will get the temporary thrill, so familiar to the original nuclear scientists, that comes from developing something that can in the short term be of benefit to millions, no matter the unintended disasterous/permanent consequences that are easily forseen?
I don’t think it’s fair to equate Chinese sticking glycol in toothpastes with artificial genetic selection in crops.
It may be apples and oranges, but they are part of the same fruit basket. The processes which created both problems are part and parcel of a greater process.
Mencken makes the points I was trying to make with far more eloquence. Especially in regards to both examples arising from the same underlying system.
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.
“All I could get were Roundup Ready soybeans from Iowa”? How do you know they were from Iowa?
“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.
That’s as silly as saying ‘we shouldn’t fight terrorism, because it creates terrorists!’ Oh wait, that’s exactly what you guys say on this side of the aisle, huh
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?
RE: Iowa, well, the giant bean sacks say so.
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.
I said “spring wheat”. Monsanto isn’t bothering with Roundup Ready winter wheat; the guys up in the Dakotas are the ones with weed control problems.
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.
One thing I’ve always wondered was how the consumer’s reaction (‘yuk, rat turds, throw it away!’) to certain harmless foriegn material in rice (red rice and coffeebean/indigo) was ever proven to Big Agri. I’m sure there were and are surveys, but..
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.
I’m not calling you a whore. I didn’t know you were in the farm press. Really. I’m happy to have an Arkie here and am not trying to flame you.
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?
HTML, I’m waiting for some corporatist whore to tell us that the potato famine has “in the long run” proven to be a Good Thing, because Ireland is now the leader of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economies, and millions of fine upstanding Americans are descended from Irish peasants forced to emigrate or die. Ergo, who knows what fantastic social results will arise from a pandemic of maize rust or soybean blight in today’s monoculture!… if only we could take the long view, like Serious Pundits, and not get all hung up on short-term problems like ‘mass famine’ much less ‘destruction of America’s family farming infrastructure’…
I’m sure Cargill’s lobbyists have the funds ready for EFT the minute they can find a plausible enough liar-for-hire.
No, the Dakotas and Montana. Spring wheat has not been profitable for those guys; they shifted heavily to soybeans with the ’96 Farm Bill, and now lately to corn because of ethanol. So US spring wheat production has been going down every year; I think acreage is the lowest in about 35 years, though there might have been a small pickup this year because of the price. Why do they grow corn and soybeans? Because they can slather it with glyphosate and boom, their weed worries are done. These are extraordinary times for wheat; we’ve had a series of crop failures among the biggest exporting nations over the last two years, and we’ve rarely seen prices elevated over $4, much less $5, this long. The assumption is it will end one of these days, but that Easter freeze was absolutely murderous here, and now they’re getting drenching rains and fusarium in Texas.
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 don’t see any evidence of a consumer reaction against [GMO] in the United States.
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.
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.
dodger — It’s not about drawing a line at the 90’s and saying, ‘that’s it’; it’s not about standing athwart history yelling ‘stop’.
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.
I’m waiting for some corporatist whore to tell us that the potato famine has “in the long run� proven to be a Good Thing, because Ireland is now the leader of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economies, and millions of fine upstanding Americans are descended from Irish peasants forced to emigrate or die. Ergo, who knows what fantastic social results will arise from a pandemic of maize rust or soybean blight in today’s monoculture!… if only we could take the long view, like Serious Pundits, and not get all hung up on short-term problems like ‘mass famine’ much less ‘destruction of America’s family farming infrastructure’…
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.
I knew flouride was a Communist plot!
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…
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”…
I did want to check on this one just to make sure I was right. And I was. The Plant Variety Protection Act, as amended in 1995, expressly prohibits the unauthorized sale of seed grown from varieties to receive protection since the date of enactment. So unless you’re growing a variety that came on the market since 1995, HTML, you cannot resell the seed.
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.
I did want to check on this one just to make sure I was right. And I was. The Plant Variety Protection Act, as amended in 1995, expressly prohibits the unauthorized sale of seed grown from varieties to receive protection since the date of enactment. So unless you’re growing a variety that came on the market since 1995, HTML, you cannot resell the seed.
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.
Just a little note from China;
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=189169&Disp=0
Just a little note from China;
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.
Dan Someone said “Invasion and occupation are not the only way to fight terrorism, are they?”
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.