[goofkid (OP)]

What do you think?

[paul.fr]

not in my back yard..ba boom.

I think for the starving, third world countries that GM could really be a wonder. I understand that GM has a bad reputation in the states with plenty of protests and stores that sell GM products. I think this is the way we will go, especially if climate change dictates the way and where crops are grown.

[goofkid (OP)]

Yes....but "third world" coutries cannot afford such advanced things anyways.
GM food inverntors will suffer from their own invention  i.e. usa or canada.

[paul.fr]

Yes....but "third world" coutries cannot afford such advanced things anyways.
GM food inverntors will suffer from their own invention  i.e. usa or canada.

NPR, radio in the states

Talk of the Nation, December 27, 2000 · GUESTS: JOHN BIEWEN *Correspondent and Producer, American RadioWorks CHANNAPATNA (C.S.) PRAKASH *Professor, Plant Molecular Genetics, Tuskegee University ANURADHA MITTAL *Co-Director, FOOD FIRST (Institute for Food and Development Policy) Genetically modified crops are a scientific wonder and the focus of heated debates in the U.S. over food safety and environmental concerns. But farmers in other parts of the world say genetically modified crops could give them self-sufficiency and be the answer to world hunger. Should genetically modified crops be harvested in Third World countries?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1116087

i could be and often am wrong, but i thought third world countries were already planting GM crops. either way i think we should be subsidising the sale of GM crops and technologies to those countries.

[goofkid (OP)]

...i thought using the term "third world coutries" wasn't considered good in the states...but i guess i was wrong.

[_Stefan_]

There is no reason why they wouldn't be safe to consume.

However, if GM organisms escape into the wild and breed or compete with natural populations, the results could be devastating.
GM crops need to be modified in such a way that they would lose their modified genes after a few generations in the wild, and if I remember correctly this has been done with GM turnips, I think I heard it in a Nature Hereditary podcast.

[another_someone]

There are two issues with GM - one is economic/political, and the other is safety.

In some ways, maybe the two are not so very different, in that we are making the food industry behave more like the pharmaceutical industry.  In a sense, the gap between drugs and food has always been a bit artificial (after all, eating healthy food is like taking a low potency drug, and all herbs are in their own way also drugs).

The difference is that over the last few centuries we have been developing ever more powerful ways of manipulating drugs to have more powerful effects.  In the process we have also moved from drugs being something you grew in your back yard to drugs being something you created in a factory.  We have had to create ever stricter control regimes in order to manage the power of the new drugs we create, while making the drugs something that can only be produced if you pay the patent holder large sums of money (which they need in order to prove the safety of the drug).

So, GM is a potentially very powerful way of modifying food.  It does not mean that all GM food is dangerous (any more than all drugs are dangerous), only that the powerful tools we are developing make the line between safe and dangerous ever more easy to inadvertently cross.

We are already developing patent law (at least in many countries) that puts GM foods on par with drugs, but we have not yet caught up with the safety regimes that should go with it.  Maybe it is because we don't yet understand where the safety risks lie with the new technologies, and will not fully understand it until we get some thalidomide type disaster in the GM food industry.

[Soul Surfer]

Genetic modification is just a more controllable version of what mankind has been doing for thousands of years by selectively breeding his plants and animals.   All it does is enable more precisely defined characteristics to be incorporated in a more controllable way.

In general I see nothing wrong with it and GM food is quite safe as long as it is designed to be safe.  It is of course possible to create "unsafe" food by both natural cross breeding and genetic modification if that is the intent.

[another_someone]

My understanding is that GM is more than merely a more precise way of doing what we have always done, it is also a faster, and more powerful, way of doing the same.

In the past, we could select for genetic traits, or cross between different breeds of the same species; but GM allows us to transfer genetic material between totally unrelated species, but even between totally different kingdoms (taking genes from a fungi and introducing it into a plant).  There is no way that this could ever have been achieved by conventional breeding programs.

Furthermore, the compressed time scale by which GM can achieve even that which had been possible by traditional breeding programs means that in the past there was more time available to understand the peculiarities of the new breed.

[that mad man]

Quote:

"But farmers in other parts of the world say genetically modified crops could give them self-sufficiency"

The catch there is that it wont give self sufficiency as the farmers will always have to buy their seeds from a GM supplier as they are not allowed to produce their own.
Wow betide those that do produce their own seeds as they will swiftly get prosecuted. I think GM is being used as an excuse in helping the 3rd world and is just a ploy to make money from poverty.

Unfortunately, pirated seeds obtained from cross breeding are now on the market in India and elsewhere and there is no control on the quality or safety of them.

Bee

[another_someone]

Quote:
Unfortunately, pirated seeds obtained from cross breeding are now on the market in India and elsewhere and there is no control on the quality or safety of them.

Since Indian law does not allow the patenting of living entities, so GM patents, which are patents on a living organism, cannot be recognised under Indian law.  Thus the Indians would not recognise this as piracy.