Genetically-Modified Copyrights

In, Unhealthy Fixation, William Saletan defends GMOs :

I’ve spent much of the past year digging into the evidence. Here’s what I’ve learned. First, it’s true that the issue is complicated. But the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust.

And then he talks up Papayas with viruses, staple crops with Bt and Golden Rice with Vitamin A. Somewhat late in the article, Saletan does admit that the extent to which pesticide-resistant GMOs lead to increased pesticide use is a problem:

Two factors seem to account for the herbicide increase. One is direct: If your crops are engineered to withstand Roundup, you can spray it profusely without killing them. The other factor is indirect: When every farmer sprays Roundup, weeds adapt to a Roundup-saturated world. They evolve to survive. To kill these herbicide-resistant strains, farmers spray more weedkillers. It’s an arms race. …

As weeds evolve to withstand Roundup, farmers are deploying other, more worrisome herbicides. And companies are engineering crops to withstand these herbicides so that farmers can spray them freely.

He also admits that monoculture is a problem, but claims that monoculture is thousands of years old, therefore not GMO’s problem.

Saletan hammers home the point that GMOs are not really a group of like things, therefore shouldn’t be labeled as such. As all pro-GMO astroturfers point out eventually, homo sapiens have been altering the genetics of its plants and animals through selective breeding for centuries. Saletan uses, ‘Genetically-Engineered’ (GE), and that or ‘transgenic’ organisms would be more accurate terminology, but most people use GMO for organisms modified using biotechnology rather than breeding.

In the comments is the interesting theory that anti-GMO activism is a false flag operation intended to discredit those who are actually opponents of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), The TransPacific Partnership (TPP) and Big Ag’s tendency to slap a patent or copyright on anything with DNA.

As a recap, ACTA is law in the US, but was rejected in Europe. The proposed TTIP and TPP include much of the same corporation-friendly intellectual property legislation as does ACTA. Seeds have been patented for quite some time, and now GMO seeds are being copyrighted. Patents expire after about twenty years; copyrights are supposedly the life of the author plus fifty or seventy years, but as my former coblogger Jim Marino has noted, valuable copyrights seem to be extended routinely.

GM I dunnO

Suddenly Republican representatives prefer federal oversight to state’s rights.

In, Food fight! Congress, consumers battle over GMOs, McClatchyDC covers Kansas’ Representative Mike Pompeo’s efforts to protect conventional agriculture from state laws that would require them to label GMO products.

So far, three states – Vermont, Connecticut and Maine – have passed mandatory labeling laws for genetically modified food. At least fifteen other states are considering similar regulations.

Pompeo’s “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act” would nix those laws and instead set up a voluntary nationwide labeling system overseen by the federal government.

A lot has been written back and forth about GMOs being safe or not. Less has been written about the safety of the workers handling GMO crops that are doused in pesticides. Even less has been written about the possibility that some pests will eventually become resistant to glyphosate.

For my money, the produce I get from organic producers seems to taste better. It also seems to be better for my teeth, weight and sleep. It costs more, but I consider it a worthwhile investment in my family’s well-being.

First Peoples

A week after posting The Ugly Little Boy, I ran across First Peoples on PBS. There are five episodes: Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe. I find it worth watching, though I expect that in ten or twenty years some of the theories presented will be superseded as more discoveries are made.

Wall to Wall Television includes brief, illustrative scenes of both archaic and early modern humans, and to my eyes, they seem to have tried hard to cast appropriate-looking actors. East African modern humans, like Omo-1, are played by dark-skinned African-looking men and women, while the Neanderthals are somewhat lighter-skinned with bushy hair and heavy prosthetic facial features. Eva of Naharon, found in the Yucatan, looks like a dark Latina woman and the woman from Tam Pa Ling, found in Northern Laos, looks like a dark Eurasian woman. Oase Boy, found in the Carpathian Mountains, looks like a modern Caucasian. The Clovis Makers in Northwest America are shown just about as light-skinned as present day native Americans, while Kennewick Man (the Ancient One) is somewhat darker.

While discussing how interbreeding between modern and archaic species may have occurred, some scenes show a small group homo sapiens nervously moving through a landscape, then meeting up with a group of homo erectus and sharing some food. Later another group of sapiens meets up with homo neanderthalis and shares a campfire. Such meetings did (sometimes) happen between European trappers and native Americans, so it is possible that archaic and modern humans met peacefully, traded goods and either intermarried willingly or sold wives.

It is also possible, though, that one group may have wiped out another and taken women and children as captives. Or perhaps one group may have raided another for the express purpose of stealing women. But watching dark-skinned invaders overwhelm lighter-skinned tribes would certainly be fodder for race-baiting in today’s racially-charged atmosphere.

Speaking of Kennewick Man, after nineteen years of study, it seems about time for the Corps of Engineers to let the Umatilla, or some other tribe, bury him with some dignity.