Permission granted to grow GM potatoes in Ireland

--Kaiser-- wrote: »

Here's a good article, stating GM debate is commonly based on emotion rather than evidence.
http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/1526/gm-debate-in-europe-based-on-emotion-not-evidence

And they have a point, you can see by the rhetoric people use...

It's not natural! - cyandide is natural, doesn't mean it's good for you (and vice versa)

It's messing with nature! - we've been messing wit nature for hundreds of thousands of years, most of the food we eat bears little resemblance to the plants and animals we bred them from

It's bad for the environment! - actually, creating pest resistant crops is good for the environment

and so on and so forth

Seaneh wrote: »

...that patented plant will cross contaminate the other plants in the area and then the company will sue the farmers who aren't even planting their organism for patent breech because of cross contamination. It's already happening in the US.

kupus wrote: »

If you are interested take a read of this where one company sued a farmer because the strain cross pollinated with the farmers.........

http://www.percyschmeiser.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser

If Im farming potatoes and some numbers cruncher came onto the farm to say these potatoes are ours and ours alone, well I am not going to say anything else as to do so would get me barred.

Seaneh wrote: »

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-4048288.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser

That's two.

spankysue wrote: »

I think GM crops are the way forward.

Here's an article about a man who is estimated to have saved a billion lives through GM crops. http://www.torontoglobalist.org/2010/11/24/the-man-that-saved-a-billion-lives-norman-borlaug-gmos/

How could that be a bad thing?

Plan for GM trials

Sir, – It is regrettable that you chose to run a one-sided article by Stella Coffey on the proposed GM (genetically modified) trials by Teagasc (Opinion, March 26th). It should be pointed out that gene transfer by agrobacterium has been happening for centuries if not longer. It was well documented but not understood. It must therefore be accepted as a naturally occurring event. An understanding and exploitation of the event is only some 30 years old.
The exploitation of this phenomenon has led to the production of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) although some more sophisticated processes have sprung from this natural phenomenon. It should be said in favour of GMOs that millions in the third world have been spared blindness thanks to the GMO Golden Rice. The development of high Lysine Maize has made survival on a staple diet of maize possible. I owe my well being at this advanced age to insulin produced by GMO as do millions in the western world. The majority of cheeses produced in Ireland use Rennet produced by GMOs. It would seem, therefore, that GMOs are not intrinsically bad.
In respect of the proposed trial by Teagasc, Ms Coffey would seem to have little knowledge of the sexual life of the potato or of the blight organism. The chances of gene transfer from potato giving rise to any super organism are beyond my comprehension and if she can offer a mechanism for such an event I am all ears. Over 100 million have been consuming the extensively grown GMO plants and many of our farm animals have been doing likewise. The absence of her threatening forecasts is striking. Perhaps the American consumption of GMOs has led to behavioural problems that gave rise to the war in Afghanistan. Such a claim would not be more outlandish than some of the claims made by the Apostles of Humus in regard to GMOs.
Which would the Irish people prefer: A potato with an extra protein which would be digested normally the same as any other protein, or a potato that came from plants treated with heavy, nay, even toxic, levels of copper applied to prevent blight? Inadequate phytosanitary measures have led to the decline of the once thriving seed potato industry in Ireland. To espouse slack preventative regimes that allow the rapidly evolving pathogens to outpace disease prevention seems a very unwise choice.
Simply look at the superbug situation in our hospitals.
A salient epidemiological feature of much of our green organic growing of potatoes is that, due to inadequate use of insecticides, the growers provide and maintain a reservoir of plant viruses. They also provide them free of charge to hapless commercial growers.
The same applies to a certain extent with blight. Crops such as those proposed for trial by Teagasc may in the long term benefit both organic and conventional growers. There is nothing to prevent GMO crops being grown under an organic regime.
I believe these trials should be approved and I hope that if they are, the crops will not be destroyed by Green Luddites. – Yours, etc,
MATTHEW A HARMEY, Emeritus Professor of Plant Molecular Biology, UCD, Pleasants Street, Dublin 8 .

andrew wrote: »

So are people against GM food on principal, or just because they think it's dangerous. As in, hypothetically, if there was a 100% proven safe GM food, is there anyone who still wouldn't eat it?

Anyways, GM food is old news. Bring on the lab grown meat!

Use the C-word all you want: they're still GM potatoes

STELLA COFFEY
OPINION: THE CAPACITY of new language to confuse comes into sharp focus in the GM crops debate.
Their defining feature is that they contain a gene transferred from another species by genetic engineering. Species can be usefully defined as a group of organisms all of whose members are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring.
So, the kind of “transgenic” jump involved in the production of GM crops is not something that could ever happen in nature.
Only in the past 20 years or so have GM/transgenic crops even existed, an invisible blip on the evolutionary timeline of 1.2 billion years since sex evolved. The normal scale of evolutionary change in organisms has been completely overwritten by GM technology, and we simply do not know what the long-term effects might be.
The first GM/transgenic commercialised crop, a tomato, hit the US in 1994 and today GM/transgenic maize, soy and canola make up a considerable portion of the food supply, primarily through animal feed. Yet, none of these crops were independently tested before their release on the US market and, not surprisingly, controversy dogged GM/transgenic crops and food and its commercialisation and, as more people became aware of the issues, it became hotly contested.
The EU door to GM/transgenic crops has been difficult to prise open, and in the face of such opposition, promoters of the GM industry seized upon the concept of “cisgenic”, a word that was literally invented in the course of a PhD thesis submitted to Wageningen University in the Netherlands in 2004.
“Cisgenic” is said to describe close relative breeding. It is a clever word in this context, with its scientific connotations of opposites or mirror images, one labelled with the prefix “cis-” and its mirror image, “trans-”.
From this usage in science, “cisgenic” suggests itself to be the opposite of “transgenic”. And once the c-word appeared in refereed journals, despite challenges by fellow scientists, it gained currency and began to be seen as a potential key to open the door the EU had virtually closed to GM crops.
Cisgenic, however, is a classification subset of transgenic – cisgenic clearly involves genetically engineered transferral of a gene from a different species and is unequivocally transgenic. It is the transformation process, not the source of the transferred gene, that gives rise to unpredictable effects. Cisgenic, in the case of the Teagasc GM potato, involves an agrobacterium tumescens-mediated gene insertion with a vector, all of which contribute to unpredictable effects of the transgenic process.
Meanwhile those Wageningen creatives set up a train of events to get cisgenic crops deregulated so they could be grown in compliance with GM regulations. For all biotech supporters, the potato is a perfect GM vehicle, a veritable Trojan horse, with its cultural resonance throughout northern Europe, and the fallout from a new virulent blight strain.
The Wageningen initiative secured European Commission support to the extent the European Food Safety Authority published a scientific opinion on matters cisgenic last month, a move one commentator has dubbed “political science”.
But a significant corporate involvement is evident in these EU potato circles. For example, Wageningen University’s plant section got €16.2 million from industry in 2006, 13 per cent of its total budget.
All of this has a strong bearing on Teagasc’s licence application to the Environmental Protection Agency to grow GM potatoes. Teagasc’s application uses the term “cisgenic” 48 times. However, and crucially, it does not at any point define the term.
The documented and widely acknowledged reality is that transgene technology is likely to cause unpredictable effects, effects that wouldn’t occur in many types of traditional breeding. We simply don’t know enough to know that these crops are safe. Haven’t we learned enough “late lessons” on issues such as asbestos and PCBs to be cautious in this case?
One of the side effects of having GM potatoes trialled here would be the “thin end of the wedge effect”. The Teagasc GM potato will have established the GM precedent here, undermined consumer opposition, and the EU door will be wide open to GM canola, maize, wheat and other food crops. Ireland, whose island nature gives scope to avoid cross-border GM contamination, is one of the few EU countries not growing GM crops, so the Teagasc potato trial represents a hugely significant development.
The commercial and institutional interests that promote GM foods frequently cite/exhort us to take a scientific approach to their products and research. But if the scientific method teaches us anything it is to adopt a healthy scepticism.
The deadline for objections to Teagasc’s licence application is today. Rather than becoming cheerleaders for a risky, questionable technology, perhaps now would be a good time to exercise our scepticism.