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Sep 12, 2016 6:38 PM CST
Name: Rick Corey
Everett WA 98204 (Zone 8a)
Sunset Zone 5. Koppen Csb. Eco 2f
Frugal Gardener Garden Procrastinator I helped beta test the first seed swap Plant and/or Seed Trader Seed Starter Region: Pacific Northwest
Photo Contest Winner: 2014 Avid Green Pages Reviewer Garden Ideas: Master Level Garden Sages I was one of the first 300 contributors to the plant database! I helped plan and beta test the plant database.
Golden Rice is a perfect example of "humane GE", and notice that it was NOT invented by a for-profit corporation. I forget whether it was a government agency, a university, or NGO.

Its goal was something that capitalism seems to have little interest in : keeping poor kids from going blind and/or starving.

That kind of fact changed my attitude towards Bernie Sanders. "Democratic socialism" sounds both radical and heretical. But our system is perfectly happy making food MORE expensive, and access to crop seeds MORE restricted. Our system has almost no pressure to make things better for poor people (they aren't a "desirable demographic" or a "lucrative market"). It also had no motivation to prevent catastrophic climate change. And "the system" is resisting efforts to prevent global "death by CO2". OK, that tells me that the system is broken, or at least that it no longer addresses the important challenges for the human species, not even survival of industrial civilization. OK, I'm ready to change the system, since Citizen's United now makes it "government of the people, for the rich".

I think it was the fact that no one was going to make $100 million by preventing blindness that kept Golden Rice from overcoming bad PR. (I also heard the claim that the first version did not have enough vitamin A to fully protect. And claims about "funny color" and "tastes different", which will remain obstacles to any kind of change. I think I understand why people are very conservative about what they eat!)
Avatar for hazelnut
Sep 14, 2016 7:43 AM CST
Thread OP

Charter ATP Member
Well Monsanto's message in the beginning was that it would save the world from hunger--by feeding the poor food grown from GMO seeds. It seems the poor and third world get the brunt of our experiments.
Avatar for Shadegardener
Sep 23, 2016 9:08 AM CST
Name: Cindy
Hobart, IN zone 5
aka CindyMzone5
Celebrating Gardening: 2015 Plant Identifier
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
http://www.ecowatch.com/bayer-...
Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we can't eat money. Cree proverb
Avatar for hazelnut
Oct 20, 2016 12:20 PM CST
Thread OP

Charter ATP Member
I dont think it is good to alter the genome of our basic food supply - and most Europeans don't either. Jeffry Smith has been collecting information for a few years now. http://responsibletechnology.o.... While most people think of food as just this taste or that, actually our bodies process food as information--the information in the plant's DNA. If that DNA is altered, the plant is no longer food, it is garbage that we have to process as toxic junk.
Last edited by hazelnut Oct 20, 2016 12:21 PM Icon for preview

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