GM Cassava to help Africa's poor.

There are issues regarding GM corn, GM peas and GM soya. In fact, total harvests have been lost. This technology has to be proven in the field to be at least sustainable before it's rolled out. The poor of Africa might not have much say, but I would object to them being treated as guinea-pigs for this technology.

 

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Ultra

Guinea pigs is not a good description. This is a development carried out for purely altruistic purposes. Not to make money. The scientists behind it will carry out a range of tests to ensure safety, which is why it will take another 3 to 5 years. I have no doubt that, at that time, there will be a lot more answers to your concerns.

 

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It took more than fifty or sixty years - ten times as long - for the fatal flaw in the Irish potato to show up. And the potato was well understood - not a brand new and untried notion like this GM stuff.

The potato was brought into Ireland, and encouraged there by the rich and powerful English, for very similar and just as altruistic motives.

Meanwhile, dependency on Monsanto is only altruistic from Monsanto's pov.

 

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Sorry, I missed your post yeaterday. I really do hope this tech works out as planned, though when do complex issues like these ever go without a hitch? The problem is that a hitch in this instance could cost lives. A total failiure as has happened with other GM products could leave the recipients worse off than before.
All I'm saying is that there should be a plan B should this not work out. If this is done and an independent assessment of the impact on the flora and fauna is done, I would have little objection. This is an instance where there is clearly a need and a great potential benefit to be had. That's why I'm not opposing this plan.

 

iceaura

The Irish potato story is not germane to this situation. The 'fatal flaw' was simply that a pathogen - Phytophthera infestans - endemic to the Americas, was able to cause disease. That kind of disease is well understood today, and controllable. Which, of course, is why the potato is a major crop in today's Ireland.

The cassava situation is simply the introduction of a new gene, whose effects are well known. However, detailed studies are planned for the next 3 to 5 years, in case something is overlooked. When the new cassava is introduced, it will save many human lives due to the increased protein. This benefit would have to be accompanied by a truly terrible flaw to make the result a net detrement. That is seriously unlikely.

Ultra
Thanks for that support. This is not the only GM project geared purely to helping the impoverished in the third world. For example, 200 million people in Africa are totally dependent on maize as their staple. The maize is subject to insect attack, and the growers cannot buy insecticides, so 40% of the potential crop is lost each year. Insect resistant GM maize for Africa is another such project. If and when successful, it will increase the food supply to a people subject to famine and starvation.

 

Hi Skeptic, there is suspicion that BT maize is not yet safe eg.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/feb/27/gm.science

This has always been a potential problem, but I'd not heard of it making people ill before. As I've always said, this is still a relatively young science. There are risks involved releasing GM materials, some predicted and some not. We have to make sure the maize is safe before shipping it. There's no piont making the maize 40% more bountiful if people are too ill to farm it. It's very much still a work in progress and we shouldn't rush it - that makes good scientists do bad science.

 

To Ultra

Yes, perhaps.
I have encountered Prof. Traavik's name before. He does work for some of the anti-GM groups, and is clearly an anti-GM enthusiast. While this does not prove him wrong, it does cast a little suspicion on his findings. It is a bit like a person working for a drug company who finds that his employer's product works extremely well. Not necessarily wrong, but definitely requiring more work to verify.

 

And there's another, worse problem. South Africa has just dumped thousands of tons of GM maize into the largely unregulated African market. Kenya has been seriously affected by this with the price of maize crashing. But what's worse is that it totally circumvents Kenya's own GM policy. Citizens of Kenya now have no choise but to eat GM maize whether they want to or not. Thier basic right to choose has been totally blown out of the water.
I don't know if the maize is safe or not, but this kind of irresponsible use of GM products are not going to help the GM lobby one bit. I suppose it will act as a large-scale consumption experiment should anyone bother to moniter the health of the consumers over the next 40 years or so, but I seriously don't think its gonna happen..

 

Ultra

That is a political problem - not one of health, safety, or any other technical matter. South Africa has been growing GM maize for at least 5 years, and it makes up the bulk of their production. The people of South Africa have been eating that crop for all that time, with no health problems. This indicates that those who think it is 'the devil's grain' are not being terribly rational. In addition, the maize has passed the standard safety tests required before something GM leave the laboratory.

As I understand it, a very large percentage of grain exports from South Africa follow, and always have followed, 'informal' routes of export. That is : they are sold across borders by persons who do not necessarily have the blessing of the South African government. That being the case, and with most of the maize harvest being GM, it was pretty much impossible from the beginning to stop GM maize being exported.

Since it has been eaten by South Africans for 5 years with no harm, it would seem enormously unlikely that exports will cause harm, either, unless the harm comes from totally psychosomatic causes.

 

No, Skeptic, I don't think the maize was harmful in a biological sense. It is a geopolitical issue that the African nations need to get to grips with. Apart from the economic issues, I am unhappy that people now have no choise but to eat this GM maize. It may do no harm at all, but the principle is and always should be pro-choise. It just makes the industry look reckless, which it just doesn't need right now.

Edit: Here's an article on it..

http://mg.co.za/article/2010-05-15-sa-dumping-gm-maize-on-africa

 

Nonsense - completely divorced from reality.

It is the introduction of a complex of genetic information, including insertion factors and other (not always planned) junk as well as "a gene", into various and not precisely specified locations in a poorly understood genome of one or two strains of one variety of a major food plant. This makes a modified whole plant, with its own requirements and vulnerabilities and best practices for farming, which is then being pushed - for some of the best of reasons, and some of the worst - into the foundation of the food supply of many people (by plan, millions). The social, political, and economic effects follow by the means of development, the necessities of the plant's farming, and the economic structures of support involved.

None of this stuff - not even the internal effects of the gene itself on the new plant over generations - are "well known". Not even close.

It started out in almost perfect parallel

 

It may (or may not) be of interest to you that I'd written a blog inspired by this thread and the one I wrote about GM beef being deemed safe to eat in the UK. http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=105479
With further developments with SA dumping GM maize onto the African market, I had hoped rather to pull the various threads together in one article with resources and contemporary accounts. It can be found here at: http://lou904718.wordpress.com/cloned-beef-enters-uk-foodchain-gm-cassava-the-new-hope-for-africa/
I would be interested to recieve any other interesting materials, suggestions and comments to improve the content. After all, it was SciForumers that inspired it.

 

To iceaura

The Bt gene expresses a protein, which is specifically toxic to most insects. It has been tested by feeding studies on mammals, and has, in fact, been part of "organic" sprays for decades. It has been eaten by many millions of human with no effect. The GM maize itself hss been eaten by millions of South Africas for the past 5 years. The risk of this modification is at the very bottom of any risk scale.

It always staggers me how the anti-GM mob continue to ignore all the experience and test data and continue to clang alarm bells over things that are much more heavily tested and known than, for example, many of the new foods and crops from all around the world that are being introduced into the human food chain untested.

 

Skeptical, you have probably noted by now that there nothing you can say or even the mountains of evidence that you can present that will serve to educate him. He's dyed-in-the-wool ant-GM - in fact, he's strongly anti- on MANY subjects. He's very comfortable speaking from a stance of ignorance on many, many things. For example, on the topic of modified rice, he isn't aware (or more than likely, given his ignorant stance) refuses to realize that there are over 80,000 varieties of rice in this world.

It's just not worth the effort to attempt to educate him on ANY subject - his mind is totally closed and is not capable of receiving facts.. :shrug:

 

In the first place, that is such an obvious attempt at deflecting the arguments here as to call your honesty into question - nobody here has been talking about Bt toxicity in food.

In the second place, those assertions are not well established -

no one, for example, is monitoring millions of South Africans to discover the effects of continual and occasionally very concentrated ingestion of Bt toxin, or even if such exposure is occurring,

and five years is not nearly enough time for such a study.

It's use as an "organic" spray does not produce such continual exposure, nor is the toxin normally incorporated into the foodstuffs thereby. The exposure is completely different, in quality and quantity, and the experience of "organic" users is beside the point.

And so forth.

In the third place, the conclusion does not follow even granted the assertions. The risk of the modification does not depend very much on the toxicity of Bt protein in everyone's food.

In the fourth place, the only point of relevance to this thread seems to have blown right by: apparently South Africans have been used as guinea pigs for five years - if they have come to no harm, that is not to the credit of the people who have been abusing them in that fashion. And it points to the motives behind these ventures, which are not wonderful and trustworthy.

The irresponsibility of attempting to conceal the nature of the GM modifications currently being broadcast and promoted worldwide, by treating them in rhetoric as though they were just another borrowing of some crop or food by one culture from another, just another breeding of some variety of familiar crop, merely more of what we already know and do, is borderline criminal.

Seriously: there's a moral issue here.

 

iceaura

No dishonesty here. The Bt modification of crop plants is one of the oldest and one of the best studied. To my knowledge, the only study that showed any negative effect on mammals was one sponsored by Greenpeace (liver effects in rats) which was barely statistically significant, and enormously suspect due to the nature of the sponsor - a bit like Smith Klein and French telling the world that one of their drugs was 100% safe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis#Health_and_safety

Masses of safety data was available before the Bt maize was grown and eaten in South Africa.

With all the studies and all the data, if any detremental effect comes from Bt on humans, it has gotta be pretty damn minor, and easily overlooked!

 

1) So? What's that stuff doing on this thread?

2) Immediately below the report of the Greenpeace study, in the same section of the same link of yours, we read this:

3) If this haphazard and hole-filled stuff is what we have for the "oldest and best studied", heaven help us for the rest of the field.

 

This is a rather interesting article-yes it's written from a biased perspective, but one might expect results such as this: the transgenic plants seem to be less resilient and less able to handle non-ideal conditions...
The reason I say "might expect" is that that's generally what you see with transgenic lifeforms beyond bacterial level-they tend to have unexpected problems.

www.foodfreedom.wordpress.com/.../new-study-gm-wheat-yields-48-56-percent-less-in-field-experiments/

Please note-the awful field results noted were from a new cultivar that I don't believe (skimming again) is yet in production; most GM cultivars only have a mild to moderate drop when introduced to field conditions.

Waitaminute...I must have missed something-where did they say they were selling them GM seedcorn without telling them it was GM?

Was the S. African government allowing this???

I mean, most countries outside of the US, including most of Africa, have pretty much refused GM seeds-they may take the grains-so long as they are rendered sterile...

Pardon-end of work time.

 

? Not following - - -

 

If you read the book "Junk Science", you will discover an artifact of statistics that is widely used by the less reputable organisations (like Greenpeace).

It is simple, really. Most scientific studies are done at the 0.05 confidence limit. This means that 19 out of 20 scientific studies will arrive at the 'right' answer, while 1 in 20 come up with the 'wrong' answer. This leaves lots of scope for the anti-GM movement, to cherry pick data. Simply, one in 20 studies will give the incorrect answer. Where 19 out of 20 show GM to be safe, 1 in 20 will show it to be hazardous.

Since many thousands of studies have been done on the safety of GM crops and foods, and 1 in 20 give the wrong answer, this gives the advocates of false science plenty of ammunition.

This 1 in 20 phenomenon must be borne in mind when considering the claims of those who are in political opposition to something like GM. Good scientists will consider every study done. Crackpots will publicise only those studies that come up with the fluke result that supports their crackpot beliefs.