well said and its happening globally to eg USA’s FDA/CDC/EPA
In relation to formaldehyde in GMo foods, suggest that you read this. Statements about GMO foods and linking them to say cancer due to some presence of formaldehyde is scaremongering and not factually accurate.
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Just one correction, bees don’y turn pollen into honey, they do this with nectar from nectar producing flowers. Most flowers which rely on bees (native or European) have adapted over time to use bees for pollen dissemination…that being that the flowers have evolved such that bees come into contact with anthers (pollen part of the flower) and the pollen brushes onto the outside of the bee, allowing it to transport it to other flowers.
@Leptobrama is correct that not all flowering plants require bees to pollinate. May plants also self pollinate as well. Many food crops consumed by humans do not require pollination to produce the eatable part of the plant (tubers and root crops, a good example are potatoes whereby the potatoes form even without pollination of the flowers at the end of the growing cycle).
GMO and bees is not an issue for longevity of pollination in the world. A bigger issue is the Varroa mite which can destroy hives and reduce pollination of those crops which require pollination for fruiting.
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This are conspiracies perpetuated by the anti-science/anti-GMO camp. Anyone who has worked in the academic environment, where much genetic science was developed, would find such assertions quite offensive. There is a significant amount of independent peer reviewed research which is undertaken showing the outcomes of GMO research. There is also research, used by activists, that it doesn’t work…that the hypotheses being tested by the research is not substantiated. This does not validate that GMO doesn’t work or cause problems.
In relation to chemicals in foods, most plants produce compounds which are toxic to insects, plant pathogens (bacteria, fungi, viruses) or soil borne pests such as nematodes. Humans have eaten these foods since the start of our evolution without any problems as we have become resistent to or don’t have the biochemical reaction to such chemicals.
Activists/anti-GMO camp creating hysteria by saying that GMO foods are somewhat toxic or contain toxic compounds shows a lack of understanding of biochemistry and natural evolution within the plant kingdom.
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Most flowers are not that specific regarding pollinators. If a bee can touch the anthers, so can a fly, butterfly, beetle, etc.
Are organic foods really healthier than non-organic foods? Researchers from Newcastle University in England have reviewed and conducted meta-analysis on 343 peer-reviewed scientific studies in an effort to find out if organic foods contained greater nutritional value than conventional foods. The results will probably shock some, but will confirm what many people already knew; organic foods are indeed much healthier for human consumption than ‘conventional’ foods. http://themindunleashed.com/2014/07/scientists-reviewed-343-studies-see-organic-food-better-heres-found.html
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So, what’s the conspiracy here? “Science and the reporting of science has become an exercise in propaganda these days. Big corporations can pay for studies to produce any outcome,…”
How much research is carried out these days that’s NOT sponsored by corporate interests?
Even Australian Universities are forced more and more to rely on corporate sponsorship. A classic example is Adelaide Uni research into the effects of fluoride compounds on children’s teeth, sponsored by Colgate Palmolive. It turned out to be the only (oft quoted) Australian research that shows children within a certain age bracket had less caries if they were subjected to fluoride. What they didn’t emphasise is that fluoride delays the eruption of new teeth in children, so the reason they had less caries is because they had less teeth.
On the subject of nutrition in organic food vs GMO foods, how can you possibly compare them when the GMO food has been modified to withstand toxic herbicides such as RoundUp? How can a food that’s been subjected internally and externally to poisons be more nutritious than food that’s clean of toxins?
It’s a joke, not a conspiracy!
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I wish the scientists had to prove it DOESN’T cause cancer, rather than the other way around.
We’re all guinea pigs.
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As a person who has virtually NO scientific knowledge might I suggest that all of us who have concerns about the food we eat just grow as much as we can! A garden is good but today, with simple hydroponic setups, a small indoor space will provide daily greens and lots more. There is much we can do ourselves to help ourselves!
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An interesting read from the Diggers Newsletter about GM/Hybrid Tomatoes and what it has led to.
https://www.diggers.com.au/garden-advice/articles-and-more/blog/rnle17-blog-how-science-ruined-tomatoes/
"How science ruined tomatoes
10 April 2017
By Clive Blazey, Founder of The Diggers Club
Caption for this image is “Hybrid Tomato grown for Long Storage Not Flavour”
If it doesn’t go rotten it was never fresh!
In this dystopian age of fake news the latest attack (reported in the New York Times) by a Florida plant breeder on the supermarket tomato is breathtaking in its hypocrisy.
Plant breeders have been deceiving us since the 1960s with picture perfect hybrid tomatoes that never ripen. We gardeners once joked about an heirloom tomato called Never Will (ripen) — never ever imagining that its genes would become the basis of the hybrid supermarket tomato that could bounce off the floor.
I was astounded when I found a multinational seed merchant’s catalogue in the 1980s showing their latest hybrid tomato (pictured above) placed under a rock to illustrate, not its flavour or food value, but its extraordinary toughness.
The first Genetically Modified laboratory tomato was launched to much fanfare in 1994, brazenly called Flavr Savr, not because it passed any taste test, as its name indicated, but because it had a shelf life of more than 4 weeks. Shopper disgust was so fierce, its withdrawal was forced from shops before its first fruit could even go rotten.
So instead of wrinkling and ripening with age, as all good healthy food does, it was the ‘Hollywood ageless beauty’ version of food.
Deceived shoppers have awarded the supermarket tomato with “the highest dissatisfaction rating of any vegetable”.
The Diggers Club, which pioneered the rescue of heirloom tomatoes in Australia, have been conducting taste tests for over 20 years, and every year the supermarket tomato has always rated last, in every public test.
So since the original tomato, that we now call an heirloom tomato, has all the flavour that’s missing from the multinational breeding, you might ask why do we need to breed these genes back from the original forms that all of us gardeners and farmers have been growing for more than hundreds of years?
Haven’t these US scientists ever been outside their laboratories to a farmers’ market, an heirloom festival or a Californian restaurant?
Surely we just choose from the thousands of heirloom cultivars that evolved in the public domain, before hybrids became a device to wrest ownership and control from an unsuspecting consumer.
After all, heirlooms are part of our cultural history.
The original fruit that arrived in Europe from the Andes was Pomodoro, and it was yellow, but Italians selected out the yellow colour in favour of red tomatoes for pastes or salads, which launched a whole cuisine.
Can you imagine a pasta or pizza without tomatoes?
Now is there any reason that we need to take the lousy hybrid tomato and, like Cinderella, turn it into something desirable? Well, it’s that bottom-line again.
Heirloom tomatoes are part of the public domain and not owned by any corporations, so previously growers could choose from thousands of heirloom cultivars.
The switch to hybrid seed forced growers from saving their own seed, because hybrids in the second generation aren’t true to type.
The price of hybrid seed escalated over 20 years of corporate control from about $500 a kilo to $450,000 a kilo for glass house production hybrids.
Let’s get to the honest truth.
Not content with control, about 95 % of the tomato market multinationals are now competing with tiny seed companies, like ourselves, who have made inroads with vastly tastier heirlooms, because of shopper dissatisfaction.
Now there is no biological advantage in hybridising tomatoes because being a self-pollinating crop, there is no hybrid vigour, so falling multinational sales and profits are what’s driving this bleat from laboratory scientists.
For thousands of years our food supply was ours, but with the advent of hybridisation and seed patenting from GE crops, corporate ownership sees just six companies control about 68% of our seed driven food supply.
Public domain tomatoes and other food crops (not Monsanto’s or Syngenta’s corporatised seeds) are a major contributor to our food heritage, our diet and our health.
Our food heritage and health is under threat when controlled by US multinational seed corporations because of their preference for processed food over fresh food, which has led to the disappearance of the local green grocer, the baker, and the butcher, as food has been corporatised, advertised and warehoused.
So today, for the first time in US history, Americans are facing a reduced lifespan.
Clive Blazey (10 Apr 2017)"
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I have long since given up buying tomatoes…you just need a sunny spot (indoors is fine) and a couple of pots to keep yourself a ready supply of home grown tomatoes - the small ‘cherry’ type tomato is the best!
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Why don’t you like GM crops? As you say, grahroll, they have advanced the agricultural industry leaps and bounds in terms of increasing food security, reducing environmental harm, and increasing the safety of food. The consensus proving the safety and efficacy of using GE a tool in agriculture is just as strong as the consensus proving the climate is changing and that humans are a major driver of this change. Why accept one consensus but deny the other?
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Mainly I am concerned with the loss of diversity in the gene pool. As an example I prefer to use where possible “Heritage Seed” varieties of Tomatoes rather than hybrid and GM types. Corn is difficult to source in heritage form so I will usually get a close hybrid. This is also the reason I am a member of Diggers as they strive to keep diversity in the food chain.
While I understand the benefits of GM in regards to resilience, crop yields and similar I where possible am hesitant to use them when I can grow what I need even with a lesser yield per given area or the fact that some will be attacked by pests that might not occur with GM crops.
I also understand hybrid does not mean a product is GM but it does occur.
I add to this the concerns I have with corporate ownership of food crop seeds that now licences the use of particular crops rather than them being owned by the public.
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Hobby gardening is super fun! I remember plucking up my first ever season of carrot in a little tub on the roof of an apartment building when I was 19 or 20 years old. It turns out, my carrots were actually really short and stumpy, and my roommates felt very sorry for me and had bought a bunch of carrots with tops from a supermarket and placed them in my growing tub. It was a nice gesture, but I never new what my first batch of carrots looked like because they had thrown them out!
Anyway, back on topic. Growing heirloom produce as a hobby is super fun, and I have quite a few varieties in my arsenal. But it is near impossible for a random Joe Bloe or Jane Blane farmer to hoddle on down to the green grocer and pick up a packet of GM seeds off the shelf. I’m not aware of any direct-to-consumer GM seeds presently available. What we are discussing is avoiding GM agricultural crops (such as soybeans, which was the first example offered by rjstevens.
And the fact of the matter is that using GE as a tool in agriculture has nothing to do with genetic diversity at all, as the below article explains [1]. Genetic diversity simply has to do with global dietary norms (among other factors, considering how nuanced any agricultural issue is). For example, if 80% of people only buy apples and bananas, the approximately 80% of production will be apples and bananas. That has nothing to do with whether new varieties of apples or bananas were created through different types of genetic-modification (ie. heirloom/traditional breeding, hybrid breeding, GE technology, etc). It seems that any genetic diversity loss we are seeing is largely explained by what consumers demand, and by how farmers resond to this demand most efficiently.
GM crops actually help to sustain and increase genetic diversity among agricultural farms, so avoiding GM foods is what contributes to genetic diversity loss [2]. Having evolutionary advantage over other varieties is not unique to GM crops - this is what any new variety (be it heirloom/traditional, hybrid, GE, etc) has the opportunity to do. Whether you breed a drought-resistant trait into wheat by:
- 10 years of traditional breeding
(the genetic-modifications we’ve been doing for 10,000 years, which consists of randomly mutating tens of thousands of genes and hoping for the best that one of the genes creates the desired trait), or - 10 years of hybrid breeding
(the genetic-modifications we’ve been making for about 200 years , which also consists of randomly crossing tens of thousands of genes between species, and once again hoping for the best), or - 10 years of GE
(where the trait is actually bred quite quickly, but the rest of the time is testing for safety and efficacy. Your traditionally bred/heirloom tomatos have had no safety testing after mutating tens of thousands of genes. Why is it suddenly scary to only change one or two specific genes?)
So whether the trait is bred through different techniques, the result is still that you have this trait, and it is now competing - evolutionarily - with other varieties in the field. A gene changed is a gene changed. It doesn’t matter whether your food was delivered in a red truck or a blue truck. Similarly, it doesn’t matter that the trait was bred through one technique or the other.
(except the fact that one technique is super precise, cheaper, quicker, and better for the planet - but that’s a scary thing apparently 
)
Not many people realise this: that all food (and all living things), whether genetically-modified or not, all food has genes in it. GE just allows us to choose which one to use, instead of randomly throwing tens of thousands of genes we don’t know about into the mix and hoping for the best. There’s actually a fairly strong link between those who oppose GM technology, and those who don’t understand GM technology [3]. I recommend researching it a bit (using evidence-based sources, not gardening blogs or politically-interested activist sites, but actual scientific literature) to learn more about what it is and how it works
[1] https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/12/14/myth-busting-modern-agriculture-really-led-75-drop-crop-diversity/
[2] “Biodiversity is actually enhanced by the adoption of GM crops. Those crops commercialized to date have reduced the impacts of agriculture on biodiversity, through enhanced adoption of conservation tillage practices, reduction of pesticide use and use of more environmentally benign herbicides, and through increasing yields to alleviate pressure to convert additional land into agricultural use." - Martina Newell-McGloughlin, University of California
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0520-3
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I would also like to mention that as an environmentalist myself, I used to be staunchly against GMOs because that’s what all my peers did too. I decided to look into it myself, and form my opinions around all the available evidence, rather than taking an ideological stance then finding some evidence to match. I have since (maybe about two years ago) changed my mind on the use of modern genetic-modification and am now able to accept the scientific consensus that has been around for half a decade, at least. I don’t want to be lumped in the same boat as climate deniers! 
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From your link #1 “This is why, although we could see no absolute loss in crops consumed over the past 50 years, I am concerned. For even in the relatively small list of crops reported in the FAO national food supply data, . That doesn’t seem like a good thing for the long-term resilience of our agricultural areas, nor for human health, although it’s important to remember that such changes are the collateral damage resulting from the creation of highly productive mega-crop farming systems, which have increased the affordability of these foods worldwide, leading to less stunting and other effects of undernutrition worldwide. On the other hand, global dependence on a few select crops equates to expansive monocultures, with more lives riding on the outcome of the game of cat and mouse between pestilence and uniform varieties grown over large areas”.
The increased diversity they are talking about is not species diversity but more the diversity of foods included in worldwide diets eg the use of wheat in previously rice eating cultures. CAIT which the author references also states " The world is losing crop diversity at an alarming pace
Humanity relies on just a handful of crops. But these arose from a staggering diversity of wild and domesticated plants that nature, farmers and scientists produced over thousands of years. Today, many of these varieties are lost in the wild – and much of the crop diversity that remains is threatened. This is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. The staple crops of the future will need to draw on natural diversity to withstand the imminent environmental extremes"
Then the corporate ownership of the product to be grown also is dis-empowering for people. If I grow crops from seeds I harvested that are not subject to GE licencing I am not obliged to pay anyone for that use. If I use seed from a GE crop then I can be subject to legal processes, penalties, and fees. They can even withhold permission for me to grow that crop if it is subject to a patent. Then they have produced crops that now have poorly viable seed if it is harvested to be re-planted that, perhaps as just a consequence but also may have been a desired outcome, further enhances the sale of their commercial product.
I am not so extreme as to never use GE/GM food but I have a preference to avoid if I can.
My use of Diggers is mainly not because of their perhaps stilted/tilted view regarding GM crops but rather a preference for varietal choices and public ownership that many GM crops do not give. I like the taste and texture changes that occur even in things like apples and tomatoes. Some are more crisp, have more acid, some are sweeter, some have more juice, some are more dry, some fleshy and all have different flavours and these things add variety that can be missing when patented crops are produced.
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You are still struggling to link how GE is the cause of this loss of crop diversity. How do you suppose GMOs are the reason for this?
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From your quoted links “global dependence on a few select crops equates to expansive monocultures, with more lives riding on the outcome of the game of cat and mouse between pestilence and uniform varieties grown over large areas” add to this another from your links “much of the crop diversity that remains is threatened”. When you have single or limited crop types that are now more broadly produced by GM to master all “problems” you then have a reliance on 1) Corporate ownership of crops not forgetting the cases of when GMO types have infiltrated non GMO types and the non GMO farmers having to then pay the licence for the GMO products they didn’t want 2) less diversity because of the greater use of these GM (and limited types of these), this results in a lack of diversity ie a disappearance of the older crops as they are no longer grown or used.
From the FAO UN Panel of Eminent Experts on ethics in Food and Agriculture report "The Panel recommends that more support be given to small-scale food production, particularly for issues regarding access to or control over seeds, water, infrastructure, information, credit and marketing, and that in place of almost unregulated international trade in agriculture, the primary emphasis be put on fair trade regulated in ways that benefit primarily those that are food-insecure, while focusing on traditional food culture and on traditional crops produced for local markets.
The Panel also recommends that measures be adopted to counteract pressure towards acceptance of genetically modified crops, and in this respect urges that due attention be given to the precautionary principle and to the potentially negative social impacts,particularly for smallholders, of the use of such crops. More attention should be given to assessing the potential of existing biodiversity."
Monoculture is the problem for diversity and GM crops certainly strengthen the use of monoculture.
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Another aspect, corporate and some government, is that ‘aid’ to 3rd world agrarian countries is not to make them self sufficient in the end game, but to create customers for ‘the right seeds’, pest controls, and fertilisers. Not too hard to guess which are the ‘right’ ones.
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