The idea of punitive damages being awarded to a single person in a situation like this seems unjust on its own. If Roundup is responsible for this person's cancer, it's almost certainly responsible for the cancer of many other people, alive and dead. Clearly I am not a lawyer, but in cases of such a finding, I feel like there ought to be some mechanism to identify an affected class, and make proceeds benefit that class. The alternative seems to be that the first individual plaintiff whose judgement drains the defendant of funds pulls resources from later plaintiffs whose case is just as sound.
Generally the first plaintiff (attorney) takes the greatest risk as there's no precedent of guilt. Afterwards the class action suits ride the single case momentum towards relatively easy payouts.
Shaving off a part of the company as a sacrificial lamb is like trying to say "my fingertip is responsible for the murder, here take some skin shavings from the tip".
Reforming how class actions are done is probably a very good idea. But Bayer has a market capitalization of over 45 billion. This judgement will probably get appealed and negotiated down. And if it isn't, there is a lot of value in Bayer to pay out in a class action if one succeeds.
If by "reform" you mean weaken class actions, I would argue that is a bad idea.
Larger businesses have already gone to great lengths to eliminate / curtail class actions.
I'd argue that this weakening is the root cause of a chunk of the aggregate problems I see discussed on HN.
It is in a company's interest to harm a great many people a little bit because the people often have to challenge the company as individuals rather than as a group. And the economics often make no sense in that way, so the company is functionally immune to the effects of its harm.
Further weakening the remaining viability of that case type stands to only encourage companies to commit more aggregate harms.
Businesses aren't trying to harm. They aren't a Mao or a Stalin just going for The Greater Good no matter how many people they have to kill. They're trying to make a profit, and sometimes horribly unethical people in those businesses will not care about harm in order to make a profit. But the goal isn't harm.
To be clear, I was not suggesting the intent was harm for harm's sake. I was suggesting that it was in the company's/businesses' interest to harm. I agree that, often, that interest is framed as making profit, but it can also be framed as reducing cost, not having to care, etc.
The bigger point is that such an incentive exists and that it is further incentivized if the individuals who are harmed are deprived of a mechanism to resist.
> framed as making profit, but it can also be framed as reducing cost
Reducing cost does increase profit. Profit is (basically) revenue minus cost.
> The bigger point is that such an incentive exists and that it is further incentivized if the individuals who are harmed are deprived of a mechanism to resist.
Of course. Russia is invading Ukraine right now, as causing harm can benefit you, if you don't care about harm. This isn't a business thing; it's a people thing.
It's just that the blast radius of a business's harm is much smaller than a state's, and it's possible to shape rules so that profit incentives line up (even better) with harm minimisation. There's no harm minimisation you can do when a power-hungry person gets into a political position.
Future archaeologists will find the global layer of lead in soil, ice, etc. and wonder who these supervillains were and why they were not promptly shot.
Tobacco? Asbestos? Leaded gasoline? Uncontained mining tailings and failures of tailings piles? Oil w.r.t. global warming? They are working to continue harm. As if I accidentally stabbed someone and decided the best next step is to stab deeper.
When I say "They are working to continue harm." I mean that yes, they are trying to harm. Intending to harm. Knowingly. Almost always knowing it before the public knows it.
How is "we're trying to make a profit here, we do not care about harm" any different than Mao's or Stalin's "we're doing it for The Greater Good, we do not care about harm"?
Undoubtedly Monsanto are (were), but greedy Bayer should have done proper due diligence about the risks of acquiring it. Presumably the net value of the acquisition and the extent of uninsured risks were known and considered acceptable at that point.
Disclaimer: I used to work for Bayer, but nothing related to ex-Monsanto. Also, I have never had contact with the people who made these decisions, only heard things on passing, so take this with a grain of salt.
I believe the reasoning went like this: food security is the big issue of our times, making agricultural products a market with a high growth potential. And big companies like Bayer have an attitude of "top 5 or nothing". Monsanto was the last "big" company up for sale with a portfolio that could push Bayer's Crop Science division to the top, even when accounting for the possibility of losing the first trial.
I believe the CEO who led the merger (with the blessing of the board) will be remembered as the plague that brought Bayer to its knees. But the rich people on the board thought the idea made sense.
The primary function of the U.S. civil judicial system is to adjudicate disputes, which is what it did here. Making society more just is an overarching, but ultimately, secondary goal.
But the concept of punitive damages is about some claim on justice, right? Like, "in addition to causing harm to this other party worth $m, because your behavior was so bad, you should pay a further $n whose value is about your badness which demands punishment, rather than about their loss."
$7M in compensatory damages and $325M in punitive damages sounds like almost all the dollars in this are about justice, not dispute settlement.
The judgment was based on failure to warn of risk, not negligence in design.
On causation, as far as I can tell, the 2015 finding of epidemiological evidence for a 41% increase in non-hodgkins lymphoma (NHL) was rebutted by non-affiliated researchers, but paid experts are continuing to publish, and claim others have recently found a mechanism. But AFAIK there's no epidemiological or mechanistic proof, now or at the time they made warnings. (I would assume a failure to warn requires some proof they knew of the risk?)
In this case, 57 is barely on the young side of the affected population, but decades of exposure is hard to overlook.
Warnings are something of a fiction. Detailed legalese is regularly ignored, and if it's unclear any commercial gardener avoids glyphosate even today after all the scary news. But the hugely differential impact is a legitimate environmental justice concern, and the lawsuits might be the tip of the iceberg.
It would be best if Monsanto/Bayer negotiated a pool to pay affected people and more importantly to do outreach and monitoring for those who might be affected.
The incentives are all wrong here: huge 100X punitive damages based on failure to warn when there's no proven risk just make any rational decision-makers dig in if not suppress research. It'd be better for companies to pitch in for investigations and treatment over the lifecycle of the product, in exchange for protection from legal lotteries.
see no judgment happend when Monsanto was US owned but the Moment it was bought up by a non US company somehow judges flipped their opinion and even did ruling on non peer reviewed non fully published studies (which later turned out to fail to proof that it causes cancer...)
nothing against banning this and similar roundups on suspicions of them being bad (actually I'm quite in favor of that)
but whats happening there in this case(es) really doesn't look like a proper state of law acting but like some geo political nonsense
> but the Moment it was bought up by a non US company somehow judges flipped their opinion and even did ruling on non peer reviewed non fully published studies (which later turned out to fail to proof that it causes cancer...)
During the same trials it came up that Monsanto at least believed that it had enough contacts to undermine any study it did not like. That probably also influenced what kind of studies the court accepted. You can hardly limit evidence to peer reviewed studies when the defendant outright said that they had full control over which studies would make it that far.
Using non peer reviewed studies means using studies which have not yet been properly error checked!
It's like making decision based on draft laws which have not yet been passed i.e. it fundamentally undermines the justice systems claim to be based on facts, because creating a study which uses various form of "subtle accidental mistakes" to twist the truth is very viable (and sadly also often enough tricks peer reviews, but if there isn't even a peer review you have free rain to manipulate).
I mean you are basically saying because the judge belived that it's probably true that it causes cancer without prove it's okay to use some intermediate test results and pretend they are final to get a fake claim to base a decision one, that's just so wrong.
And surprise the parts which where mostly used as a reference for the ruling where found to be quite faulty (in ways which look to me a lot like someone tried to forcefully come to the result that it is causing cancer).
> to undermine any study it did not like
you still need to use facts to do so, if any study showing that it causes cancer can be undermined using facts then maybe it's a strong indication that there is no good way to proof it to be harmful (with current methods)
If the US believes there is enough suspicion for it being harmful to make it okay for judges to conjure facts where there are non then they should just ban it through a congress decision. This might not be fact based but at least it's based on a proper political due process.
A process which Monstantos internal discussions assumed to be completely under its control.
> I mean you are basically saying because the judge belived that it's probably true that it causes cancer
You are going even a step further and skipping any evidence entirely. Which afaik (not a lawyer) there is even a legal principle that would have allowed the judge to go that far. Something about defendants getting caught red handed messing with evidence allowing the court to assume the worst.
> you still need to use facts to do so,
I think the talk was more about using contacts to shut down the studies while in progress or outright put pressure on the people involved to "correct" the results.
> A process which Monstantos internal discussions assumed to be completely under its control.
you are mixing up writing and reviewing paper
it's very obvious that this paper was not under any control of Monsanto
> You are going even a step further and skipping any evidence entirely
I'm not a non peer reviewed paper is no evidence at all, that given example is the best proof because pretty much all evidence went away once errors where found in peer review and corrected. Furthermore it where errors which if you understand enough about the topic where kind pretty clear, i.e. in no way any Monsanto twisted any truth think. So pretty clearly the judge did a decision which isn't based on any facts.
> I think the talk was more about using contacts to shut down the studies while in progress or outright put pressure on the people involved to "correct" the results.
but this doesn't make it okay to not wait for a peer review in any way, also there is a non small well known group of people which are very clearly not in favor of glyphosat and scientist and outside of the reach of Monsanto it's not that you can't cross review their reviews and feedbacks of the paper with other "more neutral" (but maybe Monsanto pressured) people
either way a fundamental aspect of non scientific papers is _that anything in non peer reviewed papers must be seen as not yet proven and speculative_ ((not necessary in exactly that wording)) and a judge ignoring the some of the most fundamental aspects of scientific practice but then basing a ruling on scientific practice is just ridiculous
>nothing against banning this and similar roundups on suspicions of them being bad (actually I'm quite in favor of that)
This would be a terrible mistake. Even if it turned out that glyphosate causes cancer (it's extremely unclear that it does), it is still the least dangerous herbicide of its type, which is what makes it the most popular herbicide worldwide.
The alternatives are much, much more harmful to people and to the environment. If we ban glyphosate, we will see a drastic rise in the use of far more harmful substances.
This makes no logical sense. If a heavy penalty is established for the use of roundup, an even more prohibitive one would be appropriate for anything more harmful, making it extremely cost-inefficient to use them.
This would drive the development of new farming methods and research into different classes of chemicals.
I think there might be a few problematic ideas in you comment
1. that the people using it [the more harmful roundup] pay the price
2. that the people making the decision to provide more harmful roundup for a high "short" term profits will be penalized in any way
3. that it wouldn't take many years before the more harmful roundup is banned/court rule it to be dangerous
4. that it would increase the development of new farming methods and research into different classes of chemicals
I think given how messed up things are there is a realistic choice a company would push a (under the hand) know more harmful alternative to gain huge short term profit in hope that when court ruling come in they still made a net benefit or at least the people which did the decision back then and now have left the company do.
I mean best example for this would be Teflon pans, long term known to be harmful in many ways but still pushed en mass because they know even with any penalties or damages they might pay it's likely still a huge profit (it was). Then once things went to bad the replaced it with a different chemical composition which supposedly is safe now but is in practice way less researched then what Teflon was made from (or glyphosat). In the end the made a huge profit became marked dominant and the harm done is just a food note forgotten in history.
But we aren't discussing penalties for harsher chemicals. RoundUp is getting undue legal attention relative to the risk it carries, and farmers are already under enormous pressure to switch to more harmful herbicides. (There are no less harmful broad-spectrum herbicides. Glyphosate is the safest we've got.)
Is there a way of telling from the MSDS or other sources that you actually need protective equipment when dealing with a particular chemical? I'm sure some of the stuff my partner deals with requires it, but suspect some of the other stuff she would be safer without the protective gear making her clumsier.
> Is there a way of telling from the MSDS or other sources that you actually need protective equipment when dealing with a particular chemical?
Not generally from official sources. The risk of liability is basically always going to make institutions recommend a bunch of precautions if the effect isn't perfectly known.
Which, y'know, probably better safe than sorry when dealing with novel chemicals. But it's hard to distinguish between dangerous, unknown, and small risk in that kind of environment.
How does its[1] MSDS compare to any other herbicide/pesticide in common use[2]?
All the handling instructions for the them are nearly word-for-word identical. It seems to be a good idea to wear a hazmat suit when you're spraying a field with anything that's supposed to kill weeds.
Farmers (and employees certified/licensed to apply sprays) generally only spray in favourable conditions. Eg. Calm conditions where the output doesn’t go beyond a few meters of the intended swath. Given the cost, it makes little financial sense to waste it on non-target plants.
And while nearly any pesticide/herbicide/fungicide will tell you to suit up and use a respirator, it’s usually because of the (often petroleum derived) volatiles used in the mixture to ensure stability and proper spreading rather than the active ingredient itself.
Glyphosate (RoundUp) for example interacts with a biochemical pathway that doesn’t even exist in humans, yet still suffers from the legacy and cultural entrenchment of a paper that has since been refuted and retracted. The infamous “roundup causes cancer” paper where the author used lines of lab rats that were (intentionally, for use in cancer studies) genetically predisposed to developing tumours.
The volatiles evaporate and break down rapidly, which is why a freshly sprayed field will have an odd aroma for several hours after application. Meanwhile these sprays come with a PHI (post harvest interval), whereby if a producer is following laws and regulations, the active ingredient itself is virtually undetectable at the time of harvest due to UV/heat/microbial degradation.
PHIs are determined empirically by testing sprays across environments and conditions for years before certification, then still including a buffer period to account for outlier conditions where a chemical may persist beyond what was observed.
Because people see "wear standard PPE" in an MSDS and think "it's unsafe if you're not wearing a hazmat suit!" and not "this is safe." Here's the MSDS for good old table salt: https://fscimage.fishersci.com/msds/21105.htm
Quoting the PPE section:
> Personal Protective Equipment
> Eyes: Wear appropriate protective eyeglasses or chemical safety goggles as described by OSHA's eye and face protection regulations in 29 CFR 1910.133 or European Standard EN166.
> Skin: Wear appropriate protective gloves to prevent skin exposure.
> Clothing: Wear appropriate protective clothing to prevent skin exposure.
> Respirators: A respiratory protection program that meets OSHA's 29 CFR 1910.134 and ANSI Z88.2 requirements or European Standard EN 149 must be followed whenever workplace conditions warrant respirator use.
This is table salt. The thing you keep in a salt shaker on your kitchen table. If even this has "wear PPE" in its section on what to wear for PPE, then you can infer that literally every single chemical will at least advise you to wear something.
Because we need to feed billions of people. Because doing that more efficiently not only saves labour and lives of people who would starve otherwise, but also land as we don't need as much of it, so it can be forests and grasslands and steppe [1]. Currently the most efficient way to grow plants on a massive scale requires using herbicides.
As we need herbicides for industrial agriculture, herbicides need to be judged against other herbicides, not in isolation. Glyphosate is fairly benign compared to other herbicides (compare to [2] for example), it's not "shit".
See people complaining about the rising food prices, just due to increasing labor costs. Definitely won’t be politically popular to make farming even more expensive.
I used to work in the agriculture sector, and we had to fully suit up to spray anything whatsoever, even neem oil.
But there were good reasons for this:
1. Human error: If the last user didn't clean it properly, there could still be residue in the sprayer from a different (more dangerous) chemical. Or you may have accidentally added the wrong chemical.
2. Bad luck: You never know who's going to have an allergic reaction to something, like a dye or a surfactant in the product.
3. Liability: Future research may reveal risks that we do not currently know about (e.g., who knows, maybe people with prior exposure will turn out to be more likely to get long covid or some random thing like that). Requiring a suit for absolutely everything means your employer doesn't have to stress about future lawsuits over unknowns like these.
I read the wiki article you linked, but could not find any such argument there. UCC seems to have (successfully) argued that UCIL was a separate company, rather than a partial acquisition.
Doubt they even blinked, these companies hire people to calculate risk and so they can continue to get away with it. Just a cost of business. Bayer's gross revenue for just 2022 was 53.4B. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BAYRY/bayer/revenu...
Maybe 332M was a lot when you were a child. Thanks to compounding monetary inflation year after year, 332M is actually not much any more. It's enough though to make normal people believe that some kind of justice has been served.
No, it's a big amount of money, particularly if it happens repeatedly. Governments have responded to companies' practice of just breaking laws and taking the hit, by continuing to push fines up to they point that they really do hurt and drive down the share price, which directly hurts the wealth of the senior executives and directors.
Bayer's share price is 70% down off its 2015 peak and 65% off its peak since the Monsanto acquisition bid was launched, and has even dropped 30% in just the past 6-7 months. These fines and judgements, and the worry that they may keep happening into the future, are definitely damaging the company.
Monsanto before it was brought by Bayer won all cases.
The moment they where bought by Bayer (i.e. no longer US owned) somehow they start losing cases and judges doing fun things like making ruling based on not peer reviewed not yet fully published studies....
It's better to engage in good faith rather than come out of the gate swinging like that, because otherwise it just sets a mood for inflammatory responses.
Bayer's EBITDA is $12.74B for the trailing 12 months, so they can afford this payout. That said, a number that large is only going to end up getting appealed, there's no way they're just going to sign that cheque.
Thank you for pointing that out. So profit their 2022 32.523B [1]. 32.5 billion in profit dwarfs a 332 million settlement. You have made my point only stronger.
Net profit (or alternatively, free cash flow or operating income) is a far better measure than gross profit for determining whether a company can sustain a particular financial hit.
Their revenue minus expenses is usually low single digit billions, and they had a $12B loss in 2020.
They are earning less than $5B per year for many, many years, and already have a $12B loss to deal with from a couple years ago, there is no way to conclude that a multi billion dollar penalty is a “cost of doing business”.
This is also evident in their market cap graph, showing Bayer’s owners have lost a ton of money over the past 10+ years, especially considering the rocketship a risk less broad market index fund was during the same period.
Actually what they found is that Roundup is potentially cancerous, not glyphosate. Roundup has a host of additive chemicals aside from glyphosate which have been shown to be likely cancerous. Glyphosate by itself is fairly benign.
> Amongst mammals, glyphosate is considered to have "low to very low toxicity". The LD50 of glyphosate is 5,000 mg/kg for rats, 10,000 mg/kg in mice and 3,530 mg/kg in goats.
If you wouldn’t drink a cup for fun, then do you know how many aggregate cups you’re getting per month from all the food you eat? They didn’t poof into existence. Every part of your food is from glysophate sprayed crops and animals that have food-chained them.
You've got a source for that? Looks like ~0.75 pounds per acre and a 3k pound per acre yield for soybeans. Of course not all of that ends up inside the edible part, but 1/4,000 is a long ways from 1/1,000,000,000
1. Glyphosate is one of the more heavily studied chemicals known to man.
2. The evidence for it causing cancer is poor. Studies routinely fail to find evidence for it.
3. The subset of studies that do find evidence for such a link, find it in occupational exposure, by people who have been working knee-deep in it for decades. [1]
Yes, people probably should look at you like you're crazy, because you're extrapolating from cherry-picked evidence that supports your priors.
[1] Whose exposure is dramatically higher than that of someone eating food grown with it.
> people probably should look at you like you're crazy, because you're extrapolating
People who claimed that UK government gave them AIDS, on purpose, were called crazy. 50 years later, it turns out they were right.
"The blood was imported from the US after a UK shortage, where people such as prisoners could donate in return for cash.
The minutes ..shows that officials knew that haemophiliacs were being given dangerous blood from the US that was making them ill with hepatitis... No one raised the alarm to stop the spread of the blood and instead, officials hoped the imported goods would not get a "bad name".
There was a major effort to supress this information. People has to extrapolate based on limited data.
These situations are not rare - when the workers in Teflon factories were having birth defects and cancers, and started questioning that maybe it's related to their job, they were called crazy too.
In my family we extrapolated based on limited data, twice, and doctors were looking at us like we were crazy, and it turned out we were right. If we didn't press the issue, two family members would have been dead.
So now I am jaded and I have limited faith in Medical establishment and institutions doing their homework.
While I'm in essential agreement with the comment above it's still worth fleshing out the case against for those interested.
The specific papers (worst effects of a great deal of exposure) oft cited are:
Myers, J.P.; Antoniou, M.N.; Blumberg, B.; Carroll, L.; Colborn, T.; Everett, L.G.; Hansen, M.; Landrigan,
P.J.; Lanphear, B.P.; Mesnage, R.; et al. Concerns over use of glyphosate-based herbicides and risks
associated with exposures: a consensus statement. Environ. Health 2016, 15, 19.
Leon, M.E.; Schinasi, L.H.; Lebailly, P.; Beane Freeman, L.E.; Nordby, K.-C.; Ferro, G.; Monnereau, A.;
Brouwer, M.; Tual, S.; Baldi, I.; et al. Pesticide use and risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoid malignancies in
agricultural cohorts from France, Norway and the USA: A pooled analysis from the AGRICOH consortium.
Int. J. Epidemiol. 2019, 48, 1519–1535.
I'm in a grain growing district and glyphosate isn't being applied to grain ready to eat | harvest here, just sprayed pre harvest to kill weeds and mid season to suppress weeds coming up in competition.
is a decent balanced paper - it points out the vast number of studies show no real cause for concern while also giving the papers that show issues for farmers and the possible future for glyphosate free farming.
It would seem that #2 and #3 directly contradict one another and that the truth is that it does indeed cause cancer at a particular rate / exposure over time.
Rather than saying it doesn't affect this group but does affect another group it would be more appropriate to establish the level of consumption/exposure that is likely to cause a statistical increase in the likelihood of developing cancer.
He was using glyphosate as a weed-killer and getting it on his hands and feet. Way higher levels of exposure than any foods. Also if you're afraid of glyphosate, the Roundup-ready crops are the ones to avoid especially - soy, corn, canola, sugar beets. There's no Roundup-ready wheat, oats, or nuts. (edit: apparently it's used as a desiccant so it winds up in cereals as well - lovely, though still there's no evidence it's got dietary effects).
I'm not really concerned about its dietary effects since there's no evidence there, but as an amateur entomologist the effects of Roundup on butterfly populations have been devastating - in the past milkweed was pretty hard to completely weed out by hand, but modern farming can clear hundreds of acres of every trace of milkweed with Roundup/glyphosate.
The Wikipedia datalinks opines it's a practice banned in Austria and frowned upon by buyers in Canada.
Spraying chemicals on crops to make them cheaper to harvest is enough evidence to convince me it's best to avoid all cereal products unless they're organic.
I keep records of butterfly sightings. This is the worst year I've ever seen by far. In a normal year queen butterflies are one of the most abundant migrants. So far I have seen 0. I've seen no swallowtails of any species at all, and massively reduced numbers of typical species or none. But that's because of the drought, not glyphosate.
They probably do not have that high concentration on seeds itself. The problem is that it thousands of tons need to be dispersed on the environment and its effect as an antibiotic on big scale.
We have a very important microbiota that are bacteria themselves. The antibiotics on meat and environment can break havoc there, specially for people that work or live near those environments and can breathe or drink the pesticides.
Our digestive tracts aren’t fond of detergents either, and Roundup contains some. For that matter, so do the pods you use in your dishwasher, which is something that just came onto my radar recently. Are HE dishwashers removing enough detergent residue during the rinse cycle? Possibly not.
I haven't seen the data or reporting on glyphosate residues. Without clear, unbiased proof of safety following the precautionary principle, there is no assurances that this shit is safe to eat.
Also, yes, industrial meat ag is bad for creating new pandemics between human workers<->livestock animals packed together in CAFOs<->wildlife, antibiotic resistance (antibiotics injected to make animals grow faster), and climate change. Sometimes animal rights people tout animal cruelty, but few people are convinced because the cognitive dissonance "forcefield" is too strong to accept this idea. Adapting a quote by Upton Sinclair: "It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their tastebuds and drone-delivered fast food depends on their not understanding it." Probably a whole other area for discussion. :]
Most people lack subject matter expertise on topics they espouse opinions impertinently, don't look at the evidence, and don't take sensible precautions against unknowns, so their opinions don't matter.
In the absence of compelling precautionary evidence and systematic safety processes, it's clear that the faithful adherents of organic production are more likely to be safer than industrial megafarming done with the same blind faith in the miracles of chemical wizardry that brought us such hits as organophosphates, chlorpyrifos, DDT, and the over 85k compounds that are de facto unregulated because they are allowed until specific injury is proven after the damage is done ("whack-a-mole"-style), rather than first proven safe.
>the faithful adherents of organic production are more likely to be safer than industrial megafarming
But the "organic" label doesn't check whether the farmers were "faithful adherents of organic production", only that they fulfilled the organic checklist. They can use as much chemical fertilizer and pesticides as they want, so long they're on the approved list. In the same vain farming and "industrial megafarming" isn't mutually exclusive.
- Boric acid: Structural pest control, no direct contact with organic food or crops.
- Coniothyrium minitans
- Copper: Copper hydroxide, copper oxide, copper oxychloride, includes products exempted from EPA tolerance, provided that copper-based materials must be used in a manner that minimizes accumulation in the soil and shall not be used as herbicides.
- Copper sulfate: Application rates are limited to levels which do not increase baseline soil test values for copper over a timeframe agreed upon by the producer and accredited certifying agent.
- Corn gluten
- Cydia pomonella granulosis
- Diatomaceous earth
- Gibberellic acid
- Horticultural vinegar
- Hydrogen peroxide
- Lime sulfer: Including calcium polysulfide
- Minerals such as elemental sulfur, bicarbonate, or kaolin clay
- Myrothecium verrucaria
- Non-detergent insecticidal soaps: As a pesticide, fungicide, or algaecide for food crops
- Oils, including petroleum, vegetable, and fish oils: Types include dormant, suffocating, and summer oils
- Peracetic acid: For use to control fire blight bacteria. Also permitted in hydrogen peroxide formulations at a concentration of no more than 6% as indicated on the pesticide product label
- Pheromones and pheromone traps
- Plant-derived substances such as neem, caraway oil, seed fennel, quassia, or ryania
- More than 45,000 onsite inspections per year by certifying agents to monitor compliance with USDA organic standards. Every certified operation has at least one onsite inspection each year.
- Certifiers audited by USDA to make sure they are implementing the rules correctly.
- Residue testing program to verify that prohibited pesticides aren’t being applied to organic crops.
- Robust compliance and enforcement activities.
- Risk-based investigations based on operation size, complexity, geographic location or compliance history.
Glyphosate breaks down within a few days, doesn't remain in plants, and is passed out the body quickly even if you were exposed to it while spraying. You're not going to get any of it by eating oats.
Yet another invisible thing invented for substantial benefit and maybe serious harm over a long time; hard to prove cause-and-effect, difficult to protect yourself from, or to know how much you are exposed.
Isn’t the reason that people get ill from those foods is primarily due to excess calories causing obesity and inflation? Wouldn’t the same thing happen with other foods just as cheap and calorie dense?
If we're sharing thoughts, I need to point out that once you hit your late 60s, you're more likely to get cancer, and your risk keeps going up [1]. Our food is loaded with chemicals that can make you sick or even cause cancer [2]. That age is also when people usually retire and are no longer "productive".
Here's where I might lose you. In our country, illness is a way to make money [3]. If you're really sick and trying to stay alive, you'll spend everything you've got. So the quickest way to turn people's savings into profit while also reducing the population of non-productive people is for them to fall ill, pay as much as they can to survive and then ultimately die an early death, which triggers a death tax event [4].
Most "medical" research tends to never focus on actual nutrition. Probably because that would reduce profits for those with vested interest from selling treatments.
Orrrr it could just be that high quality nutritional research is actually incredibly difficult due to the number of variables involved, especially when compared with an easily controlled single intervention study. Not saying there's no money involved, but it's much more complicated than that.
Maybe that’s why America has such high productivity. We’re have a culture and economy that agree that it’s better to die than be unproductive and rely on others.
It is fairly funny, I remember how Monsanto used to run paid comments over every big news subreddit you posted stuff about them, then the moment they got acquired suddenly those stopped and Monsanto is evil.
Not saying they aren't but I trust them more now under a German firm than when they were American.
The US gives domestic tech giants a very wide berth on a lot of privacy and platform owner market power issues while Europe, which can't produce a tech giant of its own aside from ASML, is on a huge crusade about privacy and open access to tech platforms.
We're only discovering we have principles about this stuff now that foreign-based Tiktok is succeeding here.
So it seems that it takes 80 years for the American government to do something about it. Well past the golden age of profit of the tobacco industry.
Now please explain to me again how this is the justice system suddenly genuinely caring about people's health instead of a strategic case to kill European competitors and extort money out of them?
Chemical companies like Dow, 3M and DuPont are in the same basket and don't seem to get fined much.
I dont care, Bayer shall be sued as much as they can, as they were the engineers of the holocaust[1][2][3], but claiming that the US sues Bayer because they really care about corporations fucking up the health of their people, while 9/11 first responders with lung cancer etc. are thrown under the bus, and not because they exercise a trade war with the EU to this day is wrong imo.
Also totally a coincidence this started during the protectionist Trump adminstration, and a total coindicence that the EU under German leadership started pursuing US tech giants like Facebook, Google with the GDPR and so on at the same time.
EDIT: And jailed Volkswagen engineers due to diesel scandal even though their cars are labelled as trucks because they would never ever pass the emission tests that VW and others cheated.
My brother worked as a landscaper and spilled concentrated roundup all over his back and down his legs about two years ago when a backpack tank sprung a leak. About a year ago, he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. 2 months ago, he passed away - less than a year after he was diagnosed.
Is there a cause/effect relationship between these events? I don't know but hearing about the various trials and studies of roundup just make me feel so helpless. How would I even go about helping his widow and children get justice? I don't want to encourage litigious behavior but man if there's a pair of companies that deserve litigiousness it's Bayer and Monsanto
I'm not telling you what to do, but I really wish this kind of thinking would stop.
I've spilled concentrated round-up all over my arms and legs many times because I used it regularly as weed control all over my property in Texas. I've also been regularly exposed to all sorts of noxious chemicals like acetone, gasoline, diesel, various alcohols, and many different organic compounds in general. On bare skin (solvents get your hands clean fast!). Part of my life is a mixture of agriculture, oil/gas, and just general West Texas grime.
I eat virtually 100% meat now which is also supposed to give me cancer. The teflon-coated pan I use to cook eggs doesn't have much teflon anymore because I've scraped most of it off through cooking (I never wash it). When I was a child, J&J baby power was an absolute staple in all households I ever visited and I've inhaled clouds of it. I have been sun-burned countless times in my life and still regularly seek long intervals of intense sun with no sun-screen. My family were early adopters of cellular phones so I've been exposed to brain-cancer causing RF/EM radiation for over 30 years now.
No cancer. No diseases. No allergies. No excess pains. No respiratory issues. No mental fog. No general health issue to report in any way. I'm the healthiest and fittest in my life at 47. I never go to the doctor any more because the last few times I went all of my lab work came back perfect.
Maybe one day I will get some fatal disease or just get run over by a truck. For now I'm going to just keep betting on the odds, though. Most of the health fears I see today seem to have an extremely low chance of occurrence (if at all) and many times is confined to very niche cohorts. The science behind most of it is pure garbage and popular opinion is generally driven by court case outcomes rather than verifiable facts.
I'm sorry for your loss, but there doesn't need to be "justice" for every case of bad fortune. There has never been a causal link to cancer with glyphosate and it has been well studied and used for many, many, many years by many, many, many people.
This stuff is all about risk. If two people add their personal experiences, we have two data points. What are we supposed to do with that? It's not enough to quantify risk.
You can do everything wrong and be completely fine or you can do a single thing wrong and suffer the consequences immediately. Those are the two extremes and then there will be a bunch of data points in between those extremes. What you want to pay attention to are averages. How likely is it that I suffer negative consequences from this? If I do, what is the magnitude of the negative effect going to be on average?
I grew up in the shadow of the Monsanto plant that makes most of the world's Roundup. About half of the parents of the kids in my classes growing up worked there. Have people gotten cancer? Sure. Have they gotten it at higher incidents than the other half of the parents? No.
As a matter of fact, none of the men who lived around me and worked at those plants have ever had cancer. Several of their wives have, though.
What’s strange about this case is that there are lot of carcinogens and evil pesticides out there that are not heavily regulated. For example processed meat has a very strong link with cancer and the nitrites added to processed meat are likely the culprit. No one seems to care and no one is suing the meat companies.
There are “export only” pesticides that are truly scary that contaminate the us food supply and cause birth defects and cancer for entire villages.
Roundup isn’t mechanistically tied to cancer and there isn’t a scientific consensus surrounding if/how carcinogenic it is.
I wouldn’t be surprised if your brother’s cancer was environmentally related but I would bet that a boring chemical like gasoline/exhaust would be the cause. Gasoline and exhaust products are known to be carcinogenic.
Bayer buys US government owned Monsanto. Did they not know what the deal entailed?
Did they think that owning the world's food production was worth the risk of constant judical trials?
332M USD isn't that much considering how much controlling most of the global crop patents and pesticides to go along is worth IMHO.
But then again, why did the US government get rid of it?
To avert a much larger trial?
The same Bayer that killed tons of Holocaust victims in drug trials during WWII? That Bayer? I’m having trouble feeling sorry for anything that ever comes their way.
The most dangerous surface in a farm is the farmer’s hat I was told.
So they wear the hat in the sun, tilling the fields, but the reason the hat is dangerous is from spraying the fields. Pesticides and herbicides are downright scary chemicals, and we genetically modify crops to improve tolerance of these chemicals.
And that is when I went all GMO free, not because I am worried about eating grain that has modified genes, that’s plain stupid. Nature does that all day.
But when chemicals so awful they kill the crop, the crop’s genes need to be modified so that they don’t die and that chemical residue ends up all over our food system, well buddy, get me off this stupid crazy train.
I hope the settlement hits trillions. Burn the fuckers down.
I don't know if what they're saying is true, but I don't think they're saying non-GMO plants don't use pesticides. They're saying GMO crops use even stronger pesticides, strong enough that it would kill the non-GMO variants of these plants. And they want to avoid the kind of pesticides in their salad that would kill a non-modified lettuce, or whatever plant.
Roundup isn't a pesticide, or an insecticide (as the charts above are labeled). Roundup is an herbicide, which is why it is so useful to combine with GMO crops. When you spray a field for weeds with Roundup, your crop doesn’t die because it has resistance built in.
> Roundup isn't a pesticide, or an insecticide (as the charts above are labeled). Roundup is an herbicide
Pesticide is an umbrella term for herbicides, insecticides, and other types of substances. If you've read the paper, it mentions that too:
> Pesticides are substances used to repel, kill, or control animals (insecticides) or plants (herbicides) that are considered to be pests.
You are correct, though, in that while insecticide use decreased (because GMOs help insect resistance), herbicide use has actually increased because of herbicide tolerance of GMO crops.
In Europe where GMOs are banned and pesticide use is lower...yields are higher than in the US.
"We need to use poison to grow food to feed everyone" is bunch of false-dilemma poppycock.
If it were truly a matter of "we need to feed everyone", we wouldn't be wasting massive amounts of grain on raising cattle, which is one of most wasteful ways of generating food there is. 80% of agricultural land is used for cattle, but they only represent 20% of the calories in food consumed.
We also wouldn't be growing corn just to turn it into ethanol, a net-energy-negative process.
We also wouldn't be controlling the price of sugar, thus creating a huge demand for corn to turn into corn syrup.
Corn is also an incredibly resource-intensive crop all on its own, and the monocropping is terrible for the soil. But corn is where the money is..
What do you mean by "corrected for the land area"? According to this study, in the period 2016-2020 wheat yields per acre were more than twice as high in Germany than in North Dakota or Kansas.
That is probably a major reason for the higher yields in Germany, but the person I replied to claimed that yields aren't really higher in Europe than in the US.
According to data from the UN, in 2020 North America used 2.77 kg pesticiedes per hectare cropland and Europe used 1.69 kg/ha, and yet Europe has higher yields per hectare. So clearly Europe uses less pesticedes per produced amount of food.
Maybe, but both are large enough and have enough regional variation that it isn't safe to compare like that. The worst regionsare much worse in ND, and the best much better in Ukraine.
You need to compare yields for the land in similar climatic conditions. This is complicated, because most of the US is to the south of most of the European landmass. New York is on the same latitude as Madrid.
Anecdotally, I think pesticides become 'necessary' when a specific farm desires greater than a particular density of crop. Sure, the collective can achieve sufficient production with less use of these chemicals however when a farm is at a point where their plants are touching each other then serious pesticides are required if they wish to increase their yield further without pests becoming a catastrophic risk to the entire operation. If only we could all agree to just grow 'enough' instead of growing as much as science allows...
Once we started expecting farmers to be specialists instead of generalists. If you only know apples you want as many of them as you can fit. Which means pathogens have a buffet laid out.
> In Europe where GMOs are banned and pesticide use is lower...yields are higher than in the US.
While this may be causal, agriculture is incredibly complex, and I would hesitate to come to any conclusions about causality from this bit of data alone.
one major point is that you need to use the soil substainable
and as far as I know the US did do exact the opposite en mass
GMO by itself isn't bad, but a lot of GMO is made in a way which is harmful to the soil on the long term (and sometimes even short term)
Similar much higher limits for the amount of fertilizers used allow you to use approaches to growing crops which short and mid term have more yield but also drain the soil in a non-substainable way leading to a death spiral of needing increasingly more and more fertilizers, insecticides and at some point GMO modified crops.
While most EU countries had for a long time (but not necessary still have) laws which require a more sustainable ground usage and having a larger movement of people buying food which even more stricter constraints wrt. fertilizers and pesticides.
Most pesticides and hebicides break down from exposure to the sun and rain. The main reason im concerned with roundup is because it has now become common to finish crops by spraying them with roundup so they all dry up at the same time on a set schedule, which means they are harvesting within days after spraying them, then storing that grain in sunless silos with reduced moisture and drying so that roundup never has a chance to degrade.
I would have no problem eating something that was hit with roundup 2 months previously and exposed to the elements. But spraying it then eating it just a few days afterwards is just dumb.
> But when chemicals so awful they kill the crop, the crop’s genes need to be modified so that they don’t die and that chemical residue ends up all over our food system
Fortunately, you are not a plant.
These chemicals just need to not harm humans (and domestic animals). The fact that they did, in this case, is merely a safety failure. There is nothing which says that pesticides and herbicides must be harmful to humans, and if these judgments are big enough, hopefully in the future there will be sufficient motivation to ensure that they won't be.
I’m not a plant, but I’m loaded with tiny creatures that appear to support my overall health yet are hindered by stuff we put on plants. I have no interest in harming them without a clear need to, and studies show that exposure to pesticides can significantly impact gut flora either by outright killing them or causing significant imbalances. This matters, and I’d consider it a reason at least some pesticides are harmful to humans, even if indirectly.
This is a very different (but important) point to the one the OP was making though, which was freely playing with the "it'll totally kill you" imagery in the wording.
People complain when "the other side" is loose with the truth, then freely do it themselves when it suits.
Although we have seen very frequently that pesticides still affect some humans or animals. At this point, shouldn't we just reduce the possible points of failures instead of hoping the next miracle molecule doesn't kill us all twenty years later?
> Although we have seen very frequently that pesticides still affect some humans or animals.
“Pesticides” is a class that includes things intended affect animals (insecticides and rodenticides, for instance.)
> At this point, shouldn't we just reduce the possible points of failures instead of hoping the next miracle molecule doesn't kill us all twenty years later?
Probably not. We should probably improve our structures for evaluating, approving, and reevaluating once deployed agricultural chemicals of all types, but should we stop developing new technology in the field? No, we probably should not.
These chemicals are benign and the media and activists have been scaring people for decades without justification. The fact that their arguments are often convolved with arguments against lawns and lawncare should give you a better sense of their true motives.
I'm shocked Bayer lost and that the plaintiff was awarded anything. Glyphosate has not been shown to cause cancer. If it had, such literature would be paraded out as an evergreen example.
If you want to be afraid of chemical use, it's the overuse of antibiotics that should worry you. Or the high particulate air you're breathing in.
"Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide and crop desiccant.
It is used to kill weeds, especially annual broadleaf weeds and grasses that compete with crops. Its herbicidal effectiveness was discovered by Monsanto chemist John E. Franz in 1970. Monsanto brought it to market for agricultural use in 1974 under the trade name Roundup."
It’s a distinction without a difference if you’re trying to reuse the tobacco playbook and you need people to be confused long enough for your bonus checks to clear.
I think what they are meaning is that the chemical blend with glyphosate causes cancer even if pure glyphosate doesn't. I.e. an inactive ingredient or an interaction with an inactive ingredient is what causes the cancer.
The lack of basic scientific literacy is pretty shocking in the "organic is healthier" world. It's a virtue smorgasbord of "natural fallacy" and "don't eat chemicals" logic.
"Chemicals killing the crop" aren't inherently dangerous to your body, that's just chemophobia.
Best quality artisanal chocolate can easily kill your cat. Nicotine kills bugs and is benign in humans. Belladonna would kill you, but a goat can munch on it without much trouble. Lots of stuff is lethal to some species and harmless to others, "this chemical is so bad it kills plants" is as rational as "chocolate is so bad it kills cats".
But it's naive to think there's no effect - some level of chemophobia is warranted IMO, because we do not understand all the complex second order effects to these powerful compounds. Case in point: the article we're discussing.
I firmly believe science will illuminate the true risks, but it may unfortunately take decades. Time will tell, until then I try to eat organic when I can.
Imagine thinking we have a solid enough grasp of these chemicals and their interactions and likely potentiating effects with other compounds for literally hundreds of thousands of chemicals in regular industrial use for which no one alive today evolved to tolerate. The incidence of bizarre illnesses, cancer, neuroatypicality, hormonal disturbances, and so many other illnesses is exploding in incidence across the modern world. Taking a “that’s just chemophobic” stand is honestly really stupid.
Whether something kills humans, and whether it kills fish are two entirely different questions. For example: the medium fish live in has a 100% kill rate on humans submerged in it for longer then about 5 minutes.
Chemophobia - it annoys me that people think that the only harm we must consider for herbicides and pesticides is humans, then proceeded to dump billions of gallons of this, which ultimately end up down rivers, lakes, and oceans. there are countless creatures being affected by the chemicals, but somehow we skip that study.
You brought up chocolate. Hersheys arguably is chocolate and the Consumer Reports study is actually about dark chocolate, and all the amazing chemicals in it.
Who are those people? Regulators look at harm to other animals as well, and the fate of the herbicide is one of the most important considerations. Glyphosate in particular effectively binds to soil [1] and is biodegraded there by various bacteria fairly rapidly.
The fact that you are talking about "chemicals" in this generic way is what makes it chemophobia. There can be no serious point in talking about "chemicals" that can't even be defined, it's always irrational.
I don’t have a fear of chemicals. Everything is a chemical, but I’ve met the people you are describing, I promise to never use the work again.
Keep in mind these studies are from 1997, the world wasn’t even ruined by the Internet at that point. The studies about humans described in your link are: some idiot drank half a cup of it, and he didn’t die, and the rabbits and mice seem ok. It’s safe! I just struggle, because even at that time these types of anecdotal statements were so dubious. It’s now over 25 years later, so what are the long-term effect?
As a point of comparison, Johnson and Johnson continues to insist that their asbestos laced baby powder doesn’t cause cancer (contradicting reality), so Monsanto now Bayer assurances don’t generate much confidence for me.
As another poster pointed out, a lot of GMO crops are altered in such a way that they don't need as many pesticides. Non-GMO often need more pesticides and the GMO label has nothing to do with pesticides - just genetic modification.
> Food poisoning is caused by viruses and bacteria.
I've got plenty of E.coli in my gut already, the risk in food poisoning is not that I'll get a few more, it's that I'll get a few more that also produce shigatoxin.
Discussing GMO's in general and not specific varieties is about as productive as discussing manmade materials- the topic is too broad. What are we even comparing- bricks vs stones? Copper vs a rock?
Monsanto was producing crops that better withstand it's chemicals and China is producing Rice that can tolerate salt water. Clearly China is Innovating to feed it's people while Monsanto is 'Innovating' to boost their share price.
> Studies were included when they build on primary data from farm surveys or field trials anywhere in the world, and when they report impacts of GM soybean, maize, or cotton on crop yields, pesticide use, and/or farmer profits. In total, 147 original studies were included.
> On average, GM technology adoption has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%, increased crop yields by 22%, and increased farmer profits by 68%. Yield gains and pesticide reductions are larger for insect-resistant crops than for herbicide-tolerant crops. Yield and profit gains are higher in developing countries than in developed countries.
What spoiled food has to do with it? If anything, it's a tautology, because "spoiled" effectively means "bad", when the process of "spoiling" is harmless we call it "blue cheese" or "kimchi".
"Things exposed to chemicals" is literally anything you see around you. Water is a "chemical". Glucose is a "chemical". Vitamin C is a "chemical". I don't understand your point.
This tells me you don't know much about Monsanto / Bayer Crop Science.
Roundup Ready is a relatively good idea: Roundup applies easily, and after the first few generations, when the control of how to add the GMO genes was so bad yields were impacted, it's a very narrow change to plants that makes farmers a lot of money. The vast majority of soybeans in the world are running Roundup-ready genes for a reason.
Terminator seeds sounded like a scary patent, but it was mostly useless. In corn, for instance, you'd never want to run it at all, as the seeds that are sold are almost perfect hybrids of 2 inbreds, which lose a whole lot of yield in the next generation without anyone really trying. There's no need for a gene when the next generation yields worse naturally.
If you want a sick situation with Bayer, forget Roundup, and look at what's been happening with Dicamba, the next generation of pesticide that GMOs are protected from. It's not a new pesticide, but it's very aggressive and it drifts: You spray a field, and many other fields around it are going to get hit. Supposedly Bayer is telling everyone that, on tests, the new formulations of it, when applied properly under the right weather conditions, there's no drift... but reality disagrees. Therefore, a whole lot of fields that aren't planting seeds protected from dicamba are getting wrecked by not-so-close that haven't mastered the really difficult ways to spray dicamba in the calmest of days. We aren't talking a pesticide that drifts 50 feet here, or 100, but people relatively far away that have their crops ruined. This is happening often enough that we'll see bans, while more and more generations of roundup GMO are going out of patent.
I am pretty sure that this one is what is scaring Bayer's lawyers, not Roundup.
Wikipedia claims (not very current claims though) that terminator seeds are not commercially available?
They are different than the common case of infertile hybrids, which have good reason to exist and the infertility (IIUIC, not a botanist) is a side effect.
There was an old patent about making generations completely infertile, but yes, never used. Bayer's corn seeds are optimized enough that, while the next generation grows just fine, the yield loss makes it not worthwhile over just buying new seed.
Its been that way for a lot of crops for almost a century at this point. This phenomenon is called hybrid vigor. Many things we grow are clonally propagated at this point to maintain these hybrid genetics.
Tea is so simple to produce because tea leaves are booby trapped with caffeine crystals and the enzymes to break them down. When an insect eats them they mix.
> I hope the settlement hits trillions. Burn the fuckers down.
Hoping on the sidelines gets you nowhere. Laws need to be changed to end the presumption in many jurisdictions that a lack of safety data equates to a benign substance.
But it really doesn't. What it has is a lot of industry-funded "research" muddying the waters with ambiguous or misleading results.
When I worked at Monsanto, the mantra was that __the burden of proof was on those alleging harm__.
I don't know about you, but I expect a higher standard from the system that regulates the food I put in my body.
Broad spectrum pesticides are terribly complex to test and it should take years if not decades to properly prove them safe for agricultural use and human consumption.
People tell me "GMO food is perfectly safe" and they do not seem to understand that in practice they genetically modify the food so they can dump glyphosate on it and that's what I want to avoid eating!
All that says is "Farmers can use less spray pesticides when they plant GMO crops.
From a paper:
"On whether RR soybean systems reduce pesticide use and increase grower profits,
our analysis shows that –
• RR soybean systems are largely dependent on herbicides and hence are not likely
to reduce herbicide use or reliance. Claims otherwise are based on incomplete
information or analytically flawed comparisons that do not tell the whole story.
• Farmers growing RR soybeans used 2 to 5 times more herbicide measured in
pounds applied per acre, compared to the other popular weed management
systems used on most soybean fields not planted to RR varieties in 1998. RR
herbicide use exceeds the level on many farms using multitactic Integrated Weed
Management systems by a factor of 10 or more."
What makes you think non GMO is any safer? GMO seeds are studied to confirm safety, everything else is not studied at all. Random mutations happen all the time in non GMO food, but nobody checks if it is safe. Thus your worse case for GMO is no different than any other food '
Well the main alternative was cultivation, that is dragging a steal hoe threw the ground. This releases a lot of co2, both from burning fuel and faster decomposition of organic matter and so is a factor in global warming. That hoe also destoryes the soil and leads to topsoil loss. Glyphosate allows modern farm to leave the soil alone and that builds more top soil.
Depending on who you ask there is no usual alternative which is in any way competitive and isn't so similar to phosphorylate that any harmfulness of glyphosate like applies to it, too.
Through other people will tell you this is propaganda bs.
I'm not in a position to make any proper judgement there, but it seems that not using glyphosate _or similar_ requires major changes to the approach of farming used.
I develop new technology for regenerative organic farming. I would say the question is not about how GMOs and glyphosate compare to the usual alternatives, but how they compare to the possibilities. Heavy reliance on glyphosate has notable environmental consequences, but it is so cheap and convenient that its use is widespread. To be honest since I am focused on regenerative organic, I can't speak much to what conventional farming methods were like before the use of GMO'd glyphosate resistant crops as I have not studied them, but they would have been more labor intensive. So these GMO crops did make farming cheaper in some ways (tho now farmers pay huge fees to Bayer née Monsanto), but it is important to ask what the trade offs are for this.
Long term, my hope is that small scale farming robot swarms can manage crops the way a more traditional regenerative organic farmer would tend to their crops. In those systems there is more attention paid to each plant, and little to no artificial inputs. This is excellent for the soil and the local environment, as well as the people who live and work at or near the farms.
But then, I am the project lead and maintainer on a solar powered open source farming robot[1], so not only have I drank the Kool-Aid but I'm the one mixing it up to share.
I must confess to not washing all fruit before I eat it. Especially berries. I sometimes wonder if there's any home testing kit to figure out how much chemical residue is on fruit and vege. Easy testing for pesticides/sprays could prompt changes in both consumer behaviour (e.g. preparation/washing), but also buying behaviour (if one farm's berries had less spray than another's, presumably the former's would be preferable to most people).
> not because I am worried about eating grain that has modified genes, that’s plain stupid.
So, it turns out this is not so stupid. I’m going to sound a little stupid, because this is not my field, but my sister is a plant molecular biologist. All her research/work is in plant DNA. Apparently it’s been recently discovered that the gene expression for the genetically modified plants was not as had been previously understood. Instead of turning on just one gene, it turns on like five other unexpected random genes. In addition there was something about “complex interactions” and “poorly tested and uncertain outcomes” or something. Any actual experts able to weigh in?
Anyway, she’s gone from “genetic modification of plants is a great thing because of improving food security” to “I’m not letting my kids eat this stuff”.
While there is AFAIK no genetically engineered variety of sweet potato being cultivated, every cultivated variety of sweet potato bears genetic traces of having been modified by Agrobacterium tumefaciens, which is the bacterium which is widely used to edit plant genomes.
I think, to understand her concerns, you would need to be in the field. I’m pretty smart, and I have plenty of layman knowledge, but I’m completely lost once she gets technical.
The summary of the issue, as I understand it, is as follows.
The modifications do much more than we realised, and the impacts are poorly tested. That’s the gist. It’s enough for me to go “there could be dragons here”, but I honestly haven’t bothered to try and change any purchasing decisions. I think the horse has already bolted anyway. Doesn’t the gmo end up in pretty much everything regardless?
Yes, but I’m texting her to get info. I’ll update here, but it’ll probably take a while. Probably shouldn’t have said anything, but I was hopeful that there might be another plant molecular biologist in the audience who could clear things up.
There is a lot of indications that GMO crops are much more likely to "trigger" food intolerabilities then older crops.
Through this seems to be an issue about them being further distant from what humans did eat for over a thousand years then about GMO being bad per-se. I.e. this also seem to apply (but less so) to crops which used more tradition (modern speed up) methods of cultivating crop variants.
No modification is perfect: While all GMO modification tries to be as narrow as possible, it's not like things are ever so perfectly narrow as to only just express a bonus protein that you wanted.
The problem is assuming that any other change that happens is dangerous and untested. There's mutation all over the place in perfectly organic plants, just like with GMOs. There are also changes on gene expression from those changes, also like GMO. An overwhelming majority of changes either do nothing, or make the plant unviable at all. The practical risks of a change that does something, doesn't harm yields, and yet somehow makes the parts of the plant that a human eats somewhat toxic is a huge stretch. It's even less likely when one considers the actual regulatory processes that happen later. It might seem crazy, but people that work on GMOs tend to be uninterested in poisoning the public.
If I was afraid of poisoning due to mutation (which I am not), I'd be more afraid of what someone that has been crossing plans with some localized, ancestral wildtypes that have been planted just in some village for the last hundred years or something. They are more likely to be untested. But it's like the risk of getting hit by lighting for the 5th time this week.
I am far more likely to be poisoned by a detergent, or someone that has let bacteria run amok in their packing facility, and is somehow selling, say, premixed salads that land in my local supermarket.
I’d argue back, but I’m too ignorant. You write as if you are supremely confident, so can you back this up? Are you working in the field, or can you point me to (recent) commentary from someone who is?
I have no dog in this fight, I literally know nothing and care very little. However, I can’t just ignore the opinions that have come to me from someone who is an expert in this space. That’s why I raised it; because I was assuming there would be someone working in the field who could provide detail and nuance. Wasn’t expecting “this is all crap” as the response.
I figure it’s like dentists wearing aprons when doing teeth X-rays. It’s not that you are receiving a dangerous dose, it’s that they are exposed over, and over, and over again all day. That hat has seen every acre of that farm, at 10-30 foot intervals. Several times a year.
Shit. I remember clearly spraying roundup out of a backpack sprayer on a calm day, when a stray gust of wind blew some of the spray back up and into my face. I often wonder if I inadvertently sealed my fate despite that level of exposure being so brief. It was about 5 years ago,so far so good.
Much of the time, cancer risk with these chemicals is based of some level of exposure over time.
It’s people using it all day every day that are at a high risk of cancer. One blow back in to the face probably won’t do much more than cause some irritation.
You will be absolutely fine, you really don't have to worry about it. It's very uncertain whether ingesting these chemicals is harmful, touching them briefly is just fine.
