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FRINGE posted:Not at all. When the food-unaware public suddenly finds out that the "beef" is 12% something else they are predictably upset. The same with the bread filler. You are a person who thinks it frightening and confusing that taco meat contains seasonings. Are you my mom? Please don't be my mom.
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Jul 8, 2014 07:05
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I'm sorry I'm not up to your rigorous sourcing standards. How about I quote the really relevant portion of her Wikipedia page, so that even the laziest of readers can judge for themselves? Don't worry, I'm sure there are plenty more examples he can lazily pull from google without reading or applying any critical thought to.
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Jul 8, 2014 07:07
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Killer robot posted:You are a person who thinks it frightening and confusing that taco meat contains seasonings. Are you my mom? Please don't be my mom.
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Jul 8, 2014 07:16
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Slanderer posted:I'm sure there are plenty more examples he can lazily pull from google without reading or applying any critical thought to.
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Jul 8, 2014 07:17
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FRINGE posted:Im sure Slanderer will continue to no-effort shitpost in the thread he made hoping to fill the void in his life. 
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Jul 8, 2014 07:34
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FRINGE posted:You are a person who cant read short English sentences. Have you been hit in the head recently? That sucks. To add onto this, you left out how the initial fraudulent claims made were specifically that Taco Bell beef was only 35% animal content. This number, not the actual one, was what threw unaware people into a panic. The "big lie, quiet retraction" approach is common, in fact vital, to this sort of fearmongering.
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Jul 8, 2014 07:36
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FRINGE posted:You are a person who cant read short English sentences. Have you been hit in the head recently? That sucks. Why aren't you calling for public GMO research?
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Jul 8, 2014 12:34
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FRINGE posted:Now youre the one whos crazy. That will have to wait for another FDA thread but using them as the final word on anything at this time is nearly the same as just letting the corporate boards do it. What is your opinion on vaccination?
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Jul 8, 2014 12:50
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FRINGE posted:Not at all. When the food-unaware public suddenly finds out that the "beef" is 12% something else they are predictably upset. The same with the bread filler. Back up a second, the controversy was originally the accusation that their taco meat was only 35% beef. Of course people immediately believed that claim and started a ruckus because people easily believe anything about a food corporation that fits with their preconceived biases. People were interested to learn what the rest of the filler was when Taco Bell established the product was 88% beef, but that was not the number the controversy was really about. Similar to the ease with which people believed Bud was watered down below the advertised ABV, also not true...but it fits with the preconceived notions about Bud. Similarly, people believe every bad story about Monsanto because the preconceived notions are there, even though they almost always fizzle out in the end. We have pretty drat safe food in America, I don't worry about eating it and feel confident I know what the contents are. It's possible it might make me sick, but only if I'm pretty unlucky. Our regulators do a pretty decent job for such a large country. Bodies like the FDA and USDA aren't perfect, but it annoys me to see people be as critical as they often are. I'd love to increase funding for more independent testing and anything else they need, but beyond that I'm happy with their results. Not perfect, but no agency will be. quote:the luxury of expensive things like vegan protein sources Oh, the luxury of rice and beans. If only India had those things. FuriousxGeorge fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 15:11
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Wow, that's a lot to wake up to. meat sweats posted:The only problem with the "Monsanto Protection Act" is that it doesn't go far enough. We should have a law that toally exempts all FDA-approved technology from local regulation. Dipshits on a city council have no business overriding scientists ever. FRINGE posted:Now youre the one whos crazy. That will have to wait for another FDA thread but using them as the final word on anything at this time is nearly the same as just letting the corporate boards do it. FRINGE posted:There is an expectation that you must "prove harm" rather than "prove safety". This has a history of playing out poorly with food production. [..] The argument is (ironically) a matter of faith in the claims of the companies involved at this time and whether they should be allowed to have as free and unregulated of a hand as they have. [..] It is not a big leap to feel that regulations are not being created and used in the best interests of the public when facing the connections held by the current private industries opposed to the weak and malleable regulatory environment. The pesticide co-topic is a sign of this. There are people on the forum that get more angry over vitamin supplements than over confirmed toxins entering the environment via current farming practices. I pared down your last quote for what I thought were the most salient bits since this was a page ago; I'm responding to the whole thing, though. The FDA is a regulatory agency, it's by definition better than allowing the corporations free reign. I agree that there have been instances where they do not go far enough, and I agree there have been instances where corporate lobbying prevents them from doing their job properly. However, there is no reason or justification for allowing a team of random non-scientists from overruling the FDA. The unfortunate reality is that while the FDA is definitely imperfect, there are too many nutballs trying to ban products on flimsy rationale to allow localities to vote on it. Often, what the anti-GMO crowd expects for "prove harm" is a level of rigor and certainty that has never been considered for any food product in human history, which often approaches the complexity of a clinical pharmaceutical trial. My stance always has been and always will be that there should be a basic regulatory environment that reduces the risk of an unsafe product from reaching the market. This regulatory environment should not crush innovation. You can do an infinite number of tests and still never have absolute certainty that something is safe to health and environment in all contexts and all uses. Moreover, insecticides and herbicides will be harmful to some degree (this is inherent and obvious) so usage, context, and relative risk are critical. Let's quickly roll through a spectrum of "targets" that the FDA has been accused of overlooking. The easiest to debunk, and which makes my argument simple, are obviously the sorts who think something like Bt corn is going to poison them, which is so fundamentally anti-science and so thoroughly debunked in this thread that I'll just refer anyone concerned with it to page 1. The other very easy target are the nutters who go on and on about aspartame, which has been so heavily tested at this point it's one of the safest food additives on the market. However, there are certainly places you could get to vote on a ban for these things, and that's disturbing. An example of something that gets a lot of press but is likely irrelevant to human health is triclosan. There have been suggestions it is a human endocrine disruptor. In reality, there are some environmental concerns there, especially with respect to aquatic animals, but the whole of the literature says it's safe for humans in personal care products. I think it is a perfect example of something that would be banned outright by people who can't read and can't understand science, a.k.a. most of the United States. On the far end of the spectrum, we have things like Bisphenol A. I imagine we could argue for hours about it; it clearly fucks you up in sufficient quantities, there are environmental concerns associated with production, but there's good evidence that says we are not exposed to dangerous levels of BPA through food containers, so the regulatory environment errs on the side of not being obstructive. I would not be nearly as annoyed by bans on BPA as most other "controversial" compounds. There might be something out there that I've overlooked where we would just be like "yeah, what the gently caress is that doing on the market?" But more often than not, the compounds that generate controversy are so controversial because they appear problematic only to untrained eyes.
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Jul 8, 2014 15:26
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FRINGE posted:Now youre the one whos crazy. That will have to wait for another FDA thread but using them as the final word on anything at this time is nearly the same as just letting the corporate boards do it. 'No you're crazy, not the fascist-leaning conspiracy theorist who claims India before the 1960s, a country with a gdp per capita of like $200, was better off than today because of the unspecified crimes of a US-based chemical company'
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Jul 8, 2014 16:05
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FuriousxGeorge posted:Oh, the luxury of rice and beans. If only India had those things. Well, a lot of them don't.... You still need methionine and B12 even if you have unlimited whole-grain rice and beans, which will usually provide enough other nutrients. Things like "needing to take a pill every day to avoid malnutrition" are all well and good if you have an industrial economy with a CVS on every block, a car, and disposable income. This is not what poor people in India have. They need to eat, at a minimum, eggs and can't be vegans. I believe the point about veganism being a luxury for first-worlders stands.
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Jul 8, 2014 16:36
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meat sweats posted:Also, it should surprise nobody that the "15 pounds of rice per day" thing was just made up somewhere. http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/topics/goldenrice/how_much.html Yeah, here's a paper supporting those numbers. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2012/07/31/ajcn.111.030775.abstract It's not too unfair to say that lady is letting children die and go blind for her beliefs.
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Jul 8, 2014 17:43
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meat sweats posted:Well, a lot of them don't.... Sure, but the point about protein remains one of the most silly anti-vegan talking points.
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Jul 8, 2014 20:22
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As someone who is interested in reading actual discussion about an issue that I'm largely unfamiliar with, it would be nice if people with dissenting viewpoints weren't called anti-human and ostracized over it. The last page has been absurdly vitriolic for no reason that I can discern, and I'm not exactly known for being amenable to disagreement. Dude raised what seem like solid points- that haven't really been addressed other than with insults- about how it might be more cost effective to encourage growing greens or providing vitamin A supplements rather than a potentially expensive and disastrous PR campaign to make golden rice amenable to consumption by anti-gmo people
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Jul 8, 2014 22:50
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illrepute posted:As someone who is interested in reading actual discussion about an issue that I'm largely unfamiliar with, it would be nice if people with dissenting viewpoints weren't called anti-human and ostracized over it. The last page has been absurdly vitriolic for no reason that I can discern, and I'm not exactly known for being amenable to disagreement. Dude raised what seem like solid points- that haven't really been addressed other than with insults- about how it might be more cost effective to encourage growing greens or providing vitamin A supplements rather than a potentially expensive and disastrous PR campaign to make golden rice amenable to consumption by anti-gmo people Oh look, another person who is Just Asking Questions and very concerned with Civility. The use of golden rice to prevent the half a million Indian kids who go blind every year from doing so is just ONE of many immediate reasons we need to destroy anti-GMO lunacy. We're talking about starvation, malnutrition, global warming, environmental destruction, all the stuff that GMO can end if only people can get over some loving e-mail forward about Monsanto putting yoga mats in the tacos or whatever the gently caress. They ARE anti-human monsters who revel in suffering and no one should temper this fact -- it's necessary to point out the real stakes here whenever they try to turn it into a matter of "consumer choice" or "food democracy" or other bullshit.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:04
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Norman Borlaug posted:Some of the environmental lobbyists of the western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they would be crying out for tractors, and fertilizer, and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things. I think Dr. Borlaug said it better then I could.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:07
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meat sweats posted:Oh look, another person who is Just Asking Questions and very concerned with Civility. At no point have you addressed the point, though, and now you're making me think you're an idiot.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:11
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illrepute posted:As someone who is interested in reading actual discussion about an issue that I'm largely unfamiliar with, it would be nice if people with dissenting viewpoints weren't called anti-human and ostracized over it. The last page has been absurdly vitriolic for no reason that I can discern, and I'm not exactly known for being amenable to disagreement. Dude raised what seem like solid points- that haven't really been addressed other than with insults- about how it might be more cost effective to encourage growing greens or providing vitamin A supplements rather than a potentially expensive and disastrous PR campaign to make golden rice amenable to consumption by anti-gmo people I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. You can start with the goals of the golden rice project: http://www.goldenrice.org/Content3-Why/why.php http://www.goldenrice.org/Content3-Why/why1_vad.php Solving the problem by "growing greens" is just utterly laughable on its face. Supplementation has been tried and is in progress. It's neither sufficient nor sustainable. And anti-GMO people are not eating it, malnourished children in rural areas are. People responded with such vitriol because he posted obvious lies to anyone who has done a small amount of reading on the topic. I'm sorry that people who haven't done a small amount of reading on the topic are being turned off by that reaction. The only argument he posted which holds any water is that Golden Rice is part of the GMO producers' Western public relations arm.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:14
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illrepute posted:At no point have you addressed the point, though, and now you're making me think you're an idiot. There's no point to address. The only thing to debate and discuss is how to destroy anti-food-tech people. People actually posting such positions here (and you Just Asking Questions!!! about it) are idiots, trolls, or evil.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:16
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meat sweats posted:There's no point to address. The only thing to debate and discuss is how to destroy anti-food-tech people. People actually posting such positions here (and you Just Asking Questions!!! about it) are idiots, trolls, or evil. This is the exact same attitude that makes the I/P threads stupid, and you should know better. Anger is fine, but it's anger that is backed up with discourse. Even if the information is bad, there are people reading the thread who are genuinely curious, and assuming someone asking questions is doing so in bad faith is puerile bullshit. disheveled posted:I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. You can start with the goals of the golden rice project: Thanks, that's good information. Have there been opinion polls conducted on the stance of people living in the third world on GMOs? What's their take on things like the golden rice project? To what extent has that opinion been influenced by unwarranted fears from anti-gmo lobbyists?
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Jul 8, 2014 23:18
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illrepute posted:At no point have you addressed the point, though, and now you're making me think you're an idiot. Just a reminder that he unironically posted this meat sweats posted:Yes, we are in fact analyzing the proposition supported by you and your ilk that GMOs should be restricted because Monsanto Bad, in this thread about Monsanto, and not letting you bring up every bad environmental thing ever done by a corporation to deflect from the fact that expanded use of GMOs and the crushing of insane anti-GMO activists is needed immediately for humanitarian reasons. In response to someone asking what the current status of research into neonicotinoids, I think it's safe to say he's a little off his rocker. Like he said, meat sweats posted:The only thing to debate and discuss is how to destroy anti-food-tech people. meat sweats, I don't really know what you mean by "destroy" though, do you mean like change their mind? Or kill them all? Either way your rhetoric is almost assuredly working against your stated goals.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:20
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The idea of mass distribution vitamin A supplements is also an interesting one, I'm curious if it has been tried before in India or elsewhere in the developing world (since, obviously, vitamin A supplements have been around far longer than golden rice), the results of that, and whether it could work on a large scale. It might be cheaper and meet less resistance than golden rice implementation. The golden rice factsheets talked about this to a degree, and explained that India didn't have the budget to provide this. Would the UN World Food Program be able to make the up the deficit? Or international donors? illrepute fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 23:25
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disheveled posted:I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. You can start with the goals of the golden rice project: This is a good explanation. There's no way for most of these people to be able to afford greens and supplements aren't a solution. This is a sustainable way to solve an enormous problem. Here's another link: http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/vad/en/ 250,000-500,000 children go blind every year due to vitamin A deficiency. Half die within 12 months of losing their sight. The ones that go blind aren't the only ones that die. Many die because vitamin A deficiency causes problems with the immune system. Problems also occur in adults, especially pregnant women. UNICEF estimates that 1.15 million children per year die of vitamin A deficiency. Other estimates give the number of vitamin A deficiency related deaths at 2.7 million. The original rice was produced around 2000, and an improved variety in 2005. It was ready to go in 2002. That gives a range of 13.8 million to 32.4 million deaths that could've been prevented by golden rice. Now, most people who kill 32.4 million people would be considered mass murders to the degree that any analogy would basically tear right on through Godwin's law, but this is not an internet joke, it's an act perpetuated by shitheel activists who will never risk going hungry, blind, or dying due to vitamin deficiency who wring their hands and moan over the fact that Monsanto might get some good PR or their imagined idea of nature might be defiled. Environmental activists who block golden rice adoption have a lot of blood on their hands. This includes Kumi Naidoo, the director of Greenpeace, Vandana Shiva, and every other activist who extends their mindless fight against GMOs to include golden rice. These are people that gleefully distribute false information to push an agenda that they've become so invested in that they can ignore the millions of people who die every year as a result. There's no grey area here, nor room for discussion. No one who blocks golden rice can call themselves a decent human being; they're murderers with blood on their hands.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:38
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Then it's clear that golden rice should be distributed on, at the very least, a test basis (to make way for wider adoption in developing communities). I know that it has been tested in the Philippines. Is it ready for wide-scale implementation?
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Jul 8, 2014 23:40
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illrepute posted:The idea of mass distribution vitamin A supplements is also an interesting one, I'm curious if it has been tried before in India or elsewhere in the developing world (since, obviously, vitamin A supplements have been around far longer than golden rice), the results of that, and whether it could work on a large scale. It might be cheaper and meet less resistance than golden rice implementation. It could be done I'm sure and when the relevant governments and oganizations do that golden rice will have no market and will get no further research funding as a result. It's straight up monstrous to oppose golden rice until that happens though.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:40
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illrepute posted:The idea of mass distribution vitamin A supplements is also an interesting one, I'm curious if it has been tried before in India or elsewhere in the developing world (since, obviously, vitamin A supplements have been around far longer than golden rice), the results of that, and whether it could work on a large scale. It might be cheaper and meet less resistance than golden rice implementation. Getting an entire population to take medication would be an absolute nightmare, as would distributing it to every place in India. It's also much much more vulnerable to corruption. Supplements are not a good replacement for vitamins in diet anyway, their bioavalability in the pill form varies.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:41
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illrepute posted:Then it's clear that golden rice should be distributed on, at the very least, a test basis. I know that it has been tested in the Philippines. Is it ready for wide-scale implementation? It's been ready for twelve years. Just send the seeds out, get them growing, and watch an enormous cause of human suffering disappear. It's the same goddamn rice they grow everywhere, except that it provides vitamin A. Edit: Hell, if they don't like the variety of rice that's golden right now, we can make more. We just pop the genes in and let it go.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:41
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Adventure Pigeon posted:It's been ready for twelve years. Just send the seeds out, get them growing, and watch an enormous cause of human suffering disappear. It's the same goddamn rice they grow everywhere, except that it provides vitamin A. So then, the main obstacle to implementation is... what, exactly? Have anti-gmo people actually blocked its distribution, or is it just that the prevailing attitude among farmers is influenced by their lobbying?
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Jul 8, 2014 23:44
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illrepute posted:Thanks, that's good information. Have there been opinion polls conducted on the stance of people living in the third world on GMOs? What's their take on things like the golden rice project? To what extent has that opinion been influenced by unwarranted fears from anti-gmo lobbyists? Yeah, one sec, lemme just pull up this Gallup poll that sampled starving Indian children for their opinions on engineering rice with carotene desaturase. Public opinion does not really concern me with respect to GMOs, because the uneducated public comes up with a lot of astonishingly stupid poo poo; the crops will win their own PR battle just by being out there. What does concern me? First, will this project do a net good? Second, are there more effective options? I avoided diving into this when I responded about the FDA crap because I'm pretty cynical about what golden rice is all about. There's no question that golden rice began as a proof-of-concept for GM solutions that was then invested in and developed into something more usable. Syngenta did not involve themselves out of altruism. And if people were fundamentally concerned about Vitamin A deficiency, then I would not be surprised if there were better ways to spend the investment. I haven't crunched the numbers, and reliable sources for that are really, really hard to find... I just keep seeing the unsourced $100M number, which I have doubts about. But as it stands, golden rice is now an excellent solution.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:44
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disheveled posted:Yeah, one sec, lemme just pull up this Gallup poll that sampled starving Indian children for their opinions on engineering rice with carotene desaturase. I mean among Indian farmers, the people who will be growing the golden rice. The people who, if they choose not to grow the golden rice, will not have their children see the benefits. Right now the crops do not seem to be winning the PR battle, which is why this thread exists.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:46
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After some quick googling I turned up a paper discussion mass vitamin A supplementation efforts in Tanzania through UNICEF. It was generally successful and administered alongside vaccinations (if I'm understanding this correctly, I gave it a cursory read so check for yourself and all that). Issues they identified with coverage seemed to do with being able to keep good records on who did or did not receive supplementation, and this hinged on widespread good record keeping practices and health records infrastructure. I also found a study showing successful efforts in Chandigarh, so there is some of this going on in India. As for whether a widespread program of Vitamin A supplementation in India would be cheaper and meet less resistance than implementing golden rice, I think that depends on what your assumptions are. In India there is a general antipathy towards Western, "allopathic" forms of medicine & treatment that is fairly widespread among Indians. Sure, they have hospitals and doctors and all of that, but more often than not Western medicine is supplementing Ayurvedic and Unani medicine which seems to be the bulk of what is practiced. Their medical and social services infrastructure are generally lax at that. For me at least it really seems like a no brainer that circulating golden rice into a culture where rice is very much a staple food is going to be a bit easier than overturning a lot of ingrained attitudes resistant to western ideas of medicine and supplementation in general. Nutrients from the food would be an easier pill for them to swallow, no pun intended, than an actual pill.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:47
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Is PR the reason that the crops aren't being used in places where vitamin A deficiency is a problem?
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Jul 8, 2014 23:47
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Yiggy posted:After some quick googling I turned up a paper discussion mass vitamin A supplementation efforts in Tanzania through UNICEF. It was generally successful and administered alongside vaccinations (if I'm understanding this correctly, I gave it a cursory read so check for yourself and all that). Issues they identified with coverage seemed to do with being able to keep good records on who did or did not receive supplementation, and this hinged on widespread good record keeping practices and health records infrastructure. I also found a study showing successful efforts in Chandigarh, so there is some of this going on in India. Yeah this is the concern I have. Which attitude is stronger: a dislike of western medicine, or a dislike of genetically-modified foodstuffs? If we had opinion polling, or more information, then we could work with that.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:49
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illrepute posted:So then, the main obstacle to implementation is... what, exactly? Have anti-gmo people actually blocked its distribution, or is it just that the prevailing attitude among farmers is influenced by their lobbying? There are a great deal of logistics required for something like this. Certainly it couldn't occur overnight. What anti-gmo people do is delay and gum up these logistics. I believe that, given time, golden rice will be adopted, but in the time that they delay it, millions more will die. The problem is anti-gmo people and organizations do have a great deal of money and influence behind them. They can influence regulators, farmers, and the public at large, especially in third world countries, to mobilize opposition. They exploit a lack of education to move public opinion, and in situations where the public may already be justifiably suspicious about the West, this can be immensely powerful.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:52
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down with slavery posted:Is PR the reason that the crops aren't being used in places where vitamin A deficiency is a problem? In large part, yes, because even if actual benefits are greater than actual costs, it really comes down to the perceived costs and the political environment versus the perceived benefits. A project like this requires governmental support. When you have thousands of baboons chittering in your ear about how golden rice will poison your constituents, bankrupt your farmers, and leave your fields barren and beholden to global agribusiness, it's a little hard to give it a vote.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:58
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Marketing is a bit like magnets.
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Jul 9, 2014 00:00
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Adventure Pigeon posted:There are a great deal of logistics required for something like this. Certainly it couldn't occur overnight. What anti-gmo people do is delay and gum up these logistics. I believe that, given time, golden rice will be adopted, but in the time that they delay it, millions more will die. If the goal is to get farmers in developing countries to get on board with golden rice in the face of this opposition, then it seems like public opinion matters a lot, which is why I was wondering if there have been attempts at polling among Indians (which isn't easy, I imagine, but probably doable) to see what the prevailing attitudes are among the people who will be tasked with cultivating the rice and the people who will be entrusted to buy it over other varieties, and then the people who will be expected to then feed it to their children. It is concerning that there isn't a lot of information on what people in developing countries think about golden rice. If the attitude is negative, actions should be taken to change this specific stance while still remaining cognizant of western business's deservedly bad reputation in the developing world- and look into pursuing alternatives, such as supplements.
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Jul 9, 2014 00:03
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illrepute posted:If the goal is to get farmers in developing countries to get on board with golden rice in the face of this opposition, then it seems like public opinion matters a lot, which is why I was wondering if there have been attempts at polling among Indians (which isn't easy, I imagine, but probably doable) to see what the prevailing attitudes are among the people who will be tasked with cultivating the rice and the people who will be entrusted to buy it over other varieties, and then the people who will be expected to then feed it to their children. It is concerning that there isn't a lot of information on what people in developing countries think about golden rice. If the attitude is negative, actions should be taken to change this specific stance while still remaining cognizant of western business's deservedly bad reputation in the developing world- and look into pursuing alternatives, such as supplements. Education is all well and good. I think anything we can do to get golden rice adopted should be done. I also think that we need to stop the misinformation campaign against golden rice by any means necessary, including shaming the gently caress out of organizations and individuals who perpetuate them. They're responsible for a lot of death and should be treated as such. Supplements are something we can attempt to provide, but gently caress the people who are forcing that. They're not a good solution and the people who are forcing them to be used because GMOs offend their sensibilities are absolute poo poo.
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Jul 9, 2014 00:08
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Adventure Pigeon posted:Education is all well and good. I think anything we can do to get golden rice adopted should be done. I also think that we need to stop the misinformation campaign against golden rice by any means necessary, including shaming the gently caress out of organizations and individuals who perpetuate them. They're responsible for a lot of death and should be treated as such. I agree, it would be idiotic and evil to cut off options in the face of a huge crisis like the ones facing the developing world, which is why I think that golden rice should be offered and advertised as a solution- but if Indian farmers don't want to grow it? It should absolutely be acceptable to work with anti-GMO people to provide supplements if they are truly interested in helping the people in the developing world (which many people actually are, even if we think they are misinformed). Attitudes can be changed, but alternatives exist right now that are worth pursuing, ones that face different (possibly lesser) logistical hurdles, as the successful supplement programs in Tanzania suggest.
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Jul 9, 2014 00:13
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