GM food and agriculture
revere | November 29, 2008Genetically modified crops is not a special interest of mine, which is a good thing because once you get into that controversy you are like the worker who gets his sleeve caught in the machine: before long you are dragged into the gears and badly mauled. I'm not reflexively against it. I recognize that what GM advocates have been saying has more than a grain of truth: we've been engaged in genetic engineering of crops since agriculture was domesticated. Modern genetic techniques have amplified that ability by orders of magnitude, but the result is the same. We are purposely altering the…
revere | November 24, 2008Public health scientists and professionals have human health and welfare at the center of our concerns. But we have learned that the human species is part of a tightly connected web of other living species and we are all roaming around in a common environment, the surface of the earth. Avian influenza is a good case in point. The influenza virus is mainly a parasite of birds but some forms also infect humans and some infect both. The influenza/A subtype designated H5N1 ("bird flu") is a case in point. It devastates terrestrial birds, like poultry, and when it infects humans it has a truly…
revere | November 18, 2008In 2001 Ignacio Chapela, an ecologist from the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author David Quist published a highly controversial paper in Nature that appeared to show that genetically engineered genes used in genetically modified (GM) corn (maize) was spreading from GM cornfields in Mexico into traditional corn crops. This set off a firestorm where proponents of GM agriculture declared the paper fatally flawed, pointing out some apparent errors. Accusations of agribusiness conflicts of interest were traded with those of political agendas. Nature subsequently published an "editor'…
revere | June 13, 2008If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment agencies. But that was then. Last weekend the US Senate couldn't even manage a paltry 60 votes to stop a filibuster of a bipartisan and none too strong global warming bill. This kind of failure isn't new. The US slow motion fall in environmental leadership has been going on for decades. In the Bush…
revere | January 23, 2008This week sees the tenth anniversary of an important event in the American environmental movement, although few people know it (even some who were there had forgotten the date). In late January, 1998, a group of 32 environmental scientists, activists and scholars sat down together at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin to hash out a consensus statement on The Precautionary Principle. After a grueling three days, the statement was put into final form on January 25 (just in time to see my beloved Green Bay Packers lose the Superbowl. Is history repeating itself? Aargh!).
In…
revere | December 26, 2007There's a lot of stuff about tainted food in the news, whether it is toxins in imports or questionable additives in US products (e.g., bisphenol A in hard plastics). This stuff is not on any food label, of course, but there is a lot of detailed stuff that is on labels and increased concern about food seems to have made label reading more common. I've always wondered if the detail was encouraging or discouraging people from reading labels. How many people read labels really? Quite a few, it turns out, at least if you believe a new report, Label Reading from a Consumer Perspective, by the…
revere | August 28, 2006Genetically modified cotton resistant to bollworm is a reality and five million Chinese cotton farmers have embraced it. It works, too, killing bollworm larvae that used to kill their cotton. IN the late 1990s it looked like a miracle. Pesticide use was cut by 70%. After seven years, though, the miracle is looking more like a curse because new pests called mirids have rushed into the pest vacuum and taken up shop.
"The farmers are very upset about it, because GM cotton was such a wonderful thing, and they don't understand why it won't work now," says Shenghui Wang of Cornell University in…