Bzzt. If cheap, plentifully available grain could have solved the Third World's problems, the EU's Common Agricultural Policy would have done so a long time ago. Amartya Sen won his Nobel Prize partly for proving that famines are *economic* catastrophes, not ecological ones, and that advances in food production which are not connected to advances in economic development and distribution will have little effect on nutrition levels.
>
> Left can't be against GM for technical reasons since
> all bio-scientists
V. definitely not "all" -- Carl or someone will have the refs. on this.
> agree that direct manipulation of genes is far more
> efficient and reliable
> than the old-fashioned inbreeding for desired
> traits. they agree, too, that
> there are absolutely NO differences in nutritive
> value of GM food over any
> other agricultural methods.
>
Now this I know is not true -- in fact, the guy (I have the name Pusztai in my head for some reason) who did the GM-potatoes/cancer paper was roundly rubbished by the establishment for not controlling for the poorer nutritional content of the GM potato diet.
> true, whenever one selects genes for the desirable
> traits, whether directly
> (GM) or indirectly (inbreeding), one unavoidably
> selects undesirable traits
> too. however, so far, the GM undesirable traits
> appear to be fewer than
> those produced under inbreeding.
>
This could only be supportably asserted after an extremely lengthy process of trials, and we have not yet solved the problem of where to hold those trials.
> on balance, GM foods offer the third world better
> food sources than
> formerly, if the GM providers can get the food to
> the people who need it.
>
Why would the GM providers "get the food to the people who need it"? None of them, AFAIK, are charities; their current interest appears to be in creating varieties of wheat optimised for particular commercial weedkillers, or in producing "terminator" genes to make otherwise fertile seeds sterile after the first generation.
> so what's the beef? because GM undermines
> traditional farming methods and
> its "workers"? because successful GM food might
> favor capitalist production
> methods that might undermine the interests of its
> adversaries?
Because "new miracles" of capitalist science have a bit of an unfortunate track record.
dd
>
> norm
>
>
>
>
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