If you can do that in a lab, nature can do it too. Although I admit it is much rarer.

For further reading look up “Peter Berg Planet Drum” and “Peter Berg Diggers” and for amusement “Peter Coyote San Francisco Mime Troop”.

I’m a locavore, sans environmental hysteria, insofar as I don’t mind paying a small premium for local produce. It tends to be fresher. I also think it is just good common sense to grow locally what we can grow well, rather than an endless sea of oilseed rape / canola. Alisa, I completely agree about subsidies. The EU Common Agricultural Policy has been devastating to British farming and I think the policy of subsidies has a lot to answer for.

As to the actual sub-topic at hand, I believe that eliminating the subsidies for Big Agri would in turn eliminate many of the (very real) problems with the cultivation of GM plants, as well as a host of many other food-supply-related problems.

(Admin–hint,hint–I wish that, as in Mark II, I could search within the comments as well as the main posting, for both the commenter and phrases….)

My libertarian rationale goes along with that of many: I would prefer that Nature so organize herself that the bloody GM crops would stay on their own bloody side of the fence. (Although from the safety angle I don’t personally worry about it much. However, the patent problem would seem also to require strict containment, if one holds with the idea of intellectual property, which I do. Perhaps a change in IP law, there.)

The same goes for smoke from smokestacks in, say, New York (roughly 800 mi. away) or exhaust from the neighbors’ junkers. And the racket from their foul so-called “music,” which I happen to find physically irritating. And from airplanes falling out of the sky onto my house, as Mr. Whittle mentions in his video. But without the smoke and the falling airplanes, we would still be back in the 17th century. With far more difficult and dangerous lives, and far greater mortality rates–especially among the unborn and the infants.

Alas, all that we do affects others to a great or small (sometimes vanishingly small, it’s true) extent, which is one reason why pure Utopian Libertarianism can never happen in real life. In fact, it’s why I think that the degree of Libertarianism a society can maintain is inversely proportional to its geographical population density — at least, in principle.

I suppose one could accomplish virtual restriction of GMO pollen to a bounded geographic area by growing GMO crops strictly within the confines of a Biosafety Level 4 room, complete with stripping and showering every time on the way out. It seems to me this would be so expensive that, at least in the early years, more PBPILFA (thanks, Laird! *g*) would starve. And the upshot would be yet another bureaucratic boondoggle like the FDA, only in the extreme case (perfection tends to be extreme) here, proving the GMO food 100% safe (and nutritious as non-GMO food) would take as long as searching for a vaccine 100% guaranteed to have no (no) deleterious side-effects — not to anyone.

And as with horrible viruses, anthrax spores, and whatnot, sooner or later the boundaries would be breached anyway.

Everything has a downside. (TM)

Sadly in nations like Egypt and India the state controlled (nationalised and regulated) distribution system means that most of the food does not even reach the people (it rots before they can get it).

But we can not have the evil “corporations” involved in food distribution now can we…….

By the way a lot of this “food inflation” is not due to the bad weather.

Not all the money the government has been creating has gone to propping up house prices (either here or in the United States) – bad though that is.

The money has also gone into food prices.

The loss of food resources, and the added illness and misery caused by consumption of poorly-preserved foods, disproportionately affect poor brown people in lands far away. Western ‘Greens’ are quite happy to sacrifice those PBPILFA on the altar of their ideological purities.

I still well-recall working on a not-for-profit project to design a cookstove for Third World nations that would free PBPILFA from the dangers of cooking with animal manure as fuel, and the resistance we got for ‘tampering with their ancient folkways’ and ‘enslaving the people under the yoke of fossil fuels’, as though dying of cholera or dysentery is somehow culturally-authentic and a positive act of resistance to Big Oil. Another team was working on the possibility of an absorbtion refrigerator that would put ice and food refrigeration into the most remote locations at trivial cost – this was in the days of R12 and the ‘ozone hole’, and the howls of outrage about that concept have remained with me to this day.

llater,

llamas

Jaded Voluntaryist
January 14, 2013 at 10:14 am

GM allows you to cross a plant with a fish, so to speak. No thank you.

So does a fish sandwich.

I don’t think it should be banned or anything like that, I just have no desire to eat it. It seems to me there may well be unforeseen consequences of our genetic gerrymandering in the longer term.

I’m afraid I don’t agree with the people who say GM is essentially the same as 5000 years of cultivation and controlled plant breeding. These methods only allow crossing plants with things that they are naturally capable of being crossed with.

GM allows you to cross a plant with a fish, so to speak. No thank you.