yeah, sucks when people put no thought it research into posts that detract from the discussion.
I didn’t mean it negatively, I guess that word has a negative ring to it. I was just suggesting that you’re not German, which is true. My apologies if you thought that was a slight, it wasn’t intended to be.
Raising the cost of food won’t help that situation. Nor do I really believe that there is an over abundance of food and westerners just buy it away from Asians and Africans for shits and giggles.
No problem dude.
i thought this has always been a logistics problem rather than a “food is too expensive” problem. i mean, basic food has been “cheap” for a long time, yet most extremely malnourished are fed from food imports arranged by charitable organizations. cheap food just means these organizations can provide more food but it’s not like gmos are going to push a bushel of corn down to $0.10. getting any amount of food from the U.S./Brazil/Canada to rural Afghanistan/India/Africa is a buttload of money. further, many malnourished exist because of war or failed states which is more of a military problem than a scientific one. an underlying problem is overpopulation in places where food doesn’t grow well or water is scarce.
the goal of creating gmos to help the world’s poor isn’t just to lower the price of food but to create food that can grow in places it isn’t supposed to like subsaharan africa or parts of the ME. that way, the cost of transporting the food to market is virtually nil and the amount of waste is reduced. even logistics within these countries is extremely poor. anecdotally, in places where bananas are grown (S. & C. America), the bananas are most often sold black whereas in Western markets, they are green or yellow. food storage and better/faster food logistics networks in these countries would help much more than cheaper food or easier to grow gmos. this is a charitable/WorldBank issue, not a commodity price issue that can be solved with markets. it will take markets centuries to naturally solve the malnourishment situation. any change we see today will be acheived through charity.
despite the rapid evolution and utilization of gmo crops, the price of corn has risen from $1/bushel in 1960 to $4 now and traded up and down in that range throughout that period. it doesn’t appear that gmos are having a meaningful impact on pricing. this is likely due to rising demand for more water and capital intensive food products and rising demand for gmos that produce prettier or different produce (e.g. kumatoes) rather than the basic tomato but 1 million times more efficient. i think gmos’ impact on prices is limited and logistics remains the major issue with food security and pricing as it pertains to the malnourishment issue. so what if we get the cost of a tomato down to $0.25 in Toronto when the cost to ship that tomato and have it last the trip (i.e. be frozen the whole way) to Costa Rica is $1.00, greater than the daily wage for the person we’re trying to help.
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^This is a better explanation of my point than I was making. But that being said, maybe food + logistics is still to expensive for many, but if the price of food were to increase it would still impact people on the margin in nations who can afford the food at current pricing but barely.
Ok, so Reddit is a huge community with the majority leaning far to the left. But, they also love science and when people debate they have to actually cite their sources or their comments will get hidden from all the downvotes. What do you think happens when you have thousands of people debating GMOs and they have to use actual facts?
As it turns out, there’s much love for GMOs at Reddit. Apparently, even socialist hipsters can get behind GMOs once they’re presented with all the facts.
That doesn’t mean they love Monsanto or other large Ag Corps, but that’s more of an economic/political debate. As far as safety and the potential upside, it seems like GMOs are/will be a very good thing. Hell, when Bill Nye (probably one of the top three most popular people on Reddit) did a recent AMA he got crushed when he said he was leaning toward the anti-GMO side of things. His reasons were environmental though, not whether or not they’re safe to eat.
tl;dr - I don’t care about this debate so I crowdsourced my opinion on the matter. GMOs are a good thing.
Dude, did you just call me a liberal?
You’re missing the forest for the trees. I"m certain that your analysis of different measures of efficiency is likely more spot on than mine, but my point is that developed/emerging countries are at different stages of development & are subject to different government or capitalistic structures to succeed. Regarding your Asia paragraph(last paragraph), you again missed the whole point, and actually proved mine (your IMF quote on hunger/starvation) . Cheap efficient food is plentiful regardless of which is more process is more efficient than the other…but getting that to those in need, is due to a myriad of factors that have little to do with current efficiency levels.
As an american, i’m all for having my bananas actually stay yellow long enough so that I don’t have to throw some away, but if i want to enjoy a higher bug content in my fruit i suppose organic’s the way to go once in while. But the point i was making is that i’m humble enough to admit that there are secondary/tertiary effects of large companies controlling the manufacturing of the seeds to create this, the effects on emerging coountries and developed countries that i’m certain that we can map out but unlikely to comprehend accurately. That isn’t too say that it shouldn’t be done. Just that these are different views of the “stuff will take longer to brown” and therefore this means that the starving across the world are likely to get their hands on this food in a more efficient way…
Dude, i found all of your arguments at least superficialy valid except for one, which was cruel and below the belt, i haven’t been called a liberal in over a quarter century…
^ your response time certainly reeks of liberalism.
not really MLA,
The majority of my time is spent on my wealth producing tasks, while anything fun but ulitmately non-profit/pro bono… is de-prioritized…
nice. wealth production.
I was looking at an awesome German stock yesterday : KWS Saat. But they are into GMOs so fuck them.