@flabdablet said:
What's your considered opinion on the risks of making food supplies into something that intellectual property laws apply to?
Well, part of my hippy-dippy views as a software developer make me unhappy with intellectual property laws. I probably agree with the snark at Techdirt more often than not. I wholeheartedly agree with the antiGMOers that Monsanto is pretty much ethically reprehensible. I just don't understand why they, say, don't have the same view of Apple.
Personally, I think returning IP law to the early days would be better for most of us. Disney can let its death grip on Mickey Mouse go, and all those Star Wars fanfic writers can breathe easily. Having absolute power over an idea might--maybe--be sensible for the duration of a lifetime (more realistically, a working lifetime, 30-40 years maybe), but having copyrights extend beyond the grave is just some kind of IP necromancy.
Patents are just ridiculous cancers at this point.
@flabdablet said:
[...]there is no way I can ever see myself supporting public policy likely to favour the emergence of widespread reliance on patented lifeforms as a matter of basic survival.
This is what I fear we're likely heading towards. It's basically right in line with the sort of crony capitalism that rules the US at the moment. I don't like it either.
@flabdablet said:
I also don't have much time for the "generally recognized as safe" reasoning used to try to justify allowing GM produce into the food supply chain without clear labelling of origin.
It does sound like weasel words, but for most things it's a justifiably bland way of saying "if this was going to kill people, we'd mostly be dead by now". Also, most GMO products go through fairly extensive safety testing. By contrast, there is no requirement that plants bred by artificial selection be tested for safety. Since almost every poison known to humankind is the result of this common genetic variation process, it's naive of the antiGMOers to claim that controlled, tested genetic manipulation produces "toxins".
The other thing is that GMO labelling is just FUD. Trying to claim that something produced through direct gene manipulation needs to be labelled separately from things produced by artificial selection is a misunderstanding of how genetics works. At this point what matters is not whether the plant came from artificial seeds, but whether that plant's genetic clones have proven safe to eat. With "frankenseeds" this is actually easier since the genetic variation in the individual seeds is minimal. With year-to-year replanting from crop seeds and outside sources, the variation is high. So, the plants we're eating that are "organic" (I fucking hate this word almost as much as I hate the word "toxins" at this point.) are actually more uncertain than the GMOs.
To address your specific example, such proteins in canola would be regarded as safe if they occur already in another food. This is typically the case, as far as I know. In fact, I can't readily find an example where it is not, but I wouldn't claim that it means there are none. Usually these kinds of things get many handwaving arguments about how the body "processes" things and whatnot, but in reality most things are pretty much broken down to their constituents and then flushed into the bloodstream. So, if something already contains a protein that gets into the body the same way, it's just a matter of whether including it in a food means increasing the amount of that protein in your diet, and whether that has any effect.
My considered opinion on this is that what matters about our health is less a matter of the foods in the supply chain and more a matter of what we choose to consume from it combined with our sedentary behaviors. If most everyone in the US paid attention to the nutrition information on their foods and balanced their daily values and got regular exercise (not even much of it!), I think that three of the main killers (heart disease, blood pressure, and obesity) would drop in place. (Smoking is also a huge contributor here.)
Another effect I should throw in that tends to skew thinking on these things is that the occurrence of many diseases has increased in the last 100 years. This tends to be put forward as an argument that something we're doing is causing them. And something we're doing is causing them: we're living longer. For the US, the number one killer is heart disease; the curve of occurrence against age for this has a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge bubble between 50 and 80. Cancer has a similar bubble, and if you subtract cancers from smoking from it, you get a similar pattern. But half the time when these things come up, it's "oh, we're eating too much salt/sugar/fat/GMOs/non-organic foods", and I just sigh.