These two statements are entirely contradictory. You're saying that the amount cannot be controlled, and therefore kills all types of pests, then say that it is very controlled and specifically targets only a single kind of pests.
My bad, it's specifically targeted towards caterpillars, but it damages plants and weeds as well, which affects other species. The Monarch butterfly population, essential to pollination of multiple varieties of plants, is basically disappearing because BT kills the milkweed that they live on.
This doesn't sound entirely truthful. Why would Greenpeace 'threaten' to release the information? Wouldn't they just release it? Have they released it, or was it just a hollow threat? Who did the study, an independent research firm or Greenpeace?
Once again, my bad. I was a bit tired earlier and wasn't the best at wording it. Once Greenpeace and other organizations like Friends of the Earth uncovered the information, they DID release it, and thus, products were pulled from shelves.
Again, they are the most highly regulated food items available - more highly regulated then organic food for certain.
Did you not read my entire segment on Starlink corn and Cry9C? They're hardly regulated; how they're distributed is left up to the farmers, who are already losing money producing corn as it is. There's no labels if there are GM crops in your foods and no sorts of warnings or disclaimers whatsoever. That's partially because there's been no demand for federal regulation in the food source, and because they don't know where the corn or whatever other crop is going or what farm it is from.
Additionally, GE crops actually give us some tools to try and provide more, cheaper food for the entire planet of which the population continues to grow. Purely organic farming would be incapable of feeding the Billions of people that currently reside on the Earth, much less the more that are potentially to come.
Did you know there's actually enough food produced in the world annually to feed over 8 billion people? It's not so much a problem of not having enough food, it's a matter of resource distribution.
Did you not read my entire segment on Starlink corn and Cry9C?
I did, but I don't take those kinds of (generally) exaggerated claims at face value. Similarly to the Greenpeace bit (and added FoE) - I'd need to see something concrete and reliable on the subject before I'd acknowledge it as fact.
Did you know there's actually enough food produced in the world annually to feed over 8 billion people?
A documentary we watched in my Environmental Science lecture a week or so ago; same as all the other info I've been presenting.
From the EPA -
All other information indicated that Cry9C would not pose any other types of risks to human health or the environment.
In September 2000, residues from StarLink⢠were detected in taco shells, indicating that it had entered the human food supply. In response to these detections, Aventis requested cancellation of the StarLink⢠registration, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended that dry grain mills processing yellow corn test for the presence of Cry9C.
there has not been a verified positive test of yellow corn for dry milling in the marketplace since 2003.
In any case, if the positive detections are StarLink-derived Cry9C, the levels in the corn supply in 2007 are less than that determined to be acceptable for the wet milling process of corn grain allowed since 2001.
I'm not seeing what the panic is about here. The EPA is saying that for a brief period, small amounts of Cry9C were detected in the human food supply, of which the EPA was unable to determine if it was a human allergen, but all other factors showed that it would not pose a risk to humans or the environment. They corrected the error, and it hasn't been present in the food supply since.
What this says to me is that there was a small error resulting in an issue that's barely even a problem, which was later corrected by the appropriate regulatory boards. Oh noes?
Not at the moment. But the experimentation would be fruitless if it had not been considered for commercial use.
Though a fair share of grants come from companies interested in purely applied science & getting bang for their buck, it's not always the way it turns out. A lot of research gets done that expands human knowledge but doesn't necessarily wind up having a commercial outlet, but often they lead to other fields of study that do have commercial application. I wouldn't call it fruitless though.
