Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

How about stopping to use stupid and confusing terms like "G.M.O."?!

Manufacturers should be forced to label their plants explicitly with one of a set of standard labels like:

- "engineered to be tolerant to spececific herbicides" - ETH

- "engineered to be tolerant to specific insecticides" - ETI

- "engineered to be tolerant to specific fungicides" - ETF

- "engineered for better performance with the use of specific synthetic fertilizers" - EPSF

- "engineered for improved performance in all conditions" - EP"

- "engineered for better nutritional profile" - ENP

etc. And I should see this on the ingredients listing on my cereals package, like "ETH/I/F corn" or "EP corn" instead of just "corn".

There is no way to both (a) respect consumers' rights and (b) shield them from technical details. And what such technical terms mean should actually be inserted into secondary education curriculums worldwide - children should have to learn what genetical engineering is and how it is used just as they have to learn to read and write. We live in a world where technical details make all the difference and we should start educating ourselves and our children to be less illiterate about them!

Lets stop this whole process of consumer dumbification and extensive usage of "blanket terms" in all areas. This is the most damaging thing for consumer rights imho, because you can't have clear meaningful discussion about things without making clear distinctions about what specifically are you talking about! "GMO" can mean... anything!

There's a big gap between "shielding [consumers] from technical details" and legally mandating that all packaging contain those details. Why is it imperative for consumers to know the types of poisons to which a plant was given resistance? And why do they need to know how the plant came by the nutrition it contains? Nutrition information already required on packaging.

For that matter, why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider important. All modern (and even not so modern) crops are genetically modified in some fashion, whether by selective breeding or exposure to high-energy radiation.

> Why is it imperative for consumers to know the types of poisons to which a plant was given resistance?

Because this is the specific case in which the economical incentives of producers are massively unaligned with the health interest of the consumers: as a producer, once I start using a crop engineered for resistance to a chemical, then I will be motivated to increase the dosage of that chemical until I get to the best yield.

And realistically, I will do this regardless of the fact that the chemical is at some point proven to "increase by 30% the chances for group X to get cancer of type Y" or other such risk.

We don't live in an ideal world: if a producer knows that 0.01 mg of chemical X pe 100g of product is the maximum he's allowed to have in a product, he will 99% of the time still accept it to 0.1 mg (10x!) if he knows that nobody ever checks for quantity and that in the rare case this happens, he will most likely be able to blame it to some technical manufacturing error and just pay a fine and re-tweak the process...

Laws and regulations should be about practically guarding against what happens when you combine human greed+stupidity with advances in science and technology, not about what's technically and theoretically correct!

And about:

> why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider important

If we later discover that such technical details can have harmful effects with a propensity to be amplified by misaligned economical incentives, then YES, we should legally mandate that all packaging contains this information too, because this is the only way to re-align the incentives (because this way some of the producers will, for example, be able to exploit through marketing campaings the fact that they use "EP corn" or "ENP corn" instead of "ETF corn", and get a rightful economic advantage over the other ones whose incentives have become misaligned with the ones of the consumer).

Market economies need regulatory adjustment to keep the interests aligned, "market forces" will do this in theory, but with a delay of decades and a cost measured in lost human lives. Full market freedom is cool, but if we can engineer systems with faster response times I think it's worth the cost of some "lost efficiency" in the short term and on narrow niches.

All food including organic has been modified genetically over the thousands/millions of years. What we really need, and the only way to be fair, is to just list everything used for everything. The GED'd idiots who think "organic = no pesticides" will try to read the long list of stuff applied to their food and immediately die, win/win.

- "engineered to be vulnerable to confidential substance" - EV

Probably the biggest threat of GMOs is that if you can make them more resilient to a herbicide, fungicide or what have you, that you can also make them more vulnerable to some substance that could then be later used to trigger famines.

Except you don't advertise that.

Let's have at least some faith in humanity and not go that far, ok? :) 'cause if you're talking about what using bio engineering for war would mean (and what you're talking is in that category: a country damaged by such a tactic would instantly start a hot war!), this example is just the rosy tip of the iceberg...

A dead man switch on GMOs, in case there are any other unexpected consequences, has already been mentioned here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015572

And after reviewing that thread again, it appears such technology has already been commercially developed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techno...). Although in this instance it doesn't make the plant susceptible so much as it creates a food system dependency on the company that sells the GMO in order to grow the food in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com