Ron Bailey writes that Europe is starving the third world. Apparently, to the left, ideology is more important than the actual welfare of those for whom they purport to prescribe their misguided nostrums.

Know why bananas are in danger of vanishing? Because they are cloned. There is little genetic variability in the crop, while the blight continues to evolve at a rapid pace. The spores of the blight can live for years on infected soil.

People should have learned from the Irish Potato Famine that using monoculture (worse, clones) for staple foods is a bad idea. The promoters of crops such as golden rice intend to spread the use of monoculture to yet another staple food. There are many crops rich in Vitamin A and C which could be grown to improve the diet of these people (e.g. carrots, sweet potato, tomato).

It is a bad idea to put all your eggs in the same basket.

Gojira,
The assumption inherent in your argument is that while we can engineer the rice to be productive we are somehow completely ignorant and will remain so about how to engineer that rice to resist some new pest that comes out. That's why we put version numbers on things. Suggesting that the 'golden rice' we grow now will always be the same and that it will never be improved upon and that we will be creating a monoculture is just like suggesting that 640 K is all we'll ever need or that the world will never need more than 5 or 6 computers.

Michael,
It is human and capitalist nature to save money until there is a problem. i.e. if it is not broken do not fix it. This works great most of the time. However developing a new resistant crop takes years, years you may not have. Diversification of the food supply is necessary to decrease these problems. You are producing something people need to survive (staple food), takes a long time to grow, does not last that long in storage.

The monoculture will be further ensured by, among other things, a government granted monopoly on golden rice patents, centralized production of seed.

It is human and capitalist nature to save money until there is a problem.

It's human and capitalist nature to try your damnedest to make even more money. This is often done by product differentiation, which is why such an abundance of products are thrown at the market every year.

It's human and capitalist nature to try your damnedest to make even more money. This is often done by product differentiation, which is why such an abundance of products are thrown at the market every year.

Three words: gene patent monopoly.

Gene Patent Monopoly...

Oh, so you mean there is incentive for people to develop a new variant, so they can have their own patent. I glad you see how it works.

By the way, it tooks a fraction of acreage to cross-breed for developing new types of plants and testing their viability. It takes a lot of acreage to feed hungry people. So why you may see thousands of acreage devoted to one seed variant, it doesn't mean that the world is coming to an end.

One thing I fail to understand about the article is why cassava should be affected by Europe. Africa doesn't export much cassava to Europe, does it? Also, I had heard that genetically modified cassava (virus resistant, by that same mechanism) had already been spreading in Africa, when it was 'inadvertently' released from an agricultural research station there. This happened years ago.

Gene Patent Monopoly...
Oh, so you mean there is incentive for people to develop a new variant, so they can have their own patent. I glad you see how it works.

Other businesses manage to be profitable just fine without resorting to a government sponsored monopoly to stiffle the competition.

Other businesses manage to be profitable just fine without resorting to a government sponsored monopoly to stiffle the competition.

Are we supposed to (illogically) infer from this fact that therefore all businesses can do so? Do you think that drug manufacturers would spend the many millions to develop new drugs without patent protection?

To the best of my knowledge, the millions required to develop new drugs are basically spent in extensive testing and certification to comply to FDA standards. Hence the government is granting the pharmaceutical companies a monopoly to kludge fix a problem the government itself was responsible for.

To the best of my knowledge, the millions required to develop new drugs are basically spent in extensive testing and certification to comply to FDA standards.

True, but do you have a better system in mind? I suppose a true capitalist/libertarian solution would be abolish patents and FDA, allow pharmaceutical companies to put any drug onto market, and let the market sort out the good medicine from the bad. That would certainly lower both development costs and retail price -- but somehow I doubt you would favor this kind of "buyer beware" approach.

but somehow I doubt you would favor this kind of "buyer beware" approach

Sure why not? You add a label to it saying its untested in humans. Then if someone dies or gets irreversibly maimed while taking the medicine, the drug company gets fined for some fixed rate. As people use it, they are essentially volunteering to test the drug for free.

I expect in due time computer models of the human body will enable testing of drugs without using living people as test subjects.

Gojira --

I apologize for having incorrectly assumed your position -- I think your proposal is absolutely sound. Unfortunately, there is not a chance in hell it would get implemented in lawsuit-happy US (the line "drug company gets fined for some fixed rate" is a non-starter right there), nor in nanny-state-happy Europe. Maybe in Thailand.