Since 1991, the EPA has held that glyphosate is not carcinogenic; it was (at the time) categorized "Group E", which means that not only is there not evidence for it being carcinogenic, but that there is material evidence that it is not. Later, IARC (in a decision that was controversial among global public health agencies) listed glyphosate as a 2A probable carcinogen, alongside red meat, potatoes, deep fryer oil, and a slew of scary chemicals that includes many other insecticides and herbicides.
States like California enacted labeling-law regimes that key in part off IARC's classification, which meant that in those states Roundup products required labeling. Monsanto/Bayer lost civil cases based on failure to label.
That's the domain-specific stuff. What the court likely cares about is the preemption doctrine. In a variety of different situations, competing state and federal statutes are by explicit or implicit preemption rules. In many cases, federal preemption is a result of bargains with industry: for instance, we got programs like Energy Star after negotiations where industry (and the states dependent on those industries) made concessions to the federal government in exchange for exemptions from state regulation, which is why there's controversy over local municipal ordinances that attempt to ban gas ranges (apropos nothing, but: combustion products of gas ranges: also IARC carcinogens).
There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
For those people it's worth knowing that the civil liability Monsanto/Bayer is trying to avoid here is approximately the same as the reason Jays Potato Chips bags sometimes have "Not For Sale In California" labeling. Nobody has declared that Roundup is categorically unsafe. Some states have declared that you have to label it the same way you would a gas station or Disneyland ride.
It was mentioned on a podcast recently that in many cases, the SC is not making a decision on what should/shouldn't happen/be the policy/is correct or whatever. They are deciding which layer of government gets to decide a given question. The Executive Branch? Legislation? Constitution? Who is the controlling entity?
Now, in a practical sense, by the time it gets to the SC, making a decision on who gets to decide, is, functionally, picking what the outcome is, since the various layers of government have already made their positions clear.
But the upshot is, if one is upset with what happens with a given policy after a SC decision, in many cases (although not all), the proper target of one's ire should not be the SC; since what they are usually saying is something like "this is something that is controlled by statute. If the statute is dumb/bad/poorly written, that is not our fault nor within our control, take it up with Congress to rewrite the statue", and instead one should be upset with whoever the controlling entity is for doing a bad job (in recent years: most commonly congress, not so much for doing a bad job so much as not doing any job)
Also worth noting that Monsanto could stop selling Roundup entirely, and it wouldn't really matter. Monsanto's Glyphosate patent expired, so you can get cheaper Glyphosate from many different manufacturers. Which is great, because it means we can avoid the potentially-more-dangerous Roundup, and use the simpler base chemical instead. Distancing the pesticide from the "evil corporation" might actually make people less afraid of it.
"Aluminum and Glyphosate Can Synergistically Induce Pineal Gland Pathology: Connection to Gut Dysbiosis and Neurological Disease"
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=53106
"Glyphosate, a chelating agent—relevant for ecological risk assessment?"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823954/
"Glyphosate complexation to aluminium(III). An equilibrium and structural study in solution using potentiometry, multinuclear NMR, ATR–FTIR, ESI-MS and DFT calculations"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01620...
Like the tobacco industry before them, a Monsanto employee proposed producing a scientific paper with outside scientists: “by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak” — see https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...
If you refer to it as glyphosate, as GP does, that either means you've fallen victim to their PR campaign, or labels you as a paid astroturfer.
https://www.worldenergydata.org/roundup-herbicide-ingredient...
Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical.
It really seems like you're looking for a reason to justify Roundup as uniquely bad, in the face of evidence, with extremely vague statements.
There are numerous studies that show glyphosate binds with aluminum and other metals, having negative impacts on public health.
"Aluminum and Glyphosate Can Synergistically Induce Pineal Gland Pathology: Connection to Gut Dysbiosis and Neurological Disease"
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=53106
"Glyphosate, a chelating agent—relevant for ecological risk assessment?"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823954/
"Glyphosate complexation to aluminium(III). An equilibrium and structural study in solution using potentiometry, multinuclear NMR, ATR–FTIR, ESI-MS and DFT calculations"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01620...
Being tired after eating bread or whatever is not a gluten allergy, that's just how food works. A lot of people claim to have gluten allergies but no, you would know for sure if you had a gluten allergy.
I know what you meant, and I suspect everyone reading it does too, but this is the type of sentence where the ambiguity amuses me. It's certainly true that most of the controversies before the Supreme Court aren't about glyphosate!
The Jays chips comparison cuts the other way. CA's Prop 65 warning for glyphosate got blocked by a federal court in 2020, the Ninth Circuit upheld the block in 2023, and Prop 65 warnings for acrylamide in food were permanently shut down last May. So... California isn't actually making Roundup carry a Prop 65 warning, which is what your chips comparison assumes. The real question in Durnell is whether federal pesticide law stops a Missouri jury from finding Bayer liable for a specific person's cancer. Pretty different from whether you slap a warning sticker on a bag of chips (and Jay's doesn't carry a "Not for Sale" in CA -that's generally smaller companies who couldn't afford reformulation but the reality is they likely just didn't sell there). [1]
[0] https://legal-planet.org/2026/02/03/pesticides-cancer-and-fa... [1] https://www.greenbergglusker.com/publications/court-finds-re...
I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically modified glyphosate tolerant soybeans and corn, they’re mostly fed to animals anyways.
Crossbreeding plants is genetic modification.
Essentially turning
> You wouldn't download a car
into
> You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop.
Which is obviously absurd.
So while GM has enabled some pretty good things, it also comes with the same sort of intellectual property baggage that plagues many different areas of society, which on the face of it make some sense, but always seem to skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life, squeezing from those who have less to begin with.
Is it required that the public have a "good reason" for wanting something?
> glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments
We used to spray DDT everywhere. This isn't exactly a resounding recommendation. Perhaps there's a case for using as little additives in farming as is possible.
While it's more difficult to formulate on the internet through brief interactions - the correct answer here is nuanced. Somethings are beneficial to farm land productivity and also beneficial to consumers by lowering prices, increasing availability to healthy food etc - and some things are not but might be highly profitable to conglomerates. We need to pick issues like this apart carefully.
It's not relevant to glyphosate, but there is such a thing. It's called Integrated Pest Management. I only know it wrt fruit crops. The main idea is to use the least-intrusive methods first, and pesticides last. For example, sanitation comes first: remove last year's debris where larvae and spores have over-wintered.
Glyphosate isn't a pesticide (unless it kills host plants? maybe?)
Not required but it's a nice to have, especially if the thing they want done is to have the desired outcome.
Is this true? Can't we we give in on glyphosphate without losing GMOs?
That's not really what preemption is about. A major point of having "interstate commerce" -- actual products crossing state lines -- at the federal level, is to prevent states from enacting trade barriers.
Suppose California disproportionately has more organic food producers and other states make higher proportions of food products grown with glyphosate. California then passes a law requiring the latter (i.e. disproportionately out-of-state) products to carry a scary warning label based on inconclusive evidence. Are they trying to enact a trade barrier? It sure looks like one. Meanwhile if the stuff is actually dangerous then it's dangerous in all 50 states, so the warning label should either be everywhere or nowhere according to the evidence, right?
Relatedly, having dozens or (at the city level) hundreds of different sets of rules is also a kind of trade barrier. Some small business in Ohio is willing to ship nationwide but every state has different rules, they might be inclined to cut off everyone who isn't in the local area since that's where they get most of their current sales, but that's bad. So then there is a legitimate interest in being able to say the rules have to be uniform if the states start trying to micromanage too much.
The better way to do this would be to only apply the interstate commerce rules to actual interstate commerce. So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California. A lot of states would then say you have to follow the federal interstate rules even if you don't cross state lines, but it would be their decision and some might not.
In the message board controversy over glyphosate itself, I don't think this case has much to say. The state labeling regime was either preempted or not; that's a technicality of state and federal statutory evaluation. If the labeling regime is enforceable, it doesn't much matter whether it was about IARC classification or midichlorian counts. Strict liability is strict liability.
The substantive part of this case, whether glyphosate is an inherently dangerous or flawed product, was resolved by the trier of fact in favor of Monsanto.
A simpler way to say all of this: "the safety of glyphosate is not before this court".
Excuse me if I dont believe "this stuff isnt harmful".
And Arsenic was once safe.
Asbestos was the most amazing fireproof wonder material.
Thalidomide was a wonder drug with no side effects.
Tetraethyl lead was perfectly safe everywhere.
Fen-phen was a great diet drug.
Id also add "consumption of fluoride in water supply" (topical/toothpaste makes sense, consumption does not).
Thalidomide never even made it to use in the USA.
Fluoride being good for teeth was discovered by fluoride naturally being in the water already
Can't speak for the other two, but I hope you're not basing your fears on stuff like that.
(There are mechanistic reasons to believe glyphosate is less harmful than other landscaping treatments; it has a fairly elegant mode of action.)
Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people spray their lawns with. I don't think we should - the worst you get on a typical suburban lawn if you mow but don't spray are dandelions and clover - but it's probably not giving you cancer. As for food... again, there are far worse, more persistent pesticides that escape this kind of scrutiny.
The longer term issue is evolved weed resistance due to its over use with "Roundup Ready" crops and for end of the season dry down.
I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to develop resistances over time.
And ... so what? The value of a weedkiller like glyphosate is using it to kill a lot of weeds in wide-scale agriculture. If the weeds develop a resistance to it, and we stop using it because it's no longer effective, we're not really in a worse position than if we never used it at all. It's not like there are some really bad weeds we need to save it to be able to combat.
A 22 caliber is safer than a 40 caliber. But, I still wouldn’t a hole made in me from either.
It's not a complicated argument.
A note: It appears that the picture in the article is if the new formulation for tonight, not the one containing glyphosate.
I wouldn’t bathe in the stuff, but the data strongly indicates it’s one of the more benign compounds used in agriculture and landscaping.
[1] Cancer incidence and death rates in Argentine rural towns surrounded by pesticide-treated agricultural land: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221339842...
The rule of law is well and truly dead in the United States.
See, for example, Justice Ginsburg.
And also almost all bread in the US including organic contain 10-1000 ppb of glyphosate.
America's food supply is fucked because of rampant greed, a lack of proper regulation, and a lack of application of the precautionary principle.
We almost saw that played out in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_economic_crisis_(20... - and its a call for genocide on the economic less prosperous by economic means. It should be treated as that - regardless of the appeal of the ideology pushing for such measures.
And that is coming from someone rooting for weeding robots to remove parts of the pressure to use herbicides.
Sure they cost more than modern chemicals. If you get sick from the modern chemicals, the costs incurred from treatment might be higher than the organic premium.
https://www.organicvalley.coop/blog/organic-farming-from-the...
https://www.arbico-organics.com/category/aphid-control-preve...
And if you contribute anyway- you are naive or mercilessly willing to sacrifice millions in the 3 digits. Which makes this one of the more murderous ideologies- that ever roamed the earth- just because it has spots on the apples on the flyers does not make it so.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2309822
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c09524
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c03924
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...
There are a lot of studies that find correlations, and then are studies like this one that show that the direct introduction of microplastics alters cell functions negatively:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12692081/
I think at this point we should stop talking about how "there's no data" or "no studies" and "no one has shown" and graduate to "oh, maybe should figure out the extent of the damage."
Microplastic pollution is a global problem amongst a whole host of global pollution problems. We'd do well to try to figure out how bad it is, because it isn't going away. Oh, and we should probably work on fixing all of our pollution problems, especially cumulative ones like this.
(This is a summary of a Nature Matters Arising article).
Glyphosate kills grass, so I would not recommend this unless you are planning to reseed from scratch (or replace the grass with something else).
Are there "Roundup Ready" grass seeds?
I also get a lot of morning glory AKA bindweed that kills my grass. But spraying doesn't really help with that anyway, so :shrug:.
Glyphosate in our food supply - almost no evidence of cancer risk. (The gut microbiome is affected though).
Direct and sustained contact to glyphosate as an agricultural worker - potentially very severe risks, particularly non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The data is strong but epidemiological.
So yeah, I think your conclusion is roughly correct. Don't bathe in it. Probably avoid using it at home or work. But otherwise, its not a serious risk to consumers.
> Night shift work
> Red meat (consumption of)
> Very hot beverages at above 65 °C (drinking)
Defined as[2]:
> Group 2A: The agent is probably carcinogenic to humans
> This category is used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and either sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals or strong mechanistic evidence, showing that the agent exhibits key characteristics of human carcinogens. Limited evidence of carcinogenicity means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations (technically termed “chance”, “bias”, or “confounding”) could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence. This category may also be used when there is inadequate evidence regarding carcinogenicity in humans but both sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals and strong mechanistic evidence in human cells or tissues.
[1] https://monographs.iarc.who.int/list-of-classifications
[2] https://monographs.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/I...
This may be the case.
But I remember tobacco execs testifying under oath in the mid 90s that nicotine wasn't addictive and that there wasn't strong evidence smoking directly caused cancer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Berkshire
https://senate.ucsf.edu/tobacco-ceo-statement-to-congress
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/15/us/tobacco-chiefs-say-cig...
> The executives also made a number of other notable admissions, including these:
> * Cigarettes may cause lung cancer, heart disease and other health problems, but the evidence is not conclusive.
> * Despite earlier denials, a Philip Morris study that suggested that animals could become addicted to nicotine was suppressed in 1983 and 1985.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/glyphosate-the-new-bogeyman...
It's based on a Rube Goldberg causal mechanism and a slapdash correlation analysis that vibes glyphosate as the presumed cause of sleep disorder and autism diagnostic increases over the preceding 20 years --- glyphosate went up, autism went up, what more is there to say?
A later review of the literature on glyphosate went out of its way to exclude it:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00420-022-01878-0...
I admit that's probably like 1 out of every 100,000 people, but they're out there
You hear a lot about it because a large subset of people have discovered that a low-FODMAP diet relieves their torment of intestinal distress.
People who are suffering from pain and bloating with no obvious cause may be advised to go on a low-FODMAP diet for a few weeks to see if their symptoms go away.
https://apple.news/AQ4nHcV41Qd6azTmXaEDHPg
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/25/nx-s1-5795674/farmers-tariffs...
https://apple.news/AMiKpZ2bAS6Os1h7C2gl7_w
https://apple.news/A9S4aFHoiQw-Tl1Q9TsQbeg
? Organic Valley is not a hobby, over a billion in revenues.
? Seems like the current way of doing things leads to a lot of externalities that aren’t accounted for…
>Scientists Tracking the Microplastic Pollution Just Realized They Were Measuring Their Own Lab Gloves
thing. Which was quite entertaining. Reminds me of my own abilities as an experimental scientist.
(https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/environmental-issues/scie...)
As for solutions, I agree with you that there's no single clean solution to mitigate resistance. But it seems like some weeds' reproduction paths are better suited for resistance than others (Kochia produces tens of thousands of seeds and spread similar to tumbleweeds, so there's a lot of potential for mixing and genetic diversity relative to other weeds).
https://saskpulse.com/resources/kochia-resistance-update-res...
It's also inevitable: there are weeds which have substantially changed their appearance to more closely resemble crops as an adaptive strategy just to human driven control measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
Which is a problem which mechanical weed control measures will exacerbate probably in bizarre ways (e.g. the weed is no longer selecting against the human vision system but instead a machine vision model)
Edit: though probably worth noting that encouraging weeds to compete against a machine vision model opens up interesting possibilities - e.g. encoding a failure mode for something which the active model can't spot, then running it competitively against a model trained to sport the adaptation and then switching back over when your hit rate falls below a certain level - trap the weed in a controlled local minima. You can't replace human image recognition and new compounds are hard, but updating software is easy.
They’re annoying and might go home with a symbolic win.
First remember that glyphosate has been used around the world continuously for 52 years. If there is some kind of pattern of harm due to its use, it's already happened, so it should be possible to find those harms all over the place.
85% of the USA has hard water. If glyphosate being in hard water causes 10% of children to have early onset kidney disease, we would have been seeing that in the USA for at least the last 42 years. But we haven't. So it's likely that whatever is happening in Sri Lanka, is specific to Sri Lanka.
You can take this same basic logical premise and apply it to all of the concerns about glyphosate. None of them stand up to scrutiny, because we have been using it for so long, everywhere, and despite that, we have no concrete evidence of any significant harms caused by glyphosate itself.
For one, you can't control what the weather does in the afternoon after you've applied it in the morning (and it might take all morning because farms are huge and you have to tank up again)
The trend today is toward AgBot / SwarmBot type boom sprayers with onboard weather stations for wind speed and air temp, coupled with computer vision to limit spray to actual weeds rather than broad area even spray for weed / non weed alike.
Again, driven by $$ watching, etc.
"There's a weird reason the public wants this and it has little to do with the thing itself."
Very often the implication being:
"Therefore the public is wrong and should be ignored."
What? It was initially blocked by the FDA, but was later approved for use in cancer, where it is in fact a front line drug for some myelomas, albeit with significant usage warnings.
Glyphosate for field prep also doesn't really come through in food, it's much worse with the pre-harvest desiccation.
Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets? This is amenable to natural experiments where one country bans it on a specific date and the neighbor does not.
That's a rather sneaky way to invert the issue. It's fishing for random luck when you ask for more and harder to obtain evidence given existing facts pointing to possible harm. A single study that doesn't show harm doesn't refute those that do.
You have to provide hard evidence that glyphosate (or another non-essential ingredient) does not cause adverse effects, and thoroughly explain the differences with the studies that show the opposite - until you do that, any in-vitro or other studies that show harmful effects count against the use of the product and you cannot ask for more evidence, you can only accept the remedies.
In this case, the appropriate remedies can be different: banning it altogether, limiting it to specific usage (e.g. no pre-harvest spraying), labeling using LARGE PRINT and scary language or some combination of the above.
I would have expected a single dominate weed to take over, but instead, if I let the grass grow for 6-8 weeks in summer I get this amazing field of different knee length plants. And it alive with bee's and butterflies.
I much prefer it to lawn.
Of course you can claim that they are wrong about their claim. But that is another point.
You: "Courtrooms are the appropriate final venue to determine if something is inherently dangerous, using the word inherently purposefully, as I do not misuse words, as long as the result is something I agree with."
> Oak Park, the ultra-blue inner-ring suburb suburb in which I live, can ban gas ranges, which I enjoy cooking on
I guess this is why you and I write on random social media forums instead of getting elected.
I got all of this done by... posting on random forums.
It sounds like you think this is about hypothetical and marginal health benefits but people have very acute and immediate physical (and cognitive) issues because of disrupted gut biome that are objectively improved by cutting out, in particular, gluten. This isn't just some weird obession.
I don't think you could solve gluten intolerance but just improving your gut microbiome, so they're probably not related.
I’m pretty sure there’s hundreds of things we rightly understood are detrimental centuries before we knew how it worked. Aka pretty much everything bad before 1900.
If you find someone using it you severely fine them and/or put them in jail.
“Reasonability of X” factors into many people’s assessment of “should we do X or not-X?”
If the only value is to increase the value of crops, by planting patent seeds, and then dousing the land in weed killer, perhaps people, regardless of the published scientific quality of their rationale, think that our food supply would be better off without it.
Unless the suggestion that Glyphosate is the only way to grow the necessary amount of food then I think the question should be: What justifies it's use? So then why would you bother to care if the imputed and over generalized public rationale is right or wrong?
If it is in fact so worth using then why shouldn't the government use imminent domain to capture the patents and distribute the technology for free?
> So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California
In my ideal world I'd slightly adjust the framing here. California law should apply to products that are being sold within California, regardless where they may have previously been (yes, that would be a complete repudiation of Wickard v Filburn's declaration that a butterfly flapping its wings is interstate commerce). A California distributor or retail store that gets shipments from Ohio but then sells locally should be required to follow California law about what they're selling, as those sales are occurring wholly in California. Also if Ohio and California can agree on something that differs from federal, then that should also take it out of federal preemption territory. But of Ohio and California cannot agree, and someone in California orders direct from Ohio, only then federal law should step in with preemption.
Only if other states or the federal government give that much of a shit about food safety, which is not a guarantee, both in theory and in practice. They might, for instance, care more about agri-profits than California does.
> So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California.
That's just a regulatory-arbitrage race to the bottom. You'd just have out-of-state producers that don't have to follow any of your laws out-competing local ones.
I'm not sure why you think there's a problem with that. (I mean, I think it's a problem for the residents of a lot of states, but that's their problem, that they have agency to fix, not mine.)
If the Midwest likes using paint chips as food coloring, that's not my problem. And it should still not be my problem if they elect some brain-worm addled moron to a federal office who goes and raises the federally permitted amount of paint in my food.
You wouldn't. You'd drop the conversation regarding whether it was safe.
Ive also seen that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine which is banned in most of the world. Decent countries straight up banned it, since it doesnt degrade with slaughter or cooking. My SO is also allergic to it as well - thats evidenced by not being able to eat US/Canadian pork, but being able to eat Spanish/European pork.
Tl;dr. Regulatory capture has made most of US food not good, potentially toxic, and full of nasty shit we dont want to eat. But hey, selling toxic food makes money for someone.
Yes, you are correct, and you are not contradicting me: This is a system that makes sense on the surface. It's economically superior to pay some more money to a seed supplier to get a better yield on my fields.
But this economic advantage is captured by the seed supplier after all farmers moved to this new system where you are no longer able to rely on the previous' harvest seeds. Once everyone is on the economically superior system, the seed supplier can start capturing more of the value that is created by farming.
The point here is that Monsanto creates a superior yield in a crop. All your farmer peers move to use it, and now you have to too or get priced out of the market.
hence: > skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life. > skew
The word "farmers" is doing some heavy lifting here - might be some multinational, might be a small family making a living.
The point is not that the market is pricing out inefficient farms, the point is that it turns a millennia old practice on it's head and using government force to enable monopolies to remove competition.
Farmers use it because their time horizon is 1-5 years, but the government monopoly on seeds is more like 20 years.
It's skewed.
Easy to disagree and argue with these points, but the original question was why there are people opposed to GMOs and while GMOs are not the only patented organisms they are the most obvious for people to have concerns over the economics
If there was ever an area where patents are justified and necessary, this is it. This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.
Objection to patents on GMO plants is just a way to object to GMO plants themselves without coming out and saying so directly.
The entire argument is stupid, only bad/hobby farmers plant their own seed.
The thing is, that existed for like 100 years before GMOs were a thing. Basically no one saves seeds to reuse and didn't even prior to GMOs. The whole "poor farmers can't save their seeds" thing is propaganda from the organics industry that gets repeated by people who don't understand modern (or even semi-modern) works.
They don't get roped into anything. They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost. Further, at least part of the reasoning for not allowing replanting is to avoid genetic deviation in future generations of crop.
That is correct. They are so much better ( and I am in awe of that technology) that outside of some niches (depending on the crop) as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them. But now your farmer-timeframe of a few years is up against a 20 year artificial monopoly in the form of a patent. And all your peers are facing the same situation. This isn't a situation where you can just decide to do whatever you want.
You suddenly find yourself dependent on a third party that knows your situation exactly and will try to extract the most amount of value from you - trying to capture your profit while keeping you healthy enough to keep being a customer.
This skews towards the seed supplier.
Yes, because it's a good product.
Farmer's can't afford not to use tractors or artificial irrigation either.
It's not sinister to develop a product that is better than the competition.
> This skews towards the seed supplier.
Right up until someone else makes a better product.
Making do without artificial fertilizer would be a lot harder.
So no, it is not a very significant factor.
Allowing a known carcinogen to make crops "easier to harvest" has to do with profit margin not food supply. People literally use this to kill dandelions in their yards. I have known many people who have died from cancer. I have eaten dandelions, while bitter, are actually healthy. A good start would be to work with nature instead of trying to out engineer it.
If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
Yes. That is literally exactly what we're doing. You can't sustain the current human population without fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels. Half the people on the planet would die.
If we don't want half the planet to die, we need pesticides. So do you choose a pesticide that's more harmful, or less? If you said "less", then you want glyphosate.
Yet you continue to respond. So why mention it?
> because glyphosate is more benign, and relatively more inert, than other herbicides
Except for the fact you have to use genetically modified crop seeds to survive it. Do other herbicides require this?
> The case for it is not complicated.
The case against it isn't either.
No, you really can't do that without breaking the Code of Federal Regulations. Smoked products must be labeled "smoked" in addition to many other requirements, and that despite the distinctive stink that self-labels these products. Even the font size is specified to be no smaller than the letters for the kind of meat on the label.
The real issue is why there's no such requirement for glyphosate, having it would be a good starting point.
> This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
I don't think all potato chips deserve, or have, such warnings but some might. Regardless, there might be specific regulations that are over the top and I don't mind admitting or discussing such cases but glyphosate isn't among them.
If 90% of the raw food at the grocery were 'processed' in the same way that a smoked fish, or a french fry was, I think we'd have very valid reasons to be displeased with many of the myriad problems that come with that.
Here's a decent paper that shows an adverse effect: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10330715/
I understand that this is the realm of crunchy weirdos, but thinking holistically doesn't mean you need to lobotomize yourself.
Here's another paper examining some brain effects of chronic gut inflammation, which could be reasonably inferred as a potential consequence of long-term glyphosate exposure: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10661239/
"It impacts the gut biome" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for these arguments; if it were, you could knock down all sorts of things, including specific diets (and most abrupt changes in diet).
Other gluten intolerance is probably not gluten, gluten is just a close enough proxy. Could be FODMAP + IBS or maybe some other sensitivity.
We also don't really understand why things like a FODMAP diet work. It's not that feeding your gut bacteria is bad, it's actually pretty good. But for some people it's bad, and they get symptoms they attribute to gluten intolerance.
Legumes, onions, whole grain etc that are high FODMAP are good for you. Fiber is good for you, it lowers your risk of metabolic diseases and helps your digestion. But, for some people, it's bad for their digestion. That's weird.
So all that is to say that, while gut bacteria matters, it varies person to person and we can't definitely say what food is good for the microbiome and what isn't.
Seems extremely unlikely. Of someone is eliminating gluten they from their diet they usually aren't also eliminating dairy, legumes, and other high-fodmap foods; gluten-free is restrictive enough already.
The only other sensitivity I could think of in which this makes sense is wheat sensitivity (but not other gluten containing grains which are less common).
Yes. A different seed supplier. My point isn't that it's morally wrong to make a better product. My point is that the way it's set up is that those who are in the position to make a better patented-product are in an unbalancedly better position towards the people who use the product to create something as fundamentally important as food.
They have sued farmers for innocently acquiring their seeds (through the wind or whatever) and then spraying their crops with Roundup (ie: using the whole system).
Isn't that a massive societal benefit vs rent seeking though?
If we have to get the seeds from expensive R&D that wouldn't occur without patent protection, then no.
Why not?
It's literally a self replicating system. Trying to control that for rent seeking purposes seems pretty unethical.
Despite their being plenty of capacity elsewhere because the smaller redirects of trucking into the European markets crashed prices enough that it led to protests in Poland and discontent elsewhere (though probably with significant Russian psyops involvement).
I have raised a flag. Lowering your exposure to a novel chemical agent that directly impacts a massive and poorly-understood symbiotic system within the body isn't a bad response. Glyphosate exposure certainly isn't beneficial, so I'll treat it like Pascal's wager: avoiding this has more upside than downside.
(rolls eyes)
Because if no one does the R&D to create the seeds they WON'T EXIST.
I would have thought that was 100% obvious, but apparently not!
Sure. If no-one does the R&D.
Perhaps if rent seeking is the mechanism for getting there, then it's better off if they don't? :)
Here in the real world, private firms are the source of things like this. Roundup Ready soybeans involved cooperation from multiple private firms that contributed various elements.