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Comment on Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest
After writing a blog post about the paper “Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest” I decided to submit a formal comment to the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability in July 2013, which was published today. As far as I know, Heinemann et al. provided a rebuttal to my comments, which […]
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The Precautionary Principle/Critique of GMOs
Nassim Nicolas Taleb and colleagues present an (almost?) tautological view of the effect of GMO (PDF): the large areas of establishment, human consumption and some unspecified risk mechanism (which does not seem to affect non-GMO crops, see next paragraph) may cause ruin to humanity, because, hey, they say so. I could come up with a […]
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A couple of thoughts on biotech and food security
“What has {insert biotech here} done for food security?” This question starts at the wrong end of the problem, because food security is much larger than any biotechnology. I would suggest that governance, property rights and education are the fundamental issues for food security, followed by biotechnological options. For example, the best biotechnology is useless […]
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My take on the USA versus Western Europe comparison of GM corn
A few days ago I came across Jack Heinemann and collaborators’ article (Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest, Open Access) comparing the agricultural sectors of USA and Western Europe‡. While the article is titled around the word sustainability, the main comparison stems from the use of Genetically Modified crops in […]
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GM-fed pigs, chance and how research works
Following my post on GM-fed pigs I received several comments, mostly through Twitter. Some people liked having access to an alternative analysis, while others replied with typical anti-GM slogans, completely ignoring that I was posting about the technical side of the paper. This post is not for the slogan crowd (who clearly are not interested […]