The crazy conspiracy theory believed by 190 million Chinese - Alliance for Science
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Numerous public opinion surveys have shown that Chinese people have a sharply negative attitude towards genetically modified foods, despite the worldwide scientific consensus that they are as safe as any other. But the latest piece of research, published in the Nature partner journal Science of Food by two scientists working at University of California-Davis, is […]

You can read about the reason I’m asking this in the spoiler. TLDR I’m just wondering if there’s some debunking I can do since western media is oh-so-not-trustworthy

spoiler

I’m in some IRL debate (Well, online but in a closed chat) with some libs. They are talking about the right-wingers saying Taylor swift is being paid off to spread democratic votes, whatever, hollyweird are all dems, no conspiracy needed.

I mentioned that we need to actually, you know, actively keep conspiracy theories from spreading, and my liberal friend is gishgaloping a bit, but I’ll bite since they are sincere, even if wrong.

They came back with “Well china has conspiracy theories”, which I didn’t mention china, I didn’t mention anything about censorship, it’s just gishgalloping like I said, but anyway…

Any truth to this one? I mean being anti-gmo is not rare, so I’m not surprised if it was true. I don’t have a good handle on high quality china news (And cannot read their sites myself, even with translators it’s a slow experience).

Edit: Oops, I had to go AFK after posting this and didn’t get to clarify as the comments were all being. I meant do Chinese people broadly believe in the conspiracy theories around GMOs such as causing cancer or making your DNA change or something like that. Of course GMOs are complicated science and are a tool used by capitalists to patentize (did I make up that word? Lol) the food industry, which is a natural science and typically difficult to patent.

  • urshanabi [he/they]
    2·
    9 months ago

    I think there are interventions that might work, e.g. golden rice which has more of some vitamin, creating hybrids of crops to make them disease resistant, I mean it’s already done, crops are sequenced and changes in their genome can be understood, modelled, and changed. It’s not trivial. Look at the wheat genome, it’s 16 Gbp (giga base pairs), which means letters like ATGC, for context the current reference human genome is around 3 Gbp. I recall when the wheat genome was sequenced, it was a mess of complexity,it’s been bred selectively so many times and has exaggerated features you wouldn’t find in nature. Understanding it to make major modifications might take some time. At the very least for now artificial selection can be done which is proven and works rather well.

    An issue with golden rice and all gmo’s are their ties to industry. Golden rice I think was opposed by local farmers because they may have been displaced or at the beck and call of who owns the IP and rights of the crop. I don’t really recall and don’t want to go searching.

    I’m only against gmo business practices, and it’s hard to decouple the publicly funded research with cruddy profit-seeking behaviour.

    Just recall that there’s more than enough land to feed the entirety of the world’s population. Companies need to stop discarding & wasting food. People in the Global North would have to eat less meat to open up agriculture from feed & domesticated animals to food which can directly feed humans. There is significant energy loss in the Plant>Animal>Human pipeline.

    A genuine problem is the effect of climate change on agriculture. Many crops and arable land will be lost.