Intelligence Squared, an organization that organizes public debates across the globe, holds them in traditional Oxford debating style which pits one team against another in swaying a voting audience for or against the motion in question.
The winner was decided through votes held before and after the debate, online and at the hall where the debate was held. Garnering a 28 percentage point increase in support, the ‘for’ speakers gained the victory on the night 60 – 31 percent.
In the opening round of the debate, the ‘for’ scientists–Robert Fraley, vice president of Monsanto, and Alison Van Eenennaam of the University of California, Davis–hung their argument on the safety and environmental record of current GE crops and their documented benefits, as well as the potential they hold for feeding a growing population with less environmental impact.
First to speak Fraley, argued that during the 1990s adoption of insect resistant crops saw a “dramatic reduction in insecticide use and an increase in crop yields” while herbicide tolerant crops had a beneficial impact by “enabling farmers to use safer and more environmentally friendly chemicals” and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Fraley compared the scientific consensus on their safety to that on the role of greenhouse gases in climate change, with Van Eenannaam using the scientific literature to defend their safety and benefits for the environment and farmers
Van Eenennaam made the case that many current publicly funded applications of the technology are “compatible with agroecology, sustainability,and feeding more people better with less environmental impact.”
“GM is sometimes uniquely able to deliver a useful trait, like crops that are more resilient to climate change,” said Van Eenennaam,
Speaking against the motion–Charles Benbrook of Washington State University and Margaret Mellon, formerly of the Union of Concerned Scientists–played down the importance of genetic engineering in feeding a growing population without further damaging the environment. Questioning how successful the technology has been at living up to its early promises, they argued that any initial benefits have withered, and that continued investment in developing new GE varieties distracts attention from other, more promising agricultural tools.
“I’ve read essentially all of the statements by various bodies,” said Benbrook. “Most of the recommendations for better science, more careful risk assessment, and post-market surveillance that have been made for more than 15 years, in these reports, have not been acted upon.”
Mellon said that how the efficacy of herbicide resistant crops has fallen as resistant weeds have developed. She described how early falls in herbicide use are being offset by recent increases and that there is “nothing ahead of us except skyrocketing use, not only of glyphosate, which is the major herbicide in Roundup, but of other herbicides… herbicides we thought we’d never have to use much of again.”
Fraley, a 2013 World Food Prize Laureate, responded by noting that weed resistance develops to all herbicides eventually, which is not a reason to abandon using herbicides and is not unique to GMO crops. “You’ve all heard of antibiotic resistance, so what should drug companies do? Should they not develop new antibiotics simply because there’s resistance to an antibiotic?” he said.
Both Mellon and Benbrook focused much of their ire on the use of glyphosate, which they suggested could pose dangers to humans, which the research by mainstream scientists does not support. It was also pointed out that both scientists had previously heaped praise on glyphosate because it profiles as a very mild herbicide compared to the chemicals it has replaced, and is less toxic than many organic herbicides.
Benbrook also focused on existing crops, asking of Bt corn “what the impacts of the Bt proteins that are all throughout that plant are on the environment, on aquatic ecosystems, on the cost to farmers.”
Following the opening statements the chair pressed both sides on the safety issue. Mellon argued that despite the safety record on acute health effects there was a dearth of evidence on subtler, long term effects. Benbrook suggested the safety of stacking traits – introducing several desirable genes into a single crop – has not been adequately assessed.
Benbrook denied that there exists a scientific consensus on the safety of GMO crops, although he did not site any independent organization that has challenged the benign views expressed by the National Academy of Sciences, World Health Organization and the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences, among dozens of global organizations.
Both speakers for the motion defended the robustness of the safety literature. Van Eenannaam cautioned against making blanket assertions about safety, but also explained the implausibility of the hypothesis that stacked traits would introduce new concerns.
Another seam running through the evening’s discussion was the environmental impacts of GE crops, with a particular focus on the use of glyphosate. Responding to an audience question from Bill Nye about the appropriate amount of time needed to assess ecological effects of GE crops, Mellon pointed out that the decline of monarch butterflies showed that effects could be felt within decades. Van Eenannaam responded by pointing out that was conflating the technology with other issues, namely weed control, as there GM crops have no direct impact on butterflies or other insects.
Addressing the issue of whether GE crops be instrumental in feeding a growing population, the ‘against’ speakers highlighted trade problems stemming from the patchy adoption of GE foods across the globe. Fraley downplayed this point as “really minor against the context of the benefits that these products have provided for food security.”
Mellon also pointed towards a research project that had developed far more crop varieties able to survive nitrogen poor African soils through conventional breeding that through genetic engineering.
“We need to be clear about what genetic engineering can’t do,” said Mellon. “We’ve got other technologies out there. They’re far more powerful than genetic engineering.”
Common ground was almost reached on the necessary use of non-GE technology in answering food security challenges, but Van Eenannaam warned over framing the issue as a choice between mutually exclusive approaches.
Both sides also agreed there was too much attention on genetic engineering, but for separate reasons. Those against the motion argued that the technology’s record does not justify further investment, and that nothing lies ahead except a chemical arms race with resistant weeds. Those for the motion argued the scaremongering over hypothetical risks has skewed the debate and stifled development of beneficial products.
“Sometimes the risks that concern people and the risks that kill people are entirely different,” Van Eenannaam said.
Decades of research and safety evaluations vs “But what if’s”
The audience was not fooled.
The poll methodology was not released. The poll is invalid…this is just another PR gimmick that merchants of junk have to employ to sell crap no intelligent sane human would ever voluntarily buy.
Benbrook knows darn well that he’s just being downright disingenuous when he claims that there’s no info on the effects of Bt crops economically on farmers. I know darn well he has heard from (ok, yeah, but was he actually listening??) farmers who, in the same room as Benbrook, testified that their yields were up, their profits were up, their uses of more harmful pesticides down. (maybe he was asleep)
Benbrook, talk to a GE farmer rather than just making up hypothetical blather. Your credibility sinks everytime you open your mouth, as the results of the poll showed.
Oddly enough, the before and after votes are about the same as the “before” and “after” votes on gmo labeling in Colorado. Which reinforces my belief that the more people heard about labeling, the more they decided to vote No. The more people hear about the science of gmos, the less “fearful” they become, and the more generally supportive.
It is the same thing that all surveys show on the topic. People don’t know what it is, they just don’t like it. That’s a residue of the manufactured risk by anti-GMs. When people can learn about the process and products, how they help farmers, and how they could help the poor (if they were allowed to), they actually think it’s pretty cool.
If the polling was done correctly, and that’s a big IF, because methodology was not posted-there are only two explanations for the outcome
1) the audience wasn’t randomly picked but was stacked with GMO supporters
or
2) the audience was clueless and voted for style over substance.
Both reviews Van E’s cited were scientifically deplorable junk
http://beachvethospital.blogspot.com/2014/10/gmo-junk-science-meets-junk-journalism.html
http://rightbiotech.tumblr.com/post/103665842150/correlation-is-not-causation
Or rather more plausibly, swing voters were more convinced by the pro-GM argument by a factor or 2:1. The results don’t declare the inner thoughts of audience members, but dismissing it as “clueless audience votes for style over substance” just because you don’t like the outcome is pathetic.
Although not quite as comical as declaring that IQ2 (presumably Monsanto stooges to a man?) must have packed the audience with pro-GM supporters (presumably primed to give roughly balanced pre-debate indications of their leanings).
Also, bear in mind that this is a debate — it reflects how convinced a general audience was by the speakers’ arguments. Since the before-debate views were pretty equal, the unambiguous conclusion is that pro-GM was felt to be more convincing on average. That’s not the same as a truly expert and comprehensive review of the evidence, where… erm, the support for GM (the technology, if not necessarily every way in which it is used) is pretty much unanimous.
It is only unanimous among science illiterates who haven’t bothered to read or don’t comprehend the evidence ( including the junk science I cited above), among clueless politicians paid off by entrenched special interests and GMO junk scientists with personal conflicts of interest- hocking junk, just like so many used car salespeople -no offense to used car sales staff, really.
I guess “illiterate” and “paid off” describes the scientists at the National Academy of Science, European Commission, Germany Academy of Science, French Academy of Science, Royal Academy of Science and the World Health Organization, when the anti-GMO scientists, dedicated ideologues scornful of independent empirically reviewed science and on the pay of the organic industry, are the good guys. Welcome to Alice’s Wonderland.
Write a scientific rebuttal to my critique of the chicken study you peddled.
I am sorry to disagree with you I am a stickler for accuracy and rigorous science, so I don’t engage in guesswork. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this poll is that to say: ” no valid conclusions can be drawn from an unscientifically conducted poll”
I’m a fan of accuracy, too, but not being a “scientific” study doesn’t mean there is no information contained in the results.
They never claimed it to be a scientific study or representative poll — it was a debate: a measure of ability to persuade others using a mixture of fact and rhetorical skill. As debates go, I think the reporting of before and after voting numbers, and provision of the research references on which each side leaned were very good practice. There’s no clear evidence of bias from the chair, and I’d love to know the basis for claims going around that 30% of the audience was paid by Monsanto! Can you imagine them taking the risk for reputational damage that would involve!? Seems to me more likely that it’s an invention of commentators so invested in an anti-GMO stance that they can’t possibly imagine anyone voting for GMOs without being paid to do so (I for one am still waiting on my big fat cheque).
Within the confines of this debate format, and noting that this result doesn’t necessarily extrapolate to other audiences or to whole populations, there are still some interesting quantitative indications here that a balanced audience in a well-chaired debate with some emphasis on presenting evidence base for claims was more convinced by the pro-GMO position than the anti-GMO one. It would be an error to claim more than that, but those restrictions don’t make it invalid or uninteresting. It’s better methodology than quite a few research papers that anti-GMO campaigners like to cite!
This unscientific poll was promoted all over Twitter and social media as a component of aggressive biotech advertising campaign.. very similar to tactics used by tobacco corporations. And if you haven’t yet noted the parallels between agricultural GMOs with its companiion toxic health-damaging herbicides, denial of evidence of harm, and attacks on independent scientists–the playbook the two use is identical.
” In Denmark, for example, we have created a coalition known (in English) as the Committee for Freedom of Commercial Expression. We were able to recuit more than 50 prominent Danes, including a leading Constitutional lawyer, the President of a major brewery, a leading Danish writer and philospherand a well known architecf . The group has lobbied, conducted media briefings, participated indebates, and written articles and conducted andpublicized an opinion poll which showed more than 70% of Danes opposed the EEC AdvertisingDirective / and any move to ban tobaccoadvertising. What tangible results has thisproduced? http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_Dollisson
No, this debate wasn’t organized to debate the science-it was manufactured as a component of a larger campaign to sell Americans on something all other societies reject, and rightly so.
It was organised by a commercial debate hosting organisation, and operated according to their normal procedures. Are you suggesting that an international debate company was set up specifically as a route to manipulate US opinion on GMOs? I can think of better disinformation strategies!
What specific methodology do you want to know? They publish before and after numbers, tracking the migration between those groups. There may be a selection effect in the class of people who bought tickets for the event (I’d guess that people who want to spend an evening watching a debate probably have above-average income and education), but the “before” numbers indicate that there was not a large prior bias in either direction — and a substantial population of undecideds. Again, it wasn’t a “real poll”, or “scientific study” it was a commercial debate. The conclusions represent little more than what that room of people thought; promoting that across social media may be in danger of extrapolation, but certainly no worse than the egregious abuses of data carried out in the name of anti-GMO campaigning.
The rest of your post above is not about GMOs or agriculture at all, except in that you’ve decided that whatever was done by tobacco companies *must* be what ag companies are doing, too. You don’t have any evidence for your accusations about lack of testing (actually heavily tested) and health risks (heavily studied, rejected); and actually there is an awful lot of independent non-junk science that supports the position that there is no particular human or ecosystem health issue with GMOs. More than organic has been studied, incidentally, so why not include them in your complaint of untested methods? (And of benefiting Big Ag: https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/01/12/cornucopia-institute-organic-farms-industrializing-as-sustainability-benefits-of-gmo-crops-rise/ )
Incidentally, the EU just relaxed its ban on GMO cultivation, so you can stop pointing at “more enlightened societies” as if the actions of European governments are the ultimate arbiter of right & wrong.
Start with criteria used to select the audience–the basics to assure us the poll didn’t have selection bias!
By the way, you are misrepresenting the EU position entirely. The law allows individual countries to ban GMO cultivation. Don’t get your hopes up–they will reject them with a few exceptions (Norway for example only allows GMO for fish food)
Not sure what I said that was an “entire misrepresentation”. It’s a significant relaxation of the previous position; not an enforcement that they must be permitted, but the removal of atop-down ban that several countries were unhappy with and which ran against mainstream scientific opinion. As for uptake of the new rights, let’s see what happens.
http://www.foeeurope.org/european-parliament-votes-new-powers-governments-ban-GM-crops-130115
I also looked for this, and as far as I can tell the audience was self-selected by whether they wanted to pay to watch a debate. It never claimed to be representative of wider society. However, they were roughly balanced in their pre-debate views and the shift is clear. Read into it whatever you like — I suspect that it just indicates that this kind of audience found the pro-GM arguments more convincing. Nothing more, nothing less.
There is no way to determine if your conclusions are correct or not without methodology of the poll being disclosed, including selection criteria , which weren’t posted in spite of dozens of requests- a serious breach of scientific ethics for which Intelligence squared should be censured. The fact is that you are still defending guesswork in spite of being provided links below to scientific standards for polls by a professional organization of poll-takers.
Sorry- we have huge differences in opinion we aren’t going to brigdge on what constitutes rigorous science.
It’s not rigorous science: we agree on that. They never claimed that it was. But neither was it a complete procedural mess, so I think we can be fairly sure that the numbers of people in that room during that event did indeed vote as they have been reported to. Did anyone claim more?
Re. the “selection criteria”, look on IQ2’s website: you can attend and vote if you click the “Add to basket” link and pay £10. IQ2 is a commercial entertainment business, not a conductor of representative public opinion polls. Judging it by the standards of the latter is absurd.
This is my last comment-you are willfully obtuse-
It is impossible to draw ANY CONCLUSIONS FROM AN UNSCIENTIFIC POLL.
Results are about as accurate as asking your neighborhood psychic. The poll was NOT done to scientific standards-unsurprising at all coming from Monsanto.
Keep on supporting junk-science!
Good bye!
:)
a) It wasn’t a poll
b) It didn’t come from Monsanto
c) No-one’s claiming more than that a debate was won by a pro-GM argument, starting from a balanced audience position
You seem to be the only person who wants to interpret this as an opinion poll.
Thought experiment: the EU just voted on passing responsibility for GMO regulation to individual states. Was the sampled population representative? In a technical sense, yes, but certainly subject to selection bias. Was it a scientific poll? No. Does this mean that the result is any doubt and the implications unimportant? No.
Bye.
That’s funny. Citing yourself, a vet, as an expert on genetic engineering. Got junk??
That’s funny. Got anything besides ad hominem and useless lists that you don’t comprehend?
Talk about your area of expertise- philosophy & presstitution.
Lol @ ‘presstitution’! Very apt :)
dogtor just needs to save some time and just post…
“Read my blog
Please,Read my blog
Pretty Please, Read my blog”
More like ” refute my blog”, which has gone around for over a year and not one scientist has refuted yet, because…. wait for it
….. junk science is indefensible.
What no link to your blog???? Youre slipping…
not one scientist has refuted yet
Yep, the Ancient Alien guys say the same thing…
I suppose if the antis won the debate, the polling would have been fair and the audience randomized. I am waiting for a temper tantrum and crying like a little baby.
Ethics on methoddological disclosure apply to all polls. http://www.aapor.org/AAPORKentico/Standards-Ethics/Disclosure-FAQs.aspx
But whoever ever believed that Monsanto has any ethics?
First, the debate was not sponsored by Monsanto. Second, have you sent your questions to I squared, the people who sponsor the debate?
Yes I did-tweeted IQ2 dozens of times to publish poll methodology. They clearly didn’t.
Though I enjoyed the people in the “debates” it seemed the audience polls were gamed. I pay no attention to the declared “winners,” and eventually quit watching because of the seemingly gamed results. I also wanted to scream the questions or points I wanted people like Robert Reich to counter arguments by Laffer with (if the Laffer curve was used, it seemed we were well down, compared to the rest of the OECD countries, on the upslope, very far from sliding down the downslope).
Still, the gaming of the scoring, was what finally caused me to avoid the otherwise interesting debates.
Congratulations to Robert Fraley and Alison Van Eenennaam on an excellent debate. The massive shift from undecided to pro was a clear indicator of who had the better arguments. The immovable 30% of antis before and after the debate is a sad commentary on how “faith-based” the antis’ case against GMOs is. No evidence or argument will move these “stone heads.”
There was no shift– the poll was a joke, and the fact you are buying results of an unscientific poll demonstrates the science illiteracy that permeates the GMO cult.