Kat2

I'm not a pill person but in this case it might make sense.

Supplementation: Current international recommendations call for high-dose vitamin A supplementation every four to six months, targeted to all children between the ages of 6 to 59 months living in affected areas. Providing young children with two high-dose vitamin A capsules a year is a safe, cost-effective, efficient strategy for eliminating vitamin A deficiency and improving child survival. Giving vitamin A to new mothers who are breastfeeding helps protect their children during the first months of life and helps replenish the mother's stores of vitamin A, which are depleted during pregnancy and lactation. Childinfo.org: Statistics by Area - Vitamin A deficiency - The challenge

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neferset

If this works and if it's done as a humanitarian aid type thing and if the plant isn't dependent on fertilizers that the recipients must buy and if they accept it, it could be a good thing. I seem to remember programs like this existing since the 1970s (not GMO, at least not in the sense of anything more than breeding a different strain), though, and the problems getting people to adopt a new variety, the need for petrochemical fertilizers, etc etc. It's tricky when you don't work with native plants and unaltered plants, on an anthropological level.

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Caretaker of the Undead Meyer Lemon.

Hammocked Banana

Rob, it's very interesting to hear your opinion on GMO being from Hawaii. Roseanne Barr was on Howard Stern last week and she mentioned that they had banned GMOs on the big island and all I could think about was the papayas. She also believes in MK Ultra (gov't mind control bs) so what's that tell you. I agree 100% Genetic Engineering is a very misunderstood issue that is very hard to talk about with people. Firstly every one confuses Genetic Modification with Genetic engineering. GM is the modification of the genetic material in any way, including through natural breeding. Pancrazio made the argument that most frustrates me: that GMOs (GEOs***) are "bad for your health." This is a very ignorant blanket statement (sorry to point you out but its the perfect example). Let me ask the question, what makes it bad for your health? The plain and simple answer is nothing. I can assure you, nobody is using genetic engineering to insert genes into the plant that will make a human sick. What is the difference if the plant is bred naturally, requiring vast amounts of time and space, or simply bred in a lab by just inserting the gene of interest? The only difference to the plant that was GE'ed is that one gene to resist pests, drought, improve yield, etc. There is nothing in there to make you sick, or any cancer causing agents, etc. What is worse, a non-GEO plant that is sprayed with gallons of pesticide, hormones and other chemicals in order to get a successful crop, or a GEO that has the genes to naturally resist disease, crop failure due to drought, etc that does not need to be sprayed with artificial poisons? I am a person who grows entirely organic at my house, but I am also entirely for the use of science. Science is not our enemy.

Pancrazio

Honestly, I tried to say the opposite. This is what I referred to, when i said that evidently I can't express properly in English. Probably with a longer explanation i could have expressed better my thoughts. When i quote "because they are dangerous to human health" I quote one of the most abused argument against GMO, which i don't agree to (not totally, at least).

My point is that even if they are healthy, the way the are marketed now, is by itself a problem. So i don't even want to consider the health aspect because honestly, is a mess.

(The biggest problem with health issues is that you can, scientifically prove that something exists, but you can't prove that something doesn't exists. So it's easy to show when a product is unhealthy, it's impossible to demonstrate that something is harmless - here the reasonable frustration of gmo enthusiast which can't show conclusive prove that gmo are harmless for human consumption - even if they were! But even here the problem is complex: since we have let companies put their funds in scientific research, how can we be sure that scientific research is still impartial? Scientists are men, not saints.)

However, even if we agree on this point (that the health discussion shouldn't be started) there are a couple of things worth saying, just to enrich the topic, and i hope we can agree on them too.
Some GMO products are made to actually be able to use more chemicals. Take as example the soy beans roundup-ready. Is that desirable? In this regard they are worse than organic foods.
And again: how we can be certain that genetic material introduced in a specie won't end in another specie trough horizontal gene transfer?
And I'm still awaiting an explanation on how we can deal with patent issues, loss of biodiversity, companies monopolizing crucial sector of a society and so on...

I don't see myself as a fanatic, but i don't think that GMO should adopted light heartedly. Sort of "last resort" when everything else has failed (EVERYTHING). And I do firmly believe that often the hard way is the right one; and GMO are the easy way. When i see people in Africa with vit A deficiency I'm more inclined to think that they maybe need some more favorable commercial treaty with EU or USA (like, for instance, no foreign banana company harvesting their bananas) to increase their income (and allow them to access food richer in vit A), way more than a GMO banana.

Romance language are a nightmare. Being italian hasn't many upsides, but at least you haven't to learn italian, never ever. I pity the one which have to study it, along with spanish french and so on. I still have chills from the days I've had to study latin.

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Italian fruit forum

Hammocked Banana

Like I said sorry to point u out, but it was right there. Your last post was also fantastic, u covered how I feel also. It is essentially impossible to prove something is healthy, which is a big issue. Also agree 100% about the roud-up ready soy beans. This is what im opposed to, not the GEO aspect but the spraying of poisons. Your post expressed my views better than my post did. Like I said it is a very difficult issue to talk about. Also your English is not that bad at all.