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Having just spent several hours reading through this entire thread from the beginning I'm aware that several of the same themes keep getting recycled, and there's a fairly consistent pattern of thrust and parry using references to articles found on the internet, without anyone seeming to be moved to change their position, ever, by anything the other side posts.
I have a different viewpoint on this issue than many, and a lot has to do with personally knowing papaya farmers here on the Big Island of Hawai'i who would have lost their farms and lost their livelihood if it were not for the introduction of GMO papayas in 1999, when the University of Hawai'i distributed free seed to anyone who wanted it.
The history is fairly well documented... the delicious, juicy, nutritious fruit known as the Solo Papaya was a major export crop on Oahu until a viral disease which causes bad blemishes that make the fruit unsalable, called Papaya Ringspot Virus (PRSV) and spread by aphids, became so widespread that it destroyed the Oahu industry in the 1950s.
By the 1970s the papaya business had been rebooted on the Big Island, mostly by small farmers on family farms, who did their best to quarantine against aphids and the disease they carried. By the 1990s, however, the aphids had shown up and spread and were doing their damage, and the industry was ready to collapse again. Then a native born Hawaiian who had become a virologist at Cornell University, Dennis Gonsalves, Ph.D., with the assistance of one part-time researcher and a tiny research budget, used GMO technology to cause the papaya to immunize itself against the virus.
When grown out it had remarkable resistance to the disease, with no other detectable changes to the fruit, and the University of Hawai'i and CTAHR, the agricultural college, cooperated in getting the fruit tested and free seeds from it distributed to farmers in 1999. Since then there has been a remarkable rebound for the growers, including, after a 7 year testing period by the government of Japan, permission to resume shipping the fruit to Japan. And absolutely no credible evidence of any issues of food safety have shown up. None.
Now about 90% of the papayas grown in Hawai'i are GMO, and exports of fresh fruit are back to high levels. The small remainder grown non-GMO are mostly processed into jams and puree and dried fruit, which uses are unaffected by the PRSV blemishes, and a small amount is available as fresh fruit locally.
I'm clear, talking to my neighbors who own the small family farms where the GMO papayas are grown, that their livelihood, indeed their whole way of life, has been rescued by this remarkable GMO technology, developed by Dr. Gonsalves. Yet now anti-GMO activists are currently pressing an aggressive agenda with the Hawai'i County Council to try to limit the cultivation of these fruits to existing farms and farmers, and to impose other restrictions, without a single iota of scientifically valid evidence to support their views.
Meanwhile, across the ocean in Thailand, people are starving to death in remote agrarian communities where green papayas are the staple food, because they are under attack by another variant of the virus that causes PRSV. And concerned scientists have no question that a variation of the technology Dr. Gonsalves developed could reverse the epidemic. Unfortunately, Thailand, like several other Asian countries, adopted strict anti-GMO policies in the past, not based on any science, but simply based on fear. They didn't understand it, so they banned it, as so many other countries did. And now those restrictive laws are keeping them from benefiting from urgently needed breakthroughs that GMOs could provide.
And so, they've recently taken a remarkable step... Thailand, and Malaysia, and India and other Asian countries with national prohibitions against GMO technology have banded together in a consortium to finance new GMO research in neutral locations, to try to solve some of their most pressing problems.
And I enjoy my delicious SunUp and Rainbow papayas from the farmer's market for breakfast every morning, where I sometimes buy them 3/$1, often 5/$1 by closing time, which would easily sell for $3-5 each on the mainland, and seriously wonder why so many people are so blindly opposed to such a wonderful thing.
Given a choice between a GMO papaya and no papaya, I'll take the GMO papaya, no question.
i started a thread here some time back and was saddened to see that the vast majority of posters here would rather lose every orange tree in the country than even consider citrus trees made resistant to deadly citrus greening bacteria via the inclusion of a naturally-occurring gene found in spinach
Your bias is showing. There is no connection whatsoever between these tragic deaths and GMOs.
Also, you are mistaken about GMOs relying on pesticides... really, no more than conventional crops, and in many cases less. For example, bT corn incorporates the same natural pesticide that organic farmers have been using for over 50 years, which greatly reduces the need for chemical pesticides.
And that's what a lot of the many thousands of GMO projects around the world are aiming for... reducing the amount of fertilizer needed, reducing the amount of pesticide or herbicide needed, improving yield, making crops more drought resistant, increasing nutritional content, etc.
Why choose between GMO papayas and no papayas? Because I like papayas. If you don't like them you don't have to buy them.
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Do we REALLY need a GMO papaya or is there another agenda at play that just wants to "justify" genetic engineering?
No, it's pretty much exactly as I told it. No big secret organization at play, no hidden agenda. No corporate profits. Just a solo scientist trying to improve life a little back in his home state. And a lot of small farmers are grateful, because he saved their farms.
what is your alternative 'green' method for protecting papaya trees from papaya ringspot virus?
I can answer that, because there is only one method that has proven effective, and that is actually being used ... if you surround your plot of non-GMO papayas with GMO papayas, it cut down (not eliminates) the incidence of PRSV in the non-GMO papayas, since the GMO papayas don't harbor the disease. That's known as herd immunity.
Just a bit of info on the papaya -- SunUp is GE and contains genetic coding from the PRSV-P, the result is a vaccination of sorts, since the plant contains a portion of the viral code the plant is resistant to infection by that virus. Rainbow is an F1 hybrid created by breeding GE SunUp with a non-GE papaya. SunUp & Rainbow only work against Hawaiian strains of PRSV-P and don't work against PRSV-W (which infects cucurbrits like squash and watermelon). You can't take SunUp or Rainbow to Florida, much less Taiwan or Guam, and have it work because a different strain of PRSV-P exist there. However, you could use the same technique to "genetically innoculate" those plants against a local strain of the virus.
PRSV doesn't cause any ailments in humans when eaten or affect the flavor or nutrition, it just makes the skin of the fruit look mottled. It can, however, severely damage or kill the plant such that production drops drastically.
In this instance, GE is the only method that works consistently and reliably, other than complete isolation under netting. They tried all the conventional methods first (quarantine/removal/destruction, insect control, hybridization, rotation, etc) and those methods proved unsuccessful. Cross-protecting, a form of vaccination, was successful; but is cost and time prohibitive and less effective than the GE alternative. In Taiwan, sequestered growing under netting has been successful, although it is initially expensive to set up and requires slightly more maintenance and labor.
OpenD is correct - if you surround your non-GMO papaya with GMO papaya, it does create a barrier for transmission via aphid. Unfortunately, this also results in the eventual infiltration of GMO genetic material into the non-GMO crop so you'll end up with a 100% GMO field over time instead of just a barrier.
Dr. Gonzalez created SunUp to save the papayas (and secondarily the livelihood of papaya growers) and it was originally offered free to any farmer that wanted it. Somewhere along the line, Monsanto ended up with the patent and then "generously" extended open license to the Hawaiian Papaya Industry for use and distribution at their discretion. There are pros and cons to the GE varieties -- while they are resistant to PRSV, the seed is more expensive for unsubsidized growers, the plants require additional fertilization, and the fields must be replanted from new seed** more frequently than non GMO varieties, and producers have lost a portion of their market from countries that ban GMO.
** it is unclear why mature GE papayas must be uprooted and destroyed after 3 years. Does the resistance decline? Does the yield drop drastically? Is it a condition of the use license?
In the case of Papaya, the use of GE was arguably justified and appropriate because they had tried everything else and the extinction of the plants was at risk. The only other "green" option would be to produce under 100% netting to control transmission via aphid (non-green option is to systematically and routinely spray large amounts of pesticide to control the aphids). What is questionable is the privately-held patent and licensing for use (unlike Golden Rice which is public domain, and which SunUp papaya orginally was).
I think most people arguing against the current GMO industry would agree that GE may be appropriate for other crops which cannot be saved from extinction (i.e. the infection systematically destroys the plant) or permanent loss of use (i.e. the product is no longer useful once infected) by any other non-genetically-invasive means. But non-genetically-invasive means should be exhausted first, and the impact should be more than simply cosmetic or monetary, and the benefits universally tangible and accessible and not solely profit-driven.
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I'm aware that several of the same themes keep getting recycled, and there's a fairly consistent pattern of thrust and parry using references to articles found on the internet, without anyone seeming to be moved to change their position, ever, by anything the other side posts. 
