Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)(www.vanityfair.com)
57 pointsby kamaraju4 hours ago5 comments
  • tptacek3 hours ago
    These stories have all basically been debunked. Monsanto did sue farmers. But they did so in cases where they had evidence that those farmers were not only planting IP-encumbered seeds, but also spraying them with Roundup. You can't do that accidentally: if your seeds aren't genetically modified, Roundup kills your crop.
    • free_bip3 hours ago
      The entire concept of IP-encumbered seeds is cruel and dangerous.
      • derektank2 hours ago
        I do not think granting someone an exclusive right to sell their new cultivar for 20 years is particularly dangerous, especially when existing variants don’t disappear. I like that someone was incentivized to grow Pink Lady and Cosmic Crisp apples back in the 90s and 2010s and I struggle to see where any cruelty was involved.
        • tancopan hour ago
          The problem with patented seeds (and everything else) is the owner can decide who gets to use them. No one should hold that power.

          If patents worked as a royalty system where you're guaranteed to get a license if you pay there would be no problem. But right now Bayer can use their control over Roundup Ready plants to make farmers buy more products they don't need, or punish them for dealing with competitors, because they have a monopoly.

          And it also lets them set the price to anything they want because competing with them is illegal. Exclusive rights are always like that.

          • stephbookan hour ago
            Can't you just .. plant something else, lol? I don't think that's a monopoly, then.
        • dcrazy34 minutes ago
          Apple cultivars are interesting because they are often developed by governments motivated to promote the existence of a healthy farming industry, not by private monopoly rights. Case in point, the Cripps Pink (aka Pink Lady) was developed by the Western Australia Department of Agriculture, and the Cosmic Crisp was developed by Washington State University.

          (Honeycrisp is another fantastically successful government-funded cultivar, this time by the University of Minnesota. But it apparently led to the spontaneous breeding of the SugarBee, which is privately owned.)

        • tptacek2 hours ago
          And this isn't even a cultivar. It's a commodity crop in which the only difference between ordinary seeds and Monsanto's seeds is that you could use Monsanto's Roundup pesticide on them without killing them. The seeds were literally just a utility for using a specific Monsanto herbicide system.
      • tptacek2 hours ago
        Why, because without IP encumbrance farmers would be developing their own glyphosate-resistant shikimic acid pathway enzymes?
        • defrost17 minutes ago
          They're certainly creating and spinning off their own not for profit Grains Research & Development Corporations funded by harvest profits to keep creating variations for ANOVA trials.

          Along with doing the same for billion dollar port and rail grain handling spin-offs.

          Maybe not the farmers you're thinking of, but farmers in the world are.

    • Veserv2 hours ago
      Yep. Here is another comment of mine where I breakdown one of the most famous examples:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46176059

      And another comment where I discuss another example and their legally binding declaration to not sue over accidental contamination:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725426

    • qmr2 hours ago
      "IP-encumbered seeds" is a wild phrase.
  • nativeitan hour ago
    This brings back some memories. I was an admin for “Millions Against Monsanto”, a group on the still-nascent Facebook. I ultimately left because the org was overtaken by conspiracy theorists who couldn’t stop yelling about aspartame and antivax nonsense long enough to focus on the very real, and very alarming, actions of Monsanto. At this point in time it was still not considered “normal” to patent biological materials. I’m a bit more pragmatic, since I’ve grown past my college idealism, but I still don’t believe seeds should be considered patentable.
  • SlightlyLeftPad4 hours ago
    Where does Monsanto stand now? It’s been many years since HackerNews was AstroTurfed by them.
  • 21asdffdsa1231 minutes ago
    Look at life, or its systemic counterpart capitalism. Look at that attempt at an exponential. In that curve is all the cruelties, all the danger, all the colonialism, by eating other curves, all the failure because physics is linear on a sphere in the sun.

    Everytime somebody tries to emotionalize any discourse around any of these topics, look at the defining curve and think for yourself - "yeah, thats life, still preferable to death." - then go and solve that problem, or go an be absolved from that problem. Any vital system is expansive

    • tovej29 minutes ago
      Capitalism is not the equivalent of life, it's the equivalent of cancer. It forces uncontrolled growth within the system.
  • KennyBlanken3 hours ago
    I can't wait for all the usual Monsanto fanboys to start popping up with comments that show how wildly ignorant they are, with comments like "we need this tech to feed everyone!"

    1)Hunger is entirely artificial and is a problem of US farm bill policy and trade policy (not to mention using food to produce fuel that provides less energy than the energy required to grow it.) We pay farmers to grow and then till the food into the ground. Or to ship it to a warehouse where it rots. Massive amounts of food are thrown away by supermarkets. The list goes on.

    2)European farmers, who cannot use Roundup or a large swath of other pesticides and herbicides, *have greater per-acre productivity.