Thread

Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)

96 points · 38 comments · kamaraju

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SlightlyLeftPad · 1789614131 · focus · HN ↗
Where does Monsanto stand now? It’s been many years since HackerNews was AstroTurfed by them.
1. theChaparral · 1789617264 · focus · HN ↗
  Monsanto was bought by Bayer who kept the products and killed off the name.
2. downrightmike · 1789618007 · focus · HN ↗
  I just found out that farmers spray enough of the chems to kill all the plants off so they can be harvested at the same time. They aren't applying it just to grow, they then pump it full of them and then we eat that. No wonder why people are getting sick from it.
  1. seattle_spring · 1789618847 · focus · HN ↗
    Source?
    downrightmike · 1789619161 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.cornucopia.org/2017/10/glyphosate-used-kill-prepare-crops-harvest/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cornucopia.org/2017/10/glyphosate-used-kill-prep...
    quickthrowman · 1789661864 · focus · HN ↗
    Now provide a source that has proof that glyphosate makes people sick. I’m pretty sure that’s what proof they were asking for anyways, it’s no secret that glyphosate is used as a desiccant prior to harvest.
  2. SlightlyLeftPad · 1789622057 · focus · HN ↗
    Not sure why this was downvoted. AstroTurf?
    Anyway, this was really what I was looking for anyway. Thanks.
KennyBlanken · 1789617619 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. opo · 1789669571 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
2. lithocarpus · 1789671672 · focus · HN ↗
  Not to detract from your point that chemicals are not necessary for high food production.
  But just to point out that Europe does use glyphosate, on something like 1/3 of crops.
  <a href="https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145682" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145682 Antier et al. (2020) Glyphosate Use in the European Agricultural Sector and a Framework for Its Further Monitoring, Sustainability, 12(14), 5682.
tptacek · 1789617633 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. free_bip · 1789618274 · focus · HN ↗
  The entire concept of IP-encumbered seeds is cruel and dangerous.
  1. tptacek · 1789619025 · focus · HN ↗
    Why, because without IP encumbrance farmers would be developing their own glyphosate-resistant shikimic acid pathway enzymes?
    defrost · 1789626772 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. derektank · 1789620894 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    tptacek · 1789620995 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    tancop · 1789624230 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    stephbook · 1789624342 · focus · HN ↗
    Can't you just .. plant something else, lol? I don't think that's a monopoly, then.
    ivandenysov · 1789636882 · focus · HN ↗
    Prisoner’s dilemma: margins are razor thin. If your fellow farmers use better seeds then you are forced to use them as well. Otherwise you won’t be able to match their prices without selling at a loss.
    thechao · 1789645944 · focus · HN ↗
    Only if the cost of monsanto seed + roundup is less than the cost of regular seed per expected harvested bushel? Otherwise, no one would use the monsanto seed + roundup?
    tptacek · 1789653535 · focus · HN ↗
    That's true of any productivity enhancement. If your neighbors use more efficient tractors you're at the same disadvantage, but nobody argues that farmers should be able to steal tractors.
    tavavex · 1789658205 · focus · HN ↗
    The parent has to do with permission, not stealing. Imagine if your neighbors could have an exclusive license to buy the new obviously superior tractor which you will never be able to obtain no matter what you do, simply because you're not them. This is legal today, the argument is that it shouldn't be because it punishes competition and lets the rights-holder wield too much power over the market.
    tptacek · 1789660292 · focus · HN ↗
    No, anybody can buy into the Roundup Ready system; it's not exclusively licensed.
    quickthrowman · 1789661590 · focus · HN ↗
    The farmer isn’t forced to grow soybeans, corn, canola, cotton, beets, or alfalfa. Those are the crops which roundup ready variants exist for. They’re free to use organic pesticides and alternate seeds which some farmers do.
    Your analogy is flawed, Bayer isn’t preventing anyone from buying glyphosate and roundup ready seeds, they’ll sell to any willing buyer.
    dcrazy · 1789625723 · focus · HN ↗
    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.)
2. qmr · 1789620246 · focus · HN ↗
  "IP-encumbered seeds" is a wild phrase.
3. Veserv · 1789621881 · focus · HN ↗
  Yep. Here is another comment of mine where I breakdown one of the most famous examples:
  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46176059">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46176059
nativeit · 1789622471 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. bigbadfeline · 1789688819 · focus · HN ↗
  > I ultimately left because the org was overtaken by conspiracy theorists who couldn’t stop yelling about aspartame and antivax nonsense
  A textbook subversive operation.
21asdffdsa12 · 1789625927 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. tovej · 1789626064 · focus · HN ↗
  Capitalism is not the equivalent of life, it's the equivalent of cancer. It forces uncontrolled growth within the system.
  1. 21asdffdsa12 · 1789643471 · focus · HN ↗
    Uncontrolled growth within a system- sounds like nature to me.
    mikem170 · 1789653971 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    tovej · 1789727008 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and the focus on growth in general. There is a sustainable amount of goods and services that need to be produced. Capitalism forced the economy to go beyond that many decades ago.
    tavavex · 1789659157 · focus · HN ↗
    Nature has existed at a relative equilibrium for billions of years. It changed, but there was never a single thing that could take over the entire system.
    It took humans a few hundred years under the current system to start a mass extinction event and begin dismantling the ecosystem we rely on. And we are ready to go 10x further if it means someone somewhere else makes a few more dollars.
    Cancer is the most apt comparison, actually. At a system level we don't care for survival or long-term viability, only replication and exploitation.
    21asdffdsa12 · 1789713874 · focus · HN ↗
    That is - a anthropomorphization of nature- assuming what is nice and "stable" to me, is not actually furiously attacking one another. Nature had buildup of warfare materials (the plastic that was trees before fungi digested it).
    Nature had campaigns ebb and flow, due to iceages and warmspells, had island holdouts being wiped-out by systems adapted to furious combat on continents (invasive species).
    Your picture of nature is very much distorted by a rejection of a rather cthullian reality.
    What you mistake for peace is a coldwar equilibrium, where all sites furiously roll the dice of research for new war-tech- and then humans came along. Humans are very much a natural system doing natural things, very successful though.
    tovej · 1789726927 · focus · HN ↗
    Cancer is natural, "natural" does not mean good. This focus on things being "natural" is very strange when we're discussing artificial constructs like the economy or technology.
    Technology and capitalism are not natural phenomena, they are political ones.
    You are conveniently ignoring the comparison to cancer. Capitalism and cancer both demand growth at the cost of everything else. This is what leads to them destroying the systems they inhabit.
    tovej · 1789726702 · focus · HN ↗
    Growth is checked by balancing processes in nature. Every "exponential" in nature is actually a sigmoid. Growth is a means in nature, in shareholder capitalism, it is an end.
    Shareholder capitalism explicitly ignores natural constraints in order to chase a constant rate of growth. That's what cancer does, it eats up resources from other cells in the organism in order to do nothing but grow, killing the organism in the process.
internet_points · 1789629212 · focus · HN ↗
Speaking of poison, does washing fruit and vegs help? Or is it like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-second_rule" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-second_rule
1. orwin · 1789635615 · focus · HN ↗
  depends on the product and when its applied. for potatoes sprout inhibitors, the old product you definitely needed to remove the skin and every touched part. For the new stuff (i think its ethylène or something like that), washing it is enough (so you can now eat potato skin in europe). I would still wash my fruits just because of the transport though.

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