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Comment by vichu | Hacker News Reader

This is why I'm a proponent of genetically modified organisms in agriculture. The world needs to be fed and needs to be fed properly, and it is pure privilege to deny use of tools in our toolbox that abet solutions to global hunger. I won't deny the issues around the corporatization of farmland, vendor/seed lock-in and IP issues, and the litany of other issues around its use - but damn is it a viable solution for vitamin deficiency and a way forward through changing environments.

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GMOs for human consumption are not necessary. Enormous amounts of plant biomass are grown to feed livestock.

GMOs also have an issue of exposing the once very inert system to black swan events, health or environmental issues.

Similar thing happened with pesticides. Before GMOs can be used we should at least test them rigorously for a couple of generations. But yeah, that stuff did not happen with pesticides, cars or anything else that now has huge externalities.

Plants are used to feed livestock for their energy, not their nutrients.

GMOs would be used here to limit the amount of energy derived (carbohydrate) with regards to nutrient density.

Also, for what it's worth, part of the plant biomass used to feed livestock is inedible by humans (think cellulose).

Yeah, but the reason GMOs started was to improve yields for livestock-feed related plants and is the reason GMOs exist today (if we ignore cotton, which is GMO-ed primarily for the clothing). I'm pretty sure soybean is nutrient dense livestock feed, not just a carbohydrate source.

The only reason GMOs would exist for humans would be to improve the yields of most popular plants which are obviously not raised for nutrition but for taste. Almost every other plant in the world is produced in such minuscule amounts compared to soybean, wheat, maize and rice that there's no need for GMO.

I would say that enough land is spent on livestock feed that if we switched to meatless diets we would likely be able to feed everyone. There are regions only suited to food for livestock but most of the world imports food making it not an issue. The regions that don’t import food that tend to eat more meat from necessity are also likely to be the places that don’t contribute to overuse of land for livestock food.

I used to work on GMOs and I fully believe that they are an important part of the solution to world hunger. But increasingly I feel that the same types of corporations/stockholders/countries that are directly/indirectly responsible for the dire state of the environment and all that will flow from it, are the same ones who will benefit from everyone being forced to use GMOs.

The answer is to end capitalism, so that the GMOs are no longer controlled by corporations that no longer exist.

The world does need GMOs, I just wish that all GMO's that are sold for human consumption were required to have their genome available under an open source license.

Side note to your main point: the IP issues around GMOs are little different than the IP issues around other types of agritech, so I don't think it's a huge concern.

Governments and non profits are free to make GMOs that are available to all without IP issues, too, as has been done with golden rice.

golden rice isn't free if you want to make money off of it (more than $10k it seems). And none has ever been grown for consumption it seems.

On the plus side of golden rice taking so long to amount to anything, any patents from back in 2000 when the non-commercial licensing thing dates from have almost certainly expired; it should be unencumbered by now.

I'm exasperated by the holdup on golden rice. I'd buy a sack of it and put it in the ground myself if it were on the market.

I'm not finding anything like what you're talking about in my web searches, could you expand on that a bit with some sources?

http://www.goldenrice.org/Content1-Who/who4_IP.php

underneath "The essence of the Sublicensing Agreement"

Great, thank you! Is this an attempt to decommodify food (in the Marxist sense)? Do non-corporate farmers typically make more than $10k/year in developing countries?

Beats me. I literally just googled golden rice 10,000, found what you were looking for, and dropped in a link.

> Side note to your main point: the IP issues around GMOs are little different than the IP issues around other types of agritech, so I don't think it's a huge concern.

I'm no expert on the issue, but from what I'm aware this is not true.

At least in the EU it seems there's now largely a consensus that non-GMO plants can't be patented:

https://legacy.euroseeds.eu/european-patent-office-follows-e...

There are still other IP rights that can apply to plants, but patents are a very different beast.

This may differ based on jurisdiction; in the US plants (including fungi) are patentable.

From the US Patent Office:

https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/patent-basics/...

As just one example, the University of Minnesota got $6M in payments for their patent on HoneyCrisp apples before the patent expired:

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2007/10/11/honeycrisp

“Full speed ahead and damn the licensing issues!”

I think we should also understand the cause of this deficiency.

E.g. the increased CO2 may be causing the bulk of the plant to grow bigger while the overall production of nutrients remains stable (nitrogen-limited ?) resulting in a lower concentration.

Adapting fertilisers might improve this. Or not.

Indeed. Genetic modification is doing with a scalpel what we've been doing with a sledgehammer for thousands of years with selective breeding and hybridizing.

Yep. And both tools can be used carefully or carelessly.

Do you have an example of selective breeding that resulted in a negative outcome?

High fructose corn syrup, broiler chickens who can barely stand up, pugs who can barely breathe, crops prone to blight.

"The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi has an interesting part of the plot involving GMO food and companies.

Also his short story, Calorie Man: http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Society/WINDUP-STORIES.h...

also https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/genetically-modifi...

So we need open-source and probably government funded (UN-funded ?) vegetables.

> it is pure privilege to deny use of tools in our toolbox that abet solutions to global hunger

I'm curious if you support the solution of allowing human population to decrease by encouraging fewer children.

corporations are not incentivized to make GMOs that are more nutritious. experience shows that they are more likely to make GMOs to sell more pesticide

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