There's nothing ethically ambiguous about Monsanto. You'd be hard-pressed to name an organization of any ilk that's actively perpetrating more devastating evil.
Also, there's a very good reason you put "green revolution" in quotes, and "agricultural productivity" deserved them in that context also.
The problem is we now have a food system that is:
- reliant on genetic monocultures
- quickly depleting our non-renewable water supplies
- heavily reliant on oil
- causing massive algal blooms and hypoxic zones
- destroying the thickness of the soil
- depleting the soil of micronutrients
- killing the mycorrhizae
The way we're going there is a very real possibility of 1 billion plus people dying in the next fifty years as part of a massive human dieback because of our current Monsanto-style food production.
Not to mention the fact that even today our food is largely devoid of any taste or real nutritional content, and is causing epidemic levels of obesity, diabetes, cancer, etc.
Tell me, since you obviously know so much about the worlds current problem with food.
Why is it that food production has gone up, yet the number of starving and hungry individuals throughout the world hasn't changed significantly?
The answer is there isn't a food abundance problem, there is a food availability problem. People don't grow crops and just give them away to the poor; the fact that monsanto has created genetically engineered foods that do things such as resist pesticides, so that large quantities of pesticides can be dumped onto crops without killing them, thus creating, "more food" because less is lost to pests, doesn't get any more food into the belly of starving people around the world.
In fact, the abundance of things like cheap corn around the world is one of the very reasons continents like africa can't ever seem to get on their feet; why would someone buy local african corn that's more expensive than cheaply grown american corn? Undercutting local economies with cheap food has not "feed the world" and does more damage than good.
Monsanto hasn't done a damn thing to allow, "the human population to grow while malnourishment shrinks", that's total absolute garbage.
I'd recommend you ask for more money from your monsanto employers, and if you don't work for them, maybe do some actual research into the company you are defending instead of spewing bullshit that looks like it's been copy pasted from a monsanto PR brochure.
Patenting genetics is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of, and you call this ambiguous? You are a fool.
Care to back that up with evidence?
The Global hunger index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Hunger_Index), indicates that hunger has decreased over the past 20 years. Out of the 30 countries with the most hunger, only 3 have more hunger now than 20 years ago. Every country on that list has had hunger decrease of stay still, with the majority of them seeing less hunger.
The green revolution (as led by Norman Borlaug not Monsanto) may be able to take credit for some of the advances during the 60s and 70s but any advances due to Monsanto in recent years cannot be made up for by their completely unjust business practices as others have mentioned.
I am also disappointed in hearing that a YC company is going this direction.
people deal with monsanto voluntarily. nobody is making you buy their seeds. the fact that so many do suggest that their advances in gmos are indeed worth the cost.