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Comment by run4yourlives | Hacker News Reader

Most people would take "organic" in this context to mean "natural", as in if you plant one seed, you can grow a crop, save some of the harvest and replant the seeds for next year, like we've been doing since we started farming.

That is what Monsanto wants to stop.

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This is amazingly naive to think that we human have practiced anything close to what you state. From advent of agriculture, the practice has been to mix and match various plant species to get the best produce at lowest cost. We have destroyed huge amount of bio-diversity in the process. For example, of hundreds of banana species that existed, there is now only few, and all bananas are essentially clone of each other.

We have far left behind the days when agriculture was "natural", what ever that word means. The only difference that GM food bring to table is that we can now actively modify genes without taking a guess of what to mix with what.

Hating Monsanto might be understandable, but it only shows how patent system is broken, rather than a group of innovator being evil.

Don't like Monsanto, stop using them. Let them die without profit as no one would buy their stuff. But I guess great motive of money is stopping the "small" farmers from doing that.

If I have to choose between "plant one seed, save some of the harvest, and replant the seeds for next year" and saving the lives of a billion(10^9) people from starvation, I'm picking the latter.

this is what the Green Revolution did.

That's a false dichotomy.

In theory, it is, but in practice, the Green Revolution hybrid(very carefully cross-bred) seeds required you to get new seeds every year, because the seeds you'd get from your harvest would be cross-pollinated improperly. GMO could possibly bridge this gap, but you don't want GM crops cross-pollinating with everyone else's, if only because if it cross-pollinates with an organic farmer's crops, the latter can lose their organic certification. The solution to this is the terminator gene, that makes it impossible for such a situation to happen.

I'm not going to support Monsanto's IP actions here, but they aren't pure evil the way, say, De Beers is.

The reason for the terminator gene is not to support the Green Revolution however. The practice was successfully carried out in North America long before GURT was even conceived.

The reason for the gene is to ensure Monsanto's share price continues to rise, by ensuring a recurring stream of income from a product that was never previously purchased beyond initial implementation.

Hence, false dichotomy.

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