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Comment by evandijk70 | Hacker News Reader

With regards to 'seed slavery's, how can farmers be worse of than they are now? They can always go back to the normal seeds if that is cheaper.

Regarding resistance, you could make the same arguments for any pesticide.

Moreover, this is about outlawing a technology. That should only be done if that technology forbid is harmful to the environment or public health. The farmers can then decide whether they should transition to other crops. That should not be imposed from above.

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Seeds have to be planted continuously to have more seeds. Their shelf-life is notoriously short. No, they cannot just return to their old seeds. They got ground into cornmeal and eaten long ago.

Is maize native to Kenya?

If you introduce proprietary seeds into the marketplace with considerably better yields, you can easily destroy the markets for the free-to-replant crops by lowering prices of the produce.

It's not outlawing a technology really, it's outlawing a middle-man who takes a sizable chunk of the profit.

Yes, if the proprietary seeds are so much better and cheaper that nobody will ever buy legacy seeds, the latter might go out of business. Isn’t it a good thing? It’s not like proprietary seed makers will then be able to rack up prices, as bringing legacy seeds back to market is cheap and doesn’t require large capital investment.

Double yields with more expensive seed, commodity prices halve due to higher yields (you never really gain income long term with increased productivity). But now instead of being able to replant your own seed, you have to buy expensive seed. You can't go back to the old less productive seed because the prices for the yields have gone down significantly.

This is a fully general argument against any progress: let’s not improve any production processes, because if we make stuff cheaper to make, everyone will have to do it the new, efficient way, which would be terrible. Just try to think of similar proposals in the realm of computing: imagine suggesting that hardware companies shouldn’t make CPUs and memory faster, because this will allow software to do more things and do them faster, which will force people to buy this new, more productive hardware, and will put out of business companies trying to develop software for and run it on old, less productive Pentium 4s.

This is extremely silly: with this attitude, we’d never have transformed our economy away from where majority people work in agriculture to where only a small fraction does, and the rest is freed to make other products and services nicer and more affordable.

They don't have to be "so much better" - they just have to be the few % better that represents farmer's thin margins.

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