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Comment by sdeframond | Hacker News Reader

Many businesses are not thinking long term. Farming businesses are businesses too, and may prefer short term profitability over long term sustainability.

See for example the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, which is at the same time an existential threat to to farming and caused by farming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

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This is a tragedy of the commons and not comparable to a singular farmer making a singular decision about what to plant on his field.

Imagine if hypothetically a supplier offered very competitive - maybe even loss-making - prices when they had 25% of the market; then once they had 90% of the market and most of their competitors had gone out of business, they planned to raise prices substantially, make back the loss, and produce a big profit.

Isn't each customer's decision to buy (or not buy) from the loss-making supplier a tragedy-of-the-commons situation?

I struggle for an example of that actually working. If it does it must be exceedingly rare. I can think of lots of example of having 25% of the market and then getting closer to the majority by cutting prices, but the part where they jack them back up usually doesn't work. For instance, Rockefeller did that to put his competition out of business, but then the price of Kerosene just kept going down.

The times where it actually worked (railroad) was because the people doing it convinced the government afterwards to "protect the market" (interstate commerce act) and created a violence enforced cartel that prohibited by law rebates and other methods by which cartels (and pre-ICA railroad cartels) commonly fall apart.

Once mosanto has 90% of the market and they jack up their prices. Farmers can go back to growing non-GMO seeds and not using round up to weed.

Another hilarious thing about the argument is that Roundup, and also the gene package involved in Roundup Ready plants, are now in the public domain. The patents are expired.

There's nothing preventing a country from just ignoring patents, too. That pretty much happened in India with Bt cotton, engineered to express an insecticidal protein. Gray market seeds with the trait became widely available there and the foreign patent holders judged it not worthwhile to try to prosecute. This was all very good news for Indian cotton farmers, especially considering the personal cost to them of exposure to the pesticides they'd otherwise have to have used.

Imagine if Monsanto just murdered every farmer that didn't use their seeds.

Both are equally legal.

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