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Comment by quickthrowman | Hacker News Reader

> There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.

I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically modified glyphosate tolerant soybeans and corn, they’re mostly fed to animals anyways.

Crossbreeding plants is genetic modification.

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Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.

Essentially turning

> You wouldn't download a car

into

> You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop.

Which is obviously absurd.

So while GM has enabled some pretty good things, it also comes with the same sort of intellectual property baggage that plagues many different areas of society, which on the face of it make some sense, but always seem to skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life, squeezing from those who have less to begin with.

I don't think the case law supports this argument that farmers got roped into subscription crops. Farmers use this system because it has value, and is economically superior to the systems that preceded it (or they don't use it).

There is a problem though. If you opt out of it and just use seeds without any IP and your neighbor uses IP seeds and some of the seeds are blowing into your field from your neighbour you risk trouble.

No in fact you do not. This is an Internet/activist myth.

Source that it is legal to keep the profits and the plants from a patented crop that can’t be prove you have intentionally planted it there? As far as I understand Montosanto claims it would always belong to them no matter how the seed ended up there.

Feel free to cite the case they've brought where they claim that!

They have sued farmers for innocently acquiring their seeds (through the wind or whatever) and then spraying their crops with Roundup (ie: using the whole system).

There is absolutely no case law suggesting it is illegal to harvest and keep accidentally cross contaminated seed. Seeing as farming seeds is default legal there would need to be precedent otherwise for such an act to be illegal.

There is patent law. Patent law says you can't do the patented thing without the license. Growing the seeds is patented. So you can't grow them without license. This may be so obvious that it never needed to become a notable precedent-setting case.

Nice of you to axiomatically rederive patent law for us, but this is false. You cannot be sued simply for allowing seeds that blew onto your land grow.

You can for using them commercially.

Feel free to cite a case where that happened. I don't think you can.

I worded it so carefully to not have an argument, just for illustration, but...

Yes, you are correct, and you are not contradicting me: This is a system that makes sense on the surface. It's economically superior to pay some more money to a seed supplier to get a better yield on my fields.

But this economic advantage is captured by the seed supplier after all farmers moved to this new system where you are no longer able to rely on the previous' harvest seeds. Once everyone is on the economically superior system, the seed supplier can start capturing more of the value that is created by farming.

The point here is that Monsanto creates a superior yield in a crop. All your farmer peers move to use it, and now you have to too or get priced out of the market.

hence: > skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life. > skew

The word "farmers" is doing some heavy lifting here - might be some multinational, might be a small family making a living.

The point is not that the market is pricing out inefficient farms, the point is that it turns a millennia old practice on it's head and using government force to enable monopolies to remove competition.

Farmers use it because their time horizon is 1-5 years, but the government monopoly on seeds is more like 20 years.

It's skewed.

Easy to disagree and argue with these points, but the original question was why there are people opposed to GMOs and while GMOs are not the only patented organisms they are the most obvious for people to have concerns over the economics

I find the objection to patents on GMO plants to be completely indefensible.

If there was ever an area where patents are justified and necessary, this is it. This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.

Objection to patents on GMO plants is just a way to object to GMO plants themselves without coming out and saying so directly.

> This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.

Isn't that a massive societal benefit vs rent seeking though?

If we got the seeds from the GMO fairy, yes.

If we have to get the seeds from expensive R&D that wouldn't occur without patent protection, then no.

> then no.

Why not?

It's literally a self replicating system. Trying to control that for rent seeking purposes seems pretty unethical.

> Why not?

(rolls eyes)

Because if no one does the R&D to create the seeds they WON'T EXIST.

I would have thought that was 100% obvious, but apparently not!

> Because if no one does the R&D to create the seeds they WON'T EXIST.

Sure. If no-one does the R&D.

Perhaps if rent seeking is the mechanism for getting there, then it's better off if they don't? :)

Yes, yes, let's imagine automated turbo communism where all inventions can be made outside the free market.

Here in the real world, private firms are the source of things like this. Roundup Ready soybeans involved cooperation from multiple private firms that contributed various elements.

That's the same line Private Equity often trots out, and those seem to corrode the world far more than they improve it.

Wow. If a correct argument is made by a morally compromised actor, we can dismiss the argument! Logic is wonderful.

Using last years harvest stopped being a thing when heterosis was developed, 90 years ago.

The entire argument is stupid, only bad/hobby farmers plant their own seed.

>Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.

The thing is, that existed for like 100 years before GMOs were a thing. Basically no one saves seeds to reuse and didn't even prior to GMOs. The whole "poor farmers can't save their seeds" thing is propaganda from the organics industry that gets repeated by people who don't understand modern (or even semi-modern) works.

> Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.

They don't get roped into anything. They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost. Further, at least part of the reasoning for not allowing replanting is to avoid genetic deviation in future generations of crop.

> They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost.

That is correct. They are so much better ( and I am in awe of that technology) that outside of some niches (depending on the crop) as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them. But now your farmer-timeframe of a few years is up against a 20 year artificial monopoly in the form of a patent. And all your peers are facing the same situation. This isn't a situation where you can just decide to do whatever you want.

You suddenly find yourself dependent on a third party that knows your situation exactly and will try to extract the most amount of value from you - trying to capture your profit while keeping you healthy enough to keep being a customer.

This skews towards the seed supplier.

> as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them.

Yes, because it's a good product.

Farmer's can't afford not to use tractors or artificial irrigation either.

It's not sinister to develop a product that is better than the competition.

> This skews towards the seed supplier.

Right up until someone else makes a better product.

> Right up until someone else makes a better product.

Yes. A different seed supplier. My point isn't that it's morally wrong to make a better product. My point is that the way it's set up is that those who are in the position to make a better patented-product are in an unbalancedly better position towards the people who use the product to create something as fundamentally important as food.

The major important gmo patents are expiring close to it. If that is your argument it isn't relevant. There are new patents but they are not hard to work around.

There are IP protections for non-GMO seeds as well.

It's some combination of ideological opposition to GMOs and a way to get trade barriers against import of cheap grain and soybeans from the US to the EU. The latter is less important now that Trump has blown up free trade.

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