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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

These stories have all basically been debunked. Monsanto did sue farmers. But they did so in cases where they had evidence that those farmers were not only planting IP-encumbered seeds, but also spraying them with Roundup. You can't do that accidentally: if your seeds aren't genetically modified, Roundup kills your crop.

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The entire concept of IP-encumbered seeds is cruel and dangerous.

Why, because without IP encumbrance farmers would be developing their own glyphosate-resistant shikimic acid pathway enzymes?

They're certainly creating and spinning off their own not for profit Grains Research & Development Corporations funded by harvest profits to keep creating variations for ANOVA trials.

Along with doing the same for billion dollar port and rail grain handling spin-offs.

Maybe not the farmers you're thinking of, but farmers in the world are.

I do not think granting someone an exclusive right to sell their new cultivar for 20 years is particularly dangerous, especially when existing variants don’t disappear. I like that someone was incentivized to grow Pink Lady and Cosmic Crisp apples back in the 90s and 2010s and I struggle to see where any cruelty was involved.

And this isn't even a cultivar. It's a commodity crop in which the only difference between ordinary seeds and Monsanto's seeds is that you could use Monsanto's Roundup pesticide on them without killing them. The seeds were literally just a utility for using a specific Monsanto herbicide system.

The problem with patented seeds (and everything else) is the owner can decide who gets to use them. No one should hold that power.

If patents worked as a royalty system where you're guaranteed to get a license if you pay there would be no problem. But right now Bayer can use their control over Roundup Ready plants to make farmers buy more products they don't need, or punish them for dealing with competitors, because they have a monopoly.

And it also lets them set the price to anything they want because competing with them is illegal. Exclusive rights are always like that.

Can't you just .. plant something else, lol? I don't think that's a monopoly, then.

Prisoner’s dilemma: margins are razor thin. If your fellow farmers use better seeds then you are forced to use them as well. Otherwise you won’t be able to match their prices without selling at a loss.

Only if the cost of monsanto seed + roundup is less than the cost of regular seed per expected harvested bushel? Otherwise, no one would use the monsanto seed + roundup?

That's true of any productivity enhancement. If your neighbors use more efficient tractors you're at the same disadvantage, but nobody argues that farmers should be able to steal tractors.

The parent has to do with permission, not stealing. Imagine if your neighbors could have an exclusive license to buy the new obviously superior tractor which you will never be able to obtain no matter what you do, simply because you're not them. This is legal today, the argument is that it shouldn't be because it punishes competition and lets the rights-holder wield too much power over the market.

No, anybody can buy into the Roundup Ready system; it's not exclusively licensed.

Apple cultivars are interesting because they are often developed by governments motivated to promote the existence of a healthy farming industry, not by private monopoly rights. Case in point, the Cripps Pink (aka Pink Lady) was developed by the Western Australia Department of Agriculture, and the Cosmic Crisp was developed by Washington State University.

(Honeycrisp is another fantastically successful government-funded cultivar, this time by the University of Minnesota. But it apparently led to the spontaneous breeding of the SugarBee, which is privately owned.)

Yep. Here is another comment of mine where I breakdown one of the most famous examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46176059

And another comment where I discuss another example and their legally binding declaration to not sue over accidental contamination:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725426

"IP-encumbered seeds" is a wild phrase.

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