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Comment by ScottBurson | Hacker News Reader

I found this remarkably unpersuasive -- one irrelevant factoid after another.

Tellingly, the word "glyphosate" does not appear in it. And the part about the Monsanto Protection Act -- yes, I know that's not its official title -- is just a gem:

protecting [farmers] from emerging state propositions that aren’t based on science or research

... because we've assumed the conclusion, that there couldn't be objections to GMOs that are based on science or research.

I understand that GMOs have to be evaluated individually -- GMO technology per se is not necessarily dangerous. That said, I think there's sufficient evidence of the toxicity of glyphosate -- and that it remains in food grown with it -- that I strongly prefer not to eat such foods.

Also -- we're talking about our food supply. Doesn't it stand to reason that the burden of proof should be on those who claim the resulting foods are safe, rather than on those who claim they are dangerous?

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Indeed. I have absolutely no idea why this is on HN. The man's rant gives absolutely no impression that he understands the criticism of Monsanto - it's just 2655 words of absolute meaninglessness.

I particularly liked the bit where he said "but people called Google evil!". Yeah. Yeah, they did, dude. Still do.

Is it true the Monsanto's approach is threatening the genetic diversity [1] as @e12e mentioned?

If it's true, we're going to rely on a much smaller gene pool for food production in next decades, which will cause severe genetic information loss and more vulnerability to new crop diseases. Another potato famine disaster but in global scale?

Do we have any measure to protect the gene pool? Do we need something like Gene Tax to curb the genetic convergence? I've no idea how Carbon Tax helps solving the global warming issue, but it seems a good idea to invest some money to protect those 'useless' genes and make all reserved natural seeds open for public access.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_diversity

This is exactly the biggest problem that comes with commercial GMO plants. GMO companies are massively buying smaller seed producers and are actively reducing the food genpool, they are clearly out to control the global seed market - from a business perspective this absolutely makes sense.

For future generations this is a total catastrophe - reducing the available food genpool is is the maximal possible damage you could apply to the human kind.

This is not a theoretical scenario - india has lost big parts of it´s genpool for many food plants since the indian government is pushing gmo company products. The results are a complete disaster today, but this is just a foretaste what will happen on a global scale in a few years. Especially Africa, now beeing invaded by mega-industrial agro-projects backed by hedgefonds, will be hurt massively in the coming years.

Local seeds are of immeasurable value - it is conserved knowledge of hundreds, sometimes thousands of years that is deleted forever, when a variety disappears. This are not "failed experiments of nature" that vanish not able to survive the test of life - instead we are actively eradicating very good functioning and over a very long time optimized varieties, just because of some short-term experiment, that usually fails, and was only motivated by short-term profit-think.

GMOs are not "evil" or "good" - it´s the extremely short-sighted and brutally enforced business-model that translates the totally stupid short-term profit-think into very destructive consequences for global biodiversity.

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