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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

> But productivity isn't the problem of our food chain. We can grow plenty of food, and cheaply.

We can. The rest of the developing world has a lot of trouble keeping people fed. There's only so much aid can do, but if we can find ways for small-time farmers to produce more, and also to transport those goods, then the rest of the world could feed itself, something small-time agriculture has historically had a lot of trouble doing.

Better, hardier crop strains aren't just a profit-making scheme, they're absolutely critical in the fight against world hunger.

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GMO crops aren't invented for developing world conditions. They're invented for the developed world that can afford them. They're an extension of Green Revolution agriculture ideas. The core of Green Revolution is a focus on cash crops rather than subsistence farming - high intensity monocropping to create raw feedstock for junk food factories in the global market, rather than immediately edible food for local consumption. You don't eat soybeans. You eat things made in a factory out of soybeans.

Green Revolution is often the cause of rather than cure for hunger in the developing world. Here's an example. Ethiopia is one of the most agriculturally bountiful places on Earth. For thousands of years, it has been farmed effectively, and nomadic cattle herding was a key part of that. In the 1970s, it joined the Green Revolution. River valley land was "bought" and fenced in for industrial cattle farming, raising low quality beef for the European pet food market. This cut off access to the rivers during dry season for the nomadic herders, backed up in force by a now internationally funded army. The nomads were forced to stay in the hills, overgrazing during the dry season. A decade or so later, and the hill country desertified and the rivers silted up, ruining both the nomadic and Green Revolution cattle farming. Suddenly, a peaceful and well-fed land became the scene of a world-shaking famine and civil war.

The picture is much, much bigger than just GMO.

> GMO crops aren't invented for developing world conditions

There are, in fact, ag biotech firms that have expended resources to develop GMOs for developing world conditions and problems. Of course, there's more money in solving first world problems, attracting more investment, but that's true of pretty much every industry, not something special about GMOs.

Could you give some links? I'd love to read about this but can't find anything on Google that talks about anything earlier than 2000.

I got this back in the 1990s from reading actual books. Don't know about links offhand... I was actually thinking about this myself.

Search Google books for "green revolution ethiopia", lots of hits.

The hits are mostly modern, unfortunately.

If you find some links, post to the front page! Do you remember what the books were?

> GMO crops aren't invented for developing world conditions. They're invented for the developed world that can afford them.

This is not true for all GMO crops. Golden Rice is a prime example of a GMO crop developed specifically to fight malnutrition in the developing world.

But your argument is probably true for the stuff peddled by Monsanto and their competitors.

We produce more than enough food to feed the entire world. The issue is distribution.

It's not just distribution, it's regulation, tariffs, customs agreements that prevent or heavily restrict food imports and allow prices to remain high or low in certain areas.

Absolutely true. A big problem to African farmers is that we dump our surpluses below cost on their market, driving them into bankruptcy, but we don't allow them to compete on our market.

That's only a proximate cause. Beyond that is economics and therefore power structures.

It depends if you want to argue if it's the economics behind distribution that is the problem or not. Because the problem with everything can usually be turned into an issue with economics, I tend to draw the line where economics gets involved. In this case: distribution. I can understand how you might see that as a simplification - and in some ways it is. Even non-existing technology can boil down into being an economic problem. [0]

Since everything is an economic problem, blaming economics doesn't help people envision where the problem is. Blaming distribution shows where the problem is - which is both in our methods and the economics of doing so.

An issue with improving those methods is also an issue behind economics.

[0] non-existing technology --> which requires R&D to be developed --> R&D requires $$$ --> economic problem; especially if technology is difficult/impossible to actually create

> We can. The rest of the developing world has a lot of trouble keeping people fed.

True, but that's more an economic and political problem than one of food production. Making farmers more dependent on large corporations is not going to fix their economic problems.

The problems in the developing countries are at least partially caused by things not directly related to agriculture, for example speculation with food and subsidies in developed countries making local agriculture unprofitable.

Speculation is ultimately driven by scarcity. There's no purpose in speculating if you can't generate an arbitrage. Greater productivity on the part of small farmers will alleviate scarcity, driving food prices down.

Similarly, there are lots of markets that are unserved by the global food chain. How can one say that food subsidies in developed countries can affect these unserved markets? They can't sell to the developed world, and developed world food doesn't really make it there.

I spent some time in Colombia, not quite a developed or a developing nation, in mostly big cities, and even there much of the food consumption was local. Sure, bigger farmers would be able to sell at a profit to Western conglomerates, and Western food was available (at steep prices) in the large chain grocery stores.

But most people shopped at the ubiquitous small family-run groceries that served a mix of local agricultural output and mass-market, also locally-produced goods. I'd be very surprised if Western agricultural innovations weren't being employed to grow all of the great-tasting produce I ate there. Seeds are much much easier to transport than mangoes.

What is your point? You can not disprove what I said with one counterexample. Look for examples that confirm what I said.

I for example remember a documentary I saw a couple of months ago with starving people collecting single grains of rice, I think, from the streets at a market in India if I remember correctly. On the other side of the street behind a wall was a huge open space with hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of rice, bought by speculators hoping for rising prices but they didn't. Hell, even if everything worked as expected, less supply because everything got bought up causing rising prices in turn, this would be plain unethical extortion.

One other example that comes to mind is milk producers in Africa going out of business because of cheap subsidized milk powder flooding the markets. Cheap milk in exchange for now unemployed milk producers and capital leaving the country seems not such a great deal to me. And because of credits from the world bank they are not allowed to counter this development with import taxes. Free trade may be - not necessarily is - a good thing between equal parties, but between a rich, developed and powerful party on one side and a poor, underdeveloped and powerless party on the other side it becomes quite probable that it will not turn out as a win-win situation.

In order to turn a profit, speculators have to eventually sell their buys. So no supply restriction in the longer term.

Also war, corruption, water mismanagement, and foreign aid undercutting local growers.

Fighting world hunger by producing more food is putting out fire with gasoline.

A lot of the GMO fetishists are completely ignorant of the Green Revolution and how the economics of modern industrial food have contributed to hunger. Industrial agriculture for cash crops brings in global money, topples governments, and arms the police to run traditional agriculture off the lands that once fed the people. Third world shantytowns are filled with people who were once farmers, before "modern" agriculture was introduced to the land they once farmed.

GMO is just an extension of Green Revolution capitalism-centric agriculture. That model has done miracles for supporting the growing population and making food cheaper, but it's not a free lunch.

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