Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)
85 points by kamaraju 11 hours ago | 26 comments
  • SlightlyLeftPad 11 hours ago |
    Where does Monsanto stand now? It’s been many years since HackerNews was AstroTurfed by them.
    • theChaparral 10 hours ago |
      Monsanto was bought by Bayer who kept the products and killed off the name.
    • downrightmike 10 hours ago |
      I just found out that farmers spray enough of the chems to kill all the plants off so they can be harvested at the same time. They aren't applying it just to grow, they then pump it full of them and then we eat that. No wonder why people are getting sick from it.
  • KennyBlanken 10 hours ago |
    I can't wait for all the usual Monsanto fanboys to start popping up with comments that show how wildly ignorant they are, with comments like "we need this tech to feed everyone!"

    1)Hunger is entirely artificial and is a problem of US farm bill policy and trade policy (not to mention using food to produce fuel that provides less energy than the energy required to grow it.) We pay farmers to grow and then till the food into the ground. Or to ship it to a warehouse where it rots. Massive amounts of food are thrown away by supermarkets. The list goes on.

    2)European farmers, who cannot use Roundup or a large swath of other pesticides and herbicides, *have greater per-acre productivity.

  • tptacek 10 hours ago |
    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.
    • free_bip 9 hours ago |
      The entire concept of IP-encumbered seeds is cruel and dangerous.
      • tptacek 9 hours ago |
        Why, because without IP encumbrance farmers would be developing their own glyphosate-resistant shikimic acid pathway enzymes?
        • defrost 7 hours ago |
          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.

      • derektank 9 hours ago |
        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.
        • tptacek 9 hours ago |
          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.
        • tancop 8 hours ago |
          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.

          • stephbook 8 hours ago |
            Can't you just .. plant something else, lol? I don't think that's a monopoly, then.
            • ivandenysov 4 hours ago |
              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.
              • thechao 2 hours ago |
                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?
        • dcrazy 7 hours ago |
          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.)

    • qmr 9 hours ago |
      "IP-encumbered seeds" is a wild phrase.
    • Veserv 8 hours ago |
      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

  • nativeit 8 hours ago |
    This brings back some memories. I was an admin for “Millions Against Monsanto”, a group on the still-nascent Facebook. I ultimately left because the org was overtaken by conspiracy theorists who couldn’t stop yelling about aspartame and antivax nonsense long enough to focus on the very real, and very alarming, actions of Monsanto. At this point in time it was still not considered “normal” to patent biological materials. I’m a bit more pragmatic, since I’ve grown past my college idealism, but I still don’t believe seeds should be considered patentable.
  • 21asdffdsa12 7 hours ago |
    Look at life, or its systemic counterpart capitalism. Look at that attempt at an exponential. In that curve is all the cruelties, all the danger, all the colonialism, by eating other curves, all the failure because physics is linear on a sphere in the sun.

    Everytime somebody tries to emotionalize any discourse around any of these topics, look at the defining curve and think for yourself - "yeah, thats life, still preferable to death." - then go and solve that problem, or go an be absolved from that problem. Any vital system is expansive, the trees colonialize the grass by throwing shade. Equality - and thus peace can only be reached by having a equality of arms, by copying working mechanisms.

    • tovej 7 hours ago |
      Capitalism is not the equivalent of life, it's the equivalent of cancer. It forces uncontrolled growth within the system.
      • 21asdffdsa12 2 hours ago |
        Uncontrolled growth within a system- sounds like nature to me.
  • internet_points 6 hours ago |
    Speaking of poison, does washing fruit and vegs help? Or is it like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-second_rule
    • orwin 5 hours ago |
      depends on the product and when its applied. for potatoes sprout inhibitors, the old product you definitely needed to remove the skin and every touched part. For the new stuff (i think its ethylène or something like that), washing it is enough (so you can now eat potato skin in europe). I would still wash my fruits just because of the transport though.