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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Why Nigeria accepted GMOs
bluGill wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
The real question is why anyone would not.
Before you reply remember random mutation is common - normal in nature.
what is the difference between a random mutation and one a scientist
comes up with. So far the only one I've found is random mutation isn't
studied for safety.
MatekCopatek wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
From my perspective, this is a slightly naive opinion. I believe
we're not fighting against GMOs because "mutations are bad". When
activists point that out, it's because it's the easiest way to reach
the general population and convince them to get behind the cause.
The real reason, however, are the political and economical
implications of GMOs. Sure, they say they'll use them to fight
famine. But in reality, they'll just try to extract as much profit as
they can, regardless of the interests of the people growing the
plants and eating the food. We've seen farmers get sued (see Bowman v
Monsanto) and other evil stuff like that.
bluGill wrote 4 hours 14 min ago:
Bowman v Monsanto deserved to be sued and lose in court. By citing
that case you prove you have not dug into the details and don't
understand what you are talking about.
I don't understand why you are fighting against GMO. Not all GMO is
done by corporations. Golden rice for example was not done by a big
corporation.
like_any_other wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
Why not? First, the safety reason: random mutations (and selective
breeding) are to genetic engineering as a pedestrian is to a 747 jet.
The range of possibilities and the speed at which they can be
realized is far greater with genetic engineering.
But, supposing there are rigorous tests and only well understood,
small alterations are permitted, there is the second reason:
economics. E.g. what will a country do when a GMO seed company starts
taking over farms?
Like store-brand products in supermarkets, such company farms have a
competitive advantage in that they can get seeds cheaper, so it could
happen they slowly take over all farming. And even independent farms
would be in the precarious position of depending on a small handful
of global companies for their seeds. If they don't comply with the
demands of these seed companies, they'd go out of business, unable to
compete. Yes there are seed companies already, but the barrier to
entry, degree of consolidation, and advantage gained by doing
business with them, is less than when you need genetic engineering to
stay in the race, so the risk of such sovereignty-wrecking monopolies
is much greater with GM seeds.
And third, the health reason (distinct from safety). When companies
are allowed to engineer food as they want, we get Snickers bars and
Coca Cola. Do we want to unleash these same corporate practices on
plants themselves? Why do we believe business pressures will get us
only things like drought-resistant and vitamin-enriched rice, and not
some rice variant that sacrifices nutrients to increase yield or
taste? Currently, the healthiest foods are those with the least
corporate engineering. What reason is there to believe this will
change with GMOs?
bluGill wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
> The range of possibilities and the speed at which they can be
realized is far greater with genetic engineering.
This is 100% false. Random genetic change happens often across the
billions of seeds planted every year. GMO is a much much smaller
amount of change that targets a very tiny section of DNA.
> what will a country do when a GMO seed company starts taking over
farms?
That is unrelated to GMO. Seed companies existed for many decades
before GMO. There is a reason they have not taken over: the
economics of running a large farm do not pay - they still need
employees at each farm to learn the field and make decision on what
works - soil is not 100% uniform and often farmers plant different
seeds in the same field (that is 4 different corn seeds depending
on the soil- the low areas get a variety that handles wet
conditions better, while the high areas need to handle drought.
Then there is the sand/clay mix... And that is a very high level
overview, you can get a phd in soil if you want details). Someone
needs to make decisions about what fertilizer to use. Someone
needs to take the risk of good/bad weather, tariffs, and all the
other things farmers do. There is a lot of value to seed companies
in not having to worry about that.
> Like store-brand products in supermarkets, such company farms
have a competitive advantage in that they can get seeds cheaper, so
it could happen they slowly take over all farming.
This is a competitive disadvantage. A seed company doesn't make
the best seed for all situations, so if they end up with a farm
where their competitors seeds are better they are losing value
putting their own seeds in their fields - seeds that they cannot
then sell to a different field where they would do better.
Remember from above planting 4 different seeds in a field is not
uncommon - 1 of those might be from a different company.
> the health reason
Has nothing to do with GMO.
like_any_other wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
> This is 100% false. Random genetic change happens often across
the billions of seeds planted every year.
Yet in all the billions of mice born every year, not one was born
luminescent [1]. Peddle your lies somewhere else.
> There is a lot of value to seed companies in not having to
worry about that.
Yet many companies vertically integrate, and get a competitive
edge. You think soil and weather diversity is an unassailable
moat?
> That is unrelated to GMO.
I explicitly explained how it is related to GMO.
> This is a competitive disadvantage. A seed company doesn't make
the best seed for all situations
Can still buy from other seed companies, same as any other
farmer. But they get a discount on their own seeds, unlike other
farmers.
> Has nothing to do with GMO.
I explained how GMO enables it.
URI [1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/02/glowing-mice-s...
bluGill wrote 4 hours 41 min ago:
> Yet in all the billions of mice born every year, not one was
born luminescent
That is random chance. There is no reason to think it won't
happen next year. A statistician can calculate the odds - but
remember that the odds are the same for every other random
mutation - yet many of them happen. (many many more will not)
Symmetry wrote 23 hours 3 min ago:
And before GMO essentially all modern strains were created by
accelerating the mutation of plants via the application of x-rays.
jackbravo wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
One common drawback of GM crops is the monopolistic nature of their
seeds. They come with a license and a cost to use, you cannot save
seeds and use them later. So it seems like a threat to the
sovereignty of a Country.
The article briefly mentions that initially some seeds are given with
royalty free licenses, but for how long?
bluGill wrote 21 hours 58 min ago:
The patents are expiring. Many of the useful traits are no longer
under patent.
even ignoring that things the patents were easy for golden rice to
license.
URI [1]: https://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how9_IP.php
gruez wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
1. as others have mentioned in a sibling thread, "saving seeds"
isn't really a thing that can be done with modern crops, GMO or
not.
2. If you get a productivity boost from GMO, and but then GMO
company goes rogue, can't you still go back to planting regular
seeds?
abdullahkhalids wrote 19 hours 51 min ago:
Re 2: on this software engineering forum, the following example
will help.
If you have core dependency goes rogue, and you have to switch to
an alternate library with similar features, is that a free
switch? Think of how many thousands of hours of work are often
needed? How many businesses have gone under because of such
issues?
Growing a particular variety requires a lot of knowledge gained
by each individual farmer from experience. You can't just go back
to an old variety for free. It may take several years for yields
to go back to previous levels and by then the farmer may have
gone under.
bluGill wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
Farmers change seeds all the time. One I know tells me that a
great variety will terrible in 3 more years, though I'm not
clear why. In any case they all are planting several varities
ever year - four different ones in a field isn't uncommon -
with harvest data to track the difference (different soils need
different seeds). Test plots where they do many different side
by side are somewhat common. they are always trying different
options to see what works to do more. Plus predictions on
weather mean different seeds.
gruez wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
Ok but going back to the library analogy, GMO bans are like the
government banning react.js because they're convinced angularjs
(or jquery) is good enough and facebook might go rogue.
Shouldn't it be up to individual farmers to decide?
small_scombrus wrote 13 hours 10 min ago:
The difference I think, is that the libraries are open
source, and you don't have to pay Facebook yearly to use
React.
Countries can and do ban closed source paid products when
they don't trust the provider (e.g. Huawei)
icpmoles wrote 12 hours 6 min ago:
When you buy hardware that goes rogue you're forced to
throw it away and install something new, which costs money
for hardware and labor.
When a GMO goes rogue you can just buy a different seed the
next planting season, which you were going to do anyway.
redwood wrote 1 day ago:
I'm a believer in taking advantage of GM crops but also believe that
some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those
crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.
If these crops are designed to require you to buy from a producing
company each year, that just seems so fundamentally artificial and
going against the grain of all of our agricultural history. And I can
see how much of a slippery slope it can represent... ayou read about
farmer suicides in India related to this topic. I bring this up because
the fact that none of this is discussed in the article makes me fear
it's got a profit agenda.
Suppafly wrote 14 hours 19 min ago:
>I'm a believer in taking advantage of GM crops but also believe that
some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those
crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.
That's not a GMO issue, that's a hybrid issue that applies to pretty
much all modern seeds. Unless you're specifically worried about
so-called terminator seeds, a common boogeyman discussed by organic
farming proponents, but those have never been on the market and there
is basically a worldwide ban on them.
coin wrote 15 hours 5 min ago:
> read about farmer suicides in India related to this topic
The data doesnât support this claim
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India#G...
userbinator wrote 17 hours 24 min ago:
"going against the grain" --- was that deliberate? ;-)
imtringued wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
To this day nobody in the agritech industry touting expensive super
seeds and synthetics has figured out how to sustainably sell their
products to developing countries.
Agriculture is the primary industry in most developing nations. The
value proposition of agritech is "give us your money and we'll give
you food". Meanwhile the people in developed countries need a way to
turn what they already produce into money. The objectives are
diametrically opposed.
How exactly is an agricultural society that primarily produces crops
to feed itself pay for the imported goods which were the source of
their money in the past? What I'm trying to get at here is the fact
that a domestic farmer has to export their crops to earn money for
the imported inputs. You need more land to feed the same quantity of
people, because only a portion of the land will be farmed for
domestic consumption.
The business model just fundamentally doesn't make much sense,
because it makes the underlying assumption that these people are
already busy doing more important things than farming that earn them
enough money to buy seeds, so buying the more productive seeds means
they are less busy farming and spend more time earning money.
ch4s3 wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
I think having terminator genes in seeds is a reasonable safeguard
against leaking lots of novel genes into the environment above and
beyond what crops from across the planet already would leak. I think
this is a benefit that people too quickly dismiss. Seed saving as
others have pointed out is already increasingly rare for many crops.
throwup238 wrote 19 hours 24 min ago:
Most farmers don't save seed for replanting anymore even if they're
non GMO, especially if they want to be economically competitive. The
$50-150/acre that seeds cost are a small fraction of the benefit of
using F1 hybrid seeds due to hybrid vigor - the plants they produce
have a higher yield that more than makes up for it, on the order of
15-50% higher depending on variety.
The seeds they get from a manufacturer also mature more consistently
and uniformly, they do a much better job of cleaning and protecting
the seed (e.g. fungicide), and usually end up costing less than doing
it yourself because of the labor involved in preparing the seed for
storage.
kouteiheika wrote 18 hours 23 min ago:
If it's economically advantageous to buy the seeds anyway then why
do the manufacturers legally prohibit the farmers to save the
seeds? Wouldn't the farmers naturally pick the option that yields
them the most profit?
throwup238 wrote 11 hours 0 min ago:
It allows them to maximize the value they extract from the whole
enterprise and defend their competitive advantage. In short:
greed and fear.
The long answer is more complicated. For example corn, soybeans,
and wheat arenât generally planted as F1 hybrids so farmers can
(and do) save seed so the manufacturers walk this tight rope
between crops where it really matters and ones where they
donât, but have to defend their whole system regardless.
contrarian1234 wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
Because that'd be unmanageable.. obviously a local "seed
cleaning/prep" company (such at the one providing nonGMO seed)
would just come around and undercut the company that developed
the GMO seed. The farmers will just claim they're reusing their
seed
Broken_Hippo wrote 20 hours 22 min ago:
Apple trees are weird. You can take a seed from an apple tree in your
yard and grow apples that taste disgusting. One of the apples from
that disgusting tree might make apples that taste absolutely
heavenly. You can't just grow an apple tree from seed and expect
anything other than an apple only fit for making alcohol. Johnny
Appleseed was keeping folks drunk, not healthy.
Hybrids sometimes produce no seeds or seeds that won't grow the same
thing. Sometimes this is desirable - seedless watermelons, for
example. Or having a plant that grows better in your region at the
cost of having to buy seeds (which you were likely to do in modern
times regardless).
I get your point, but this isn't really a problem that's special to
GMOs in particular. It is a problem now, and it isn't always that
horrible of one. We can support farmers better now and prevent some
of it now.
Tuna-Fish wrote 21 hours 53 min ago:
You do understand that your requirement effectively cuts out many
modern non-GMO seeds?
One of the big advancements in the turn of the 20th century was
heterosis, or the systematic exploitation of hybrid vigor. If you
maintain two (or more) extremely inbred but different from each other
germlines, but cross them to produce seed, you get seed that is much
more heterozygotic than is naturally common. This seed is then
dramatically more viable and productive. But if you replant what it
yields, you only get very disappointing yield.
That is, it has been normal for farmers to buy new seed each season
from some provider that specializes in making very productive seed
for more than a hundred years now. Part of getting developing
countries to raise their agricultural productivity to modern
standards is getting them to start doing this, instead of
continuously replanting their old seeds.
redwood wrote 18 hours 19 min ago:
Thanks for this. I did not know
Suppafly wrote 14 hours 12 min ago:
>Thanks for this. I did not know
Honestly, you weren't even informed enough to make your initial
comment if you didn't know that much.
benced wrote 22 hours 15 min ago:
I really dislike this logic because it centers the farmers, not the
people who buy agricultural products (everybody).
padjo wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
Iâm fairly sure that farmers often buy seeds rather than harvesting
them. There are lots of reasons for this but essentially growing
seeds and growing produce is just quite different. I donât think
itâs the dramatic shift youâre making it out to be.
dpe82 wrote 16 hours 21 min ago:
My grandfather in the US Midwest in the 1950s farmed specifically
to harvest seeds for planting which he then sold to his regional
neighbors via distributors. I don't know the specifics, but I
understand that even back then the farming practices were
sufficiently different that the specialization was warranted.
kevin_thibedeau wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
It depends on the crop. With cereals, the seed is the product, and
you could divert a part of production to next year's planting. With
other crops, harvest may happen before seeds mature and may require
special processing to extract them for the seed producers.
Suppafly wrote 14 hours 13 min ago:
>With cereals, the seed is the product, and you could divert a
part of production to next year's planting.
Theoretically, but generally that doesn't happen because you want
hybrid seeds that need to be grown every year to get the traits
you want, you don't want to plant the seeds you harvested from
the hybrid plants.
bluGill wrote 21 hours 53 min ago:
If you are planting hybrid seeds you would never save seeds
because their children don't yield well. Hybrid yields so much
better that it isn't worth planting anything else if you have the
option.
0x000xca0xfe wrote 23 hours 10 min ago:
On the other hand fertile GMOs will sooner or later mix into the
surrounding nature, compete with local plants and undergo "normal"
evolution. This might be undesirable.
Another consideration is that optimizing one or two features like
yield or resistance in plants often affects other areas negatively
like adaptability or fertiliy. Making fertile GMOs with the same
yield is probably harder than making infertile ones.
But at the very least it should not be possible to patent or
copyright DNA or any other parts of living organisms, what an utterly
horrible idea.
pfdietz wrote 15 hours 36 min ago:
In some cases this is desirable, like with the GMO American
Chestnut with the transplanted wheat gene that makes it resistant
to chestnut blight.
adrr wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
Is natural breeding better with just randomly flipping genes with
help of radiation or whatever they use to get a bunch of genes to
flip? At least with GMO, you know the outcomes of the DNA instead
of rolling dice over and over.
GMO is just more precision and regular breeding can do the same
given enough time. Itâs just DNA code end of the day.
0x000xca0xfe wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
Personally I think genetics and evolution are highly fascinating
topics and we should do much more research.
I'd love to have some glow-in-the-dark tobacco plants in my yard.
Why not?!
But realistically there is just too much irrational public
resentment.
cyberax wrote 23 hours 19 min ago:
> I'm a believer in taking advantage of GM crops but also believe
that some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that
those crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.
This hasn't been that useful for quite a while. Most modern crops are
hybrids that rapidly degrade if they are just replanted year after
year.
tick_tock_tick wrote 23 hours 43 min ago:
> but also believe that some kind of regulation should be put in
place to ensure that those crops yield seeds that can be used to
plant future generations.
Did you mistype? I think in general it should be 100% illegal with
guaranteed jail time to to make any non sterile otherwise we are just
going to create our own invasive species.
bluGill wrote 21 hours 52 min ago:
Farmers want sterile crops. last years seed in this years field is
a weed that messes with your crop rotation plan without any
upsides.
kjkjadksj wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
From a practical standpoint that is difficult to do. E.g. many crops
are hybrid species taking advantage of hybrid vigor (1). If the
hybrid is fertile at all will be quite variable in phenotypes.
1.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
bootsmann wrote 1 day ago:
I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief that
farmers are not very smart businessmen. The idea that a farmer would
abandon their current crop for GMO crop that they cannot replant
without making a cost-benefit analysis in their head just strikes me
as very odd. These peoples life depend on making such decisions, we
should trust them to make them themselves.
ZeroGravitas wrote 8 hours 53 min ago:
Do any smart business people get locked into software ecosystems?
People seem very focused on the science to the expense of the
business side.
Like it's possible to be pro-database but anti-Oracle. And if the
Oracle guys called you anti-database it would be very transparent
bullshit. Doubly so if they wrapped it in "databases are going to
save the poor" rhetoric.
lo_zamoyski wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
It's not just a question of intelligence or education, but also
power.
The free market does not always produce good outcomes, hence the
need for regulation.
RobotToaster wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
Many Indian farmers have been driven to suicide due to debt from
buying GMO seeds
URI [1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-ge...
coin wrote 15 hours 1 min ago:
The data doesnât support your claim
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_Ind...
RobotToaster wrote 8 hours 32 min ago:
> "A 2015 study in Environmental Sciences Europe found that
farmer suicide rates in India's rainfed areas were "directly
related to increases in Bt cotton adoption." Factors leading to
suicide included "high costs of BT cotton" and "ecological
disruption and crop loss after the introduction of Bt cotton.""
The contradicting studies were mostly produced by
"International Food Policy Research Institute, an agriculture
policy think tank formed to promote the adoption of innovations
in agricultural technology, based in Washington, D.C." which
seems like an obvious conflict of interest.
pfdietz wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
Isn't gray market Bt cotton widely used in India outside
patent protection? (Or was, given patents likely expired by
now.)
parineum wrote 18 hours 4 min ago:
That's a story of a farmer in debt because he had two consecutive
years of crop failure. I'd be less apt to blame the expected cost
of seeds than the unexpected crop failures for his misfortune.
nchmy wrote 19 hours 48 min ago:
depends on which farmers youre talking about. In much of the world,
they're smallholder subsistence farmers with little to no
education, and are often at the mercy of middlemen who steal a
significant proportion of their (meager, due to not much land that
they dont really know how to take care of/take advantage of) crops'
value.
gnulinux996 wrote 19 hours 49 min ago:
> I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief
that farmers are not very smart businessmen.
I feel like assuming that the farmers are competent businessmen
capable of understanding the ups and downs of GMOs is in
disagreement with reality and mostly used to drive "free
marketeering / deregulation" agendas.
georgefrowny wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
It's the same argument they make for why we don't need food
safety rules. Intelligent and rational people will be able to
work out that the cheap carcinogenic additive is bad and
therefore won't buy it and the company will do better and it's
just fine. Right? Right? If they don't they're probably too
stupid and probably poor and only have themselves to blame. It's
just business.
Never mind that the the exact same kind of people are
simultaneous lobbying for the elimination of (quote) "unjustified
trade restrictions or commercial requirements, such as labeling,
that affect new technologies, including biotechnology" ( [1] )
URI [1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/4201
estimator7292 wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
The problem is that even with the seed rent-seeking, GMO crops are
more productive and more profitable.
The farmer still makes just enough money, with some corporate
middleman skimming off the top for no good reason. It's not that
the fees are untenable- obviously nobody will buy it if they can't
make a profit. The problem is the corporate rent-seeking. Producers
have to raise costs which percolates up into increased costs for
consumers.
pfdietz wrote 15 hours 39 min ago:
Isn't this an argument against literally any technological
advance?
NoahZuniga wrote 20 hours 15 min ago:
How are the food costs raising if GMO crops are more productive?
Shouldn't this increase supply and lower prices?
9rx wrote 12 hours 59 min ago:
> How are the food costs raising if GMO crops are more
productive?
The farmer cries we've been hearing in the news over the last
few months may be a little overblown, but they certainly aren't
coming from a place where food costs are rising...
> Shouldn't this increase supply and lower prices?
Not necessarily. Prices are determined by supply _and demand_.
onemoresoop wrote 21 hours 1 min ago:
What would stop them from jacking up prices when they have
monopoly? It's not like we haven't seen this scenario before..
Waterluvian wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
I canât think of a more complete âJack of all tradesâ than
the modern farmer.
abdullahkhalids wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
In a multi-agent dynamic system, the optimal actions by each
individual agents (based on whatever cost-benefit analysis they do)
can evolve the system into a state where every agent is worse off
compared to some initial state. This holds even if every individual
agent is a "smart businessperson".
One main purpose of law and social rules is to prevent multi-agent
systems from getting stuck into these global non-optimal states.
And arguing that agents are smart is not a counter-argument to
this.
reducesuffering wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
Moloch:
URI [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-mol...
bootsmann wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
This is true in the abstract but I donât see how it applies to
this specific case. There are two agents here and the GMO plants
will only be planted if planting them is the optimal choice for
both.
georgefrowny wrote 19 hours 56 min ago:
If you are a farmer who has the choice of planting more
productive plants or not, if you do not, you will be at a
disadvantage and eventually will be outcompeted in the market
if you don't "defect". Planting the GMO is the optimal choice
if you want to survive in the short term, even if you can see
disaster looming in the long term despite sweet supplier
promises.
Once everyone is using the proprietary seeds, the price
magically goes up and the farmers have less money than they had
before, but the biotech company now gets a cut of every grain
of wheat which has to increase year on year (growth!). This
isn't the only negative outcome you could imagine.
A classic multipolar trap for the farmers because they all made
an entirely rational decision at every stage and yet they all
ended up worse off in the end. And a trap agrotech will be
extremely happy to coax farmers into.
For their part, if they don't do it, a less scrupulous company
would and so they need to do it or get outcompeted - not only
must they grow, they just grow faster than the competition to
survive long term. And so they are also a trap of their own
where they could end up in a strongly negative situation (angry
mobs after their blood, say) despite making what was both an
optimal and necessary decision at every step.
Which is not to say you can't or even shouldn't use biotech to
increase crop yield. It's just that you can't rely on people
making rational choices for themselves to produce long-term
overall good outcomes.
contrarian1234 wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
> Once everyone is using the proprietary seeds, the price
magically goes up and the farmers have less money than they
had before, but the biotech company now gets a cut of every
grain of wheat which has to increase year on year (growth!).
This isn't the only negative outcome you could imagine.
How does that make any sense? They can always switch back to
the non-GMO crops. Short of original seed somehow
disappearing.. it seems the farmer can make the decision to
switch back at any time. The GMO company has no mote to
coerce people to keep using their product. They only use it
as long as it provides higher profits.
You'd have to get very create to imagine scenarios where this
breaks down. Like the local climate changes and the original
seed is no longer viable, and they have a ton of agricultural
equipment for this one particular crop type.
This also has the premise that the farmers are somehow stupid
and don't realize seed prices can change year to year
bilegeek wrote 11 hours 58 min ago:
>> If you are a farmer who has the choice of planting more
productive plants or not, if you do not, you will be at a
disadvantage and eventually will be outcompeted in the
market if you don't "defect".
More productive crops = more competitive = higher chance of
market survival.
It's not about the crops per se. It's about surviving in a
market that is ruthlessly cruel to anybody who doesn't
subscribe to "line go up" dogma, and who isn't cutthroat in
every advantage they can eke out or margin they can widen.
contrarian1234 wrote 11 hours 3 min ago:
i dont understand what the dogma is... yes, it may become
economically infeasable to grow nonGMO plants. What's the
problem?
if the seed price is increased then either it will become
feasible again, or the price of the crop will increase
but this is just extremely basic capitalist market
forces... has no relation to GMO. The end result is
cheaper food for everyone
Ancapistani wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
My immediate concern is the loss of overall
biodiversity and specific genetic lines.
I'm not a large-scale farmer, but I've spent more than
my share of hours in the cab of a tractor. It's already
very difficult to find seeds for "heritage varieties"
of many crops.
For example - for the past several years, I've grown a
small patch of "Little Dutch". It's a tobacco variety
that was popular in the 19th Century, but fell out of
favor. To my knowledge it is not currently grown
commercially at all. The only reason there are seeds
available is because someone collected it from a farm
in Ohio at some point.
In this example, seeds can be ordered without too much
hassle... but there are relatively few vendors selling
them, and I'd say it's still at moderate risk of being
lost. There's a small but active hobby community around
growing esoteric tobacco varieties, but that's not the
case for most food crops. I wouldn't even know where to
begin to even determine what varieties were grown in my
area fifty years ago, much less where to obtain seeds.
In fact, this conversation has prompted me to go
acquire some sorghum from someone I know that has been
planting a couple of acres and processing it themselves
for at least the past 50 years. They're getting older,
their kids aren't interested in agriculture, and I
seriously doubt they could even tell me what variety
they're growing. It wouldn't surprise me if they've not
purchased seed in generations. When they pass, that
line will likely be gone forever if someone doesn't
intentionally preserve it.
DSMan195276 wrote 12 hours 58 min ago:
What prevents a farmer from simply switching back to the
non-GMO seeds if the GMO option goes up in price? Or even
ignoring that, switching to a different cheaper GMO seed from
a different company?
I think that's the piece I and others are missing, isn't it
ultimately a question of which seeds will make the farmer the
most money? If a particular GMO seed suddenly become so
expensive that either non-GMO or other GMO seeds are more
cost-effective, why can't they just start using them instead?
sam-cop-vimes wrote 11 hours 15 min ago:
Not really - if the market price for a crop is such that it
depends on the greater volume which can be produced by GMO
seeds, switching to non-GMO seeds becomes uneconomic.
Let's say GMO crops gives you a grain yield of 1-ton/acre
and that non-GMO crops gives you a yield of 0.5-ton/acre.
Now the market price is say set at $100/ton. This cuts down
their earnings by half in the best case, all other inputs
remaining the same.
Now if the GMO-seeds are controlled by a foreign entity,
your entire agri output becomes dependent on that foreign
entity not behaving badly. Whichever nation that controls
the entity who owns the GMO-seed now has leverage over you.
So no, it isn't as simple as "switch back to using non-GMO
seeds". This has to be carefully considered before adopting
GMO-seeds.
refurb wrote 16 hours 51 min ago:
It's just that you can't rely on people making rational
choices for themselves to produce long-term overall good
outcomes.
Yet most of the world relies on such a system and itâs
produced the highest advancement of any system.
The tale you weaved is clearly an edge case of a monopoly.
Thatâs not the situation we have.
And youâre ignoring the fact that farmers will be aware
that they are purchasing from a monopoly and that can help
weight their decision.
geysersam wrote 16 hours 30 min ago:
> Yet most of the world relies on such a system and itâs
produced the highest advancement of any system.
Nah this is a simplification at best. Countries have
regulation and laws, none rely only on free markets. GMO is
great but it needs governance
pfdietz wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
Why does GMO need governance, vs. (say) hybrid non-GMO
seeds?
All these arguments smack of badly functioning
rationalizations for basically irrational prejudice
against GMOs.
georgefrowny wrote 3 hours 36 min ago:
Food security in general does need governance and this
does includes vulnerability to price fixing of non-GMO
seeds and agricultural chemicals as well as safety.
It also includes vigilance against such things as
agricultural equipment with expensive repair lockouts,
antibiotic overuse, soil degradation, deforestation and
poor disease control.
The original assertion was that rational
self-interested agents would naturally find and migrate
to optimum global outcomes for everyone. Not only is
this not true in the abstract game theoretic sense, but
it's especially not true when many of the agents are
independent developing world smallholders and some are
multibillion agritech transnationals.
pfdietz wrote 2 hours 52 min ago:
So it has nothing to do with GMOs specifically.
georgefrowny wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
Correct. It's continuing the general observation
first made here ( [1] ) that doesn't specifically
mention GMO at all and a disagreement with the
premise of the reply to that here ( [2] ).
Obviously the argument is using GMO as the subject
due to the context of the article, but you can have
the exact same argument about powerful companies
angling for capture of slices of many industries
and even parts of the general human experience in
many places where you can say "well if it wasn't
going to be good for the farmers/taxi
drivers/warehouse workers/software engineers/people
looking for a date/restaurant chefs/whoever,
they're not stupid and wouldn't agree to it".
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725...
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725...
abdullahkhalids wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
The agents are numerous, as pointed out by sibling comment.
The farmer agents only make decisions based on personal
profitability. The overall system after some years can evolve
to a state where some of the following are true:
- the GMO seed maker acquires a monopoly over certain types of
seeds, which enables it to reduce farmer profits to below what
they were when they were planting non-GMO seeds.
- the country's food supply becomes dependent on foreign
countries/corporations, which can cause severe problems at
international negotiating tables.
- the GMO crop has long term health impacts, say after 20 years
of use. When these are discovered, it is no longer possible to
go back to non-GMO because the infrastructure required for
non-GMO crops is not easily reconstructable (for instance a
country might reduce its pesticide production significantly
once enough farmers have switched to GMO). Similarly, farmers
have living knowledge about how to grow certain crop varieties
learned by long experience. non-GMO and GMO varieties require
different techniques, and non-GMO techniques may be forgotten,
making it infeasible to switch back to non-GMO.
Decisions to prevent these outcomes can only occur at the
government/regulatory level, and may possibly be "GMO are
banned".
swiftcoder wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
I don't think you can arbitrarily leave out all the other
parties in the agricultural system: the bank, who the farmer
may need to borrow from to buy seed, the politicians, who may
or may not accept money from the companies producing GMO seeds
to produce favourable legislation, the public, who may vote
with their wallets when purchasing the resulting crops, and so
on...
TimTheTinker wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
Great point.
As an extreme example, I'd add -- in some cases, because of
market conditions (and perhaps the legal climate as well), within
a given financial year a farmer may be forced to choose between
purchasing GMO seeds and having to sell the farm, especially if
the farm already used licensed GMO seeds in a prior year.
But as you pointed out, without legal and regulatory guardrails,
the system at large can become badly suboptimal long before
compromise-or-die dichotomies arise.
thinkingtoilet wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
Are they? Farmers in the US just went a full month without selling
a single soy bean to China. The last time it happened was seven
years ago. Guess who was president both times it happened. Guess
who farmers overwhelmingly voted for? They regularly vote against
their own business interests. Perhaps farmers in Nigeria are better
educated.
rpdillon wrote 22 hours 9 min ago:
I think farmers know about the trade war that Trump will create,
but they also think he will do other things to help them. [1] I
was also curious about this, so I ended up watching a documentary
a local politician made where she interviewed local farmers
trying to figure out why they would vote against their own best
interests, and the short answer was, net, they thought additional
bailouts + deregulation of farming would outweigh the potential
trade war.
URI [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/10/02...
thinkingtoilet wrote 20 hours 34 min ago:
They do not.
JumpCrisscross wrote 7 hours 13 min ago:
Wyoming here. The farmers and ranchers are 100% convinced
theyâll be bailed out.
And honestly? They probably will. ICE basically stopped
enforcing around here because the farmers threw a hissy fit.
thinkingtoilet wrote 5 hours 35 min ago:
Of course they will, but losing your long term market for a
short term bailout shows they don't understand the actual
business ramifications of what they voted for. Great. You
get a bail out. What's the long term plan when China keeps
buying soybeans from other countries?
mrguyorama wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
The entire reason almost every modern country massively
subsidizes and manages the staple food crops of their
agricultural economy is that letting them rationally act in their
best interests kept causing famines when farmers did dumb things,
like cause the dust bowl.
Central management of food supplies has been an essential part of
societal stability since ancient times, and the USSR using
"industrialization" and "centralization" of farming as an excuse
to kill a bunch of "kulaks" does not undo that.
sdeframond wrote 1 day ago:
Many businesses are not thinking long term. Farming businesses are
businesses too, and may prefer short term profitability over long
term sustainability.
See for example the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, which is at
the same time an existential threat to to farming and caused by
farming.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
bootsmann wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
This is a tragedy of the commons and not comparable to a singular
farmer making a singular decision about what to plant on his
field.
michaelt wrote 21 hours 57 min ago:
Imagine if hypothetically a supplier offered very competitive -
maybe even loss-making - prices when they had 25% of the
market; then once they had 90% of the market and most of their
competitors had gone out of business, they planned to raise
prices substantially, make back the loss, and produce a big
profit.
Isn't each customer's decision to buy (or not buy) from the
loss-making supplier a tragedy-of-the-commons situation?
parineum wrote 18 hours 7 min ago:
Imagine if Monsanto just murdered every farmer that didn't
use their seeds.
Both are equally legal.
bethekidyouwant wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
Once mosanto has 90% of the market and they jack up their
prices. Farmers can go back to growing non-GMO seeds and not
using round up to weed.
pfdietz wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
Another hilarious thing about the argument is that Roundup,
and also the gene package involved in Roundup Ready plants,
are now in the public domain. The patents are expired.
There's nothing preventing a country from just ignoring
patents, too. That pretty much happened in India with Bt
cotton, engineered to express an insecticidal protein.
Gray market seeds with the trait became widely available
there and the foreign patent holders judged it not
worthwhile to try to prosecute. This was all very good
news for Indian cotton farmers, especially considering the
personal cost to them of exposure to the pesticides they'd
otherwise have to have used.
mothballed wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
I struggle for an example of that actually working. If it
does it must be exceedingly rare. I can think of lots of
example of having 25% of the market and then getting closer
to the majority by cutting prices, but the part where they
jack them back up usually doesn't work. For instance,
Rockefeller did that to put his competition out of business,
but then the price of Kerosene just kept going down.
The times where it actually worked (railroad) was because the
people doing it convinced the government afterwards to
"protect the market" (interstate commerce act) and created a
violence enforced cartel that prohibited by law rebates and
other methods by which cartels (and pre-ICA railroad cartels)
commonly fall apart.
trenchpilgrim wrote 1 day ago:
If your neighbor planted a GMO crop in their field, and then
sprayed them with the compatible chemicals, two things might
happen:
1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field,
killing your non-GMO crops
2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and
corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a
lawsuit. Or maybe if your neighbor doesn't like you, they spread
some GMO seed in your field, then report you to the company.
This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities,
in some cases turning violent.
URI [1]: https://youtu.be/CxVXvFOPIyQ?t=1567
tptacek wrote 22 hours 0 min ago:
This (2) case is, I think, mostly (maybe entirely) false. In
every case I've read where this was claimed, the actual fact
pattern was that the "victim" farmer wound up with unlicensed
herbicide/pesticide-resistant crops that they then sprayed with
herbicide or pesticide. If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready
seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you
were doing.
Ancapistani wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
> If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray
the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing.
... or you're trying to exterminate an errant plant, only to
end up with it being the only thing remaining in the field.
tptacek wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
That's a thing that can happen, but there's no evidence that
anybody has been sued for it. The cases where people have
been sued, the record is pretty extensive that they knowingly
used the whole system, not just the seeds.
gruez wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
>1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field,
killing your non-GMO crops
That sounds like it should be handled by tort law rather than GMO
laws. Even without GMOs you'll have issues like this, for
instance conventional fields polluting organic fields, or
herbicides that work for one type of plant but not another.
cyberax wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
> 1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field,
killing your non-GMO crops
Have you ever been on a farm?
> 2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and
corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a
lawsuit.
Sorry, but this video is just pure post-truth bullshit. I
unsubscribed from Veritassium because of this video, and I was a
paying Patreon subscriber.
Monsanto has NEVER sued anyone for accidental contamination.
Moreover, they will buy out your contaminated crops at
higher-than-market prices.
They sued farmers that specifically and intentionally, over
several years, bred resistant crops by using GMO genes from
neighboring fields or by replanting the previous years' crop.
> This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag
communities, in some cases turning violent.
Can you cite any examples? Go on, fire up Kagi and search.
pfdietz wrote 20 hours 8 min ago:
Monsanto Derangement Syndrome got Veritasium? Geez...
bluGill wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
1 - farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an
issue. the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift
before approving spray
2 - this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus
killing anything that isn't gmo and bringing the patents into the
field. if you don't take advantage of the trait the corporate
people don't care.
though many of the more useful traits are off patent now and so
they won't care anyway
Y-bar wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
> farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue
Do they really? Never seem my neighbours being particularly
picky about wind conditions.
> the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before
approving spray
Putting aside the current grave gutting of the agency in
question, do they really inspect each usage on a regular basis
or is it a pinky promise?
> this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus
killing anything that isn't gmo
That's a primary problem which is already happening as linked
previously in the discussion, it essentially forces a
mono-supplier and a mono-culture.
Suppafly wrote 14 hours 16 min ago:
>Do they really? Never seem my neighbours being particularly
picky about wind conditions.
You really think they don't consider how to effectively apply
the expensive chemicals that increase their profits by a ton?
Y-bar wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
You made me looking back at historical wind patterns in my
county and last year they sprayed it was 12m/s SSW
(Beaufort 6) the day I remember they sprayed.
MostlyStable wrote 20 hours 8 min ago:
We have a small-ish farm in Oregon. We religiously watch the
wind before spraying for two reasons:
1) Chemicals are extremely expensive and chemicals that drift
off the field are wasted, not to mention that in high winds
you can't be confident in good coverage (unless you just
dramatically increase your spray amount, which, see again re:
cost).
2) Despite our extreme care, we have had regulatory bodies
called on us by neighbours about drift (investigation
exonerated us).
Thus we have both an internal, selfish reason to not spray
during high wands and an external reason to not spray during
high winds. I can't speak to other areas of the country (let
alone the world) or other kinds of farming.
pfdietz wrote 20 hours 10 min ago:
It doesn't force a mono-supplier, since existing seeds are
not suddenly made unavailable when new seeds are brought to
market.
Y-bar wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
It has on multiple occasions as linked elsewhere in this
discussion, made usage of anything other than a specific
vendor's strain unusable. That is a textbook type 1.B.
mono-supplier condition.
pfdietz wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
Yeah, I call bullshit on that claim. The only way
something like this could become required would be if
it's so much more performant that farmers would have no
choice. But that would mean it's creating so much extra
value the farmers still come out ahead. How is this a
bad thing? In no scenario is it possible for the
introduction of a new variety to force farmers to make a
decision that leaves them worse off than some other
decision they could make.
lm28469 wrote 1 day ago:
Point 1 isn't a "might happen", it's a "will happen"
bootsmann wrote 1 day ago:
Valid points but this seems more simple to address using
regulation rather than removing the seed patents (which are
essential to some degree to make this whole process worthwhile
for manufacturers). The argument is that without seed patents
most of the genuine advancements would not be worth pursuing.
8note wrote 23 hours 32 min ago:
this is still based on the idea that farmers are bad
businessmen, and couldnt find the seed innovation because it
would result in better crops.
if the advancement is genuinely worthwhile, farmers are going
to make it happen
bootsmann wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
The whole point of the G in GMO is that you donât get these
plants by the usual technique of selecting good strains
produced by natural gene variance.
trenchpilgrim wrote 1 day ago:
What regulation would you propose to fix either of these
issues?
Case 2 I suspect could be addressed by a law granting some
level of immunity for simply having GMO plants in a field. But
how do you fix Case 1 with laws? These are effects of biology
and physics.
Veserv wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
Monsanto has already made legally binding declarations that
they will never sue for "simply having GMO plants in a field"
or "accidentally growing trace amounts of patented crops"
which have been affirmatively held as legally binding [1].
The cases you are referencing are cases where the farmer
discovers trace contamination of their field, then
deliberately sprays Roundup to kill all non-GMO crops, then
deliberately harvest seed from the survivors, then
deliberately create a GMO section of their farm where they
repeatedly plant and harvest to concentrate seed production
until they have multiple thousands of acres of GMO crops they
derived from the trace contamination [2].
Or cases where they signed a agreement to not replant their
GMO soybeans, so they sold those GMO soybeans to a facility
which sells to consumers for consumption, then turned around
and rebought from that same facility the GMO soybeans they
just sold so they could replant them [3] claiming that the
sale to a third party meant they were not "replanting" the
soybeans they just produced since they just oopsie-whoopsie
bought them from someone not bound by the agreement.
If you actually look into it, most of the cases that people
imagine were really bad or evidence of Monsanto screwing
farmers are actually examples of ridiculously slimy farmers.
That is not to say that Monsanto is a saint as they almost
surely are hiding evidence of Roundup toxicity and you should
be generally distrusting that large corporations are
value-aligned with regular people, but specifically in the
cases of Monsanto versus farmers, the farmers are almost
always hiding how absolutely slimy they are actually being.
[1] [2] [3] .
URI [1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/06/12/1909...
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_...
URI [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co
RobotToaster wrote 19 hours 8 min ago:
The idea that a farmer can ever be sued for saving seeds is
horrific, no matter what corporate pr speak you dress it up
in
linkregister wrote 18 hours 8 min ago:
Why is that horrific? Is it because some farmers are
smaller operations and have less bargaining power? What
about a large farming conglomerate, e.g. Cargill? What in
particular is bad about this contract, and makes it
different from other contracts?
Is it horrific to be sued for modifying and selling
software with a removed GPLv3 notice?
bootsmann wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
If a factory pours poison into a farmers water source they
can already sue, I cannot imagine it would be significantly
harder to enable similar regulation for fertilizers and
pesticides.
LunaSea wrote 23 hours 26 min ago:
Yes, that very famously worked for PFAS poisoned waters by
DuPont in the US.
It's still ongoing and we're 24 years later.
trenchpilgrim wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
The legal costs would bankrupt most non-corporate farms.
(In fact that's what happened - as explained in the link in
that comment, many farmers had to settle even if they
believed themselves innocent.)
A lawsuit is rarely a good remedy to a problem, between
legal costs, the time delay to any rewards, and the
overloaded court system strongly encouraging people to
settle out of court.
abdullahkhalids wrote 1 day ago:
From the TFA
> In general, a higher democracy index correlates with greater GM
acceptance, although large differences exist between individual
nations.5 South America contains both pro-GM and GM-skeptical nations.
When comparing the two using the Democracy Index, however, the pro-GM
countries have a consistently higher Democracy Index (6.8) than those
that ban GM (4.4). Similarly, the mean Democracy Index for Sub-Saharan
African countries that cultivate or are currently legislating towards
GM crop cultivation (4.7) is higher than those that ban it (3.5).
> This suggests that fostering democratic accountability is not simply
a political good in itself, but also a precursor for enabling
science-based agriculture. For countries looking to promote GM, the
priority may not be exporting âdemocracyâ wholesale, but supporting
governments in building credibility, transparency, and public trust â
the very conditions under which new technologies can take root.
This makes this piece sound like a political propaganda post. There is
no concrete causal mechanism posited here, just vague assertions. Two
seconds of thought would reveal that all non-democratic countries have
adopted technologies of all sorts. And people in those countries use
technologies extensively in daily life.
I would assume it is easier for corporations to spread bribes around in
a decentralized decision making system like representative democracy,
than it is in centralized authoritarian systems.
margalabargala wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
> I would assume it is easier for corporations to spread bribes
around in a decentralized decision making system like representative
democracy, than it is in centralized authoritarian systems.
I would assume the opposite. The more authoritarian the country, the
fewer people who need to be bribed to get what you want, generally
speaking (placing things like lobbying under the umbrella of bribes).
arandr0x wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
Is there not a confounding factor at play that a more functional
government would facilitate both more democracy and more legislation
on newer technology? Is this notion that "it might be nice to help
your target market have a generally working government to facilitate
them being willing to divert money towards non-corruption goals and
able to protect your market with laws" really that new?
(Here the model would be that democracy is something that countries
develop once they have some OK government systems, not that democracy
in itself makes those systems better, but it works with the causation
the other way too)
hollerith wrote 1 day ago:
I agree: at first glance it is a very flimsy argument -- made by an
organization whose entire purpose seems to be to advocate for what
they consider to be technological progress specifically in the
biological domain.
kranke155 wrote 1 day ago:
GMOs allowed for the huge expansion on the use of pesticides in
America, since the crops are "pesticide ready".
parineum wrote 17 hours 58 min ago:
What do you think farmers were doing before GM crops?
Symmetry wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
They've allowed for a huge expansion of the use of herbicide but
drastically reduced the use of insecticide. I'd much rather have
the former than the later.
dzonga wrote 1 day ago:
maybe we need to ask why was Nigeria in a place to accept GMOs being
pushed by the Gates Foundation ?
what are the conditions that led to that outcome ?
trallnag wrote 20 hours 10 min ago:
Because GMOs are superior
pidgeon_lover wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
No, GMOs are hazardous and inferior
xchip wrote 1 day ago:
Because they are poor and you can easily bribe the politicians
ryoshoe wrote 1 day ago:
Regardless of potential bribes to politicians, its easy to look at
the increased yields from GMO foods as a benefit for a country where
~20% of the population are undernourished
URI [1]: https://www.globalhungerindex.org/nigeria.html
imtringued wrote 17 hours 30 min ago:
You're making the fallacy that these people can afford greater
quantities of more expensive food.
darth_avocado wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
It is an artificial dichotomy tbh. When you say GMO foods, you
usually refer to foods that have been introduced to populations
across the globe in environments they are not suitable to be grown
in. Yes GMO rice will probably grow better and feed more people in
drought prone regions of India, but so would the indigenous
millets that were replaced by rice. They require less water (and
fertilizers and pesticides that GMOs require), are more resilient
to climate events and more suitable to local climate. Not saying
GMO foods are A solution, just that they arenât the ONLY solution
if the goal was to feed enough people.
Some additional reading:
URI [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10695985/#:~:text...
kjkjadksj wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
Behavior follows costs. There is probably some stumbling block
regarding millets. That being said, seed companies are very
interested in land races, do not be mistaken. They are a good
source of phenotypic variation and potential traits that might be
favorable to introduce into the elite cultivars.
maddmann wrote 1 day ago:
Did you read the article? I think this case study shows why gm is
likely to be key to avoiding mass starvation as climate change
becomes a bigger issue.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
The government can't even make a dent into wars between farmers and
livestock herders.
Any political control or statement on GMOs are largely theater.
They have next to no means to prohibit it nor subsidize it.
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