Item — HN Reader

The argument "making food cheaper for the poor" doesn't give you a pass messing with nature and people's health. I can make food cheaper by killing half of the population since there's going to be more left for the rest of us! Does this justify my action?

Get real, food has grown and can grow naturally and there are natural ways to have healthy crops that don't need dangerous pesticides. Nature has been working in a balance since ever and they are messing with it. It's MY nature they are messing with. All they're doing is maximizing profits at the expense of everything and everybody else.

3 comments

> food has grown and can grow naturally

It most certainly can, but it hasn't for tens of thousands of years. People have been genetically modifying food and growing it in non-natural ways for as long as we have had agriculture.

If we could somehow turn to clocks back to a pre-agriculture food supply, do you feel that it would be viable to keep the current human population alive? Keep in mind that the crops we grow today didn't even exist back then, and only came to exist through thousands of years of genetic modifications.

No they didn't. Genetic modification is not the same thing as crossbreeding. And what they did always happened with regards and love for the environment. They produced crops that brought balance and harmony in nature so they always had fresh and healthy food. They didn't use artificial fertilizers or pesticides nor they messed with the DNA sequence manually for shady purposes.

Have you seen a goat or sheep eating its way through a field of weed? They eat and poop at the same time as they move around. That's an example of a natural fertilizer, cleansing and ploughing tool.

It's the obsession of first-world countries wanting meat every day on the table. That is unnatural. That is disturbing harmony and that is why we need chemical pesticides and genetic modifications and that is why these countries have an excess rate of cancer in comparison to those that still grow food in their yards naturally.

So stop calling natural agriculture genetic modification. That's an argument Monsanto and the likes brought to the table to mess with your mind and justify their cause and is completely invalid.

Okay, let's put it another way. The Dekalb company is 100 years old. They are in the business of crossbreeding, attempting to produce better traits each year in the same way famers did thousands of years ago. Do you feel that they do so with love?

If you answer no, at what point did agriculture lose that love, if more than 100 years ago?

> Have you seen a goat or sheep eating its way through a field of weed?

I have never seen a field of weed with or without animals in it. Such a field would be illegal in my country. (Sorry, I couldn't resist)

Get real. People can still grow food naturally as they always have. They can't use patented technology that took billions to develop and use it for free without approval of the patent holder.

Really? Ask for approval before planting a seed in the ground? You call that technology? Technology doesn't lock-in, it unlocks potential. Maybe ask for a commission then for the oxygen their GM plants produce. After all, it took billions to develop and I am breathing free air that originates from their patented plants.

Yes, really. It's a patented seed. It's a "special" seed. It needed billions of dollars in scientific research to engineer. It's not your seed. You're not free to use it because you didn't develop it and you didn't purchase a license to use it. You're free to use other seeds however, if you have the rights to it.

I think everyone on HN knows by now that the patent system is horribly broken, but that is not in any way exclusive to seeds. I can get in just as much trouble doing similar things with natural ore and carbons.

The reality is that, from a farmer's point of view, nothing changed. You still go to the same vendors, who supply seed same as they always did, and you plant them just like any other. It is not a practical issue, and never would have seen major use if it was.

The RR1 patent expires next year. That means we've been growing the stuff for almost 20 years now. The only problem I have heard of come as the result of the patent in all that time is the guy who got in trouble for spraying roundup on his "naturally occurring" roundup ready crop.

no kidding. So glad my food is cheaper. Too bad this cancer isn't.