8 ms·

We can feed the world many times over with existing tech, we just can't distribute it. How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that? http://www.glo

• afarrell 10y ago
  It makes it easier for and given locality to grow more food, so it makes it easier to distribute that food. It means that you can tolerate greater levels of waste. In a world where logistics are imperfect, there will always be some waste. Also, if you have greater yield for a given input of labor, more people can go work in a factory make latex gloves or some huge number of life-saving products.
  • DasIch 10y ago
    Has there been any practical success in that area or is this still mostly theoretical?
  • moptar 10y ago
    If you can grow food in more hostile environments, won't that mean people move to those more hostile environments and again end up dependent on unreliable food supplies, but now slightly further into the desert/salt flats/etc than before?
  • ctack 10y ago
    This would be it, you'd deal with the inefficiencies of distribution by having more a robust ability to grow food where you need it.
  • therestisgone 10y ago
    How is that supposed to help subsistence farmers who can't afford the seeds and heribicides?
• sp332 10y ago
  If you want to protest that, then protest that instead of GMOs.
• eivarv 10y ago
  How is "privatising/patenting seeds" synonymous with "G.M.O. Foods"? The Nobel Laureates are not talking about the business-practice of certain companies, but rather about fear-mongering about G.M.O.s themselves, e.g. appeals to nature as basis for "health concerns", etc.
  • BonsaiDen 10y ago
    They are simply ignoring the real world economic impacts though, which is stubborn to say the least. The world is no utopia, and as long as money / economic gain is the utmost priority for most of humanity and its corporations, allowing widespread use of patented G.M.O.s will only cause more damage in the long run. Imagine a whole countries population being dependent upon a companies patented seeds. Now add some secret courts implemented via trade agreements so the country is effectively unable to just "use" these seeds without paying up incredible amounts of money and suddenly you got yourself a situation where the country might end up under effective control by the company. Yes there's probably still a way out of this dilemma, but with the right/wrong people coming to power through the course of action, you might quickly end up with nationalist government for which the most easy solution is out is a war.
    • etatoby 10y ago
      Spot on. Let's try not to end up as the Century of the GMO Wars.
  • etatoby 10y ago
    They are synonymous because that's the current situation: GMOs are the product of billion of dollars of R&D, on which the owners fully expect a return on investment. Which means protecting the IP of GMOs, aka. sterilizing / privatizing / patenting seeds, and usually selling additional chemical products related to the GMOs, as in RoundUp resistant seeds, with their own set of problems when deployed on a massive scale. The Laureates are effectively saying: "GMOs are OK to eat. This scientific / statistical fact has no direct link to how they are developed and sold in practice and what consequences that will have on society, the economy, and the environment. That's a different problem. Stop bashing GMOs." They are not only missing the point: they are behaving in a very irresponsible way.
• vlehto 10y ago
  Patenting and privatizing is different from GMO itself. Food surplus means nothing if it can't be distributed reliably. It matters nothing if you can spread food nice and even in 2017 if we get famines in 2018. Transporting and trading food makes it vulnerable to problems in transport and economics. So nothing beats locally grown high yield nutritious crops. And GMO can improve yields and nutritional values.
  • fovc 10y ago
    Do you have a source for GMO improving yield and nutrition? I thought most GM was Roundup Ready and similar, designed to be herbicide resistant. I've heard of e.g., Golden Rice being more nutritious with beta carotene, but was under the impressioname that yields weren't great. Even with non-GMO there's a well known tradeoff between yield and nutrition (search dilution effect), so this would be a big deal
    • Kristine1975 10y ago
      >Do you have a source for GMO improving nutrition? Golden Rice comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice >Golden rice is a variety of rice (Oryza sativa) produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the edible parts of rice. But see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015708
  • tomp 10y ago
    > It matters nothing if you can spread food nice and even in 2017 if we get famines in 2018 That's exactly what happens with sterile GMOs if you throw away all your non-GMO seeds then can't pay next year's GMO licencing costs.
    • vlehto 10y ago
      Some of the most productive varieties of traditionally bred plants are sterile already. Patent laws are completely different set of problems. They don't necessarily need to have anything to do with GMO as process.
• deleted 10y ago
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• douche 10y ago
  Most vegetable seed you can buy is already a proprietary hybrid cross that doesn't seed back true anyway.
  • Turing_Machine 10y ago
    Yes, exactly. The same even more true with grains, where the production of "organic" grain using heirloom varieties is even smaller than it is with vegetables (it's basically a rounding error). The bulk of seed grain is produced by specialized seed companies who hybridize Cool Variety #1 with Cool Variety #2 and sell the resulting seed which produces Cool Variety #3. The problem is that if you plant Cool Variety #3 seeds, only a minority of them will be Cool Variety #3. This is a real problem. If you kept growing the seeds for many generations, ruthlessly weeding out anything that didn't exhibit CV #3 traits, you'd eventually get something close to a pure CV #3 strain, but most farmers don't want to do that. Let's say that CV #1 is resistant to "gray-green rot" (made up names here), while CV #2 is resistant to "early leaf blight". CV #3 is resistant to both, thanks to having one GGR-resistant gene from CV #1 and one ELB-resistant gene from CV #2. But what happens if you grow CV #3 seeds? The kicker is that genes (usually) come in pairs. You'll get 25% offspring that are resistant to both (what you want), 25% resistant to GGR (but not ELB) 25% resistant to ELB (but not GGR), and 25% resistant to neither. If both GGR and ELB kill the plant, congratulations! You've managed to reduce your crop yield by 75%. That is why most modern farmers do not save seeds.
• daveguy 10y ago
  Agreed. To address some other comments: 1) You can't patent seeds unless you have modified them genetically. Occurrences of nature are not patentable. No GMO, no associated business practice. 2) Some of the modifications (I'm looking at you Monsanto roundup ready) allow plants to be tolerant of increased quantities of herbicide. This is obviously not something you want to encourage on a global industrial scale. Like you said, we have the food, we don't have the distribution. 3) That said, there is absolutely no inherent danger of genetic modification. We do it all the time, it's well controlled for effectively getting a specific modification. Calling GMO "frankenfoods" or implying there is some inherent health risk to GMO food (outside specific problematic modifications) is just bullshit.
  • smackay 10y ago
    I agree with your points but the genetic modification is not just about tinkering with the existing set of genes that the plant has but adding new ones from sources that would never happen naturally, https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/gefood/glowingpotato.php https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/gefood/glowing.... This is where the "frankenfood" moniker comes from. Apologies for the partisan/political link objective data is not so easy to come by.
    • eivarv 10y ago
      Why does it matter what would or wouldn't happen "naturally", though?
      • tomp 10y ago
        The point is, we know pretty well (based on millions of years of "natural" mutation and evolution) what can and cannot happen in "nature". If you introduce mutation based on human engineering, you could easily (even inadvertedly) develop something very dangerous, e.g. move a gene from a bacterium to a plant, but now all of a sudden this plant becomes as resistant/dangerous as the bacterium was, on a much larger scale! Compare this with nuclear weapons - humans have in a few decated managed to engineer something way more dangerous than millions of years of "natural" permutations/combinations of atoms.
• saalweachter 10y ago
  To the lesser question: > How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that? The patent on the first generation of Roundup-Ready soybeans expired last year. A third party immediately produced a generic version of Roundup-Ready soybeans and sold it for half the price of the Monsanto seeds, with no restriction on seed saving. Madness! A company created something new, obtained a patent, and enjoyed a limited monopoly until their patent expired and the free market used the now-public information to undercut them. This is an example of the system working. Regarding your greater point -- the claim that we are producing many times more food than we need -- the important question isn't how much food we're "wasting" but how much food waste is avoidable, given the constraints we want to live under. The difficulty in food distribution -- as the article you linked pointed out -- isn't just a matter of warlords hording food or rich westerners cramming their maws with too much food[1]. The larger problem is that food is an organic product (as in, literally, not philosophically) produced in messy conditions with a limited shelf-life. Some food produced will be of substandard quality; some food produced will spoil before reaching a consumer. Agriculture is a leaky pipeline between the farmer and the hungry consumer, and most of the leaks that are left are difficult to plug, or shouldn't be plugged. Consumers shouldn't eat spoiled or fouled food, so if you can't prevent the food from being fouled or spoiling you should let it fall out of the system. What all this means is that we need to be producing some multiple of the amount of food people consume to actually get that amount to them. We should try to improve distribution as well, of course, but the returns there will be as diminishing as they are everywhere else. By 2050 we'd like 60%-85% more food to be reaching end consumers than is now, to both keep up with population growth and to feed those who are hungry now. Some of that will almost certainly come from improvements in distribution, some of it will probably come from shifting diets away from meat and other inefficient crops, but we'll also need to ultimately produce more food per acre than we are now. [1]: I found this sentence in the article particularly offensive: > "And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum." There may be someone out there eating 6-7 times some minimum (1500 calories?), but that is a weird abnormality and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As someone who is mildly overweight, my calorie surplus is about 50-100 calories, about 2% extra, which adds about 5 pounds per year. That is the typical overfed westerner. Adding in the extra calories to support my extra body weight amounts to about 10% more calories than would need at my ideal weight. If 30% of the world consumed 10% fewer calories, it would indeed have a measurable impact on the global food supply, but it is a bit of a red herring.