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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
by georgefrowny 1y 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 1y agoSo it has nothing to do with GMOs specifically.
- georgefrowny 1y agoCorrect. It's continuing the general observation first made here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725408) that doesn't specifically mention GMO at all and a disagreement with the premise of the reply to that here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725551). 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".