As I understand it from the farmers whose presentations Iâve attended (note this was a meeting about what makes organic produce organic, so thereâs the bias), itâs difficult to do large crops without buying from Monsanto â or another giant agricorp of the same ilk. Just like with electronics and other products, they are near-monopolies who want to trap their customers in their ecosystem (a literal one in this case).
Itâs a late-stage capitalism situation where choice is being taken away from the consumer, but it has extra resonance in this case because 1) itâs about the food supply and 2) the people whose crops are really suffering are not necessarily Monsanto customers â theyâre just downwind from farmers who are.
If the Monsanto-buying farmers donât win the lawsuit mentioned in the article, theyâll be vulnerable to lawsuits from the other farmers whose crops were damaged by the genetically keyed weedkiller.
People want ease of use but technological products may not be easy to use. Many years ago we bought an HP fiber optic module which had a screw on the back labelled âDo not undo this screwâ. On about page 4 of the maintenance manual was the instruction âRemove the screw marked âDo not undo this screwâ. This instruction is for people who do not read manuals.â
I was thinking of this just the other day because I was buying an adhesive which had very mixed reviews on the net, and was in fact advertised as not being suitable for the use to which I intended to put it. But I had read the manufacturerâs application note which explained precisely why they said that, and what instructions you needed to follow to make it work. They are quite complex as to clamping pressure, time and temperature and the need to apply wood preservative.
It became obvious that the negative reviews were from people who had not read the instructions.
Now, that said, I regard Monsanto as an evil, monopolistic company that tries to leech off of farmers. But what do I know, Iâm just a European, and not a biologist.
However, people are de facto being forced to use them due to the fact that you canât really put 50M high walls round farms, and at least one agribusiness has sued a farmer for growing a crop contaminated by blow-over from another farm using its products.
??? Itâs been the case since at least the 90s. Never mind GMO or not, itâs hard to procure seeds in large quantities while avoiding large agricorps.
And if the seeds are designed to use specific herbicides, farmers are in a double bind. Remember when on-line music stores tried to have it so you could only play music on their players bought from their stores?
So youâve got a situation where if they want the crop, they have to buy the seeds and the weed killer as a set.
I think youâre discounting the ease of following the instructions. The one thing that jumped out at me was the â24 inches max heightâ stipulation. That eliminates the use of crop duster airplanes, for starters.
The law of course doesnât make any distinction between a multibillion turnover company that employs QCs and a farmer with a turnover of maybe ÂŁ40000 a year that has trouble finding the money to pay a local solicitor, or time to attend court.
@Cynical, I often agree with your posts but on this occasion you seem wilfully to be misunderstanding how stacked up things are against small farmers.
Sensible, but guess what? Buying the commercial seed typically includes a contractual obligation not to save any seed â a farmer can and will be sued if they do so. Similar legal logic to copying a music file you bought.
Also, some of these crops (most often the GMO ones, but some more traditionally produced varieties as well) do not produce viable seeds anymore, so saving isnât an option. The seed providers are trying to make it so you have to buy seed every year, either for biological or economic reasons. âEconomic reasonsâ meaning even if you can legally store the seed, you may not be able to afford dedicating the necessary amount of land to seed production.
Plus, if a given variety had been bred to only be useful with certain herbicides and pesticides, the agricorps can use seed purchasing as a throttle for how much chemicals they sell you in a given year.
Surprisingly enough, Monsanto will sue you if you keep seed from the crop, whether to sell or use yourself. Terms and conditions, you know, and the courts have gone along with it.
Oops, ninjaâd by gadgetgirl.
You assume that (a) Monsantoâs yield claims are correct, (b) that all externalities have been accounted for. In fact for agrarian farmers the time of summer rainfall can make the difference between success and failure. I am not a farmerâŚbut last year we produced fruit but very little in the way of vegetables and this year we canât find any more people to give food away to. Farming is not like making iPhones. And if you knew how much stuff farmers are bombarded with about miracle this and superior that you would be amazed. Around here thereâs a farmersâ co-operative that has its own vets and independent advisers, and then farmers have to decide who to believe - the government, the co-op, or agrichemical businesses.
Attempts at planned farming such as those in the former Soviet Union proved not to work either.
Agribusiness, in fact, often seems like a less ethical version of the music business. For their managers, the farmers are the crop.
Great summary! Yeah, that is not the first time Iâve heard of Monsanto and like corporations claiming theyâre solving world hunger while they conveniently make customers reliant on their products.
You must be a Big Organic / anti-vaxx shill! How dare you suggest that Monsanto is anything other than genetically modified goodness!
[Shudder]
I⌠I got nothing.
Iâve had too many conversations IRL that went 'round in circles before the opposite number would finally acknowledge that just 'cos itâs scientific, doesnât mean itâs being put to good use.
And about the same number of frustrating IRL conversations about how just 'cos itâs scientific, doesnât mean itâs automatically evil.
Itâs bloody difficult being an artsy who likes science, I tells ya.
Science is neutral. You can make safer quarrying explosives or more destructive bombs.
Where it all goes wrong is when the money men get involved. Money itself is just a convenient way of book-keeping. But when people start to worship it, as a street rabbi once commented, things go downhill.
Genetically modified food could have worked very well if it had been done by something like the NIH. But not by for-profit corporations.
Edit - also see the human genome project and how it was rescued from Venter.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=710
This is a starting point for the seed reuse question.
i whole-heartedly disagree. the topics we chose to pursue in science are part of our cultural, personal, and as you say â economic â bias. thereâs nothing neutral about it. ( even which papers get published, and who and what gains notoriety can be very political. )
the fact that atomic science was pursued for the sake of the bomb canât be ignored. nor can can things like anthropology and primate studies which for a long time looked solely ( and still overwhelmingly ) with the male gaze. ( ex. alpha-beta males, the âman the hunterâ myth, etc. )
you may mean that facts are neutral ( though iâm told reality has a well-known liberal bias 
) and so, over time, our knowledge should steer towards more âtruthâ.
i certainly hope that we are headed towards a more equal and more just world where what we know and how we interpret it becomes ever more honest, i am not sure, however, that this is guaranteed. if history has shown anything its that we tend to forget that which is inconvenient.
i think itâs hard to say if gmo science would even be a thing.
if we really kept the profit motive out of critical research and infrastructure â maybe the strife in countries which are frequently racked with famine ( which some gmo research seeks to reduce ) wouldnât be nearly the issue that it is in the first place.
the context of our world â political and otherwise â defines many of the scientific questions we even believe are worth asking.
That is ahistorical, however. I have a 1936 physics textbook, from before anybody considered making an atomic bomb, which contains all the necessary formulae and scientific information. The Manhattan Project was mainly an engineering project., not really science. Had WW2 not happened it is entirely possible that nuclear power would eventually have developed for energy generation use, but it would have taken a very long time due to the need for large scale engineering to get enough U-235 in the first place.
Who knows without the incentive of the bomb we may have gone down the thorium route instead.
Or perhaps the large scale engineering would have been for heavy waterâŚ
Sounds like a moderately good idea.