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Comment by sebleon | Hacker News Reader

Despite Monsanto and Syngenta's marketing about "saving starving children", there's good reason why developing countries are actively fighting GMOs. Giving centralized control of food production to a handful of American corporations is a precarious position.

In practice, GMO agriculture creates a trade imbalance. Instead of simply exporting produce, many countries will find themselves importing huge volumes of proprietary products from the likes of Monsanto. This includes buying new breed of patented seeds every year, fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides, etc. And of course, once a farm goes GMO, soil damage makes it almost impossible to go back to organic farming. High level of lock in.

http://sustainablepulse.com/2015/10/22/gm-crops-now-banned-i...

GMO seeds have been modified to create plants that won't make new seeds, great for recurring revenue

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That's not an argument against transgenetic modification, it's an argument about intellectual property and economic practices.

As for terminator seed, this is a valuable technology that addresses concerns that transgenes could spread into the environment. It's also quite irrelevant to any crop that relies on hybrid vigor for yield; F1 seed must be specifically developed from inbred parents, thus no seed saving is possible. In this context, a terminator line would only serve to protect the environment.

> That's not an argument against transgenetic modification, it's an argument about intellectual property and economic practices.

That's not a refutation, that's a goalpost shift.

In the real world today, you can't separate transgenetic modification from intellectual property and economic practices, when the intellectual property is technologically enforced in the transgenetic modification.

Yeah, all these arguments against non-GMO products, painting non-GMO proponents as antiscientific, seem to me to be strawman arguments that ironically miss the point. It's a thinly veiled means of asserting intellectual superiority that backfires to me because it overlooks the real arguments against GMO products.

Great, you're parents and scientists. I'm a parent and a scientist too. But I understand that many of the arguments against GMOs have nothing to do with science (at least biological science) and everything to do with economics and human rights.

Just because something involves biology doesn't mean that arguments about it can be reduced to that.

> the intellectual property is technologically enforced in the transgenetic modification

You seem to hold the false belief that only GMO plants are patentable.

In reality, the US Plant Patent Act is from 1930. The First plant patent (in US) was granted in 1931. Everyday examples: Honeycrisp apple was patented in 1988 (so expired in 2008). 20 different mutant cultivars of Fuji apples are patented. Over 1000 plant patents are granted every year, and these don't go to only GMO plants.

> GMO seeds have been modified to create plants that won't make new seeds

This technology was developed in the 1990s, but it was never taken into use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techno...

>but it was never taken into use.

Exactly! Terminator genes are banned by law in India and Brazil, the UN has a moratorium on them. There are no terminator genes available in sold seeds!

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