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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

My understanding of the GMO debate is that there are two kinds of GMO development: there's GMO for the purposes of making crops themselves hardier, more nutritious, etc., and then there's GMO for the purposes of making crops more resistant to novel pesticides, herbicides, etc. The agricultural industry likes to conflate the two, since the latter is much harder to defend.

I have no idea what Neil Young actually believes (and I don't especially care), but I do know that it's possible to be pro-GMO (or even just neutral) in the first sense and anti-GMO in the latter sense. And that's the position that I've seen otherwise scientifically informed people take.

(This is ignoring some other reasonable responses, such as "what do GMOs have to do with Spotify?" and "why do you think that being anti-GMO makes you anti-science?", but there are only so many hours in the day.)

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Isn' t there another kind of GMO whose sole purpose is IP so farmers can' t reuse seeds from one season to the next ?

Well they're in the seed selling business and make seeds that can survive being sprayed with herbicide. Farmers agree not to save the seed when they purchase them. But no one is forcing them to buy those seeds, they could buy different ones and use different and less effective herbicides. The one guy they drug into court was not only saving them, he was reselling them to other farmers which seems like a straightforward violation of the agreement he signed.

> But no one is forcing them to buy those seeds

This isn't true. Those seeds produce fertile plants that reproduce with plants from surrounding farms and farmers are prevented for saving those seeds. I don't know what you mean by "one guy" as they do it all the time in India from what I've read.

> Those seeds produce fertile plants that reproduce with plants from surrounding and farmers are prevented for saving those seeds.

This isn't true. While they do cross pollinate, farmers aren't being sued for picking up some stray genes, this is a myth.[1][2] They seem like total assholes, but there's no evidence that they're suing people who are accidentally picking up the roundup ready genes. Every case I could find where a farmer claims that, they're able to show that the farmer in question intentionally selected those crops, replanted entire fields with those seeds, and were often selling them to neighbors.

> I don't know what you mean by "one guy"

I'm referring to the famous case in the US that made it's way into a Netflix documentary.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/to....

[2] https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/06/01/dissecting-cla...

> Every case I could find where a farmer claims that, they're able to show that the farmer in question intentionally selected those crops, replanted entire fields with those seeds, and were often selling them to neighbors.

As I said, there are many cases in India that it seems you're not aware of [1]. Who would have guessed a multinational corporation would win in court against peasants the world over... It's not just Monsanto either [2].

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-monsanto-idUSKCN1P5...

2. https://www.rt.com/news/457812-indian-farmers-pepsico-potato...

Th first article about India not allowing the seed until after people started buying them on the grey market, after Monsanto withdrew an application over a royalty dispute with the Indian government. Monsanto didn't sue any farmer there.

The second article is about farmers intentionally planting the potatoes and refusing to stop as part of a settlement deal that offered them either purchasing contracts or asked them to simply stop.

Neither of these is an example of an agro-tech company suing farmers for accidentally growing patented seeds. Did you read the articles?

> accidentally growing patented seeds

First, that's moving the goalpost. Second, "who would have guessed a multinational corporation would win in court against peasants the world over..." You're just repeating their side of the story.

The whole thing was about who they were actually suing. My original claim was that it’s a myth that they sue people for accidentally planting the seeds. If people choose to illegally buy and plant the patented seeds, then they should expect legal trouble.

I’m not actually a fan of these gene patents, but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people trying to use them on the cheap then pretending to take an anti GMO stance when they get caught.

> But no one is forcing them to buy those seeds

Oh yes, lobbying, price gouging and all other means to force someone don't exist.

Almost Hobson's choice.

How do lobbying and price gouging make someone plant a seed in their field?

Ever pre-GMO farmers preferred buying hybrid seeds over heirloom for their stability and traits. Nothing has changed in this way with GMO's.

That's a contractual agreement made when buying the seeds.

It has to do with speech, that people often hold stupid positions that are not aligned with the truth but we don’t usually demand that they’re silenced. [0]

The GMO case was an example of a position Young may hold that is likely political and wrong. There are many examples across the political spectrum.

[0] I’d argue this is because as a society we understand the risks here with speech restriction leading to less truth on net.

There are also other pro science reasons to be against GMO crops. A couple example. GMO based industrial farms grow monocultures that ultimately reduce the variety of foods people traditionally grew and ate, leading to less varied diets and loss of culture. GMO crops also have yields that are unsustainably high, leading to disruption of water cycles (see Ogalalla aquifer depletion).

If GMO opponents stuck with the slogan "the yields are too high" they would be a lot more respectable. At least it's an honest position to hold.

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