Comment by shawndrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shawndrost | Hacker News Reader

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For another side of Monsanto's story, see Norman Bourlag's speech commemorating Monsanto's committment to rice and wheat breeding[1].

Norman Bourlag's life work was to develop and distribute high-yield crops. He's a Nobel peace prize winner and is often credited with saving over a billion lives. Monsanto is carrying on his work at a scale he always strived for.

People in this field is deeply passionate and morally involved in their work. Read the responses from this Monsanto employee at IAMA[2] -- his earnest attempts to explain his morals and his rationale speak for themselves. These people aren't even naked capitalists (not that I have any problem with that) -- they're empirical environmentalists and humanists.

I'm kind of disappointed to hear Monsanto shrilly decried here. Modern ag is a deeply interesting and controversial topic, but that Vanity Fair piece is just rhetoric and linkbait.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1w4zM4SouM [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d83i9/i_work_for_the_m...

IRobot is also helping America conduct safer wars. Where is the humanism is that?

An employee emoting isn't the company or its actions.

> Norman Bourlag's life work was to develop and distribute high-yield crops.

Borlaug's work was via selective breeding. He helped countries produce unpatented food at massive scale in order to feed a billion people.

These crops also were productive because they were planted in areas that had not yet been subject to intensive farming methods. The major obstacle with modern farming is NOT the crops, but the soil quality, and depletion of topsoil is a major problem which is only exacerbated by more productive crops.

There's no free lunch -- in order to have a more productive crop, i.e. more output, it has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the agricultural inputs.

Monsanto's attempts to control and patent food, were an IP regime put in place to actually enforce that, would simply instigate a food crisis.

You can't have Big Pharma profits without severe controls on availability.

"Feeding the poor" is a complete smokescreen that is fundamentally incompatible with their business model.

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