"But the GMO lightning rod distracts from the larger cautionary tale: Our reliance on monoculture to feed surging global populations is catching up with us."
A lot of old true-to-seed breeds of plants with diverse sets of attributes (like e.g. being more resistant to certain environmental conditions) haven't been cultivated for economic reasons and consequently have become extinct by now.
There are some enthusiasts trying to preserve those old breeds by running seed-banks but they have a hard time to do so even here in Europe because of corporations like Monsanto and their heavy lobbying trying to outlaw this movement.
Arche Noah:
"In the past 100 years we have lost about 75 percent of agricultural diversity worldwide."
which has been used against at least one seed bank.
At a quick glance, it indeed lends itself very well to corporatocratic usages.
Having said that though, it's quite unsettling how there is much blogging about "monsanto lobbying against seed banks", without absolutely any reference which is not word of mouth.
As for word of mouth, until John Deere adds a repeater onto their tractors it's what we have to work with. I'd use my Chromebook, but Google's networking layer in Javascript continues to remain broken.
The link to the full paper isn't working but if that is who I think it is (Vandana Shiva) I'd take that paper with a massive grain of gluten-free sea salt. She's the one responsible for the Indian farmer suicide myth, as well as a bunch of other complete nonsense.
I don't understand the downvotes either. The only way I can explain them is that there are certain categories of debate on HN which instantly attract large numbers of trolls intent on suppressing certain avenues of discussion.
I didn't vote the comment either way, but it isn't all that relevant. Grocery store bananas are a monoculture because seedless fruit is more desirable, which makes breeding difficult, and also because 'the generic consumer' desires consistency, which makes it difficult to try to market new varieties. There isn't some big agenda behind it.
I think it is mostly government supported now, but in the past, it's been the case that banana companies have supported research into creating new varieties, which is sort of the opposite of the claimed corporate agenda of making it impossible to maintain heirloom varieties.
Few first minutes after submission of a comment is usually quite random and often you get downvotes Out Of Frakkin Nowhere. Fortunately, the reason usually catches up after a while and situaction rectifies itself. It's usually best to just ignore initial downvotes.
In a general way, I would agree with you. However, my experience has been that topics such as Israel/Palestine, GM and 9/11 attract an unusual amount of attention from astroturfer types (by which I mean exceptionally opinionated people who have not logged into the site for months or years, and have never made a contribution to a technical discussion).
I look at a thread like this and consider you and your downvoters to be two sides of the same coin. You might feel the need to beat the drum about Monsanto and GMO. Others feel the need to beat the drum for pushing forward with the boundaries of knowledge and the benefits that it can provide. You're being downvoted by people who feel differently than you do. Dismissing them as trolls, astroturfers or noncontributors (you don't know who they are) seems to me like rationalizing or propagandizing.
You might be right, but I usually still don't care about it. Topics like that usually have a higher bar for thoughtful comments, but the ones that manage to get over that bar are still visible and discussed. Astroturfers are annoying, but then again karma is just random Internet points; what matters to me more is if a comment manages to start a discussion involving other HNers posting interesting insights.
Karma isn't just random Internet points (in fact, that purpose of karma is pretty irrelevant and one's global "karma score" could just as well be removed without consequence.) The real point of voting is that it sorts comments, so that the dross of a conversation can fall below a certain line and you can stop reading the conversation before that line. Astroturfers negate the value of sorting, such that you have to read (or at least skim) the dross if you want to find the good comments.
Well, I guess I don't trust greying-out that much or am just curious, but I tend to skim the heavily down-voted comments anyway. Every now and then, one can find a pearl of wisdom in them.
It's indeed relevant. This is one of the biggest reason why monoculture and monsanto-like-GMO will never work (even if we knew how to properly create GMO, which is not the case and another subject).
If you create a GMO which is targeted to kill some insects or plants, there is then a huge incentive due to the large size of the crops and the lack of diversity for a new kind of insect / plant to resist to this GMO, it would have a massive competitive advantage and could spread much more quickly. There is only a benefit in the first years you are using it until the environment is adapting itself.
This is why when you buy Bt or herbicide-resistant GMO seeds, you have to either get conventional seeds mixed in, or you must plant conventional seeds yourself in the same field. This is called "refuge" and is a regulatory requirement that both GMO seed manufacturers and the government take very seriously. And your claim that "we don't know how to properly create GMO" is incredibly dismissive.
Yes but the size of the refugee is not large enough even in theory to cover the risks and in practice, the refugee crop is even smaller due to the loss of money by doing this.
I'm not sure why you downvoted but one interesting detail is that current GMO's are not equivalent between them, unlike their traditional counterpart. There is huge differences between the same plants on the same crop and current GMO's are not stable (in the scientific term).
That's what I mean by we know how to create GMO's properly with a reliable technique. This however might change in the future.
A lot of old true-to-seed breeds of plants with diverse sets of attributes (like e.g. being more resistant to certain environmental conditions) haven't been cultivated for economic reasons and consequently have become extinct by now.
There are some enthusiasts trying to preserve those old breeds by running seed-banks but they have a hard time to do so even here in Europe because of corporations like Monsanto and their heavy lobbying trying to outlaw this movement.
Arche Noah:
"In the past 100 years we have lost about 75 percent of agricultural diversity worldwide."
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
Related - I was just posting on this topic on the Red Delicious thread which popped up on the HN frontpage:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8301185
Edit: I can't see why this gets downvoted, it is clearly on-topic and relevant.