I think that, besides the obvious corruption that these court documents reveal, another conversation has to be had about how disingenuous Monsanto and its agents have been in discussing these things - using classic deflection, obfuscation techniques online.
The "Monsanto Field Manual for Internet Representatives" would be a very interesting leak indeed ..
I'm very pro-GMO, but time and time again I see pro-GMO people taunt and belittle anti-GMO people as mean-spirited tinfoil hatters who have zero reason to doubt Monsanto. It's very "Team Red" vs. "Team Blue", and unproductive.
But. That's not to say I'll defend all their practices (like this one) or will not admit the anti-GMO crowd has some very valid points.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/you-can-thank-genetic-engineering-fo...
Sure, baby cows aren't being (literally) gutted for the lining of their stomachs, but that's hardly the extent of the misery we inflict upon dairy animals.
EDIT: not directed at you. Just entertained at the semantic hoops people will set up and then jump through.
I am a predator. Predators kill prey animals, including (and sometimes especially) the babies. Cheese is delicious. Im anti-GMO and have been killing animals for food since I was 3.
GMO and monsanto practices are health issues. The pesticides are a problem in terms of chemical pollution.
As for gene editing, it's a question of polluting the gene pool of a life system. Releasing Gene-mod into a complex dynamic self-regulating self-propagating system is like modifying diseases them and releasing them into human society. It may not be a problem, but we can't know if it will be a problem till it's done, and once it's done, it's done. You can't remove or erase your mistakes.
We cant know what any particular gene-mod will do in the wild, if it will be harmful or not, but we do know that monsanto and their cronies at the FDA and EPA don't give a flying fuck about systemic consequences of new technologies.
We do know that the technology is potentially catastrophic, and there are a lot of disincentives to be responsible baked into the system of those holding the keys to this tech.
You mean like life had been doing since its inception?
You can gripe about the speed and power with which we're performing genetic modification (and things like gene drives are powerful), but I can't agree with the "It's something that's never been done before!" angle.
We're just doing so intelligently. With incomplete knowledge, but a hell of a lot more intelligently than random mutation.
> Of course if you take two fields and plant each with a monocrop, then the one without pesticides will do worse than the one with, but that isn’t really what organic farming is.
> It is true that the old, control-based methods of agriculture are nearing the peak of their productive potential. Further investments in this kind of technology are bringing diminishing marginal returns – witness the proliferation of Roundup-resistant weeds and the “necessity” of new kinds of herbicides to deal with them.
http://charleseisenstein.net/permaculture-and-the-myth-of-sc...
> Conventional agriculture doesn’t seek to maximize yield per acre; it seeks to maximize yield per unit of labor. If we had 10% of the population engaged in agriculture rather than the current 1%, we could easily feed the country without petrochemicals or pesticides.
Interestingly, it may be that with coming automation we may be better served by reallocating 9% of our population back to agriculture...
Also, in a similar vein to permaculture, I found this article fascinating if you haven't come across it yet. https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t...
Yes, one example of that political problem would be food prices being driven up by creating political barriers to more resource efficient crop technologies.
Imho, arguing that politics are resulting in people starving is a bit like saying that gravity is too strong.
You don't have to be a sock-puppet to gain karma, nor have high-karma to be qualified as a sock-puppet, but you certainly can be, karma regardless..
(Plus, there's an easy solution to your supposition: Monsanto pays its people to establish reputation that can be utilised to forward Monsanto's positions...)
Seriously though, who are you referring to? I'd be quite interested to know who the potential Monsanto sock-puppets are on HN.
At the end of the day, Monsanto is just a red herring. Besides just not being that significant - money-wise - in the food industry, glyphosate and the first generation glyphosate-resistant soybeans are no longer under patent. You can buy non-Roundup glyphosate and non-Roundup soybeans that do the same thing for a fraction of the price.
Can you clarify this at all?
My primary objection here isn't to glyphosate, which appears to be in the same fuzzy territory as other chemicals (e.g. food additives) which are legal in Europe/America but banned in America/Europe.
The thing I'm deeply upset by is the rather clear evidence that Monsanto worked with the EPA to prevent a planned review and create misleading evidence of safety. Even of glyphosate is 100% safe that's still frightening regulatory capture with ugly implications for other products, and in that Monsanto isn't a red herring.
In reality, Monsanto is about 0.2 % of global food business.
Which is silly, Monsanto doesn't even sell food.
What it does have is market power in the seed market for certain key global crops, and even more in the GM sector (e.g., 80%+ for GM corn, 90%+ for GM soy.)
Monsanto's relationship to food is sort of like 1990s Microsoft's relation to computers.
Fortunately, we don't need those seeds. They can try to patent and sue all they want; the people will prevail.
There are cases where farmers in adjacent plots were sued for using monsanto 'patented' plants without a licence because their crops cross-pollenated with Monsanto ones - further, if I recall correctly, Monsanto was illegally stealing crop samples or using some other form of shady tricks to perform the analysis required to determine the plants contained the 'patented' genes..
Also, much like bacterial resistance in other areas, if the monsanto GMO crops facillitate mutation such that their 'patented' genes are essentially required for a crop to be viable, over the long run, the argument that we 'dont need' the seeds becomes moot..
Probably the main case that comes up is the Schmeiser case, where Schmeiser claims that his roundup-ready canola came from cross-pollination from a neighbor's field. Schmeiser's account does include the fact that he specifically tested the canola in question and found it to be resistant to Roundup--and subsequently used that in later crops. The court concluded that he had to know that at least some of his crop had the GMO canola, and that his deliberate use of it in the subsequent year constituted infringement.
On Monstanto coverage writ large, I completely agree. The amount of excess attention and paranoia paid there is ridiculous, especially on topics where they have clear competitors like Archer Daniels Midland that people haven't even heard of.
When I say "Monsanto is a red herring", I mean that 90% of the time when people vilify Monsanto, they don't actually care about Monsanto. They're playing a shell game, "Monsanto is evil, therefore we should ban all GMO food crops." Hell, they barely care about glyphosate - they just don't like Roundup-Ready crops, because they're GMO.
Realistically, Monsanto is a large (but not one of the largest) corporations, and some people who work there are trying to save the world, and some people who work there are trying to make all the money by any means necessary, and most of the people are somewhere in between, just working at a job. They've definitely done some things wrong, but they're no Uber.
ADM is predominantly a food processing company; they don't really compete with Monsanto, which is a seed and chemical company. They are basically dominant players in different stages of the food supply chain. (They both have some diversification so there is probably some competition but neither is a major player in the others main markets.)
In essence:
Monsanto -> Farmer -> ADM -> food packagers
Sure, they've been off-patent for two years and been replaced with 2nd generation RoundUp Ready 2 Xtend soybeans, which have additional herbicide resistance and better yield (RoundUp Ready 1 apparently had a pretty significant yield-for-herbicide-resistance trade-off.)
While you can get RoundUp Ready 1 off-patent beans for now (IIRC, there are regulatory issues that will become an issue in a couple years unless someone picks up the burden of doing that now that Monsanto has no commercial incentive to do so), but there's little market in commercial ag for them.
The current system has low productivity per acre. It is very input intensive, inefficient, and is subject to volatile price swings. It's only advantage is that it's highly mechanized, so you get economy of scale with high output per worker and per asset, but that mechanization in it's current form is a system that destroys arability(soil health) over time. So your returns over time degrade, but input costs are on a 40 year uptrend... It's a broken system.
There are food systems that are more labor intensive (less return per human and per asset) but you can produce more food more predictably at lower margins for the producers and higher prices for consumers, but the with more stable input and end-user costs. The three added (and in my opinion most important) side-effects of this system are higher quality food, more jobs, and IMPROVED fertility over time. These new systems use science as well. They were developed by ecologists, systems theorists, and soil microbiologists.
Credentials: (i'm the first son of a 6th generation land-owning family in the Mississippi Delta region of Arkansas.)
However, i've used plastic sheeting in my garden to keep the soil warm and incidentally block light from weeds.
I don't know if that exactly makes him a "Monsanto sock-puppet", but I do think he's being too credulous toward the claims that glyphosate has been shown to be safe. The problem, as we see here, is when there's this much money involved, actually unbiased research gets to be very difficult to come by.
Just putting it out there, guys. Reasonable rates for reasonable arguments. Rhetorical trickery will cost just a bit more. I am almost certainly not joking about this.
Monsanto is deeply involved in the learning side of academia as well.
Sadly, they didn't reply.
I assumed it was just the specific comment's karma that made it go to the top.
Opposing GMO food, in the abstract, may or may not be anti-science.
In concrete terms, many of the specific criticisms of GMO foods (especially those of GMO foods qua GMO foods, rather than of specific foods that happen to.be GMOs) actually made are factually unfounded and reveal.a gross ignorance of the basic relevant facts (like what "GMOs" are and how they differ from modern crops that are not "GMOs", and the regulatory environment facing both types of crops), and suggest that the criticism is originally from someone who is at best disinterested in science and facts if not actively opposed to them.
-I often see the opinion on HN that opposing vaccination is anti-science. I know this article is not about vaccines, but can we really say with confidence that the scientific research done on vaccination hasn't been influenced in the same way?-
Now, this might reasonably lead one to want to close regulatory gaps that provide insufficient oversight to prevent similar actions relating to GMOs, but none of the evidence here directly implicates the safety of GMOs as such. (It does implicate the safety of an herbicide whose use is a major motivation for the use of some of Monsanto's flagship GMO traits, but it's the herbicide, not the GMO, whose safety is implicated.)
In layman's example, it's like having a friend that steals other people's things, what's stopping him from stealing your things when you're not looking?
The story is pretty well in on smallpox and polio.
Harder to say about HPV.
HPV produces a protein called E6, which inhibits the protein called p53 in your cell. P53 is the centralized monitor of the health of the cell's DNA. When HPV inhibits the ability for the cell to monitor its DNA, it cannot respond to ordinary damage like UV, etc. This DNA damage builds up and triggers cancerous mutations that would otherwise have been repaired were the HPV E6 protein not inhibiting the p53 protein.
By getting a vaccine, HPV cannot infect you, thus it cannot produce the E3 protein, thus your p53 protein is functional, thus when you get ordinary DNA damage you repair it rather than accumulating cancer-causing damage. If you do not get a vaccine and you get infected with HPV you now have lost a significant checkpoint in preventing cancer.
p53, E6 & HPV: https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/p53/
but can we really say with confidence that the scientific research done on vaccination hasn't been influenced in the same way
Do we know for certain that HPV vaccine research has not been influenced by the companies selling the vaccines?
Rephrasing, I wasn't doubting the effectiveness of the HPV vaccines, I was pointing out that there are vaccines that we can be pretty much absolutely certain about.
Also, most of what you see coming out of the sprayer is water. The actual amount of glyphosate used in an application is minimal.
"Buy our product, you'll spend more on inputs" would be a fucking stupid USP for Monsanto.
Here's a 2010 article--it's gotten significantly worse since then. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environmen...
No, it's not. RoundUp was around and commercially used as a weedkiller, including in agriculture, before transgenic RoundUp Ready traits were developed.
It's true that RoundUp Ready and similar traits increase the demand for and use of the herbicides they provide resistance to, but the safety of the herbicides is orthogonal to the safety of the herbicide resistant crops.
Edit: It's also worth noting that much legislation and regulations is ghostwritten by affected corporations.
Also, it's not really surprising that drug studies are industry-funded for another reason: Who else is going to fund them?
This affects an incredible array of life. Roundup is used on millions of perfect suburban lawns and landscape plants, impacting countless wildlife, pets, and humans. Glyphosate-grown foods are pervasive in our food supply, and eventually find their way into countless rivers and streams.
Using chemicals that are designed to kill living things in such a widespread manner is just a dangerous idea.
They do. I can't find any free sources with hard numbers, but numerous reports indicate that Monsanto is the top producer and the top four together have over 50% share, so Monsanto has no less (and probably substantially more) than 12.5% of the global market.
In addition, the global glyphosate market growth in the last two decades has largely been driven by another set of Monsanto products, "RoundUp Ready" (RoundUp is Monsanto's glyphosate-based herbicide product) glyphosate-resistant transgenic crops. So Monsanto not only has a large share of the glyphosate market, it also sells the products that are driving most of the glyphosate market.
No, it hasn't . The 1st Gen RoundUp Ready soybean trait patent expired in 2015 (two is not "many"), and most commercial volume has moved to product using the still-under-patent RoundUp Ready 2 Yield trait (such as RoundUp Ready 2 Xtend seeds, which also have another herbicide resistance trait.)
That said, I'm pretty sure the "RoundUp Ready 2 Yield trait" has nothing to do with the application of RoundUp. It is the same gene that gave resistance to RoundUp but when inserted into a different location it caused the soybeans to add another bean per pod, increasing yield. I don't believe any RoundUp application is required although it usually is since it is normally paired with the original trait.
And you'd be wrong from what I can tell; RoundUp Ready 2 Yield is a trait that provides glyphosate-resistance without (or maybe with less of) the yield cost of 1st Gen RoundUp Ready.
> I don't believe any RoundUp application is required
RoundUp application isn't required for growing any RoundUp Ready crop, but you wouldn't choose a herbicide-resistant crop (especially with a yield cost) if you weren't going to use a herbicide it provides resistance to.
> it is normally paired with the original trait.
No, it is itself a new glyphosate-resistance trait; it's usually paired with an additional herbicide-resistance trait in RoundUp Ready 2 Xtend seeds.
About that "driving farmers out of business with spurious lawsuits", every instance of Monsanto-bashing I've seen has been based on malicious and untruthful claims about Monsanto. So if you have evidence of such, please cite it.
And please, not naturalnews or similar fake news sites.
In this, the widely publicized case which was the basis of many documentaries, the farmer went into bankruptcy attempting and failing to defend his right to collect seeds from his plants on his farm, having never entered any business agreement with Monsanto.
Wikipedia summarizes it:
"The case is widely cited or referenced by the anti-GM community in the context of a fear of a company claiming ownership of a farmer’s crop based on the inadvertent presence of GM pollen grain or seed.[21][22] "The court record shows, however, that it was not just a few seeds from a passing truck, but that Mr Schmeiser was growing a crop of 95–98% pure Roundup Ready plants, a commercial level of purity far higher than one would expect from inadvertent or accidental presence. The judge could not account for how a few wayward seeds or pollen grains could come to dominate hundreds of acres without Mr Schmeiser’s active participation, saying ‘. . .none of the suggested sources could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality evident from the results of tests on Schmeiser’s crop’" - in other words, even if the original presence of Monsanto seed on his land in 1997 was inadvertent, the crop in 1998 was entirely purposeful."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...
In other words, the farmer knowingly collected Monsanto's seeds and used them. It definitely was no accident; he was willfully attempting to take advantage of Monsanto.
This has nothing to do with GMO or Roundup; the seed patent laws apply to all seeds.
I'm not sure why you're singling out Monsanto, to the exclusion of the government meddling.
Given the statement
a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review
Shouldn't we be pointing a finger at the EPA - even more so, because it's their duty to protect us?
We should all be watchdogs, pointing out malfeasance. But it can't stop when we discover a corporation doing wrong, especially when the implication of that finding is that the government needs more power to keep us safe - when part of the problem is malfeasance in the government itself.
I want to know why this was squashed and what interest this senior official had in squashing it.
I'm sure you meant "to the exclusion of the [lack of] government meddling, [quashed on behalf of and directly coordinated with Monsanto by a public official.]"
First, the OP doesn't say anything about "on behalf of and directly coordinated with".
Second, my intent is to point out the futility of vesting greater in public agencies to handle problems arising (in part) from malfeasance in public agencies.
It seems like the old adage about digging deeper to get out of the hole you're in. I'll grant that there may be ways to finesse this, with proper checks and balances. But it would certainly be an exception to see a proposal that tries to create such interlocking responsibilities, rather than just casting Public Choice economics to the wind.
The real story, to me, are the academics willing to sign their name to research they didn't write, for a pay cheque.
> The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence suggests there are no chronic human effects associated with exposure to PCBs
Monsanto knew the dangers of PCBs yet hid them from the public to generate profits. [http://fusion.net/story/381212/monsanto-pcb-pollution-lawsui...]
Monsanto finally confessed and agreed to pay $700 million to more than 20,000 residents in the first civil suit of its kind. [https://www.honeycolony.com/article/the-little-known-toxic-t...]
Site investigations show that the former Monsanto Corporation's PCB manufacturing plant released the vast majority of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the area. The plant produced PCBs from 1929 until 1971. [https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...]
There's nothing scientific in a blatant lie. For the background, Monsanto is not trustworthy.
Given that the company can afford to pay for the damages, and that no one has ever been imprisoned for their crimes, maybe start doing it is a good way to stop them. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases]
Is that so bad ?
This is the real story - Monsanto interfering with our ability to find out what is safe. But I'm sure needless endangerment of the health of ~tens of thousands of farmers will carry a stiff prison sentence for all involved...