Monsanto Owns Us: The Monopoly of Seeds and Intellectual Property Rights

Re:Monsanto Owns Us: The Monopoly of Seeds and Intellectual ... by davidw on Sunday March 16, 2014 @04:40PM (#7411165)

> smart farmers would invest profits into developing better seeds

There are several problems with the economics in your response.

Specialization is good, economically speaking: farmers should concentrate on being good farmers, not on trying to oversee research projects in far-off universities or labs. By having a market, it's also possible for companies to bring new products to market without charging the farmers a dime unless the products are actually any good.

This is also what's known as a coordination problem. Each farmer's profits are probably not that high, so one of them on their own is not going to be able to fund this research. So how do they coordinate their work? Markets provide a pretty good answer.

Also, as Blahah mentions, the lack of patents means that there is a free rider problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods

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Re:Monsanto Owns Us: The Monopoly of Seeds and Intellectual ... by Blahah on Sunday March 16, 2014 @05:05PM (#7411276)

Thanks for linking - I've thought about all these things, but didn't know the terms. Accessing the literature is basically impossible without knowing to call them 'coordination game' or 'free rider problem'.

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