Nestle’ sells $100B annually and Dannone almost half of that - that’s a lot of food to go missing off the store shelves - maybe not enough for people to start starving to death, but quite a few would go hungry.
Monstanto’s upstream influence affects the foundational diet of billions of people, kill their operations and lots of people would be starving to death.
Monsanto owns the patent on Roundup, and seed strains that are resistant to roundup. They don’t own the farms or farmers, they just have them in coercive contracts.
You’re assuming that if Monsanto went out of business, all of the farmers would just give up on the possibility of farming. That’s a wild assumption, and It’s insanely inaccurate. My cousin is a very successful small farmer, and he already doesn’t use anything from Monsanto.
If Monsanto disappeared right now, everyone could continue using their seed for free, but they’d likely instead start to grow different things, adding biodiversity to our food sources, and making them more resilient against unforeseen circumstances.
Your argument is either extremely disingenuous or extremely misguided.
Monsanto owns the patent on Roundup, and seed strains that are resistant to roundup.
Bt Corn (Maize), Seminis (Vegetable and Fruit Seeds), Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH / Posilac), De Ruiter Seeds, DeKalb Genetics Corporation…
They don’t own the farms or farmers, they just have them in coercive contracts.
I’m not seeing a big distinction…
If Monsanto products didn’t improve the farms/farmers’ outputs and profits, even after Monsanto takes their slice, then they wouldn’t enter into those contracts. Gank Monsanto out of the system and productivity falls. A drop of 10% to 15% in global agricultural output within a single year would likely trigger immediate, widespread, and severe global famine.
The distinction is that everything you listed is “intellectual property”, aka “thoughts”.
All of those are tools that are used to do the same shit we used to do without those tools, and if it all went away overnight, we could just go back to doing things the older way (the way we used to do things before they homogenized food in order to maximize profits, despite the reduction in nutritional value).
You are operating from the premise that profits are more important than anything else. That is flawed logic, and it’s based entirely on this specific current status quo. Outputs are not equal to profits, some farmers are paid by the government to specifically not grow things.
Your idea that the disappearance of Monsanto would cause widespread famine ignores the fact that none of Monsanto’s knowledge would die with the company. They have records, and there are living humans who know how to do everything on your list.
The existence of a corporation is not what allows agriculture to function. It functioned for thousands of years before Monsanto existed, and has functioned for less than 100 since (1945 is the year they first had anything to do with agriculture)
(the way we used to do things before they homogenized food in order to maximize profits, despite the reduction in nutritional value).
Unfortunately, even though I wholeheartedly agree that the nutritional value of the foods reaching our stores has declined, if you pull all that IP, total nutritional output available to reach the stores in the first place will be significantly reduced, more costly (labor and energy intensive) to produce, and more subject to unpredictable lean years.
Profits be damned, unless you just plan to somehow take over Monsanto’s operations and start giving away their products, farmers will be going back to the things they didn’t choose to use, for significant reasons.
Could we rebuild the corporate operations from the scraps of knowledge scattered outside their control? Sure. Then what would we have? The same corporations with new names.
Maybe think of it this way: Strip mines are evil, nasty, ecologically disasterous exploitations of the land. They have no place in Florida. Except: if we stopped all strip mining in Florida, that would take about 10 million tons of phosphate off the market, annually - roughly 75% of the phosphate used by US farmers. Loss of that fertilizer input would result in approximately 40% reduction in crop yields. Yeah, we’ve got CRP lands where the owners are paid not to farm, but those are generally less productive / fertile lands, difficult or impossible to irrigate, and even if all the CRP lands were put back into production, that might result in a +3% total harvest yield.
Modern science makes a difference, if you want to go back to farming like it’s 1930, look up the dust bowl.
We’ll just nationalize them? Sounds like we need them after all. What’s the difference between the government running Monsanto, or Monsanto running the government like we have today?
To be clear, I’m not saying we need them, I’m saying that if we did need them, we have methods of preserving their machinations without allowing them to have complete regulatory capture.
Also, to your earlier point, you could assume that we need Monsanto now that they play such a large role in the system (I personally disagree, but you can make that argument), there is no argument to say “we’d all be dead already if Monsanto never existed”, which is essentially your argument. There is nothing special about Monsanto that gives them abilities others don’t have, they’re just the only company that’s currently and legally allowed to do so. Other people already know exactly how to do what they do, but they don’t because they can’t legally profit from it.
I can’t believe I’ve let you sidetrack me this far tho, we were talking about Google. You think the world would end without those chucklefucks? Because I think it’s more likely that the internet would begin to slowly revert to a “marketplace of ideas”, rather than remaining in it’s current form, a wall of corporate propaganda.
What about em?
Nestle’ sells $100B annually and Dannone almost half of that - that’s a lot of food to go missing off the store shelves - maybe not enough for people to start starving to death, but quite a few would go hungry.
Monstanto’s upstream influence affects the foundational diet of billions of people, kill their operations and lots of people would be starving to death.
That’s an insane perspective/assumption
Monsanto owns the patent on Roundup, and seed strains that are resistant to roundup. They don’t own the farms or farmers, they just have them in coercive contracts.
You’re assuming that if Monsanto went out of business, all of the farmers would just give up on the possibility of farming. That’s a wild assumption, and It’s insanely inaccurate. My cousin is a very successful small farmer, and he already doesn’t use anything from Monsanto.
If Monsanto disappeared right now, everyone could continue using their seed for free, but they’d likely instead start to grow different things, adding biodiversity to our food sources, and making them more resilient against unforeseen circumstances.
Your argument is either extremely disingenuous or extremely misguided.
I’m not seeing a big distinction…
If Monsanto products didn’t improve the farms/farmers’ outputs and profits, even after Monsanto takes their slice, then they wouldn’t enter into those contracts. Gank Monsanto out of the system and productivity falls. A drop of 10% to 15% in global agricultural output within a single year would likely trigger immediate, widespread, and severe global famine.
The distinction is that everything you listed is “intellectual property”, aka “thoughts”.
All of those are tools that are used to do the same shit we used to do without those tools, and if it all went away overnight, we could just go back to doing things the older way (the way we used to do things before they homogenized food in order to maximize profits, despite the reduction in nutritional value).
You are operating from the premise that profits are more important than anything else. That is flawed logic, and it’s based entirely on this specific current status quo. Outputs are not equal to profits, some farmers are paid by the government to specifically not grow things.
Your idea that the disappearance of Monsanto would cause widespread famine ignores the fact that none of Monsanto’s knowledge would die with the company. They have records, and there are living humans who know how to do everything on your list.
The existence of a corporation is not what allows agriculture to function. It functioned for thousands of years before Monsanto existed, and has functioned for less than 100 since (1945 is the year they first had anything to do with agriculture)
Unfortunately, even though I wholeheartedly agree that the nutritional value of the foods reaching our stores has declined, if you pull all that IP, total nutritional output available to reach the stores in the first place will be significantly reduced, more costly (labor and energy intensive) to produce, and more subject to unpredictable lean years.
Profits be damned, unless you just plan to somehow take over Monsanto’s operations and start giving away their products, farmers will be going back to the things they didn’t choose to use, for significant reasons.
Could we rebuild the corporate operations from the scraps of knowledge scattered outside their control? Sure. Then what would we have? The same corporations with new names.
Maybe think of it this way: Strip mines are evil, nasty, ecologically disasterous exploitations of the land. They have no place in Florida. Except: if we stopped all strip mining in Florida, that would take about 10 million tons of phosphate off the market, annually - roughly 75% of the phosphate used by US farmers. Loss of that fertilizer input would result in approximately 40% reduction in crop yields. Yeah, we’ve got CRP lands where the owners are paid not to farm, but those are generally less productive / fertile lands, difficult or impossible to irrigate, and even if all the CRP lands were put back into production, that might result in a +3% total harvest yield.
Modern science makes a difference, if you want to go back to farming like it’s 1930, look up the dust bowl.
I mean, in this hypothetical scenario the government could just nationalize Monsanto
We’ll just nationalize them? Sounds like we need them after all. What’s the difference between the government running Monsanto, or Monsanto running the government like we have today?
To be clear, I’m not saying we need them, I’m saying that if we did need them, we have methods of preserving their machinations without allowing them to have complete regulatory capture.
Also, to your earlier point, you could assume that we need Monsanto now that they play such a large role in the system (I personally disagree, but you can make that argument), there is no argument to say “we’d all be dead already if Monsanto never existed”, which is essentially your argument. There is nothing special about Monsanto that gives them abilities others don’t have, they’re just the only company that’s currently and legally allowed to do so. Other people already know exactly how to do what they do, but they don’t because they can’t legally profit from it.
I can’t believe I’ve let you sidetrack me this far tho, we were talking about Google. You think the world would end without those chucklefucks? Because I think it’s more likely that the internet would begin to slowly revert to a “marketplace of ideas”, rather than remaining in it’s current form, a wall of corporate propaganda.