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by jessaustin 1748 days ago
That will be a great argument when one of these new varieties is, say 5% of world cultivation of any particular crop. We are decades away from that circumstance. This isn't even a slippery slope argument; it's more of a "moderately smooth horizontal plane" argument. Given the challenges that humanity currently faces, these sorts of low-effort Chicken Little objections would endanger millions of human lives, if anyone took them seriously.
1 comments
naasking 1748 days ago
Producing enough food is not a challenge humanity faces. We have more than enough food. Distribution is the problem.

Monocultural has also been a problem many times in the past, so calling it a "chicken little" objection is disingenuous.

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jessaustin 1748 days ago
There are lots of hungry people, in lots of places. Please have some sympathy for their plight. Capitalists tell us that they can properly distribute the food produced in a few nations to everywhere, but they have so far largely failed to do so. Invariably capitalists and their useful idiots invoke "market failures" as reasons for capitalist-owned politicians to take even more freedoms from producers and consumers than they've already taken. It beggars belief to complain about a strictly hypothetical "monoculture" (resulting from new crop varieties!) when giant firms like Cargill, Tyson, JBS, etc. control so much of our society.

It has in most cases been far more reliable, resilient, nutritious, environmentally benign, and just to produce and consume food locally, rather than burning fuel to ship it around the world while it's still edible. We put up with lots of externalities from agriculture, because it's important that humans have food to eat. We can't dismiss completely benign ag tech out of hand, for essentially religious reasons. I make no particular claim for these particular crop varieties, but your objections are ridiculous.

You're simply wrong about this, and it's not "disingenuous" to say so.

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naasking 1748 days ago
Honestly, I don't see what anything you just said has anything to do with what I've been saying.
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