[cyberax]

> ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding

And during the last 100 years, the yields for many types of plants have grown several _times_ because of modern selective breeding methods. Here's a nice graph for cereals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Index-of-cereal-productio...

So you want to go back hundreds of years and force people to live in hunger with frequent famines?

There are plenty of patent-free crops. So just plant them. And the patents eventually expire.

[AngryData]

Many yield increases are due more to increased fertilizer availability. You don't want to grow ulta-large-super-crop if it means you suck 95% of the fertilizer from the soil and can't replace it. Even if you could breed the plant 100 years ago, nobody would want to use it if it sucked their topsoil layer away in a few years. Or if it was nutrient limited already, those plants would simply not grow as large or have as much yield.

[dylan604]

> So you want to go back hundreds of years and force people to live in hunger with frequent famines?

Sadly, there are theories that this is precisely something that is desired as population control of groups that are "less desirable". It's usually the same groups that say AIDS was designed for the same purpose.