Yeah, I think Monsanto does some pretty messed up stuff. And I think that GMOs are not 100% positive–things like turning off fertility in seeds is not something I htink we should encourage. And I think in general the priority we give to copyright and patents leads to trouble, and in particular patenting genetic codes is not a great thing.
But Vandana Shiva is terrible.
This sort of rhetorical question assumes facts not in evidence.
Before you ask WHY environmental activists look up to Vandana Shiva, you should you first establish that environmental activists DO, in fact, look up to Vandana Shiva.
“Why do ostriches bury their heads in the sand?”
“How do electric fans kill you when you run them overnight?”
“Why do gay people shove gerbils up their asses?”
“Why do Armenians slap each other with fish on Easter?”
“Why did the Pope make Paul Bunyan official mascot of Vatican City?”
Lemur866, I took the OP as a variation on “why is Vandana Shiva given credence within the environmental activist community?”
Of course, BPC ends the post directly addressing “her legion of hero-worshipping fans”, so my mileage may have varied quite a bit from the intended baseline…
This is what happens when you grow up with a bunch of aging, balding hippies.
Anyone pulling down 40k speaking gigs is bound to have a fairly considerably fanbase.
Yes, but before we can answer the question of why, we must first establish that, yes, it is true that Vandana Shiva is given credence within the environmental activist community.
Other than the OP’s Facebook friend who thinks it would be great if billions of people starved to death, I don’t see any evidence of that.
I’ve never heard of her before today, for one instance.
Why?
Turning off fertility in transgenic seeds would be a good thing, if you’re worried about the gene spreading to other species, or the variety spreading into the environment.
As it happens, though, Monsanto doesn’t turn off fertility in seeds, and never has. They developed a technology to do so, but there was a massive public uproar against it (for reasons that are entirely unclear to me), so they didn’t commercialize the technology. Though they probably could someday if they wanted to.
I don’t see why patenting genetic codes is worse than patenting anything else. If your criticism of Monsanto is that they’re a huge, super-rich company, then I entirely agree with you: I disapprove of oligarchic capitalism, and I don’t see any reason for a world with very rich people and very poor people. That being said, I don’t see why Monsanto is more morally problematic than any other large, successful, rich enterprise. At the very least they, you know, produce something valuable for the world, which is more than I could say for some economic actors out there.
I expect you know that plant/seed patents were commonplace for a long time before genetically modified varieties were developed.
It seems to be a widely held belief among anti-GMOers that in the good old days farmers saved their seeds every year to replant, and that it was only when Monsatan came along that seeds were patented (a parallel belief is that pesticide use and weed resistance are new phenomena attributable to Dem Evil GMOs).
Obviously these beliefs are dead wrong. Patented hybrids have long had to be repurchased by farmers each year (they generally don’t come true from seed), and we’ve had problems with environmentally toxic insecticides/herbicides and pest resistance for decades before GM techniques came along (up to this point, pesticides used on GM crops have been considerably less toxic than the chemicals utilized in the past).
"Shiva’s fiery opposition to globalization and to the use of genetically modified crops has made her a hero to anti-G.M.O. activists everywhere…Nowhere is Shiva embraced more fully than in the West, where, as Bill Moyers recently noted, she has become a “rock star in the worldwide battle against genetically modified seeds.” She has been called the Gandhi of grain and compared to Mother Teresa. If she personally accepted all the awards, degrees, and honors offered to her, she would have time for little else. In 1993, Shiva received the Right Livelihood Award, often called the alternative Nobel Prize, for her activism on behalf of ecology and women. Time, the Guardian, Forbes, and Asia Week have all placed her on lists of the world’s most important activists. Shiva, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, has received honorary doctorates from universities in Paris, Oslo, and Toronto, among others. In 2010, she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her commitment to social justice and her tireless efforts on behalf of the poor. Earlier this year, Beloit College, in Wisconsin, honored Shiva with its Weissberg Chair in International Studies, calling her “a one-woman movement for peace, sustainability, and social justice.”
How were these patents enforced?
Hybrids not breeding true is a different issue: you get good features via hybrids, and their lack of breeding true is almost a definitional aspect of hybridism, a side-effect of getting those good traits. I am unaware of cases before, say, 1990 in which farmers were sued for saving seeds, and I am unaware of any such lawsuits that did not involve GMO seeds.
If I’m correct, then bringing up previous patents is irrelevant to the point I was making.
Hector, I’m also aware that the “terminator” seed never made it to market–because of huge public outcry. I think that outcry was justified.
Civil actions (I don’t recall anyone going to jail over it).
Examples: here’s a nasty affair involving marketing of the (non-GMO) Honeycrisp apple (the full article is available via a Google search).
And another lawsuit over sale of a patented non-GMO ornamental heather.
The point I was making is that farmers desiring the most productive/disease-free plants have long had to buy new seeds from the producer/hybridizer year after year. They were not compelled to do so, but obviously felt it was in their interest (as opposed to saving seeds of old-time varieties in the public domain that could be trusted to come true from seed).
That situation differs little from the current one in which farmers who want patented GM characteristics in their crop need to abide by terms of sale (which include not propagating seed crops from year to year to avoid paying a fee to the seller).
Added note: “farmers saving seeds” has a romantic tinge to it, suggesting Farmer Brown carefully putting aside a bushel basket of seed for next year’s crop. The reality of what’s been litigated is a bit different.
The few highly publicized lawsuits filed by Monsanto have involved people who deliberately tried to skirt the law in ingenious ways. Like the farmer who bought up quantities of corn from local grain elevators for use as seed corn, knowing a lot of it would be from desirable GM harvests and planted it to avoid paying a license fee. Or the Canadian canola farmer (Percy Schmeiser) who sprayed Roundup on canola growing at the edge of his property by a road (apparently suspecting it might be GM canola hybridized by pollen from a neighboring Roundup-Ready field). When that canola did not die, he harvested seed from it and ultimately was able to plant a large crop (comparable canola acreage these days would yield a crop worth hundreds of thousands of dollars). Monsanto sued him when he refused to pay a license fee, and won.
These cases also bear no resemblance to the fiction that Monsanto sues farmers over inadvertent “contamination” of their fields with GM varieties.
This conflates “environmental activist” with “anti-GMO activist” which is just wrong.
There is no law against not entering into a contract with Monsanto, and anyone who thinks that a contract should exist by default without the consent of the other party can go to hell.
So? If he had no license with Monsanto that means that he has absolutely zero moral or legal obligation to avoid using the corn he purchased however he saw fit. If Monsanto wanted to control how he could use that corn, the onus is on them to offer him sufficiently valuable in exchange that he would be willing to sign such a contract. At best, Monsanto could only sue the seller of the corn for not making sure the seeds they were selling were not going to be planted.
Again, so? If he had no license with Monsanto that means he has absolutely zero obligations to Monsanto to not use plants growing on his property as he saw fit. If Monsanto wanted to control how he used those plants, the onus is on them to offer him sufficiently valuable in exchange that he would be willing to sign such a contract. At best, Monsanto could only sue his neighbour for allowing their canola to pollenise canola owned by Schmeister (and even that would be fucking stupid).
Until either of those farmers chose to sign away their rights to use their property as they saw fit (and the corn they bought and the plants growing on their farm are their property), Monsanto had absolutely zero moral or legal basis to object, and anyone who sided with Monsanto is clearly too stupid or too corrupt to be a judge.
We had a GD thread on at least one of these suits. It’s a separate issue from this thread, and one I have trouble wrapping my head around.
The issue here is not contract, it’s patent.
Look, analogize this to music. Let’s say you’re a DJ at a party and you accidentally end up with a song on your playlist you’re not licensed to use. Okay, no harm no foul, it was an accident. But what if you engineer your computer to have a glitch so that this song keeps popping up in your playlist?
In order to grow RoundUp-Ready crops, you must license them from Monsanto. Ignorance is an excuse, but this was most explicitly not ignorance.
I bought “To The End” by Orden Ogan. Does this mean I can use it however I see fit, including streaming it live over the internet? Again, this is an issue of patent law, not contract. He planted patented crops without a license. What’s more, it was shown in court that this was no accident, and that he did this on purpose to get the GMO seeds without paying for them.
Welcome to the wonderful world of plant patents. I’m sorry, but legally speaking, you’re just dead wrong. Monsanto absolutely had a legal basis to object. Again, compare it to music.
[QUOTE=Hypothetical Alternative Universe You]
If Taylor Swift wanted to control how he could use that song, the onus is on her to offer him sufficiently valuable in exchange that he would be willing to sign such a contract.
[/QUOTE]
Monsanto has engineered a breed of plant with distinctive characteristics not found in nature. In return for this, they have been given legal ownership of this plant. Farmers who want to use that plant have to pay licensing fees. You can get into a discussion on how valid patent law is when applied to plants, but that’s an entirely different can of worms. The point is, what these people have done is tried to find ways to enjoy the benefits of these GM crops without paying the licensing fees.
The analogy to piracy should be blatantly obvious here. “I want that CD, but I don’t want to pay for it”. Again, this isn’t just a case of “farmers accidentally got GM crops mixed in with their normal crops and didn’t notice”; this is “farmers went out of their way to get GM seed without paying licensing fees on it”. Indeed, a large part of both court cases was establishing that what they did was intentional and with their full knowledge. Anti-GMO advocates like to trump up cases where GM seed blew off a truck into his field and he lost a lawsuit with Monsanto, but that never happens. Monsanto doesn’t sue for that, possibly because they know if they did, they’d lose and look like evil morons.
Look, if you have a problem with patent law, or patent law applied to organisms, then feel free to make a thread about that. But don’t act like this is some bizarre special case. It isn’t - Monsanto is using the basic patent law framework that has been established for quite a long time, applying it to their plants, and then suing when people blatantly and intentionally violate those patents. It’s really that simple.
Does anyone have a feel for the economics regarding the licensing fees for GM plants? It stands to reason that Monsanto wouldn’t want to set such fees so high as to make use of Roundup Ready seeds less economically attractive than using non-GMO seed. Nor would they want (a reasonable person would guess) to encourage piracy through disregard for the market value.
I might be more sympathetic to the outrage if someone could show that usage licenses for GMO products -or Monsanto patented products specifically- are overpriced. But I still don’t see where piracy of goods is the ethical response to that. I’d rather see some efforts to reform patent law (if that’s actually needed), or to pressure Monsanto and others through boycotts and other legal means.
Interestingly, neither of these cases predate 1990, the era I asked for cases from. To the best of my knowledge, vigorous litigation over patented life-forms is something from the past quarter century. Again, correct me if I’m wrong.
And my point is that I don’t think it’s a good thing.
Sure–people have had to do so, and wasn’t that a bonus for the seed-sellers? The class I talked about before, in which Shiva was reading, dealt extensively with the economics of such actions: one byproduct of increased seed technology has been that using one particular variety of seed confers an economic advantage to farmers who use it, and ALSO requires a greater annual capital outlay for farmers who use it. Over time, it’s led to the failure of smaller farms that couldn’t afford the ever-greater capital outlay, and the purchase of those smaller farms by bigger farms.
Now, that’s led to lower food costs for everyone, and greater food surpluses, and those are great things of course, and anyone who states otherwise is an idiot. At the same time, it’s been extremely disruptive to rural communities around the globe, and lots of small-scale farmers have lost ownership of their land due to these changes, and that’s not a great thing, and anyone who states otherwise is an idiot.
The question, I think, is whether the benefits of this agricultural revolution can be maintained while mitigating the harms it’s caused. I tentatively think that softening patent protections would help mitigate those harms.
Without getting into the details of the Honeycrisp dispute, I’d note that Honeycrisp was developed by a public university, not by a for-profit corporation. That’s exactly the model I’d like to see more of: more research and development of transgenic organisms being done by universities and government research agencies.
I’d also note that apples are not and never have been a plant that you can ‘save seed’ from. They’re cross pollinated, and generally don’t breed true, which is why people graft them.
By one brand of poster-logic here, I should be able to go out and buy patented ornamental plants from my local garden center, propagate them without permission and sell them from a stand on my property (or on Ebay). Hey, I propagated them on my property, and I can do whatever I want, right?
Or if I’m a farmer and my neighbor’s fence breaks and his cattle wander onto my property. They should be mine to do with whatever I want, right?
Oddly, the law takes a different view on these matters, and it’s not case law suddenly invented since the development of GMOs.
You’re wrong, and it’s easy to find examples of such litigation.
For example, there’s Armstrong Nurseries v. Smith (a plant patent infringement case from 1958, involving a rose variety). And this link cites examples of other plant patent lawsuits dating well back before the introduction of GMOs.
Noted. But anyone from a small-scale hybridizer to a large corporation that wants to protect the effort, investment and financial rewards from developing a new plant variety would disagree with you.
This is a dubious proposition, given the myriad economic factors that have encouraged consolidation of smaller into larger farms and led to many small farmers going bust.
I suggest that for future reading you look at the example of cotton farmers in India. Since the introduction of GM Bt cotton, overall income for these small farmers has gone up considerably.* (in addition to this link, see similar stories on biofortified.org and geneticliteracyproject.org)
*this of course does not fit the bogus narrative promoted heavily by Shiva and others about Indian farmer suicides being attributable to GM crops.
I would appreciate a thread on this. I don’t feel your analogies hold water. But I don’t think they have to; patent law can address activities and innovations that are unique, and that’s fine.
I’m not sure I understand the topic well enough to formulate a reasonable OP.