I haven’t checked recently, but as late as 2007 every single variety of corn and soybean seed that had a genetically modified trait in it was also available in a non-GMO version. Didn’t matter whether the GMO trait came from Monsanto, DuPont, Liberty or whoever – you could get it with or without. (I’m not familiar with other crops like cotton, canola, etc. so I can’t say.)
That also means you wouldn’t have to sign technology agreements, worry about restrictions on exporting your grain to other countries, etc.
Here’s a recent blog post by NPR’s Dan Charles(who would hardly be described as an apologist for Monsanto) that goes into some detail about this topic.
I don’t think anyone is denying him the ability to pollinate his plants. Rather than take his crop to market, though, he decided to use the pollinated plants as a way to infringe on Monsanto’s patent.
I’d just like to point out that “teh” has a specific connotation meaning roughly the embodiment or epitome of. So, while Monsanto may or may not be evil, I don’t think they’re evil enough to be Teh Evil.
That’s the thing, he’s not disassembling it, or learning how it works, he’s just allowing the iPhone to boink his Samsung. Frankly, he could hardly prevent it if he wanted to, you know how randy those iPhones are. Then, when his phone gives birth to bunch of baby phones, he picks out the iPhones, breeds them, and gets sued.
If some dude’s prize (patented) bull gets out of his corral and screws one of my cows, am I required to destroy the calf?
This issue is not new, nor is it unique to genetically modified seed.
For many years now, seed companies have been selling hybridized seed, and the most productive crops come from these seeds. They’re produced without any gene-splicing technology, just old-fashioned cross-breeding of different varieties.
These crops yield well, but the seeds you get from them are either sterile, or the next generation will be very poor-performing. So the farmer can’t collect the seeds and use them the next year, he has to buy more seed the next year.
Wasn’t that the very plot of one the Omen movies?-the gigantic chemical conglomerate hatches a plot to control the worlds’ food supplies in just this manner.
Of course the farmer can collect the seeds from a hybrid and use them next year. He just doesn’t WANT to. That, to me, is the difference. Burpee isn’t telling me I’m not allowed to plant my tomato seeds next year - I just know I’ll get less than ideal tomato plants if I do it. I’ll get tomato plants, though. And I can sell those tomatoes if I want, and I can save and plant those seeds if I want to.
Monsanto isn’t saying, “sure, plant 'em if you want, but your crop is gonna suck…” They’ve invented a plant which WON’T suck grown from offspring seed, and then said you can’t plant it without giving them money every year, even if it got on your land without you choosing it and contaminated the plants you had intended to grow for seed stock. And I don’t see them offering free non-patented seed in exchange for that lost to their legal claim. They’re not even offering to make the farmer whole after their pollen ruined the farmer’s plan.
Hybrids aren’t trespassing and extortion. They’re choice.
Well, sort of. Roundup is teratogenic and is linked to cancers in mice and rats. You can see what it does to rats, here. The results are slightly misleading because the tumors are likely due to the pesticide not the genetically modified food, but the point remains valid. Here’s my two beefs:
The company has the biotechnology to have the seeds self-destruct but refuse to do so.
Lawyers and judges know very little to nothing about biology. It shows because lawyers hold the belief that one can patent a sequence of nucleotides in a living, breathing, metabolically-active organism. This isn’t Mansanto’s fault, it’s the fault of lawyers who think two Constitutional Law classes equals a doctoral dissertation in molecular genetics.
I can give you one side of the argument for why Monsanto’s “BT cotton” has faced criticism in India. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, mind you.
The argument goes thus - Monsanto promised/promoted their product as having much higher yields at lower costs. They neglected to mention that the crops require higher inputs in terms of fertilisers, irrigation, what have you, that the native strains of cotton did not. However, by the time the farmers figured out that this wasn’t working out for them, which took a few growing cycles/years, the native strains were scarce and difficult to obtain, effectively “forcing” farmers to continue buying Monsanto products.
I suspect that there is a lot of knee-jerk populism and mindless anti-corporatism going on in that narrative.
Well, the argument I thought someone was making was that poor farmers, if they buy these seeds, will have to buy them again the next year, forcing them into a cycle of dependence on some evil corporation. I was just pointing out that this specific issue has been with us for decades and GMO brings no new considerations to the economic conundrum.
You seem to be looking at it from a liberties POV, which wasn’t what I meant to address. However now that you brought it up…
I see this as an intellectual property issue. Monsanto developed the technology, and I think inventors should have the right to profit from their inventions for some limited time. A farmer who plants seeds that he knows are protected by patents is to me the same as someone manufacturing iPhones without the consent of Apple.
If there ever is a case where a farmer’s crop is ruined, or even harmed, by contamination with another company’s patented product, then that farmer will have a very good case for a lawsuit and he would win.
The case of Percy Schmeiser wasn’t anything like that. He went to a lot of trouble to specifically cultivate what he knew was the patented seed, the patent belonging to someone else, and chose to make new plants with that seed and sell them.
“Glyphosate is widely considered by regulatory authorities and scientific bodies to have no carcinogenic potential, based primarily on results of carcinogenicity studies of rats and mice. To examine potential cancer risks in humans, we reviewed the epidemiologic literature to evaluate whether exposure to glyphosate is associated causally with cancer risk in humans. We also reviewed relevant methodological and biomonitoring studies of glyphosate. Seven cohort studies and fourteen case-control studies examined the association between glyphosate and one or more cancer outcomes. Our review found no consistent pattern of positive associations indicating a causal relationship between total cancer (in adults or children) or any site-specific cancer and exposure to glyphosate.”
There does not seem to be convincing evidence of a link between Roundup and birth defects:
“it is concluded that the use of Roundup herbicide does not result in adverse effects on development, reproduction, or endocrine systems in humans and other mammals.”
As for those linked pictures of rats with tumors, I don’t see where the site got them from (the widely discredited Seralini study, maybe?). That particular site (Gaia Health) is a major repository of woo, and without good additional documentation I’d be loathe to believe any claims made on it (among other things, the site is anti-vaccine, attempts to link sunscreen use with Alzheimer’s disease and makes a variety of other unfounded and conspiratorial claims).
Roundup, while a relatively safe herbicide, is not completely innocuous. However, its environmental and health impact is far more benign than that of traditional herbicides used on non-GMO crops.
Like I said, it’s how documentaries presented the issues to me. I can’t really offer you more than it was a Discovery or PBS documentary on either rice or wheat that said it. It spend the last third on GE food.
Excellent observation, although I doubt it’ll receive the response it merits here. Colony collapse disorder was due, in part, to gathering pollen from genetically modified plants. It’s a one-sided street, you see. Beekeepers who lost billions of bees and likely millions in dollars aren’t able to sue the biotech companies due to negligence. I mean, really: a pollinating plant that which exudes sublethal amounts of insecticide didn’t raise a flag that it could on palpable effect on pollinating animals? Do these agricultural biotech companies not afford to hire an ecologist? The government - or really, a group of Justices in the 1980’s - shouldn’t have considered this kind of technology a novel, copyrightable invention.
The studies the website linked to are valid and peer-reviewed. It causes cancer in rats, the abstract of your cite (see the second sentence) corroborates that. The issue is whether it has the same potential in humans. The in vitro data doesn’t look too good - looks like it kills human cells. Too bad there aren’t any trials with chimps or humans to see whether this stuff is actually having an effect in the human body.
Just for the record, Percy Schmeiser was growing canola, not corn, and it wasn’t Roundup Ready™ pollen that blew onto his land but actual seeds - canola seeds are tiny and blow around easily.