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Plant a Seed, Get Sued?
Friar_MJK writes "Now even traditionally non-tech-savvy farmers are getting the rap for piracy. This isn't your grandma's p2p filesharing, but rather replanting bio-engineered seeds. Somehow the powers-that-be got the idea that replanting seeds grown from your own soil is a crime. A company called Monsanto sells those specially engineered seeds, and according to their license agreements, they make it illegal to replant the seeds harvested from a previous crop. To enforce this, they have brought many hard-working farmers to court and even thrown some in jail. According to the story, the company has not lost a case yet." We've had a couple of stories about Monsanto suing a Canadian farmer, but there hasn't been a lot of U.S. press devoted to the issue.
Exactly!
This is nothing unusual or unreasonable. The farmer's have an agreement with Monsanto. The agreement lets them use the seeds they bought to produce a single crop. If they don't like that agreement, then they don't have to buy the seeds!
This, by the way, is one of the main reasons that seedless crops have been developed. There is, of course, the benefit of not having to deal with the seeds when harvesting or eating the produce, but it also helps enforce the use agreements on them.
Next time you go to a nursery, have a look at the plants for sale. Most specialty hybrids will have usage restrictions printed on them, preventing you (legally at least) from growing new plants from cuttings, etc...
This is one of the reasons that Europe became so anti-GM a few years ago (BSE being another major factor). The idea of large companies holding the world to ransom, trying to enforce their IP with 'terminator' genes and the formation of a global monoculture of stable crops do not go down well with most people.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
No, the NEIGHBO(U)R didn't agree to the legally binding contract.
Doesn't matter according to Monsanto- and they won that case too.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Monsanto is also suing farmers who have not signed their licensing agreement, but who were caught with the genetically engineered plants growing on their farm. In the Canadian case, it appears that the engineered plants may have ended up there by accident (due to the wind blowing pollen from neighbouring farms, etc.), but the court held that the farmer was liable anyway. Basically, they held that Monsanto had an absolute right to control who grows these plants, regardless of whether they have signed any agreement with Monsanto, and regardless of whether the farmer knows that the plants growing on his farm have been engineered by Monsanto.
You might like to read this:
http://www.ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=27041
Quoting that article:
"In the well-known case of Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, pollen from a neighbour's GE canola fields and seeds that blew off trucks on their way to a processing plant ended up contaminating his fields with Monsanto's genetics.
The trial court ruled that no matter how the GE plants got there, Schmeiser had infringed on Monsanto's legal rights when he harvested and sold his crop. After a six-year legal battle, Canada's Supreme Court ruled that while Schmeiser had technically infringed on Monsanto's patent, he did not have to pay any penalties."
Sure, in the end he didn't have to pay any penalties, but he still had to endure a 6 year legal battle.
First of all, many people maintain that they never used Monsanto seeds. Their plants were very likely cross polinated by Monsanto crops growing nearby. And yet Monsanto is sueing them. Insane.
Second of all, I buy large bags of seed to feed to wild animals all of the time. There is nothing explicit or implicit in my purchase of these seeds that agrees that I will not replant the corn. However, if I were to plant this corn and it so happened to contain Monsanto seed (which I realistically have no way of knowing) how could I be legally lible to Monsanto, who I have had no dealing with? A the very least Monsanto should require that corn produced with their seeds be properly labeled so this does not happen, but instead of requiring it by contract to the farmers that they supply, they have agressive fought the labeling of corn produced by their seed.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Here is a news article regarding that. It was for the roundup-ready canola.
It's not so much about lawsuits. The grain offered was engineered so that the seed harvested from the GM plants grown from the GM grain would never grow. Thus forcing the country to keep relying on aid for ever more instead of using traditional grain and saving part of the harvest each year for re-planting.
The question has to be asked, why was the US giving Monsanto GM grain as food aid in the first place instead of a cheaper non GM alternative?
Shitdrummer.
Are you implying that independent farmers are *all* IP thieves who break their contracts with seed distributors?
This is not the case of some poor, hapless chump who had some accidental cross-polination imposed upon him, this is someone who knowingly bought Monsanto's seed, agreed not to harvest the seeds, and did so anyways. Sounds like an open and shut case, and no threat whatsoever to American farmers who honor their contracts.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
This was an issue addressed in the documentary film "The Corporation";
http://the1.no-ip.com
(If you like it, buy a copy)
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Only insightful to people who also don't know what they're talking about.
My dad is an independent farmer with a medium sized operation. When it comes to corn and cotton, all he plants is genetically engineered seed. It just so happens that pest resistant seed is a lot cheaper in the final analysis than "natural" seed + chemical pesticide application. Yes, even taking into consideration the fact that he has to buy the seed every year.
Roundup completely breaks down into Nitrogen (fertilizer) in a few days.
Yes I wouldn't want to breathe it or for you to pour it directly into my well or anything, but RoundUp isn't like many other herbicides and pesticides that break down slowly and hang around in the environment for long periods of time. Monstanto may be evil, but not because Roundup is some insidious poison that builds up over years and seeps into the groundwater or gets concentrated into the milk the children drink. Roundup is about as safe as chemicals get.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Perhaps that is how it is done in the US. In the developing world collecting and replanting seed is very common. Monsanto is often not making the terms of these deals clear to the farmers in these areas and then literally bullying them into paying more money each year.
Monsanto is just wrong.
Somehow reminds me of medieval witch trials...
I grew up on a farm about 200 miles north of Schmeiser's farm. Rapeseed is still grown on my Dad's land. So I have some personal information of the issues and I want to dispel some of the myths that have been postulated here.
A very simple way for the seed to show up is if Schmeiser hauled a load of seed into an elevator for cleaning. This is a very normal practice in Saskatchewan. I have personally done this.
Elevators have rather decent cleaning equipment and it does not cost all that much to run the seeds through.
The issue is that elevator agents will sometimes substitute seed and not tell the farmer. This is so very simple to do and clearly from an efficiency standpoint why not switch the bins instead of making the customer wait?
If Schmeiser hauled a single load into an elevator this is all that would be necesary. He didn't know and the elevator agent also had no idea of the consequences.
That being said - another more sinister explanation is that bees like to spread the genes around. Biological studies have proven that a bee will go to a plant with a different genetic makup for its next load of honey. This is probably built right into the genetics of a bee.
If so - then Monsanto genes would be spread willy nilly all over the place and there is NOTHING a farmer like Schmeiser can do to prevent this. It makes perfect sense that biodiversity will enhance bees' food supplies. 500 million years of evolution will favor bees that maximise the bio-diversity of the plants which produce the honey they consume. Any bee colony practicing mono-culture may well have died out millions of years ago when their food source failed.
Under law set by L. Paul Bremer (still in force so far as I know). Iraqi farmers are required to buy Licences from Monsanto before growing crops. They are, in fact forced to use genetically engineerd (and thus patented and copyrighted) seeds. Read it on /..
You mean the Monsanto Terminator technology. I remember they first try was to stealthly introduce to Europe a RoundUp-friendly potato with the Terminator gene.
The backlash was so terrible (they've lost their market in Europe because of that) that at least for the following years they did not attempt to commercialize anymore this technology.
Googling a bit, it seems that they started again pushing this towards the market.
Serban
First off, virtually all corn planted in the US is hybred. That means the seeds have to be grown in dedicated fields with the two types of parent corn planted next to eachother, and workers go out and pull all the tasels off the 'female' plants so that they cant selfpolinate and produce only seeds with the male plants as the polinator. the male plants are then killed and the female plants are harvested at the end of the season. They are seeds for planting. The plants they grow produce far more yeild, on stronger healthier plants with less fertilizer and pesticides then any other variety that is self polinating. So farmers buy these seeds and plant them. And they get great yields. But if they were to replant the yield, they would get sickly weak, low producing plants. Nobody plants self polinated corn, only hybred. And the only fields that need to worry about contamination are the hybred fields OWNED BY THE SEED COMPANY! They plant just plant beans around them.
Beans are different. Beans are not hybreds because its just not economical to industrially produce hybred seeds. Beans self polinate, and ONLY SELF POLINATE! Its impossible to get your beans contiminated fron your neighbor's field because they dont disperse pollen. Each flower is contained, and they are not polinated by wind, nor insects. Its impossible to have pollen contamination unless you intentionally do it. This involves getting on your knees with a tiny brush and cutting off the stamen of the mother flower and then brushing on pollen colledted from a father plant flower on the pistil of the mother flower. This single flower will then produce a pod of beans containing a grand total of 3 seeds. You can do it in a lab and it only takes a few hours per plant (1 hour per 100 seeds). But because the plants are selfpolinating, the seeds from a normal farmer's crop are all true. He could simply replant them and never pay the money that was spend to develop the plant. (thousands of tries of combinations of plants crossbreeding them in a lab for an incredible amount of work. So the seed companies require famers not to replant their patented seeds. Some may want to anyway, and like any other form of illegial copying, the companies does, and has the legal right to, prosecute the copyright infringment.
Not quite; however, measures that Monsanto are pursuing in the US have nothing on their vastly more predatory practices abroad. In India, for instance, there is widespread concern that Monsanto and others are adding to the common lot of hunger and poverty.
This is an extremely important issue because it appears that no one has taken into account the viral aspect of the Monsanto seed. The fact that Monsanto created a line of genetically modified seeds that are resistant to Round-Up is immaterial. Any hack of a lab could create some useless genetic trait and then patent it. Then also make sure that the seed easily cross pollinates so that their IP gets distributed to every seed on the face of the planet. Next thing you know every farmer in the world owes them money just because they were big enough asses to infect the world's food source with their modification.
Companies should not be able to patent genetic modifications to seeds unless they can prove 100% that that modification is not transferable through cross pollination.
Normally I don't reply to ACs, but this deserves comment.
It is patently false that Monsanto's lawsuits only target contract holders. They sue every farmer who saves seed from the same crops as Monsanto-owned crops within the same geographical area.
A quick search turned up Monsanto v Schmeiser, a Canadian farmer kept from growing canola because he chose to save seed from his naturally-produced strains which became crossed with Monsanto-owned strains. It is an impossibility to prevent cross-pollination in most uncontrolled environments, thus the burden should be on Monsanto farmers to prevent pollen drift, rather than those whose crops are infected.
Monsanto puts farmers out of business with their predatory legal practices, plain and simple. They force their way into markets that they otherwise can't access by suing farmers who won't buy seed every year. If they can get one farmer in a geographical area to sign up, pollen and seed end up contaminating all same-species crops in the area, making seed-saving illegal. Shame on anyone who does that.
I have mod points but I wanted to reply. In the case of Percy Schmeiser, he did file a countersuit.
"Schmeiser launched a $10 million lawsuit against Monsanto, accusing the company of a variety of wrongs, including libel, trespass and contamination of his fields with Roundup Ready." from http://www.percyschmeiser.com/conflict.htm
Monsanto is pure EVIL.
i dont know who told you this, this is completely off base. roundup (glyphosate) degrades over a period of 3 months into ethylamines. many microorganisms will then turn those into CO2, not nitrogen. infact, glyphosate has been found to inhibit anaerobic nitrogen fixation in the soil.
glyphosate is an amino acid analog designed to inhibit enzymes needed for neogenesis (the target supposedly being 5-enolpyruvyl-shikimate-3 phosphate synthase) of the plants amino acids.
while glyphosate has not been found to be harmful to humans, the inactive ingredient surfactant (which makes up 15.0% of roundup), polyoxy-ethyleneamine, IS known to be toxic to humans and is typically contaminated with dioxanes (as a byproduct of the formation of it) which is a known human carcinogen.
For the record, that is only an entry point, most of the exchange of genetic material happens much more informally.
Call them tree huggers or whatever, but these are the people that are keeping the world's genetic line available to all, and this started about the same time that the patent madness did. For obvious reasons. Think of this as the ham radio response to the internet.
For the record, I'm not even a botanist, or whatever, but I'm a member. I get requests maybe twice a month for things I'm growing, and I send them off. Kinda cool, right? At least, I think it is.
I don't need Monsanto's crap, and if they infect me, I will be pissed off, and they can count on me making that apparent.
I forget what 8 was for.
No, you're pretty much totally wrong. Good Job.e iser.shtml
http://www.commonground.ca/iss/0401150/percy_schm
Is this not common knowledge in the US? (the suing over seeds bit) If not, perhaps the European reaction to GM crops is more understandable to some americans now.
It wasn't just about having modified crops, it was about the whole way it worked: They're not modifiying crops to make them better, they're modifiying them so they sell more of their pesticide.
At least that was the issue for me anyway...
He had no involvement with the company, some bird probably shat in his field, or some seeds carried on on the wind.
read http://www.commonground.ca/iss/0401150/percy_schme iser.shtml it is interesting and has some important implications for GM
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell