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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.
simple for the farmers. Don't buy their seeds.
Monsanto is the true farmer's Sauron. Monsanto is about chemical factory farming (in other words, anti-Farming). My best friend is a small farmer. He has some livestock, he leases out his tobacco allotment (this is Virginia), and he raises some small "cash crops" which are all legal and vary from year to year. Unless he's not telling me everything. He steadfastly refuses to use chemicals and accept subsidies (except for that tobacco allotment thing).
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If they can engineer a seed to resist Roundup, why can't they also engineer a seed that has a lower shelf life not allowing them to be saved for another planting season?
...is why these farmers are buying Monsanto seed at all. They buy it because Monsanto has engineered their seeds to be particularly resistant to their own herbacide, Roundup. Farmers just dump Roundup by the ton on their bean fields, and basically forget about it.
Sweet deal for Monsanto, and it makes growing soybeans very easy and profitable of course, but where does all that Roundup go, do you think? Can you say, Water Table? There are a lot of people very worried about the over use of Roundup by a lot of farmers in the midwest.
Ok, #1, genetically engineering seeds for crops is a far cry from engineered steriods or drugs. It is finding the genes that tell a crop when to stop growing, or when to trigger certain events. Once we identify those genes it's just a matter of manipulating. Same thing with "roundup ready" soybeans (the same crop being sued over) which is genetically resistant to a particular herbicide that kills all the other weeds in the field, allowing the beans to grow tall. I grew up on a farm, was in FFA in high school, and go to one of, if not THE top Agriculture schools in the nation/world (though my major is technology at said school). I know people whose majors are horticulture, i've heard lectures from researchers and professors who know this stuff on the genetic level. There is nothing wrong with properly engineering crops for higher yields.
#2) The entire point of Monsanto suing the farmers is wrong. They pride themselves on helping to feed teh world. Now if any of you tech geeks would have worked a labor-type job at some point in your life, you'd know the extortion they have on the market. Both the round-up you spray to kill the weeds, and the seeds themselves. Chances are the farmers who were reusing their crops were still using MONSANTO BRANDED WEED KILLER. This is a case of straight up greed, no other way around it.
This is one of several big issues that is giving GM crops such a bad name in the rest of the world.
Europeans are well aware of the issue; the anti-GM protesters have used it very effectively to win support. There are stories in the news of non-GM farmers being sued because of cross-polination that they weren't aware of and had no control over, and it has upset a lot of people.
There are African countries that have refused food aid from the US because it would include GM crops. That grain would be useless to a rural African, because the first thing they would want to do would be to keep a portion of it to plant for next year, even if it was intended as food aid (that's how subsistence farming works).
Personally, I avoid engineered food for other reasons, but the legal issues are certainly helping to put a lot of other people off them as well.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
So, if these plants are property of Monsanto, and they happen to start growing on my land with no help from me...
I can charge them with tresspassing...
or maybe illegal dumping???
What you people think?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt. --E.C. Stanton
They sued an old man who tested to see if his canola seed (non-Monsanto variety) contained traces of the Roundup Ready canola variety, by spraying a small section with Round-up. It lived, and thus contained Monsanto's patented genetics. He did not ever plant this variety, but instead had gotten these traits from windblown pollen in previous years, from others' fields.
However, it was ruled that he's responsible for these traits appearing in his field, despite never using them, and not having a way to prevent them from appearing. He can't control pollen travelling through the air anymore than anyone else. But he's still responsible for some stupid reason.
However, I don't think this would fly in the US. Why? Well, first of all, Canadians tend to do this type of litigation. You know how there's a premium for CD-R's, DVD-R's and other recordable media that is paid to artists, with the assumption that piracy will occur? Well, it's pretty much the same deal here, and will end up the same way such litigation and legislation has in the US.
Monsanto, one of the world's largest producers of GE crops, has been ordered to pay criminal and civil charges totalling US$1.5 million for bribing an Indonesian government official and concealing the payment as consulting fees.
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More at: http://www.greenpeace.org.au/features/features_de