Slashdot Mirror
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.
"I swear, it looked like one of mine", exclaimed Ms. Nature, while being being booked. Several scattered, unharvested seed from a bio-engineered crop sprouted this Spring and the Monsanto Seed Police were right on top of it.
Unrelated to this incident, Peter Rabbit was charged with Intellectual Property theft, after taking a bio-engineered cabbage from Farmer McGregor's garden. "It sure looked good, all big and green, but it tasted like wood pulp", stated the incarcerated rabbit.
In other news, to show it's kind heart, Monsanto was offering assistance to Tsunami victims. "As long as they don't try replanting our seed", said an anonymous source within the company.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
simple for the farmers. Don't buy their seeds.
Sounds like the final nail in the coffin for the independant (non-corporate) American Farmer.
A company wanting to rape the world's farmers for more money! GOOOO Capitalism!
The company selling the seeds is really just upset because someone defeated the copy protection. I hear holding down the shift key on the tractor whilst sowing the seeds works.
Well, they got their license agreements and they need money ofc. How could Monsanto develop those seeds if once the farmer bought them he could replant the seeds grown on his soil? I'm not here trying to defend Monsanto, but I believe Bio-engineered Seeds are the future, and need money to be developed.
I know there are drug companies that have patented sections of the human genome, does that mean that I now cannot have children of my own, since I would be illegaly planting my seeds from a previous "harvest" without a license?
OK, farmer entered into an agreement with Monsanto, got it.
Somehow the powers-that-be got the idea that replanting seeds grown from your own soil is a crime.
No, somehow the powers-that-be got the idea that contracts are legally binding instruments.
What's the story here?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The farmer bought seeds from Monsanto, thereby agreeing to their terms and conditions. One of those terms was that he COULD NOT save and re-plant seeds next year - he would either have to buy them again, or use a different type of seed.
He is being sued because he saved and re-planted seeds. Exactly what he agreed not to do by purchasing the seeds in the first place.
Don't like the Terms and Conditions? Don't use their product.
There have been reports of VERY shady Monsanto lawsuits in the past that were really crappy - but this one seems fair enough.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
It's not "illegal" but a breach of contract. There's no *law* saying you can't replant the seeds.
True enough- except for Monsanto has been successfull in suing farmers who DIDN'T SIGN THE CONTRACT for patent infringement, so it's also illegal.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Plant another kind seed and go to jail, too... How about cannabis sativa (or do you prefer indica?)
Assholes always keep trying to make nature illegal. Har!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Of course, suing the farmers to whom this company markets the seeds will more or less shut down any hope of future profit from the agricultural comminuty who are "just fine, thanks," with natural seeds that don't have hundred or thousand-dollar yearly fees attached. Most farmers have it hard enough already just getting enough money to pay the bills and feed the family...
I may apply this to my daughter.
A blog I run for the wealth
Seriously. Why would any farmers choose to buy GM seed from Monsanto? They should all know how Monsanto do business and the potential consequences of their decision to purchase Monsanto GM seed.
Once you buy their seed, it's very difficult to go back to non GM seed. Mostly just because Monsanto will hound you until they find just one unlicensed grain of their GM product on your land and sue you into oblivion.
Even 3rd world countries are aware of the potential problems. Some have even gone so far as to refuse US food aid because it was Monsanto GM grain that was being offered. If leaders of 3rd world countries can see the potential problems, why can't western farmers?
Shitdrummer.
Not only is the submitter trolling, he's glossing over some important points:
If you buy Monsanto's seed, you sign a contract that says that you won't save seed for next year. If you end up saving seed, you're in breach of contract. Point finale.
If you don't agree to their terms and conditions, you're not being forced by anybody to buy Monsanto seed. You'll just have to be content with other seed that doesn't have value-added traits such as herbicide or pest resistance.
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
Monsanto is perfectly willing to sell you seed that you allowed to replant, it simply costs more. On a related note, the seed that is not licensed to be replanted often shouldn't be replanted anyway. It is frequently a dihybrid cross that whose next generation is not nearly as robust.
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
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.
We can enforce our opinions as law when they hire the new farmer-overlord judges. Anyone here with an opinion to enforce?
if a farmer buys seeds from them even once.
just once.
and grows them alongside his own.. or whatever.. then he must buy from monsanto for all eternity after that, because monsanto can argue that there's their ip in that crop regardles...
so cheaper, more effective crop becomes more expensive thanks to force of law.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
When they prove that, maybe it's just. But Monsanto genes spread to nearby crops, despite legal requirements that they not pollute the gene pool. Of course Monsanto has no actual accountability for polluting the gene pool, and it's insidious marketing for forcing polluted farms to pay for licensing, or go to jail. It's interesting that you assume the farmers are all pirates, rather than the victims of Monsanto. Monsanto IP is viral in the biological sense. Imagine if your next-door neighbor's EULA click obligated *you* to subscribe to Microsoft's trusted computing, while you also had to install Windows antispyware, though you installed only Linux on your machines.
--
make install -not war
Monsanto IP is viral in the biological sense. Monsanto genes spread to nearby crops, despite legal requirements that they not pollute the gene pool. Of course Monsanto has no actual accountability for polluting the gene pool, and it's insidious marketing for forcing polluted farms to pay for licensing, or go to jail.
Imagine if your next-door neighbor's EULA click obligated *you* to subscribe to Microsoft's trusted computing, while you also had to install Windows antispyware, though you installed only Linux on your machines.
--
make install -not war
Linda Fisher
Deputy Administrator
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Guess for which company she was a lobbyist before being appointed by President Bush.
How far do you think that case would get?
"People, particularly americans, often confuse what is legal/illegal and what is right/wrong. Please don't."
I got a better question for Slashdot. Why should anyone clear up misconceptions, and provide more information? When we all know that it will go in one ear and out the other. So when the next story comes up, we get to listen to the same mistakes, over and over. Apparently there's a lot of talking (as witnessed by the post numbers). but there's absolutely no listening. I don't know about the rest of you. But I always thought that part of the definition of a geek, was someone willing to learn. Not having to be repeatedly told the same things over and over. Always willing to do research. Now it's talk loud, be a rebel, and speak from a position of ignorance.*
*Maybe the old "/." is dead, for all the people that made it was it was, have been driven off, in the pursuit of "karma".
DON'T BUY SEEDS FROM Monsanto.
So how do I prevent my neighbours from buying patented Monsanto seeds and planting them such that they cross-pollinate with mine?
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!)
This is actually a fairly complex deal.
Farmers do not collect their own seed generally- they harvest their corn, and repurchase seed every spring. That's the way it is done. There is no sense in harvesting corn for seed and it is rarely practiced. If you've got good corn you sell it at price It's cheaper and easier to go to the Coop and get more seed each spring.
The genetically engineered corn is actually the life blood of many farmers- yes even the small ones. They plant tracts of corn that are then observed for the quality of the corn. I lived in an area of TN that Monsanto and others used for testing- you've never sen more curious rows of corn.
Monsanto is engineering a seed that produces better product. The result is simple- a farmer sees that he can harvest the engineered corn and create his own seed for less than Monsanto charges for the engneered product. That would be the only reason to replat Monsanto seed- the last thing any farmer wants to do is more work than they have to, but if they can get Monsanto's branded seed for less, they will do so.
In addition, they can at that point actually sell seed that was engineered by Monsanto for their own profit. Monsanto actually engineers the seed to help the farmers bottom line- to make them more productive.
However, I do agree that suing the little guy in this is pointless. the big agriculture corporate farms would be the major players if "seed copying" ever became a huge problem.
Still, you've got to realize that the reseeding farmer is trying to save money by copying superior product. Call it the genetic equivalent of P2P or whatever you like, but trying to use superior seed to grow it to avoid paying- that's not quite kosher.
The farmers would be motivated though because in this day and age, family farming is nearly an impossible adventure- the cost are astronomical and the payoff risky as hell.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
(1) Pause for a moment before going into "complain about big corporation" mode.
(2) Monsanto and the farmer had signed an agreement.
I think the bigger issue here, however, is the question of whether Monsanto should be doing this. Looking at this situaion from Monsanto's point of view, imagine spending hundreds of millions creating genetically modified plants. You sell them to one farmer. He turns around the every year and replants them. This means you make only one sale to each farmer. Now, it seems to me that Monsanto should probably have a two-tier system: buy the seeds for one season (cheap, but you have to buy them each year), or buy seed which you can replant, but you are limited to a specific number of acres each year. There are additional issues of "what happens to the licence when/if the farm is bought by someone else" (which is why a licence should be limited to a certain number of acres per year). And, Monsanto would probably like to prevent resale of the seeds (otherwise the farmers would become competitors with Monsanto, but with no development costs). It makes sense that Monsanto would opt for the "one year only, no replanting" clause because many farmers wouldn't be able to afford an ongoing licence. While you could argue that the one-year-only agreement is meant to suck as much money out of the farmer as possible, there are two things to note: (1) The farmer doesn't need to buy Monsanto, and (2) the fee is $6.50 per acre per year for soy. For a 500-acre farm (which seems like a reasonable family-sized farm) this works out to a little over $3000 per year. This doesn't seem excessive.
http://www.empiresofsteel.com/
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.
There are many issues here. Perhaps the most important is bio-diversity. Furthermore there is not a whole lot we can do about this other than become aware of what is going on and do our best to raise the issues in the public eye.
I have challenged the supermarkets where I live to label foods that are genetically engineered. They cannot of course do anything but the more noise I make the more aware other people become. So this is the little revolt that I am making.
Now the issue is that Rape (now called canola) has been genetically engineered so it is resistant to roundup. Percy Schmeiser had his feild contaminated with Monsanto genetically altered seeds and rather than the supreme court of Canada finding that Monsanto is to blame for not keeping their experiments in the lab the court instead found Schmeiser to be liable for not being able to keep Monsanto experiments out of his feilds.
The logic of this totally excapes me.
The economics of the agricultural community are such that even a minor percentage inprovment in productivity will be picked up by a select few. The consequence of this is that in the long term no-one wins. The reason farm income is low is because from an economic standpoint there is almost perfect competition so everyone competes to the lowest income people can survive on. This is how commodity markets work.
From the standpoint of sustainable agriculture however - this is a very dangerous development.
First off we end up with only selected strains being planted across vast acerages. Next we end up with Monsanto (95% of the genetically altered seeds come from Monsanto) controlling the distribution of these seeds and to top it off we now have an uninformed court ruling that 100,000 years of workable agriculture where any farmer is free to develope any strain of seed is to be replaced with a regime where Monsanto Labs rule the roost.
Not only this - those genetically altered seeds will form some of the most viralent weeds one can imagine.
But - what if we end up with 100% of the farm land planted with a single strain and some biological vector brings in an infection. This will result in close to a 100% crop failure. Anyone who knows of the consequences of the Irish Potatoe Blight should realise what this will mean.
Genetic alteration is not necessarily bad. What is bad is mono culture. When we get a ruling that the individual farmers are somehow responsible for preventing contamination of their seed then we move into a world where a single corporate interest can control the seeds all farmers use.
This leads directly to mono-culture and all farmers are forced into abandoning their individual strains. The result of this mono-culture will be a massive crop failure at some point in the future.
So the judges may have been well schooled in law but they are ignorant of the biology which provides the food they eat.
As I said before - as a lone voice the only thing I can do is bitch and complain which I do. What we really need to do is get a very strong movement going. Even a million voices are not enough. The disaster mono-culture can precipate can be much larger than the Tsunami that just hit SE asia.
Remember this happening in Africa too?
As I recall, Robert Mugabe (I think?) refused to accept gifts of genetically modified corn to his country from the US. As a condition of accepting the gift, he required that the corn be milled, thereby destroying it's capability to grow/sprout/etc, and rendering it impossible for Monsanto and the other giants from having a legal case against him.
I'm really surprised that the farmers are so stupid as to go along with this. Only a few months ago, Wired had an article about the new herbicide resistant coca plants in South America. The plants, as it turns out, were not modified in the lab, but through agressive breading in proximity to the American spraying efforts. No breaking of the law, just simple work. Why are these silly farmers accepting the same treatment? How long before US farmers come up with a soy bean that is resistant to roundup?
I guess it just works out to choice...If US farmers want Monsanto's hands in their pants, they're entitled to choose that. Why heck, as the story points out, it makes farming really easy and feels pretty good at first. I just know that, like taxes, once the hands are there, they're not going to go away, and they'll only squeeze harder over time. Eventually, the farmers will find that they no longer have any choice... suckers...
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.
... but not new. Being an molecular biologist myself, I have been ranting about this kind of shit for YEARS. I mean, what IS it with those people? When gene manipulation of crops, a.k.a. green biotech, came up, we were all celebrating. What could one do with this method - creating crops resistant against various pests, thereby reducing the need for pesticides, creating crops resistant against cold, draught, excess sun, whatever, increasing the area of potential farmland greatly. Maybe even building the nitrogen fixation system of legumes in other crops, completely abolishing the need for synthetic nitrate fertilizers.
What happened outside our overly optimistic minds? Corporate greed took over, corporations like monsanto created new pesticides and the correlated pesticide resistant plants, they had their lawyer draw up special license agreements - and the promise of feeding humanity with less pollution and higher efficiency was broken down to higher corporate profits. I was not a part of this personally, but simply the fact of being employed in a related field makes me bow my head in shame for all this great opportunities given away and sacrificed on the altar of capitalism.
This comment does not exist.
Sad day when seeds for crops need a license agreement. Maybe GPL....
This illustrates perfectly what is wrong with "Intellectual Property." Aside from the egregious abuses that Monsanto has been guilty of in this particular case. For example, suing farmers who DON'T use Monsanto seeds when seeds blow in from a neighboring farm which does, going after farmers who break off the deal (it would be nearly impossible to eradicate all traces of the previously-planted Monsanto seeds, so chances are high that any farm which has ever used Monsanto's seeds still have some lying around in their soil, giving Monsanto grounds for a lawsuit), and many other abuses. While unproven, Monsanto has even been accused of "planting" (in both the sense of planting a seed, and planting evidence) their crops on the farms of those who refuse to use their crops.
To my thinking, arguing that "patents" are applicable to any living organism or any part thereof (including its DNA sequence or any portion thereof) is dangerous and absolutely ludicrous. If someday it becomes possible to genetically engineer humans to cure them of crippling genetic diseases, will that person have to later purchase a "license" to have children, and the children, if they receive the modified gene, will have to also purchase such a license, and so on...
"Intellectual property" is out of control. Time to bring it back to reality (max. 5 year length of copyright/patent, only tangible, non-living, truly unique items patentable, no personal use restrictions) or, better yet, abolish entirely the dated and inappropriate concept that a person (or, worse yet, a pseudo-person known as a "corporation") can OWN an idea. This case makes the perfect argument that such laws do great harm FAR beyond college kids sharing a few movies.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Actually, that's quite common among purebred dogs. My sister is really into purebred basset hounds. She's bought from breeders who have told her that she cannot breed the puppies they sold her. I've always laughed at it because I cannot figure out how they'd ever know about to enforce it.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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
>If they don't like that agreement, then they don't have to buy the seeds!
Wrong. Monsanto and its cohorts has the market buttoned up. You should say if you don't like it, go get some other job. Organic farmers are pretty much the only farmers in industrialized countries that don't have to buy from Monsanto, since they can produce their own seeds.
On a side note, one of the threads in this discussion is about saving seed to replant next season. Monsanto is essentially doing everything it can to stop the entire world from doing this. Most of their hybrids won't produce viable seed, and now they have IP laws on their side that say if they can detect the DNA they devoloped in your crop, no matter how it got there, you're legally liable to pay them damages.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
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.
Bunch of luddites, not seeing that the future is genetically modified grains, wholly owned and controlled by a foreign company who will bury anyone who tries to grow food without permission...
Haven't we at least learned anything from Microsoft about single-source monopolistic controls? And this is food! I'm starting to think we deserve our new fascist state.
The enemies of Democracy are
I can't find a reference to it now, but I think (maybe 5 years ago) that /. had a posting about a new genetic process that Monsanto invented specifically to prevent reseeding.
As I understood it, they had a way to create a crop that you could grow from a seed, but that crop in return wouldn't bare any seeds itself. This of course was great for Monsanto and terrifying for farmers.
The closest I could find online http://members.tripod.com/c_rader0/gemod.htm mentions (search for reseed) that plants can be rasied with sterile male parts. Thank God I'm not a plant, that doesn't sound plesant.
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
http://www.tulane.edu/~bfleury/envirobio/enviroweb /DeadZone.htm
Posting this logged in so maybe someone will see it.
This is absolutely sick! Seeds float through the air, and when they land, they grow into plants, by their very nature!
That's like if I were to write a computer worm, then sue people who get infected by it for violating the terms under which I license it!
This is pure evil.
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.
Monsanto always make me thing of the moneylender in the Merchant of Venice:
;)
The moneylender can take one pound of flesh without blood or hair, from the borrower.
Similarly, Monsanto should be able to the protect its magic gene, but not anything more.
If they can enforce their IP just to that gene but not anything else go for it. They are overly greedy and ignore (or forget) the fact that 99.99999% of the plant is contributed by the mother nature and generations of farmers who adopt the selective breeding technique (keep only the seed from a good and strong plant). To me it is a bit like adding a proprietary extension to Linux and claim the whole lot belong to yours. So sad that God forgets to sign GPL with Man
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.
I just hope my dad hasn't produced me under one of those contracts. We're expecting a kid and now I'm scared!
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
This sounds horrible, until you think about what Monsanto et al. are really trying to control. The US public has made it very clear that many do not want to eat any genetically modified food. If well-meaning farmers can replant the crops whenever and wherever they want, Monsanto et al. cannot guarantee that the public isn't getting genetically modified crops in their food. That could open up a whole new round of liability for the companies.
You're missing the bigger issue here. The problem is that Monsanto CAN NOT insure that their genetic modifications will not infect other crops through cross-pollination. That's the problem. That's why the Supreme Court was short-sighted and messed up when they allowed companies to patent genetic modifications to plants.
For example, let's say you are a soybean farmer who decides he's going to hold off from buying the Monsanto seed because you don't like the license terms. But every farm around you does buy the seed. And at the end of the year, you save a little seed for the next year. And the next year you decide that you still don't want to use the Monsanto seed because you already have seed. So you plant and everything seems fine until you get a served papers because Monsanto is suing you for using their seed. And you're confused because you never bought any Monsanto seed. See that's the problem. Through no fault of your own, your natural seed has now been infected with Monsanto's genetic modifications. Is that your fault? Monsanto's the one spreading a virus.
This could very easily lead to the complete elimination of seeds that are unmodified genetically. Monsanto is criminally neglegent for not insuring that their genetically modified seed does not infect ungenetically modified seeds.
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.
A lot of agro-business seeds will not produce the same kinds of flowers in a second generation.
Also agro-business seeds often will be infertile in a second generation.
The large Agro companies get huge tax writeoffs. They get large subsidies. Meanwhile they buy up smaller seed producing companies and then stop selling the old line seeds that will polinate and reproduce themselves.
This has been going on for a long long time.
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.
t ails.html?site_id=45&news_id=1581
More at: http://www.greenpeace.org.au/features/features_de
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.
How is it that a "Dr. GeneMachine" can't tell the difference between a "pesticide" and a "herbicide"?
Every time I've used Roundup it killed the plants deader than dead. Didn't seem to bother the bugs much, tho...
It takes an idiot to do cool things - that's why it's cool!
--I have some of those "gene bank" type seeds, in a way anyway. Bought several large sealed cans of various open pollinated seeds. I keep those just packed away, and use other open pollinated for my season to season garden crops. some are many years old, lost track of when I started breeding them now.. It's a "just in case" deal, and eventually I hope to be able to build a pretty large tight greenhouse with decent air filtration and airlock styled entrys for it. Just for that purpose. Cross pollination is an extreme threat though,generally speaking, as is cross species contamination (it's happened already) and just wait until they get "terminator" gene modified seeds out on the market. They were going to do it, public outcry got them to back off just a little bit and "just do research" but it's only a matter of time now before they bribe off enough legislators to get it legal to distribute.
I think it's one of the larger threats facing the planet. People think about nukes or terror attacks or whatnot, but I think mucking around with the planets food supply with GM products will eventually result in some rather nasty disasters. I simply *don't* trust those industries spokesmodel scientists to be anywhere nears truthful on the subject. IMO, they are simply too blinded by economic greed to seriously acknowledge the inherent dangers in what they are doing. We've seen the same arrogance and public assurances of "safe" with any number of past "new shiny and improved" products that turned out to be not so swift. Just generally speaking now, could be anything, thinking that just relocating species to brand new areas was a good idea (carp, english sparrows, kudzu, etc). Releasing chemcicals for various purposes, medications that turned out to be more harmful than good or had unintended side effects, etc that were missed in the "scientific testing".
I am sure they are intellectually aware of it,back to these various GM modded plants, but that itch for buckets of scratch is just too strong for them to ignore. I know they are capable of creating most anything now, and I have read some amazing claims on what they can do with them, make new medicines, etc, but still...I just don't know if *they* know way down the road how things will turn out. Here's a good analogy, well, good enough for slashdot purposes. Look at software code, people can look at it and use it for awhile and it seems fine, perfectly ok, then one day someone does something just a tad different and POOF a large vulnerability is exposed. With code (in most cases), it's not that big of a deal, it just gets fixed, but with live growing things? Wind blowing pollen around, trucks hauling stuff hither and yon...it could get messy. Look at down in Louisiana now, the last batch of hurricanes brought up a nasty disease that's spreading all through the soybeans now. Stuff happens, planetary wildcards happen. I think with "food" they should go real s-l-o-w and careful. Wouldn't bother me a bit if they studied their products for decades before even teeny tiny uber controlled trials out in the open.
As to "always be able to purchase non GM.." you should investigate what's going down in a lot of african countries and in india lately on this front. Even in Iraq, we had as thread on Iraq and farmers just a little while ago, like last month. They -monsanto they and others- are actively trying to corner "the market" there with their brands of seeds through the legislative (read:bribes) process. They are as far from playing fair as you can get. They tried to even patent a widely used Indian wheat that's been openly grown and shared around India for thousands of years, and they didn't even invent it! It's a form of wheat that lacks some markers that causes it to be not as "sticky" in baking as regular wheat, it has lower gluten content, that's where Indians get their "flat bread". Monsanto ups and patents it! Just said "ya,we own it, give us a patent" and the freekin patent office rubber stamps it! In india they are fighting it, they had to fight in in england
I grew up on a farm and understand the why this is a problem very well.
Farmers buy seed that is basically very expensive crops harvested and cleaned and separated and tested and treated, that helps it's performance. I.e smashed seends don't grow well, seeds with mold on them don't grow well, seeds that insects eat don't grow well. This is why proportionately seed is much more expensive than feed, which is what most of the crops grown in this country are used for.
Feed usually does contain seeds, just not well protected or near the quality of commercial seed. Growing up, every year my father would always set aside a portion of the harvest to be cleaned and used as seed the next year, if for some reason commercial seed were not available. This is done mainly with wheat and soybeans, due to the population planting issues, and germ rates (wheat and soybeans are planted with a expoentially greater seed/acre density than corn is for example).
Every year, my father would send samples of each vareity from the crop that he saved off to a lab for testing. Information returned would include percent foreign matter (such as weed seeds and hulls) and the most important was the germ rate, which is basically a percentage of how many of the seeds from the sample sprouted when provided warmth, water and nutrients. In other words how many of the seeds are duds.
We could never harvest a crop or clean our saved seed enough to get germ rates within 10% of commercial seed. The equipment we used to harvest it, and our storage methods just weren't as good. Every year that I can remember, after we bought commercial seed, and had planted it, and had a crop come up, we sold the grain we had saved for seed from the previous crop.
That's basically the how and why of why saving seed vs. buying commercial seed. We never were able to determine that we would save enough money by using our own, to make it worth while. Now, for some additional issues related to GMOs (Genetically modified organisms).
These commercial seeds that are GMOs obviously bear a price premium, and what company would want to give that up? I see this as the biggest driving force behind the contracts, licensing and lawsuits. Secondly, Monsanto obviously can't put any kind of guarantee of performance on recycled seed, and most likely wishes to avoid tarnishing their product's reputation. Thirdly, and this I don't really know enough about, but is one reason that they give, is that the original seed is bred in such a way that it's crop produces optimal seed to be resistant to the proper compounds and the possibility that subsequent generations could stray from that original organisms exist. (I just don't know about this, but it sounds plausible enough)
Ironically back on our family farm, we have had mixed success with GMOs. We continue to use traditional methods on about half our crops every year. What happens when everything becomes RoundUp Ready? When volunteer corn starts growing in a bean field, but spraying the beans with roundup doesn't kill it, because last years corn crop was round-up ready? This is why we continue to choose the seed with the location it will be planted in mind, so that we can use our chemicals of choice on it, to control the problems that we know are there. We also use wide varieties of seed from a wide variety of seed suppliers to increase resistance to single variety problems. Sometimes I really don't know how my father keeps this all straight on our mid size farm.
Do we ever plant RoundUp ready crop again as seed the next year? NO. Do we save some each year, as a precaution for things we can't even imagine (shortages, catastrophes, WWIII, etc.)? YES. Hopefully we never ever have to use it. Afterall it really doesn't make that great of seed compared to what is commercially available.
Comments? Questions? please!
-Mikey P
look whos on the receiving end ....
US agribusiness giant Monsanto has agreed to pay a one million US dollar penalty to settle charges of bribing the Indonesian government, the US Justice Department said last week. Criminal charges filed in the District of Columbia charged Monsanto with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in connection with an "illegal payment" of 50,000 dollars to a senior Indonesian Ministry of Environment official. Assistant Attorney General Christopher Wray said that a bribe by a Monsanto employee was aimed at facilitating the cultivation of genetically modified crops and was falsely certified as "consultant fees" in the company's books and records. The Justice Department said in a statement that the St. Louis, Missouri-based company "agreed to accept responsibility for the conduct of its employees in paying the bribe and making the false books and records entries."
Monsanto said in a statement it regretted the actions of those involved in bribery and that it accepted responsibility. "Monsanto accepts full responsibility for these improper activities and we sincerely regret that people working on behalf of Monsanto engaged in such behaviour," Monsanto's general counsel Charles Burson said as quoted by Reuters. Mr. Burson said the company had taken actions to address the activities in Indonesia.
Monsanto has also agreed to adopt internal compliance measures and cooperate with ongoing criminal and civil investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission. An independent compliance expert is to be chosen to audit the company's program and oversee implementation of the new policies.
Monsanto also settled related civil enforcement proceedings by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which issued an administrative order finding that the company violated Foreign Corrupt Practices Act provisions. "Monsanto consented to the entry of a final judgement in the federal lawsuit requiring it to pay a 500,000 civil penalty, and consented to the Commission's issuance of its administrative order." Mr. Wray warned that: "companies cannot bribe their way into favourable treatment by foreign officials."
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.
Monsanto is selling what they call "Terminator technology" (first reference I found: http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/sterileSeed.htm ) to countries where getting enough food to survive for the day could be a problem.
The "technology" is a fancy word for genetically designing the next-generation seeds sterile, so that the farmers can't grow any new plants from the seeds produced from plants grown by Monsanto seeds.
Now, very few things pisses me off to the extent that this kind of behaviour does. (I can actually start sweating, merely thinking about this)
The idea of exploiting the starving seems to be good business for the Monsanto people.
This kind of behaviour - maximizing profits, disregard for human life, and the complete lack of any moral consideration, is, I believe, one of few that is taking us in a direction which ultimately will bring down the sad downfall (sudden, fiery death for the masses is still a threat) of humanity.
To me, the people who profit from selling these "Terminated seeds" (I here refrain from spilling my thoughts too bluntly, especially avoiding a sentence containing a suggested use of the words "Monsanto executives" and "terminate") to starving people, occupy a niche lower in the food chain than people who murder the elderly for money, and those who sell women and children for sexual exploitation and their personal profit.
Please, even if you disagree with my views, let at least the facts about this be known.
It doesn't persist in the soil like 2,4-D and many other broad-spectrum herbicides do
That's what Monsanto wants you to believe, but the truth is that they had to stop calling their product biodegradable because it is persistent. It's also very toxic for plants and animals. Just google for "roundup biodegradable" and see for yourself.
dupont for example has patent EP 744 888 which describes corn(maize) with oleic acid > 55%.
: www.ukabc.org/FAOengl-sv-j.doc+Patent+EP+744+888&h l=en/
l
in mexico you find such plants in the wild for ages...
guess what - it doesnt stop duPont for suing you if such a plants happens to be on your ground
more info here: http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:Ts0FIArHTZ8J
and here: http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/2040.htm