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Biotech Company To Patent Pigs
Anonymous Swine writes "Monsanto, a US based multinational biotech company, is causing a stir by its plan to patent pig-breeding techniques including the claim on animals born by the techniques. 'Agricultural experts are scrambling to assess how these patents might affect the market, while consumer activists warn that if the company is granted pig-related patents, on top of its tight rein on key feed and food crops, its control over agriculture could be unprecedented. "We're afraid that Monsanto and other big companies are getting control of the world's genetic resources," said Christoph Then, a patent expert with Greenpeace in Germany. The patent applications, filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization, are broad in scope, and are expected to take several years and numerous rewrites before approval.'"
"We're afraid that Monsanto and other big companies are getting control of the world's genetic resources," said Christoph Then, a patent expert with Greenpeace in Germany.
Isn't Greenpeace against GMO? Why do they care then? It's not like Monsanto suddenly owns all pigs ever born.....they can still keep using normal, everyday, unmodified pigs like they do now. In fact, they should be HAPPY, because Monsanto's patent protection will prevent other people from researching and developing GMO pigs based on these techniques. It gives me the feeling that Greenpeace just wants to protest anything. Kind of reminds me of the tea-party protesters, who mostly seemed like they were out there to have fun in the name of a protest.
Qxe4
Could we ask them to develop a pig with an uncloven hoof? It would be interesting to see kosher bacon on the shelf.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Someone has to stop these stupid genetic patents. Patents and copyrights are both way out of hand these days. Software patents, now this. I've heard of companies attempting to patent viruses and such (the kind they use to get DNA into other organisms), but a pig? I think patent law has a clause saying you can't patent a living organism (when did genes become "inventions"?). Recently though, big pharma and biotech companies like Monsanto has been lobbying to let this shit happen.
There was a movie that touched on this The Corporation. It's a Canadian movie and I think Monsanto is mentioned in there more than once.
I sincerely don't know how these companies get away with it. Giving them the same rights as people legally was a bad idea. Don't the people working at Monsanto realize how twisted this shit is?
I recently ran into a few documentaries and articles about Monsanto and was completely amazed at the depth and scope of the unadulterated greed and potential for catastrophic issues that stem from their genetic manipulation of nature.
Even that pales in comparison to the back door government dealings that have landed multitudes of Monsanto employees and board members squarely in government position that control the very laws they are petitioning for. Do a simple google search, the numbers are astounding to the point of obscenity.
GMO is a scam, IMO (disclaimer in advance. I am a farmer, I admit bias against monsanto and their ilk, I effin hate the bastids for years now, so take what I write with a grain of salt). It leads to proprietary vendor lock in in spades, along with a host of other issues, health issues, environmental issues and economics, it isn't all rosy. And the issue with superweeds now is getting serious. In my own state, pig amaranth is taking over a lot of fields that were grown with GM cotton then sprayed. Except it doesn't work now, the amaranth is winning. It gets ten feet tall. Some guys just *give up*. Roundup ready crops are just crops designed to be able to withstand roundup or generic equivalent herbicide so they can spray MORE on the crop and more often and not damage the crop. It works-for awhile, that's the real bottom line "for awhile", and you get lots more herbicide residue on whatever you grow. and the stuff itself ain't cheap, over a hundred bucks a jug now and goes up all the time, even the generics keep going up.
You never *really* get rid of all the weeds, you just fast track selective breed resistant weeds (or insect pests if it is insecticide, like with their BT modded corn). Even the crops themselves turn into weeds, they are having a hard time controlling their GM supercanola, it will spread to other fields and being resistant to herbicides...I think you get the picture.
Our farmers are by and large stuck in the 70s by mindset, swallowed all that rah rah rah corporate PR bullshit, now are stuck because they don't know any better and can't avoid it and will NOT admit they got suckered bad.
You think microsoft has vendor lockin...computer OS or some "office suite" is WAY down the list of humanly important *things*. Be concerned, be very concerned over food and availability going into the future is all I can say. They already have had several screwups, one of them one of these days is going to be the czar bomba screwup and will lead to mass famine sometime. I don't know what it will be, but I can about guarantee it will happen. That's my prediction.
We have climate indicators, and we have health of the crop and insect indicators, and the status of our honeybees now is a good indicator or canary in the coal mine if you will. Superweeds, honeybees croaking off, vendor lockin, loss of biodiversity..you have to look at the whole picture.
And it isn't so much that the tech is just evil, I don't believe that, it's that the tech is near completely uncontrolled despite so called regulations and studies and they have no idea whatsoever what the long term consequences will be and there's more than a little hanky panky going on with the studies. Think about all the past big corporate screwups, the really bad stuff, and they all have two things in common: 1) the corporations themselves always maintained until the last second there wasn't any problem and if there was they were just innocent bystanders, and 2) they always manage to trot out their posse of tame private scientists and academic scientists to "back them up" until it was so obvious they had to 'fess ip, pay up and admit wrong doing. That's just normal corporate policy taken as a general rule of thumb (same with governments, never admit they were wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence). Just the nature of the beast. Your default should be, be a skeptic to corporate and governmental PR and spin.
Extrapolate at your leisure, but I am not convinced at all they are the best way forward at this point. They are very profitable for monsanto and a few others, at this time, but that's it. It's bankrupting smaller farmers all over the world and leading to a global hegemony on seeds and food. Do we *really* want that to happen, do we really want to lose natural biodiversity and to keep putting millions of the poorest even further into the poorhouse? And, more importantly than that, something that impacts everyone, think of this: we have no "food insurance" or backup planet either once they
soon enough that will be 100% of the crops you eat; produced from GMO seed
And, why is that bad? Oh, GMOs weigh more than a duck and are therefore bad, right? Newsflash: All food you eat has been selected for certain traits. Those traits are the results of genes. The methodology is different but it really isn't that horribly different in that all either is really doing is changing genes, and there is nothing wrong with that. Sure, there is the chance that a novel trait may turn out to have a negative effect, but that happens with all technology. For example, do you really, really know that Wi-Fi doesn't somehow cause cancer? It probably doesn't, and so until there's evidence to suggest that, it is a silly connection to make. What makes altering the genes of a plant any different? That's how it works; evidence before fear. Too many people just say ZOMG, Frankenfood!!!!!1!!!eleven!! and don't think about what they're really saying.
with the "terminator" gene,
You mean that thing they currently have no plans to bring to the market? I gotta hand it to Monsanto. Genes might spread, so they're evil. They develop terminator genes to prevent accidental genetic spread, so they're evil. They're damned either way, aren't they?
fertilized with a synthetic fertilizer, and inundated with synthetic pesticides which destroy soil diversity and in fact make it impossible to grow healthy food.
Unnatural=unhealthy? Citation needed.
Do only evil
Seriously? Creating new sources of food is evil? Patents last for a few years or a couple decades (at most). New sources of food will continue to pay dividends for generations.
A small taste of monsanto's evilness.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/67878/the-future-of-food
They are not just trying to create new food sources, they are trying to become the ONLY food source.
They are playing god, and they lack any conscience.
Monstanto developed a seed that makes the plant infertile. That can cross contaminate other plants. The goal of this seed? To make it so farmers cannot use seed from the previous harvest and they have to buy more seeds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#.22Terminator.22_seed_controversy
Monsanto is quite possibly the most evil company on the planet.