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Genetically Modified Canola Spreads To Wild Plants
eldavojohn writes "A research team conducting a survey has found that about 86% of wild canola plants in North Dakota have genetically modified genes in them, and 'two samples contained multiple genes from different species of genetically modified plants.' Canola usually has little competition when cultivated but does not fare well in the wild. The Roundup Ready and Liberty Link strains of genetically modified canola appear to be crossing over to wild plants and helping it survive. The University of Arkansas team claims that the ease in which genetically modified canola has 'escaped' into the wild should be noted by seed makers like Monsanto because this is proof that it will happen."
Reader n4djs notes that Monsanto has been known to sue farmers for patent infringement when their crops unintentionally contain genetically modified plants.
So what's the risk of gene transfer giving us "Roundup Ready" kudzu, poison ivy, etc. in the near future?
You may have figured out the cause of colony collapse disorder. It's actually Monsanto enforcing restraining orders on the bees.
Frankly, I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to actually be behind something like CCD. If they wipe out natural bees, they could launch genetically modified bees that you'd have to buy from Monsanto every year.
That company needs to be shut down for the good of humankind.
Reader n4djs notes that Monsanto has been known to sue farmers for patent infringement when their crops unintentionally contain genetically modified plants.
This might have happened, but the Percy Schmeiser case is not such a case. The Supreme Court of Canada found that Schmeiser deliberately harvested and planted his field with seed which he knew had Monsanto's genetic modifications.
It rather scares me that one of the leading anti-GMO spokesmen is someone who deliberately planted his field with genetically modified seed and then lied about it when he got caught.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
1) They do a hell of a lot of trials on GM plants. They do a hell of a lot of trials on plants period, but more on GM plants because additional agencies are involved in oversight.
2) We've always been modifying plants for a long time.
If you think the foods you get in the store are "natural" as in "The state in which they exist without human involvement," then you are wrong. We've been doing crude genetic engineering for hundreds of years. It started as simply using plants that were more desirable. If a particular plant was more desirable than others, its seeds got more use. It got refined a bit when Gregor Mendel helped everyone understand how genetic traits work. People got better at cross pollinating plants to get desired traits, and doing things like grafting (cutting off a part of a desired plant and fusing it to another).
As an example, go look up a wild banana. They are not what you find in the supermarket, they are squat, thick, and full of hard seeds. That is how bananas were in the wild. They were engineered by humans, though various means, to be easier to hold and have no seeds. There wasn't any direct genetic manipulation, they were created before that, but it was selective engineering of their genetics going on.
What is going on now is just a further refinement of that. Now there is more direct control over the desired genes, and there is less chance undesired traits make it in. No, it is not 100% risk free. Nothing in the world is. However it is pretty safe over all. You may notice that people are not dying from this, we haven't had an epidemic of many people becoming ill or dying because a genetically engineered food was introduced that had adverse side effects.
Caution is needed, of course, as with anything we do. However fear is unwarranted is is basically just Luddism, just fearing things because they are new.
The funniest thing is that in their response to the film Monsato even directly admits they require farmers saving seed to provide "samples for testing".
In other words, we aren't an arm of government, we have no legal authority to "require" a private citizen to do anything whatsoever ... but if you don't we'll bankrupt you in court.
Face it, Monsanto is the BP of their particular sector of the economy. Both need to be taken down a few notches, if not outright disbanded and their assets sold off.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Say I'm in my basement (well, I'm always there so that's a given) and I "create" a dandelion that is resistant to all known forms of weed killer and I release it with a giggle into my back yard, obviously in a few months/years every dandelion in the neighborhood is of my variety. Is this illegal?
How about if I only like to look at grass that is purple (ignoring the fact that purple grass would probably just up and die, but for arguments sake lets say it thrives) and I release that into the wild, maybe by throwing a few seeds along all the borders of my property with the intent that it will cross the property line? How about if I didn't mean for it to do so? Is that illegal?
Now say I run a company that makes weed killer and I release a variant that is _only_ susceptible to my weed killer? Is this illegal?
I'm not arguing for or against what Monsanto is doing and merely questioning the legality of releasing modified plants into the wild, of which can reproduce on their own for my personal benefit (monetarily or asthetically). I'm honestly curious here.
What scares me is, what happens if/when all of Monsanto's crops spread to nearly _every_ field and there is nothing you can do about it? Say every (insert vegetable here) is now of Monsanto patented variety and some grows in your field/garden. Will Monsanto still be able to sue you into the ground? Will the government ever realize that plants are plants and _especially_ if they are able to reproduce on their own, they can't possibly be considered "property" of anyone that doesn't own the land they happen to grow on? Imagine a grass seed company selling a patented seed that can't be used for commercial reasons without paying them. I'd assume selling your house with a nice lawn would be considered as such. If the grass is spreading all on its own, is it still _legal_ to claim it as property of the grass company? I don't know, this whole, releasing patented crops essentially into the wild and then suing anyone caught "growing" it is absolutely absurd.
There's a difference; Unfortunately there's substantial empirical support for the theory that free markets "breed" companies of increasing size which at some point gain enough power to change the rules in their favor, leading to the kind of monopoly support systems we have today (copyright, patents, bureaucratic requirements). Limiting the market power of a single company is seen as communist, anti-market behavior, yet it is the only way a healthy market can survive without creating the negative consequences and ultimately degenerating into a corporate dictatorship.
it is as simple as this : it is social dynamics. if society itself does not collectively agree on and establish order and therefore limit the freedoms of each and all so that they wont infringe on others' freedoms, elements within society rise to power and establish order in that fashion. society doesnt like chaos. it ends up in order. whether the order is going to be one that is collectively decided, or, one that will be decided by minorities, is the choice.
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And that statement is as useful as saying "A green sky would lead to plants growing poorly."
We do not, and never have had, a completely unregulated free market. What we do have in the US, and in all other free countries, is a fundamentally free market. This means people are free to choose to work in the field they please, and that prices, products, etc are generally set by free market principles. The result is the most efficient, least corrupt economy humans have yet been able to create.
Trying to spin it doesn't change the reality. The free market works. That does not mean it is a be-all, end-all, that does not mean that regulation is not useful and necessary. It does mean that so far, we've got nothing better, regardless of if you like that fact or not.
You can't know that the free market works, since we've never had a free market, as you claim.
Or, you could take the reality that there was a completely free market before governments got organized, and apparently people hated it enough to organize governments.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
BP didn't do anything that everyone else operating isn't also doing. When the "right choice" is hard, it often isn't taken. I spoke with the person that pressed a button on a satellite launch. A few hundred million dollars was incinerated because he pressed a button. "What's it feel like to destroy something that's worth more than than 100 times what you'll make in your lifetime?" "It went outside the launch parameters. I pressed the button."
You have to make the right choice, regardless of the consequences. If he hadn't pressed the button, it could have ended up hurting someone, and they have rules. You follow them even if, as in that one, it wasn't a catastrophic failure (it wouldn't have ended up reaching the orbit necessary so it would have been worthless, but it almost certainly wouldn't have harmed anyone either). But BP (and everyone else in the oil industry) doesn't see the harm. They aren't held responsible for spills around Africa or many places in Southeast Asia. They are only "responsible" in the North Sea (better than the US) and the US. Most rig workers with decision power aren't local. So they may get rotated from Africa to the US and living on a rig, they may not take that into account. This wasn't the largest spill. But it got the most press because it was so preventable and so close to a very retribution-oriented and rich country.
Yeah, they screwed up and need to be held responsible. But to blame BP for these actions and not the oil industry as a whole indicates some manner of naivety. It could have been any of them, it just happened to be BP first.
Compare that to Monsanto. They are evil. They should simply have all of their IP revoked by Congress. No need to mess with anything else, and the investors get what they deserve (one of the things I don't like about mutual funds is that I'm probably an investor in Monsanto).
Learn to love Alaska
>>>It's not patent infringement, it's willful theft of DNA that is the property of Monsanto.
For those who think this is a joke, go watch the video "Food Inc" especially the second half. They interview a number of farmers who did nothing wrong, but were sued by Monsanto because their DNA-modified lants had cross-pollinated with the natural wheat (or corn or soy plants). These farmers were driven into bankruptcy trying to defend themselves (according to the video).
It's equivalent to if RIAA started mailing-out copies of songs to random people's computers, and then sued that person for "possession of intellectual property", even though said person did nothing wrong.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
One situation in Canada always comes to the forefront of my mind when discussing the patenting of genes that creates ownership of crop seeds:
There was a family that had been farming for generations (rapeseed I believe) who banked their own seed each year. Since they had the equipment and knowledge, they often helped others bank their seeds also (I assume for a fee). However, Monsanto frowns upon seed banks because people only license the gene in the seed (for such things as making plants Roundup Ready) and banking seeds means you are producing and using the gene without license. Thus they wanted his activity to stop even though, as long as he did not bank any seeds from plants grown from Monsanto's plants, he was doing nothing illegal.
Fortune smiled on them one day when they found their gene in his crops. Did they have permission to enter his land and take plants to test? No, but how do you stop someone from trespassing on hundreds if not thousands of acres of farmland. They sued the farmer and forced him to destroy the seed bank his family had maintained for generations. If I recall correctly, it was not the farmer breaking their law that caused the incident - it was the neighboring farmer who used Monsanto's seeds (and did not bank his seed) that spilled a bunch of genetically modified seed on the road and into the farmer's field.
That is why I do not think they should be allowed even 7 years of protection. I am not saying the nightmare scenario of Monsanto going over an area and intentionally spraying seed to shut down these farmers will happen - but I find that kind of potential power to be frightening and easily abused. Yes, I believe more in social democracies than democratic republics or socialist states - as such I believe the State, through its university system, should be the one to be investigating such technologies for the benefit of the entire society and not a corporation for the profit of its shareholders
Actually, Znork, nearly hit the head of the nail in his answer to CCD (minus the joke about the restraining order).
Australian research has shown that Bees that collect pollen from genetically modified plants that were modified to contain the genes for Bacillus thuringiensis (aka Bt) often experience an autoimmune response (i.e an allergic reaction). Bt kills certain species of caterpillar, a really pest for food growers. The Bt does not kill the bees, but in some, the Bt pollen engenders an auto-immune response.
Unfortunately, the auto-immune response disorientes the Bee and it has a difficult time finding its way back to the hive. This is the critical part for if the worker bee cannot get back to the hive within a certain time frame, it dies. One of the symptoms of CCD is that Bees go missing from the Hive.
More recent research ( http://www.commonground.ca/iss/225/PDFs/earthday6.pdf ) is further highlighting the link to the Bt gene in the modified crops as the cause of the Bee disappearance. So yes Monsanto is harming the Bees in unintended ways.
Here is the real nightmare scenerio as a result, if the world looses its population of pollinating insects, some experts predict that humans will be on a quick path to extinction as our current global food production systems still rely heavily on this aspect of the Natural World.
Food for though (pardon the pun!).