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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.
For infringement of intellectual property. The judge put a restraining order on the bees to remain at least two hundred yards away from all Mansanto plants and fined them $2,320 for each unlicensed strand of DNA collected from Mansanto plants and distributed to a competing plant.
My work here is dung.
im repeating this over and over whenever similar nonsense comes up. there is no evading capitalism come to this point. from property rights, to ownership of ideas, to ownership of genes, and then to ownership of entire species. if you 'let businesses be', this happens.
this, has to be the point where the sane realizes that this does not work.
Read radical news here
1. Enforce strong patent system
2. Spread patented genetic material all over domestic agriculture
3. Sue farmers
4. Profit!!!
You might want to see the film Food inc. which will give some background about Monsato and the rest of the "modern" food industry. 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". That's right; if you have nothing to do with Monsato, you still have a duty to provide them with samples of your seeds so that they can be sure you haven't "infringed their intellectual property rights".
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Prince Charles must prove his claim that GM crops could cause a global environmental disaster, Monsanto has challenged.
Cylon Number Six of Monsanto Public Relations said it was their "moral responsibility" to investigate whether genetically modified crops, fully owned and patented to the hilt by Monsanto, could help provide a suitably profitable solution to hunger in the developing world. Monsanto famously protect their hard work, having sued and won for patent violation when their seeds have blown onto another farmer's land.
"We see this as part of our Africa strategy," she said. "It's easy for those of us with plentiful food supplies to ignore the issue, but we have a responsibility to use science to get our hooks into the less well off where we can. We certainly wouldn't drive them off their land, they're too useful to us as labour. It's in their own best interest. I think of it as the 'Corporate Man's Burden.'"
Nestlé has also urged the European Union to review its opposition to GM. "People are starting to think Monsanto are a bigger bunch of bastards than we are, and we can't have such strikes against our public image go unchallenged."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
So what's the risk of gene transfer giving us "Roundup Ready" kudzu, poison ivy, etc. in the near future?
The NPR story (first link) was a real whitewash compared to the U. Arkansas press release (second link). The NPO story does not mention the fact that in some places where the roadsides are sprayed the genetically modified canola was the only thing left growing. And it downplays the risk of the genes spreading to other plants.
Patent infringement is a civil cause of action for which damages (not fines) are awarded and injunctions (rather than restraining orders, which are a specific type of injunction unrelated to patent law) may be ordered.
But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Monsanto sued the bees. Or the nearest convenient beekeeper, for that matter.
It's a good thing this absolutely positively can NOT happen. It's what we were promised. It's what Monsanto told the FDA and it's what the US is telling every-which nation they're trying to push GM foods to.
Nothing to see here. It's not possible. LALALALALA
My problem has always been this. If a pharma company releases a drug that is later proven to be a bad idea then you can do a recall and destroy all known stocks. With GM crops you can't do this as once it is in the wild it is in the wild. The TFA has proved my basic point.
I also have the feeling that less time has been spent trialing GM crops compared with drugs.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
So AOL lost 86% of its customers since 2001 and now 86% of wild canola contain genetically modified genes? Something fishy is going on!
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
Slashdaughters, let us avoid the tendency to take the focused ruling in a specific legal case and spread it over our most elaborate paranoid fantasies. We need to force our enemies to do that. They won't be able to enforce the legal rulings in their favor over more than a few isolated cases. Each new case will make their overall position appear more extreme and convince more undecided people that they are a lost cause. We have successfully used this tactic on the record industry; now the farmers can use it on the bio-engineered seed industry.
We need these news items to bring attention to the real problems in agriculture. The biggest problem is that it is over-dependent on fossil fuel for the supplementary necessities of large crop yields. Mainly fertilizer, but also for farm machinery use and post-harvest transportation of food (which has a short period between being ready-for-harvest and losing its nutritional value). Any disruption in the oil delivery process would not only disrupt our transportation, it would disrupt our food supply. Our food depends on these clowns in the Middle-East and psychopathic oil companies, not on Monsanto bullying poor farmers.
We can't feed our population without the oil to make the fertilizer, run the harvesters, and truck the produce. If oil goes to $250 a barrel, then a few months later gas goes to $7 a gallon, and ramen goes to $1 a packet. People, and that includes people like you, will start shoplifting, then start looting, then start shooting. Monsanto employees will be doing the same thing, too. Nobody will have much use for any kind of intellectual-property horseshit when their real property starts going up in flames.
At the present, keep up with the seed-bank bio-diversity people. Don't get distracted by lawyers and sensationalism-mongering journalists. Keep it real and only use fools for cheap entertainment.
Sounds like someone should send them a bill for cleaning it up.
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.
Is it bad that the plants have escaped or is it bad the some American corporation is going to make less money next year?
No sig today...
Really. I am no tin foil haberdasher, but Monsanto steamrolls through farm country like a nasty hay-seed (pun intended) Napoleon. And if you think they don't have numerous rural Congress folks in their pockets, please think again. Your food chain is far scarier than most know. I can't say I have some terrible fear of some horrid mutated crop gone wrong, but I can say I fear the corruption of democracy and our food supply that Monsanto perpetuates.
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
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.
Canola was created by man by selectively breeding varieties of rapeseed to produce an edible oil product. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canola)
So Monsanto genetically modified it, to promote the use of Round-UP (tm) - not to improve individual plant yields/nutrition, but to make it easier to control weeds. 80%+ farmers have planted it, and now it has escaped into the wild.
Despite the level of corruption, you find that in generally free societies which are all capitalist based economies (they have varying levels of regulation, but a free market is always the basis) there is the least corruption of any system. Central economies tend to be the very worst. After all, when the people doing the watching are the people with control, well there is something of a conflict of interest, isn't there? It's not perfect, but it is the best we've yet come up with. Doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement or that vigilance and regulation aren't needed, but trying to say "Oh capitalism is the problem," shows a good deal of ignorance of history and current events. As power concentrates, corruption tends to go up and in command economies, you have a hell of a concentration of power.
A completely unregulated, free market tends towards consolidation of power into large companies and ultimately monopoly. This maximizes corruption every bit as effectively as a strong, centralized government.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Here is the story NPR did on this a few days ago - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129010499
"Wilkinson says that just because the plants are genetically modified, doesn't mean they'll be more successful than wild plants. In this particular case, herbicide resistance will provide little edge to plants growing in areas that, almost by definition, don't receive many herbicides. "It's very difficult for either of these transgene types to give much of an advantage, if any, in the habitats that they're in," he says, referring to the genetically modified canola."
I hate Monsanto and GM because of their legal views and actions on DNA patents. I also hate how their products require tons of chemicals to grow and how it gets into the environment. I hate it how it promotes growing "all one type of plant" which turns niche problems and pests into giant clusterfucks because of the lack of biodiversity that would have naturally kept the problem in check. Google "pig weed" which is now ultra resistant to all known herbacides thanks to GM/Monsanto. The list goes on and on.
http://deltafarmpress.com/mag/farming_high_incidence_arkansas/index.html
It's glyphosate (Roundup) resistant. That doesn't mean you can't kill it, in fact the article lists several existing herbicides that kill it.
It just means Roundup doesn't (usually) work on it. So that means farmers in some areas no longer have the option of planting Roundup resistant crops and then hosing down their fields with Roundup. Note that this is no different than the situation before Roundup was invented. So Monsanto hasn't set farmers back, it's just that the advance Monsanto created for farmers is losing its value.
So how can you say farmers are worse off with Monsanto inventing Roundup and then having it lose value 40 years later than if Monsanto had never brought Roundup to market at all?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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
The roundup-ready gene patent has already expired. We are currently multiplying roundup-ready Canola seed for Pioneer Seeds on a couple hundred acres.
The real issue isn't the patents at all but the fact that the scientists found was that these genes are now found in most of the volunteer Canola growing. And the volunteers were found in some cases miles from where any Canola has been grown in a farmers field. This tells us that not only is the round-up ready gene travelling to other plants naturally, it's also travelling tremendous distances. So we have to be careful what we do with genetic engineering. Much more careful than we thought we had to be in the past.
The fact that the specific round-up ready genes are in the wild volunteers doesn't bother me that much. If you have to use a herbicide in another crop, any broad-leef killer will work. The risk of Canola being a super weed is overblown. Canola is already fairly hardy and aggressive; these resistance genes don't really affect that that much. Grass can easily out-compete Canola. In fact I've see Canola deliberately planted in the ditches of newly-constructed roads because it gets going fast and provides ground cover to prevent erosion, etc. Then a year later the grass that was also planted has taken over and the Canola is gone, without any herbicides.
We're getting out of the GMO seed multiplication business, though. Mainly because it's hard to control volunteers in other crops such as peas, which can contaminate the seed crop; with commercial, we don't typically care that much about the volunteers. We'll still grow the GMO'd varieties, but commercially (for crushing, not seed multiplication).
Which is why I'm no longer a libertarian. Power corrupts. Libertarians seem to read this as "government power corrupts," which isn't the same thing. I've had consistent problems finding libertarians upset over the actions of Monsanto, Blackwater, etc. Basically no problem exists unless the government is doing it, and their only solution is to say "less government." That someone could do bad stuff for profit isn't even on the radar.
e.e. cummings
That would be E. E. Cummings. He always capitalised his own name and wanted it capitalised on his works. It was his publishers who didn't always respect that.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Did he ever use his name in his works? As far as I am aware he never lower-cased his name. It was just a thing his publishers sometimes did against his wishes. Oh, and there are lots of capital letters in his poems, often where lower case would normally be expected. The thing about Cummings only using lower case is just a myth spread by those who haven't read him.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
There is no such thing as CANOLA plant!
There is no such thing as an IDIOT! Oh wait, just found one, never mind.
The Canola plant is a derivative of the Rapeseed plant. Rapeseed plants (the original source of canola oil) have high levels erucic acid, which is toxic in large amounts. Canola plants do not.
Oh the horrors of modern agriculture! Look how they are destroying the world and making things unsafe for human consumption! Oh wait, that's the opposite of reality.
I'm sorry, but the Mayo Clinic seems like a much more credible source to me than a random Chicken Little on the internet.
Canola oil is fine, good for you in fact. If you can't afford olive oil, canola is the next best thing (it's got the same mono-unsaturated fats that are good for your heart).
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Is your shift key broken or did a capitalized letter run over your dog? I'm not the sort of person to jump down someone's throat for making a grammatical error. Errors are, after all, unintended -- and I, like most, make them all the time. But what I find much harder to ignore is a person who simply decides to ignore a grammatical convention as a matter of style or lazyness, especially when doing so saves him no time and only serves to give the writer a douchey affectation.
Grammatical conventions exist for a reason. It's significantly harder to parse a paragraph of text when you can't tell at a glance where sentences are beginning and ending. Perhaps you read one word at a time, but many of us parse text in larger chunks and simply leaving out punctuation, or, in your case, capital letters can significantly slow down the speed at which a person is able to read what you have written.
It's not saving you any time. It doesn't make you seem laid back and informal. In fact, unless you are trying to impersonate a 12 year old girl, its not doing anything for you. If you are not a 12 year old girl, and the person reading your post knows this, then he/she will likely assume that you are a douchebag. Please bear this in mind in the future.