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Monsanto May Have To Repay 10 Years of GM Soya Royalties In Brazil
scibri writes "Biotech giant Monsanto is one step closer to losing billions of dollars in revenues from its genetically-modified Roundup Ready soya beans, after the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled the company must repay royalties collected over the past decade. Since GM crops were legalized in 2005, Monsanto has charged Brazilian farmers royalties of 2% on their sales of Roundup Ready soya beans. The company also tests Brazilian soya beans that are sold as non-GM — if they turn out to be Roundup Ready, the company charges the farmers 3%. Farmers challenged this as an unjust tax on their business. In April a regional court ruled against Monsanto, though that ruling has been put on hold pending an appeal. The Supreme Court, meanwhile has said that whatever the final ruling is, it will apply throughout the whole country."
They're called bees.
The thing is, we now know for a fact that plants can be bread for roundup readiness without 'stealing' Monsanto's gene (because it's been done), using only more conventional breeding and selection techniques. We also know that there are weeds growing wild that have the necessary resistance to roundup and that they are close enough to canola to breed with it. We know this because now that fields are being drenched in roundup routinely, we have weeds that are resistant to it.
Further, until Monsanto started it's war on everything not Monsanto, it was understood that the proprietary nature of a trait in a plant died once it crossed with someone else's plants. That is, you have some very special variety of corn. I am free to plant my perfectly ordinary corn on my adjoining property AND select for the amazing traits of your corn in the resulting future generations. I can even do so until I fully recreate your very special corn down to the last gene (but in practice I would stop once I had the desirable traits and had bread out undesirable ones, I wouldn't need or want a perfect copy).
Actual ownership of the gene itself is quite new and on somewhat shaky ground, especially since the gene was NOT created by designing a sequence of amino acids necessary to create the wanted trait, it was found and inserted into the genome.
A wrinkle you're missing is that Monsanto's traits actually contaminated the line of canola that Schmeiser had been developing using conventional breeding techniques for his own use for many years. He was faced with a choice of destroying years of his own work or just pretending the Monsanto gene didn't exist.
And that's the big issue. Monsanto crops contaminate the genome of non-Monsanto crops, then Monsanto sues the victim.