In the case of Roundup Ready crops, it is originally from a bacterium. Not surprisingly, that strain was apparently discovered living near a glyphosate factory.
The goal would only be to make it expensive for Monsanto to litigate, by genetic testing and estimation of how much of a crop is Monsanto RR and how much is Selected RR.
I think people are massively overestimating the amount of litigation that goes on over this issue. Monsanto only goes after the egregious cases already, so I'm not sure how much of a win this would be. Having another source of Roundup Ready plants would be good for farming in general, though. That being said, the original Roundup Ready patent expires this year, so it shouldn't be long before we see more products with it. Monsanto has a Gen2 product, so we'll see how IP enforcement works when it's not as easy to investigate without actually testing plants.
My guess is that we'll still see a low incidence of lawsuits and the whole thing will continue to be a nothingburger, practically speaking.
So what if he did? Monsanto should be glad he didn't sue them because their shit infected his land.
That seems like something very strange to do, given that he seems to have wanted "their shit" more than his own. If he was the "victim" of contamination that everybody wants to paint him as, he could have just called Monsanto and had them remove the plants in question. They do that.
No wait, he actually did that later on because of sour grapes over the lawsuit. They couldn't agree on terms, so he did it himself and billed them for it. $600. Big money. I can't believe any farmer would tolerate such an overwhelming burden.
There was massive global outcry over the very idea, and now essentially 100% of the world's corn is contaminated with Monsanto's IP — because they didn't use the Terminator gene.
I'd like to see some data on that. From what I can tell, the dominance of Monsanto IP in corn is generally because farmers are buying it for its traits. I didn't know there was data to support that it was more a contamination issue than anything else.
What happens if I repeatedly apply a light glyphosate spray to untampered soy, culling down the plants that react the worst and keeping the ones that manage to somehow survive; then start moving down through their descendants with younger and younger applications, keeping those seedlings which don't die; then start raising the dosage, culling out those which react most poorly?
Genetic testing would show that you're not using Monsanto's genes, so you'd probably be in pretty good shape on that one. Given that the gene is from a bacterium, odds are very strongly against you ending up with the same gene in your soybeans. Although my guess is that you'll waste enormous amounts of money and soybeans doing it, and you probably won't succeed. If you do, what have you saved? You could try to sell them, but if everybody agrees it's wrong for you to insist on any IP protection or replanting agreements, you won't make any money after the first generation. You could plant them for yourself, but it would have been massively cheaper just to buy them from Monsanto.
OK, so let's say we've made that tradeoff. Now we don't have Bt corn and Roundup Ready soybeans, which are both insanely popular among farmers. What have we gotten in return, aside from a good feeling about not patenting lifeforms?
So farmers cannot select for beneficial traits anymore.
No, they absolutely can. Just not ones that are specifically genetically engineered and patented. Other than that, knock yourself out. Although farmers aren't really in the "producing new and better varietals" business these days. If they want to get in to R&D, they can jump right in, but most of them are going to keep buying seeds and seedlings from the companies that actually produce the varietals.
What are they to do -- keep databases of traits so they can determine which ones might be "property" of a genetic engineering firms?
Are you seriously implying that that knowing about Roundup Ready crops was just an undue burden that nobody in the industry could ever be expected to keep up with? This case is so completely over the top that it's a wonder anybody is defending him.
Actually, it's not really a wonder, because he's the only example they really have. The other borderline cases that everybody is thought experimenting on never seem to materialize in the real world. Ending up with 95% of a neighbor's traits in your seed "by accident" is just impossible.
Construction (specifically in unsafe locations near the coast on fault lines), operation, maintenance, waste disposal (they're throwing away a lot of free energy there), cost overruns and funds unaccounted for. Pretty much the entire thing. We handed the entire business to used car salesmen, and so we need to fix it!
You're talking about the nuclear industry. I was asking about the GMO industry. Are there problems specifically with the GMO industry that are not issues with agricultural industry at large, or are you just handwaving?
Yeah, I guess, with enough lawyers you can do anything. (luckily that case went the right way)
I tend to agree with Monsanto's complaint on that one. It's one thing to say, "We don't use artificial hormones." Sure it implies that artificial hormones are bad, but that's something people already believe. It's another to call out one specific product and imply that there's a real problem with that specific product without any data to support it. If I advertised my company with a stamp that said, "We don't do business with Charles Zimmer," I think that Charles Zimmer, whoever he is, might be rightly pissed off that we were implying something was specifically wrong with him.
In any case, there has never been any controversy over generic "GMO free" labeling. The only reason that's not enough is that the organic industry wants to handicap its competitors as much as it can, just like every other industry trying to get regulations in its favor.
Paying to grow plant seeds, simply because he "ought to have known" that those seeds have artificial restrictions placed on them by government on behalf of some company?
It's not a case of "ought to have known." He did know. He specifically killed off any plants that didn't have the trait. This man is not the victim here. If he didn't want Roundup Ready seeds, he could have just kept doing what he was doing and he never would have been bothered. If he did want them, he could have bought them.
I'm totally onboard with it. The problem is that you haven't done so. At all.
"plenty of ag programs at public universities doing research on GMOs" - where do they get the money for this? Without knowing this, that research is useless.
You're asking me like you know the answer and that's a rhretorical question, but it's pretty clear that you don't and it's not. I personally know scientists who are paid by the university (with taxpayer dollars) and whose research is funded by a mix of the university and the USDA. The Land Grant universities pour a lot of public money into crop research. Do you have some specific examples of money as a corrupting influence that we can go into, or are you just going to hand wave the entire field of public scientists doing crop research into the "corrupt" bin based on your thought experiment concluding that they all work for Monsanto?
And even if you don't know where the money comes from, the research is not useless. Science doesn't work that way. Reproducible experiments and data win in the long run. If they're putting out false data, they'll get caught. And if anybody, no matter how small, has a good reproducible experiment that shows that most of America's corn and soybeans are dangerous, they'll be on the fast track to fame and fortune as a scientist with breakthrough research.
'quarter billion dollars' - how is any part of that competitive with Monsanto research? If they put 100% of that to find the truth, the big M would still crush them. Don't forget their formidable legal department.
Once again, science doesn't work that way. Scientists don't get together and decide that the winner is the one with the biggest pile of cash. They bring their data to the table and look at it. Good research will win over bad research in the long run. If corn really is poison, it doesn't take much money to test that. And if the results are interesting and they can be reproduced, they'll win. But I don't see examples of them funding good research. I see them using all of that money on propaganda instead. Seriously, nowhere in that budget is there room for a $500K grant to a professor to test one of their wild theories about GMOs?
As for Monsanto's legal department, do you have any examples at all of researchers doing real research and receiving any sort of threat? The only legal abuse I'm aware of is harassment against GMO friendly researchers at public universities using FOIA requests.
Today we have similar news about Coca-Cola planning to use science to convince us that sugar is not causing obesity. They will pay for that 'science', and nobody has the budget to prove it wrong.
Are you kidding me? Are you claiming, with a straight face, that Coca Cola funds most of the world's nutrition research and that you can't find data anywhere in the literature that sugar is linked to obesity? That researchers who have data showing the link are shouted down, squelched from the journals, kept from the public eye, defunded, and threatened with lawsuits? If that's your best analogy, I think you've made my case for me.
The book Genetic Roulette covers hundreds of scientific studies conducted around the world proving there are harmful effects to eating GMO food, especially to fertility.
Well then, nobody should complain if I want sell cyanide and heroin on the street corner.
Is cyanide a product with a bunch of beneficial uses that lots of customers want that has no known negative side effects? If so, that sounds great. But I'm pretty sure that's not how cyanide works.
But it's being handled badly, kinda like nuclear power, perfectly safe, but grossly mismanaged.
How so? What specifically is being mismanaged?
Right now we must demand simple transparency and put labeling on the package. People must be allowed the choice of what to ingest.
Sure. If there's huge demand for transparency, it sounds like a voluntary label like this one would do the trick. If you want to advertise to your customers that you're GMO free, knock yourself out. If you want to buy only foods that label themselves as GMO free, that's awesome too. But that's not what the organic lobbyists want. They want a mandatory label so they can spread FUD. It goes like this:
Monsanto: "This stuff is safe. The science is on our side."
Anti GMO activist: "If it's safe, why don't you want it labeled?" ...
Anti GMO activist: "If it's so safe, why does the government require it to be labeled? Buy our product instead!"
Some of us see a conflict of interest when they are both the world's largest producer of glyphosphate, and also produce crops upon which you can supposedly spew a lot of it with no consequences ever!
That's not a conflict of interest. That's two highly complementary products. Glyphosate is an excellent and very safe herbicide. Engineering crops that can tolerate it so we use glyphosate instead of other more potentially toxic herbicides is both a business win and a win for society as a whole. The only real downside to it is that it's such a successful strategy that it's becoming the dominant one and it's only a matter of time before evolution catches up. But that's true with any highly successful farming technique.
A "conflict of interest" would be if all of the research on glyphosate and Roundup Ready products was funded by Monsanto. But it isn't.
Plant patents were surely beneficial at one time, but today they hold back progress, just like other patents.
I'm inclined to agree with you in a lot of industries, but plants? What progress is being held back? It seems to me that the people doing the real heavy lifting in producing transgenics and novel hybrids are companies that benefit from patent protection. I mean, Bt and Roundup Ready crops are amazing and there's even more interesting work being done, but if all of your investment is gone within two planting seasons, it seems unlikely that they'll do much more expensive biotech research.
It's also worth remembering that this isn't purely analogous to other types of patents. If I get rid of a patent on a machine, you at least still need to design a copy of my machine and build it. Seeds are more like software. You can copy them at will without much effort. So getting rid of that patent protection is a lot more like doing away with software copyright. There may be philosophical reasons for doing it, but I don't think Adobe is going to be putting out a new release of Photoshop if it's 100% free to copy.
GMOs generally either need more pesticides, or produce their own.
You made that up. Or somebody did. What GMOs need more pesticides? And what pesticides are they, specifically?
Bt crops that produce their own pesticides are amazing. They took a natural bacteria-based pesticide that has no known effect on humans (and is used by the truckload on "organic" crops for this reason) and engineered the gene straight into the plant. The result is a pest resistant plant that massively reduces the amount of Bt pesticide used per acre and increases its effectiveness at pest control.
Of course, the anti-GMO crowd has a million complaints about it. It produces too much Bt to be safe. It also produces too little Bt to be effective. It's OK to spray it but it's super toxic when the plant produces it. 100% bullshit, but it's cheap to make a web site and hard to do real research.
We don't need most things. A nutritious, flavorless paste, some water, and shelter from the elements is all we really need. Making crops faster, better, cheaper, more nutritious and with less waste is just a nice option we like to have. Just like fuel efficient cars and nice smartphones. We could do without them, but why?
Only massive legal spending on a scale never before seen, and that could not be matched by Schmeiser enabled them to squeak out a victory.
Well, that and the fact that it's 100% obvious to any judge that Schmeiser intentionally killed off his non Roundup-Ready crops to select for the trait. His fields were 95% Roundup Ready. That's not "Ow! Monsanto is pollinating my crops with its big, bad pollen!" That's, "Yay, I'm going to get this stuff without paying for it!"
And Monsanto had a solution to this a while back. Terminator seeds that produce sterile plants. But everybody had a heart attack over the idea, so they've agreed not to use them. Now they're stuck chasing pollen around and getting blamed for "contamination" by farmers who clearly just want to steal their IP.
So you can impose license agreements on farmers that agree to buy your product, but if they spill your product elsewhere, then not only is all legal protection void on the spilled product, any other IP protection carried on that product cannot be enforced. So your neighbour's seed ending up on your crop is yours free and clear.
So, basically eliminate IP protection for plants entirely, then? Because within a couple of seasons, somebody like Percy Schmeiser can "accidentally" Roundup his crops and produce a field of 100% Roundup Ready seeds and start selling them himself and before long, your research is down the toilet.
That's because it's already happened. If you notice a bunch of crops growing on your land with special properties, and you dare replant those next year, you could inadvertently be running afoul of a license agreement you never saw, never agreed to and be sued for patent infringement.
And yet, with all of the farmers out there, there are no examples whatsoever of inadvertent use resulting in a lawsuit. The only ones who have gotten sued are the ones who obviously intentionally selected the Roundup Ready seed and planted that. Monsanto's position on this is pretty clear, and they've acted on it exactly how they said they would. In fact, Monsanto used to have (and probably still does) a policy that they'll pay to have hybrids removed from your fields if you contact them.
Terminator seeds don't work, period. And unless the legal system changes to the point where if your patented seeds end up on someone else's farmland, then it's SOL for you - it's your responsibility to prevent that, then it's a serious problem.
Terminator seeds would completely solve this problem, but there was so much outcry and shit flinging when they were proposed that Monsanto has pledged not to produce them. This is 100% not Monsanto's fault. They'd love to sell terminator seeds and have 0% cross pollination and never have to worry about enforcing their contracts.
Hell, the problem's compounded if your neighbour starts using the seeds and you want to go for organic certification.
That's a tougher nut to crack. USDA rules allow some cross pollination without losing certification. I haven't seen a lot of data that indicates hybrids are taking over, and depending on the crop, there are techniques to mitigate the problem (adjusting planting times, etc.). But cross pollination happens and people need to learn to live with it. If I grew strawberries and claimed that my deity was angered by corn pollen touching them, how much of a right would I have to dictate what my neighbors planted? At some point, the public's demand for religious accommodation on this issue is going to start trampling on other practical goods and we're going to need to draw a line.
There are plenty of ag programs at public universities doing research on GMOs and they don't seem to have produced the results you're looking for either. If you want to point to specific studies and back them up with funding information, I'd be interested in hearing it, but I'm guessing all you have is vague innuendo.
Do you see any non-profits who can buy a comprehensive study disproving Monsanto claims?
Greenpeace has a quarter of a billion dollar annual budget. If they spent a tiny fraction of a percent of it on that research instead of trying to get people to trample research plots, they'd have it. The Center for Food Safety has a several million a year budget and appears to have a few million left over after expenses. A $500K grant for some good research would go pretty far. If they can prove that 90+% of American corn is poison, GMOs will die off pretty much immediately and they can all go home after collecting all of their science accolades. But they don't, because propaganada is cheaper and they don't havae the science on their side.
People act like Monsanto is an unstoppably huge juggernaut and the anti-GMO movement is a plucky little team, but Whole Foods has almost the same annual revenue, so there's clearly money in the anti-GMO world. In fact, the anti-GMO industry is big business and if they're not funding halfway decent research, it's their own fault. The reality is that propaganda is a better bet for them because it always makes them look good. Real research is unlikely to produce unambiguously terrifying results, so they don't bother.
The same is true for traditional breeding and hybridisation, though. Mishmashing thousands of genes together has risks. There are practical examples of this happening. There's actually an argument to be made that putting one or two well-undrestood genes in is less likely to produce crazy results than making a hybrid that has the gene you want plus half of the genome of the other plant that you didn't want.
Perhaps you need to prove we have a true problem with food supply first before being convinced by certain corporations that the answer is only solved with patented solutions, as if greed has never been a motivator in human history.
Given the enormous popularity of the transgenic crops that do exist, I'd say the farmers think that they solve a problem. Otherwise, they'd be planting the same thing they were planting before. And yes, greed is a motivator. It's the same motivator that makes smart phones, airplanes and insulin. We could do worse.
And listening to how we "need" to grow more efficient crops while watching humans throw away tons of food annually isn't going to cut it.
Some of the newer transgenics address some of the reasons we throw food away (bruising, for example). And if you think it's more practical to put produce in cargo ships and distribute it to the world's poor rather than providing ways for them to grow what they need more effectively, I'm not sure what variables you're optimizing for. The "let them eat mangoes" argument against golden rice is a classic example of this silliness.
I don't think stone age people had things like strawberries, bananas and corn. Not to mention seedless watermellon and a million types of excellent tomato.
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I think people are massively overestimating the amount of litigation that goes on over this issue. Monsanto only goes after the egregious cases already, so I'm not sure how much of a win this would be. Having another source of Roundup Ready plants would be good for farming in general, though. That being said, the original Roundup Ready patent expires this year, so it shouldn't be long before we see more products with it. Monsanto has a Gen2 product, so we'll see how IP enforcement works when it's not as easy to investigate without actually testing plants.
My guess is that we'll still see a low incidence of lawsuits and the whole thing will continue to be a nothingburger, practically speaking.
He may have been a bastard, but he wasn't wrong about everything.
There are other examples, but only if you don't read Monsanto's side of the claim. Everybody is a victim.
That seems like something very strange to do, given that he seems to have wanted "their shit" more than his own. If he was the "victim" of contamination that everybody wants to paint him as, he could have just called Monsanto and had them remove the plants in question. They do that.
No wait, he actually did that later on because of sour grapes over the lawsuit. They couldn't agree on terms, so he did it himself and billed them for it. $600. Big money. I can't believe any farmer would tolerate such an overwhelming burden.
I'd like to see some data on that. From what I can tell, the dominance of Monsanto IP in corn is generally because farmers are buying it for its traits. I didn't know there was data to support that it was more a contamination issue than anything else.
Genetic testing would show that you're not using Monsanto's genes, so you'd probably be in pretty good shape on that one. Given that the gene is from a bacterium, odds are very strongly against you ending up with the same gene in your soybeans. Although my guess is that you'll waste enormous amounts of money and soybeans doing it, and you probably won't succeed. If you do, what have you saved? You could try to sell them, but if everybody agrees it's wrong for you to insist on any IP protection or replanting agreements, you won't make any money after the first generation. You could plant them for yourself, but it would have been massively cheaper just to buy them from Monsanto.
OK, so let's say we've made that tradeoff. Now we don't have Bt corn and Roundup Ready soybeans, which are both insanely popular among farmers. What have we gotten in return, aside from a good feeling about not patenting lifeforms?
No, they absolutely can. Just not ones that are specifically genetically engineered and patented. Other than that, knock yourself out. Although farmers aren't really in the "producing new and better varietals" business these days. If they want to get in to R&D, they can jump right in, but most of them are going to keep buying seeds and seedlings from the companies that actually produce the varietals.
Are you seriously implying that that knowing about Roundup Ready crops was just an undue burden that nobody in the industry could ever be expected to keep up with? This case is so completely over the top that it's a wonder anybody is defending him.
Actually, it's not really a wonder, because he's the only example they really have. The other borderline cases that everybody is thought experimenting on never seem to materialize in the real world. Ending up with 95% of a neighbor's traits in your seed "by accident" is just impossible.
You're talking about the nuclear industry. I was asking about the GMO industry. Are there problems specifically with the GMO industry that are not issues with agricultural industry at large, or are you just handwaving?
I tend to agree with Monsanto's complaint on that one. It's one thing to say, "We don't use artificial hormones." Sure it implies that artificial hormones are bad, but that's something people already believe. It's another to call out one specific product and imply that there's a real problem with that specific product without any data to support it. If I advertised my company with a stamp that said, "We don't do business with Charles Zimmer," I think that Charles Zimmer, whoever he is, might be rightly pissed off that we were implying something was specifically wrong with him.
In any case, there has never been any controversy over generic "GMO free" labeling. The only reason that's not enough is that the organic industry wants to handicap its competitors as much as it can, just like every other industry trying to get regulations in its favor.
It's not a case of "ought to have known." He did know. He specifically killed off any plants that didn't have the trait. This man is not the victim here. If he didn't want Roundup Ready seeds, he could have just kept doing what he was doing and he never would have been bothered. If he did want them, he could have bought them.
I'm totally onboard with it. The problem is that you haven't done so. At all.
You're asking me like you know the answer and that's a rhretorical question, but it's pretty clear that you don't and it's not. I personally know scientists who are paid by the university (with taxpayer dollars) and whose research is funded by a mix of the university and the USDA. The Land Grant universities pour a lot of public money into crop research. Do you have some specific examples of money as a corrupting influence that we can go into, or are you just going to hand wave the entire field of public scientists doing crop research into the "corrupt" bin based on your thought experiment concluding that they all work for Monsanto?
And even if you don't know where the money comes from, the research is not useless. Science doesn't work that way. Reproducible experiments and data win in the long run. If they're putting out false data, they'll get caught. And if anybody, no matter how small, has a good reproducible experiment that shows that most of America's corn and soybeans are dangerous, they'll be on the fast track to fame and fortune as a scientist with breakthrough research.
Once again, science doesn't work that way. Scientists don't get together and decide that the winner is the one with the biggest pile of cash. They bring their data to the table and look at it. Good research will win over bad research in the long run. If corn really is poison, it doesn't take much money to test that. And if the results are interesting and they can be reproduced, they'll win. But I don't see examples of them funding good research. I see them using all of that money on propaganda instead. Seriously, nowhere in that budget is there room for a $500K grant to a professor to test one of their wild theories about GMOs?
As for Monsanto's legal department, do you have any examples at all of researchers doing real research and receiving any sort of threat? The only legal abuse I'm aware of is harassment against GMO friendly researchers at public universities using FOIA requests.
Are you kidding me? Are you claiming, with a straight face, that Coca Cola funds most of the world's nutrition research and that you can't find data anywhere in the literature that sugar is linked to obesity? That researchers who have data showing the link are shouted down, squelched from the journals, kept from the public eye, defunded, and threatened with lawsuits? If that's your best analogy, I think you've made my case for me.
Pick ONE and let's talk about it. In detail.
Is cyanide a product with a bunch of beneficial uses that lots of customers want that has no known negative side effects? If so, that sounds great. But I'm pretty sure that's not how cyanide works.
How so? What specifically is being mismanaged?
Sure. If there's huge demand for transparency, it sounds like a voluntary label like this one would do the trick. If you want to advertise to your customers that you're GMO free, knock yourself out. If you want to buy only foods that label themselves as GMO free, that's awesome too. But that's not what the organic lobbyists want. They want a mandatory label so they can spread FUD. It goes like this:
...
Monsanto: "This stuff is safe. The science is on our side."
Anti GMO activist: "If it's safe, why don't you want it labeled?"
Anti GMO activist: "If it's so safe, why does the government require it to be labeled? Buy our product instead!"
That's not a conflict of interest. That's two highly complementary products. Glyphosate is an excellent and very safe herbicide. Engineering crops that can tolerate it so we use glyphosate instead of other more potentially toxic herbicides is both a business win and a win for society as a whole. The only real downside to it is that it's such a successful strategy that it's becoming the dominant one and it's only a matter of time before evolution catches up. But that's true with any highly successful farming technique.
A "conflict of interest" would be if all of the research on glyphosate and Roundup Ready products was funded by Monsanto. But it isn't.
I'm inclined to agree with you in a lot of industries, but plants? What progress is being held back? It seems to me that the people doing the real heavy lifting in producing transgenics and novel hybrids are companies that benefit from patent protection. I mean, Bt and Roundup Ready crops are amazing and there's even more interesting work being done, but if all of your investment is gone within two planting seasons, it seems unlikely that they'll do much more expensive biotech research.
It's also worth remembering that this isn't purely analogous to other types of patents. If I get rid of a patent on a machine, you at least still need to design a copy of my machine and build it. Seeds are more like software. You can copy them at will without much effort. So getting rid of that patent protection is a lot more like doing away with software copyright. There may be philosophical reasons for doing it, but I don't think Adobe is going to be putting out a new release of Photoshop if it's 100% free to copy.
Burn the witch!
You made that up. Or somebody did. What GMOs need more pesticides? And what pesticides are they, specifically?
Bt crops that produce their own pesticides are amazing. They took a natural bacteria-based pesticide that has no known effect on humans (and is used by the truckload on "organic" crops for this reason) and engineered the gene straight into the plant. The result is a pest resistant plant that massively reduces the amount of Bt pesticide used per acre and increases its effectiveness at pest control.
Of course, the anti-GMO crowd has a million complaints about it. It produces too much Bt to be safe. It also produces too little Bt to be effective. It's OK to spray it but it's super toxic when the plant produces it. 100% bullshit, but it's cheap to make a web site and hard to do real research.
We don't need most things. A nutritious, flavorless paste, some water, and shelter from the elements is all we really need. Making crops faster, better, cheaper, more nutritious and with less waste is just a nice option we like to have. Just like fuel efficient cars and nice smartphones. We could do without them, but why?
Well, that and the fact that it's 100% obvious to any judge that Schmeiser intentionally killed off his non Roundup-Ready crops to select for the trait. His fields were 95% Roundup Ready. That's not "Ow! Monsanto is pollinating my crops with its big, bad pollen!" That's, "Yay, I'm going to get this stuff without paying for it!"
And Monsanto had a solution to this a while back. Terminator seeds that produce sterile plants. But everybody had a heart attack over the idea, so they've agreed not to use them. Now they're stuck chasing pollen around and getting blamed for "contamination" by farmers who clearly just want to steal their IP.
So, basically eliminate IP protection for plants entirely, then? Because within a couple of seasons, somebody like Percy Schmeiser can "accidentally" Roundup his crops and produce a field of 100% Roundup Ready seeds and start selling them himself and before long, your research is down the toilet.
And yet, with all of the farmers out there, there are no examples whatsoever of inadvertent use resulting in a lawsuit. The only ones who have gotten sued are the ones who obviously intentionally selected the Roundup Ready seed and planted that. Monsanto's position on this is pretty clear, and they've acted on it exactly how they said they would. In fact, Monsanto used to have (and probably still does) a policy that they'll pay to have hybrids removed from your fields if you contact them.
Terminator seeds would completely solve this problem, but there was so much outcry and shit flinging when they were proposed that Monsanto has pledged not to produce them. This is 100% not Monsanto's fault. They'd love to sell terminator seeds and have 0% cross pollination and never have to worry about enforcing their contracts.
That's a tougher nut to crack. USDA rules allow some cross pollination without losing certification. I haven't seen a lot of data that indicates hybrids are taking over, and depending on the crop, there are techniques to mitigate the problem (adjusting planting times, etc.). But cross pollination happens and people need to learn to live with it. If I grew strawberries and claimed that my deity was angered by corn pollen touching them, how much of a right would I have to dictate what my neighbors planted? At some point, the public's demand for religious accommodation on this issue is going to start trampling on other practical goods and we're going to need to draw a line.
Greenpeace has a quarter of a billion dollar annual budget. If they spent a tiny fraction of a percent of it on that research instead of trying to get people to trample research plots, they'd have it. The Center for Food Safety has a several million a year budget and appears to have a few million left over after expenses. A $500K grant for some good research would go pretty far. If they can prove that 90+% of American corn is poison, GMOs will die off pretty much immediately and they can all go home after collecting all of their science accolades. But they don't, because propaganada is cheaper and they don't havae the science on their side.
People act like Monsanto is an unstoppably huge juggernaut and the anti-GMO movement is a plucky little team, but Whole Foods has almost the same annual revenue, so there's clearly money in the anti-GMO world. In fact, the anti-GMO industry is big business and if they're not funding halfway decent research, it's their own fault. The reality is that propaganda is a better bet for them because it always makes them look good. Real research is unlikely to produce unambiguously terrifying results, so they don't bother.
The same is true for traditional breeding and hybridisation, though. Mishmashing thousands of genes together has risks. There are practical examples of this happening. There's actually an argument to be made that putting one or two well-undrestood genes in is less likely to produce crazy results than making a hybrid that has the gene you want plus half of the genome of the other plant that you didn't want.
Given the enormous popularity of the transgenic crops that do exist, I'd say the farmers think that they solve a problem. Otherwise, they'd be planting the same thing they were planting before. And yes, greed is a motivator. It's the same motivator that makes smart phones, airplanes and insulin. We could do worse.
Some of the newer transgenics address some of the reasons we throw food away (bruising, for example). And if you think it's more practical to put produce in cargo ships and distribute it to the world's poor rather than providing ways for them to grow what they need more effectively, I'm not sure what variables you're optimizing for. The "let them eat mangoes" argument against golden rice is a classic example of this silliness.
I don't think stone age people had things like strawberries, bananas and corn. Not to mention seedless watermellon and a million types of excellent tomato.