10 ms·

Your allegations miss a crucial detail, Monsanto sued farmers who planted seeds and then sprayed them with herbicide[1]. Ie the farmer knew what he was doing an

Your allegations miss a crucial detail, Monsanto sued farmers who planted seeds and then sprayed them with herbicide[1]. Ie the farmer knew what he was doing and used the patented trait. Why shouldn’t Monsanto sue over that? Like many things in GMO land the myth that they sue accidental contamination is wrong. Monsanto has the worst PR team in history, which has made my company’s work much harder, but ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years. Smarter folks than me argue that their actions on Golden Rice meet all the criteria to be considered a crime against humanity[2] [1] http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/gm-seed-accidentally-in-farmers-fields.aspx http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/gm-seed-accidentally... [2] http://www.allowgoldenricenow.org/the-crime-against-humanity http://www.allowgoldenricenow.org/the-crime-against-humanity

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
koolba 10y ago
> Your allegations miss a crucial detail, Monsanto sued farmers who planted seeds and then sprayed them with herbicide[1]. Ie the farmer knew what he was doing and used the patented trait. Why shouldn’t Monsanto sue over that? Like many things in GMO land the myth that they sue accidental contamination is wrong. I disagree that anything is wrong with doing that. The way I see it, he identified that a number of plants were resistant to RoundUp and efficiently figured out which they were. It's not his fault that Monsanto's business model fails to meet up with the reality that plants have plantable seeds. > Monsanto has the worst PR team in history, which has made my company’s work much harder, but ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years. Smarter folks than me argue that their actions on Golden Rice meet all the criteria to be considered a crime against humanity[2] Friend of the earth (lower case without a ™ symbol) sure, but I'm no tree hugger. I'm not against GMOs and think Golden Rice is amazing. I just don't like the idea of imposing licensing restrictions on farmers. It's a dark road that we don't need to go down.
- technotony 10y ago
  >I just don't like the idea of imposing licensing restrictions on farmers. It's a dark road that we don't need to go down. For what it's worth I agree with you, but this is a political problem as it's congress that sets those rules. Also within the current regulatory environment, where it costs >$100MM to deregulate a GMO any other business model will be flawed. My company (www.taxa.com) makes GMO plants which are not regulated for sale in the United States (which some people thing is a bad idea). But because we have so much lower cost of getting to market we've decided to follow a open source model. Our hope is that if we can continuously improve the product people will come back for the next generation version anyway. But we can only have this model because of the way our products are regulated.
  - allisthemoist 10y ago
    > Also within the current regulatory environment, where it costs >$100MM to deregulate a GMO any other business model will be flawed. So if I wanted to create a GMO and sell it in Argentina, I'd have to pay a premium? At what stage of development does payment occur or is it a tax on sales?
- bduerst 10y ago
  > fails to meet up with the reality that plants have plantable seeds. This is a terrible argument. Is Microsoft to blame for Windows piracy because CDs are easy to copy? These cases aren't accidental - the farmer was very clearly copying the technology and using it to their benefit without contributing to the IP costs.
  - livingparadox 10y ago
    Its more akin to a company using torrent as their distribution platform, requiring a licensing fee to re-seed the content, and then suing someone for re-seeding or torrenting the file they originally seeded.
    - bduerst 10y ago
hiou 10y ago
Many of the objections would be immediately put to rest if the patent was released to a global health or other ngo that could oversee and license it without restriction. Patenting the food supply is one of the scariest things for the developing world. Certainly vitamin A deficiency is a real problem but we are then trading that problem for giving one company absolute power over a group of people with very few resources to defend themselves.
- ColinCochrane 10y ago
  For what it's worth. Monsanto have now agreed to provide royalty-free licenses for its technologies to help fast-track the further development and distribution of the rice. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2560613/pdf/11100623.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2560613/pdf/1110...
  - someone7x 10y ago
    To developing countries only. I didn't see how a country is deemed no longer developing, so it makes me think it's just the classic pusher tactic: the first crop is free. Once a developing country's economy has become entangled with the crop, start charging rent.
    - bduerst 10y ago
      The IMF typically determines the developing country status based on HDI, and when countries graduate to developed status.
    - makomk 10y ago
      They actually licensed it to low-income, food-deficit countries as defined by the FAO, which means that countries have to both be below a minimum GDP per capita and grow less calories of food than required to feed their population. (The pilot project was in the Philippines, which has since been retroactively removed from the list due to a re-estimation of their GDP.) Most of those countries can't grow rice for climate reasons. Worse, the estimates of its usefulness assume that a rather large proportion of people's calories come from golden rice, which obviously isn't possible - and it's of questionable effectiveness even then. The Phillipine government has since largely solved their vitamin A deficiency problem through a lower-tech and cheaper approach: vitamin supplements.
nier 10y ago
I am not involved with Monsanto or the organizations you mentioned. From my position it looks like both sides take their contributions very seriously. One wants to safe humanity. The other tries to preserve earth and everyone else on it. Judgment should be left to future generations. Even then it might not accurately reflect our actions today. Such is life. What we all can do today is respect our opponents. Their values do not align with ours. That does not make them evil. Let’s call them misguided.
- hodwik2 10y ago
  The problem is, for organizations like Greenpeace, they require that their supporters think the opponent is evil. When you can't engage your opponent on the facts, engage them on an emotional level, and accuse them of moral decrepitude -- then you'll never need to respond to their stances. This is a common tactic on the far left and far right: "You can't just ban all abortions, what about rape?" "Baby killer!" "Clearly some abortions are unconstitutional, like once the baby is viable." "Misogynist!" "You can't just have completely open borders, it would bankrupt the safety net." "Racist!" "You can't just close the borders, lots of industries rely on immigrant labor." "Shill!"
DanBC 10y ago
Golden rice fixes vit A deficiency, but nothing else. Since the target populations tend to have a general pack of nutrition, and not just a vit A deficiency, it seems odd to release a patent encumbered GMO (golden rice has something like 70 patents from 30 companies). Camapigning from the hippies, but also from WFP and WHO, mean that terminator genes aren't going to be used, and that farmers will be allowed to reuse the seed, and that the manufacturers will do more testing. Especially since you're probably going to continue supplementing iron and zinc and iodine you may as well keep supplementing with vit A and not releasing the GMO.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  If a population is going to grow and eat rice anyway, it may as well be the rice that provides vitamin A. It's not like the vitamin A is free either; better to be rid of an external dependency when possible. Whole teach a man to fish thing...
deepnet 10y ago
Incorrect. Your source [1]monsanto.com is their PR. The Schmeisers did not use Roundup and so owed Monsanto no money - ruled the Canadian Supreme Court in 2004. (Schmeiser vs Monsanto) - but their unpatented seeds did belong to Monsanto. It will be interesting to see how this is decided when plants have genes from multiple IP holders.
x5n1 10y ago
Yes why does the man not own all the third world's land or at least everything that can grow on it, and make all the world's farmers into sharecroppers held hostage by the innovative capitalist who privatized nature? Why? Slavery has many forms, this is but one of them. Seeds are free, they have always been free, and we should tell capitalist to work out a different model if they wish to operate in this field which has been open source and libre for million of years.
- realusername 10y ago
  I can't believe there is people disagreeing with that here... Like if copyright law was somehow more important than feeding people...
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    It's because you haven't thought it through. Should farmers be paid for their work? We are indeed saying that commercial rights of farmers are more important than feeding people (i.e. taking from farmers for free and giving to people).
    - realusername 10y ago
      Farmers have almost no leverage ... It's one of the lowest paid and most difficult job of the modern world. In practice, in relation to what they produce, they are already paid really close to zero so I'm not sure what's your point. You cannot seriously compare farmers with a global company like Monsanto. And I'm talking about copyright/patent laws here, not wages, so it's even less related.
      - ptaipale 10y ago
        Economic (and other) incentives matter. They matter so much that even if some thing is "common good", you may have to pay for it. Farmers produce food and have property rights to their products; they can then sell food (or donate). Companies produce new plant varieties, and they have intellectual property rights to their products which they can sell (and sometimes they donate as well). If you cannot have IPR to new seed breeds, there is less economic and other incentive to create new ones, and you'll have less development of technology. And the very reason that mankind has less hunger today than it has ever had (in proportion to population, and also in absolute terms in hundreds of years) is development of technology. (By the way, farmers generally don't get wages; they get earnings, like companies do.)
djsumdog 10y ago
Patenting life is the problem. Seeds should be free and open source. Monsanto, Dupont, BASF et. al. seed manufactures exploit a court case started by General Electric when they wanted to patent bacteria to clean up oil spills. The US Patent office didn't allow patents on biological material. GE won this case...and then dropped research on the bacteria because it turned out to be horribly damaging to the environment and pretty useless as a product. This opened the window for many other countries allowing similar patents. Seeds, which were once open and bread in many universities or by individual communities of farmers, were now a totally for-profit capitalistic institution. Monsanto is evil. They go after farmers who have their crops infected by Monsanto products due to basic wind and cross-pollination. Once a judge rules the seeds have patented DNA, farmers have to dump all their collected seed supply. You are spewing the official garbage line nonsense. It has nothing to do with science or the safety of GMO (which is an entirely different issue). It has to do with something that was once commons and community now being closed and for-profit for no damn good reason or benefit.
- harryh 10y ago
  > Patenting life is the problem. Seeds should be free and open source. Why? Developing new biological technology is no different than developing other kinds of technology. It's difficult, expensive, and if you don't give the people that put in the effort and money to do it then it will never get done in the first place.
  - panic 10y ago
    Farmers have been selectively breeding crops for thousands of years without help from patents.
    - harryh 10y ago
      Sure, and people have been writing books for almost as long. But we still have copyright law to encourage people to keep doing it.
      - 10y ago
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years. All of that can be true without stopping "Monsanto is Evil" from being accurate.
King-Aaron 10y ago
> These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry I feel this is also a very short-sighted comment to make. These groups are a symptom of a problem that the industry(ies) create. The fact that they slow development in certain areas are a result of malpractice on the corporate level driving people to hold certain opinions. Calling them "evil" is just as misguided as calling Monsanto "evil".
EdHominem 10y ago
If your patented robot walks onto my land and starts doing my bidding, I'm suddenly at fault? Crazy. Don't forget - their seed contaminated his pure strain. Why shouldn't he benefit from their sloppiness? Is he supposed to suffer the contamination and not, at least, gain from the traits of the new strain?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

koolba 10y ago

> Your allegations miss a crucial detail, Monsanto sued farmers who planted seeds and then sprayed them with herbicide[1]. Ie the farmer knew what he was doing and used the patented trait. Why shouldn’t Monsanto sue over that? Like many things in GMO land the myth that they sue accidental contamination is wrong. I disagree that anything is wrong with doing that. The way I see it, he identified that a number of plants were resistant to RoundUp and efficiently figured out which they were. It's not his fault that Monsanto's business model fails to meet up with the reality that plants have plantable seeds. > Monsanto has the worst PR team in history, which has made my company’s work much harder, but ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years. Smarter folks than me argue that their actions on Golden Rice meet all the criteria to be considered a crime against humanity[2] Friend of the earth (lower case without a ™ symbol) sure, but I'm no tree hugger. I'm not against GMOs and think Golden Rice is amazing. I just don't like the idea of imposing licensing restrictions on farmers. It's a dark road that we don't need to go down.

technotony 10y ago
>I just don't like the idea of imposing licensing restrictions on farmers. It's a dark road that we don't need to go down. For what it's worth I agree with you, but this is a political problem as it's congress that sets those rules. Also within the current regulatory environment, where it costs >$100MM to deregulate a GMO any other business model will be flawed. My company (www.taxa.com) makes GMO plants which are not regulated for sale in the United States (which some people thing is a bad idea). But because we have so much lower cost of getting to market we've decided to follow a open source model. Our hope is that if we can continuously improve the product people will come back for the next generation version anyway. But we can only have this model because of the way our products are regulated.
- allisthemoist 10y ago
  > Also within the current regulatory environment, where it costs >$100MM to deregulate a GMO any other business model will be flawed. So if I wanted to create a GMO and sell it in Argentina, I'd have to pay a premium? At what stage of development does payment occur or is it a tax on sales?
bduerst 10y ago
> fails to meet up with the reality that plants have plantable seeds. This is a terrible argument. Is Microsoft to blame for Windows piracy because CDs are easy to copy? These cases aren't accidental - the farmer was very clearly copying the technology and using it to their benefit without contributing to the IP costs.
- livingparadox 10y ago
  Its more akin to a company using torrent as their distribution platform, requiring a licensing fee to re-seed the content, and then suing someone for re-seeding or torrenting the file they originally seeded.
  - bduerst 10y ago

hiou 10y ago

Many of the objections would be immediately put to rest if the patent was released to a global health or other ngo that could oversee and license it without restriction. Patenting the food supply is one of the scariest things for the developing world. Certainly vitamin A deficiency is a real problem but we are then trading that problem for giving one company absolute power over a group of people with very few resources to defend themselves.

ColinCochrane 10y ago
For what it's worth. Monsanto have now agreed to provide royalty-free licenses for its technologies to help fast-track the further development and distribution of the rice. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2560613/pdf/11100623.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2560613/pdf/1110...
- someone7x 10y ago
  To developing countries only. I didn't see how a country is deemed no longer developing, so it makes me think it's just the classic pusher tactic: the first crop is free. Once a developing country's economy has become entangled with the crop, start charging rent.
  - bduerst 10y ago
    The IMF typically determines the developing country status based on HDI, and when countries graduate to developed status.
  - makomk 10y ago
    They actually licensed it to low-income, food-deficit countries as defined by the FAO, which means that countries have to both be below a minimum GDP per capita and grow less calories of food than required to feed their population. (The pilot project was in the Philippines, which has since been retroactively removed from the list due to a re-estimation of their GDP.) Most of those countries can't grow rice for climate reasons. Worse, the estimates of its usefulness assume that a rather large proportion of people's calories come from golden rice, which obviously isn't possible - and it's of questionable effectiveness even then. The Phillipine government has since largely solved their vitamin A deficiency problem through a lower-tech and cheaper approach: vitamin supplements.

nier 10y ago

I am not involved with Monsanto or the organizations you mentioned. From my position it looks like both sides take their contributions very seriously. One wants to safe humanity. The other tries to preserve earth and everyone else on it. Judgment should be left to future generations. Even then it might not accurately reflect our actions today. Such is life. What we all can do today is respect our opponents. Their values do not align with ours. That does not make them evil. Let’s call them misguided.

hodwik2 10y ago
The problem is, for organizations like Greenpeace, they require that their supporters think the opponent is evil. When you can't engage your opponent on the facts, engage them on an emotional level, and accuse them of moral decrepitude -- then you'll never need to respond to their stances. This is a common tactic on the far left and far right: "You can't just ban all abortions, what about rape?" "Baby killer!" "Clearly some abortions are unconstitutional, like once the baby is viable." "Misogynist!" "You can't just have completely open borders, it would bankrupt the safety net." "Racist!" "You can't just close the borders, lots of industries rely on immigrant labor." "Shill!"

DanBC 10y ago

Golden rice fixes vit A deficiency, but nothing else. Since the target populations tend to have a general pack of nutrition, and not just a vit A deficiency, it seems odd to release a patent encumbered GMO (golden rice has something like 70 patents from 30 companies). Camapigning from the hippies, but also from WFP and WHO, mean that terminator genes aren't going to be used, and that farmers will be allowed to reuse the seed, and that the manufacturers will do more testing. Especially since you're probably going to continue supplementing iron and zinc and iodine you may as well keep supplementing with vit A and not releasing the GMO.

jdmichal 10y ago
If a population is going to grow and eat rice anyway, it may as well be the rice that provides vitamin A. It's not like the vitamin A is free either; better to be rid of an external dependency when possible. Whole teach a man to fish thing...

deepnet 10y ago

Incorrect. Your source [1]monsanto.com is their PR. The Schmeisers did not use Roundup and so owed Monsanto no money - ruled the Canadian Supreme Court in 2004. (Schmeiser vs Monsanto) - but their unpatented seeds did belong to Monsanto. It will be interesting to see how this is decided when plants have genes from multiple IP holders.

x5n1 10y ago

Yes why does the man not own all the third world's land or at least everything that can grow on it, and make all the world's farmers into sharecroppers held hostage by the innovative capitalist who privatized nature? Why? Slavery has many forms, this is but one of them. Seeds are free, they have always been free, and we should tell capitalist to work out a different model if they wish to operate in this field which has been open source and libre for million of years.

realusername 10y ago
I can't believe there is people disagreeing with that here... Like if copyright law was somehow more important than feeding people...
- ptaipale 10y ago
  It's because you haven't thought it through. Should farmers be paid for their work? We are indeed saying that commercial rights of farmers are more important than feeding people (i.e. taking from farmers for free and giving to people).
  - realusername 10y ago
    Farmers have almost no leverage ... It's one of the lowest paid and most difficult job of the modern world. In practice, in relation to what they produce, they are already paid really close to zero so I'm not sure what's your point. You cannot seriously compare farmers with a global company like Monsanto. And I'm talking about copyright/patent laws here, not wages, so it's even less related.
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      Economic (and other) incentives matter. They matter so much that even if some thing is "common good", you may have to pay for it. Farmers produce food and have property rights to their products; they can then sell food (or donate). Companies produce new plant varieties, and they have intellectual property rights to their products which they can sell (and sometimes they donate as well). If you cannot have IPR to new seed breeds, there is less economic and other incentive to create new ones, and you'll have less development of technology. And the very reason that mankind has less hunger today than it has ever had (in proportion to population, and also in absolute terms in hundreds of years) is development of technology. (By the way, farmers generally don't get wages; they get earnings, like companies do.)

djsumdog 10y ago

Patenting life is the problem. Seeds should be free and open source. Monsanto, Dupont, BASF et. al. seed manufactures exploit a court case started by General Electric when they wanted to patent bacteria to clean up oil spills. The US Patent office didn't allow patents on biological material. GE won this case...and then dropped research on the bacteria because it turned out to be horribly damaging to the environment and pretty useless as a product. This opened the window for many other countries allowing similar patents. Seeds, which were once open and bread in many universities or by individual communities of farmers, were now a totally for-profit capitalistic institution. Monsanto is evil. They go after farmers who have their crops infected by Monsanto products due to basic wind and cross-pollination. Once a judge rules the seeds have patented DNA, farmers have to dump all their collected seed supply. You are spewing the official garbage line nonsense. It has nothing to do with science or the safety of GMO (which is an entirely different issue). It has to do with something that was once commons and community now being closed and for-profit for no damn good reason or benefit.

harryh 10y ago
> Patenting life is the problem. Seeds should be free and open source. Why? Developing new biological technology is no different than developing other kinds of technology. It's difficult, expensive, and if you don't give the people that put in the effort and money to do it then it will never get done in the first place.
- panic 10y ago
  Farmers have been selectively breeding crops for thousands of years without help from patents.
  - harryh 10y ago
    Sure, and people have been writing books for almost as long. But we still have copyright law to encourage people to keep doing it.
    - 10y ago

thaumasiotes 10y ago

> ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years. All of that can be true without stopping "Monsanto is Evil" from being accurate.

King-Aaron 10y ago

> These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry I feel this is also a very short-sighted comment to make. These groups are a symptom of a problem that the industry(ies) create. The fact that they slow development in certain areas are a result of malpractice on the corporate level driving people to hold certain opinions. Calling them "evil" is just as misguided as calling Monsanto "evil".

EdHominem 10y ago

If your patented robot walks onto my land and starts doing my bidding, I'm suddenly at fault? Crazy. Don't forget - their seed contaminated his pure strain. Why shouldn't he benefit from their sloppiness? Is he supposed to suffer the contamination and not, at least, gain from the traits of the new strain?