5 ms·

I think the hate for Monsanto is way, way, way overrated. Honestly I still haven't read a super compelling reason to hate them. All the talk about evil lawsuit

I think the hate for Monsanto is way, way, way overrated. Honestly I still haven't read a super compelling reason to hate them. All the talk about evil lawsuits against poor farmers who got accidentally contaminated seems to be FUD. The big recent case was a guy deliberately trying to skirt the rules. If farmers would like to use non-Monsanto seeds then they are free to do so. If they'd like to use (arguably) superior seeds that have to be re-purchased every year then they are also free to do so. If people think it's bullshit that Monsanto can prevent their seeds from being re-used then that's not insane, but I'd politely disagree. It's not terribly different from copyright protection on software. The way I see it is we could revoke that protection and then the seeds wouldn't be developed because it wouldn't be profitable and we'd be stuck with the old stuff. Or we could give protection to enable the development of new seeds and then farmers have the choice to use the old stuff or new stuff. And if the new stuff is so much better than the old stuff that using the old stuff isn't financially feasible then I'd be inclined to call that a success. Maybe someone can convince me to grab my pitchfork and join the mob but so far I'm just not seeing it.

skriticos2 13y ago
I think the main issue is that Monsanto is cornering the market [1]. Farmers basically have a hard time to buy normal seeds at reasonable price on the market because mostly GMO seeds are offered. It's a bit like Microsoft or ATT/Verizon. Just switch providers.. good luck with that. [1]: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091214/0856327337.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091214/0856327337.shtml
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  Microsoft uses compatibility and bundling as leverage to maintain their monopoly ATT/Verizon use municipal contracts and large barriers-to-entry to maintain their oligopoly All Monsanto has are patents on their specific crop strains. What prevents a seed producer from going into business other than the benefits of using Monsanto strains? EDIT: ok, after googling around (the techdirt link was broken), it looks like they were bundling http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/monopoly.cfm http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/monopoly.cfm http://www.patentdocs.org/2008/05/monsanto-and-sy.html http://www.patentdocs.org/2008/05/monsanto-and-sy.html
- dr8899 13y ago
  False. There are several competitors like Dupint, Dow Chemical, and Bayer.
- Blahah 13y ago
  This is just nonsense, it is extremely easy for farmers to buy non-GMO seed. Not only are there several other huge seed producers (Bayer, BASF, Dupont, Syngenta, Pioneer, etc.) that sell high-quality non-GMO seed, but there is a huge ecosystem of regional cooperative seed producers that make decent seed. Farmers choose GMOs because they really do get more return on their investment. They aren't idiots and they aren't being forced.
- randomdata 13y ago
  As a grain farmer myself, I don't know this to be true. In fact, the only GMO crop we do grow is field corn because there is no advantage of non-GMO varieties in that crop. Perhaps you could elaborate some more?
rmason 13y ago
One thing that I have observed is there's a certain percent of the population that are worriers. Sometimes they're early in worrying about something that becomes very important to the majority but often times they worry about things that never come to pass. They serve an important purpose as sentinels but on this one the evidence is a mile wide and an inch deep.
danielweber 13y ago
They link to an old opinion piece on schmeiser-v-monsanto but not the up-to-date Wikipedia article.[1] You can tell they are pushing an angle when they pretend that the "contamination" was accidental, and that Schmeiser was hitting his crops with Roundup. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...
atrus 13y ago
It IS bullshit that people are just upset at Monsanto for selling seeds that don't reproduce correctly. Most hybrids fail to reproduce into another hybrid, and people have been selling hybrid seeds for years before Monsanto even existed. I don't think it's right that you can make plants your IP however.
- Blahah 13y ago
  It's especially bullshit because Monsanto don't produce seeds that don't reproduce. Terminator technology was developed by the United States government and shut down by Monsanto because they thought protesters would go apeshit. Turns out they were right, to the extent that shutting down the tech didn't stop people going apeshit. It's one of the most pervasive myths about GM crops.
- aestra 13y ago
  Monsanto's seeds reproduce just fine, however if one saves the seeds from their harvest and replants than it is an IP violation. It would be like copying a CD for a friend, very possible but not legal
D9u 13y ago
I see the patenting of life forms as being insidiously evil. In the past we had heirloom seeds which, although proprietary, were not patent protected, so people who shared their superior seed stock didn't run afoul of courts and lawyers. Call me a pitchfork bearing loon but I find patenting life forms to be egregiously reprehensible.
- Blahah 13y ago
  We still have heirloom seeds - anyone who wants to can develop their own varieties and share them as freely as they like. Many thousands of people do this. However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties. Patents serve the same purpose in farming as they do elsewhere: it makes it worthwhile for companies to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to drive crop yields ever higher. I share your moral outrage at the idea of patenting life, and all my own research as well as all the genetic technology produced by our consortium on the C4 rice project will be made free (as in beer and speech). However, agriculture relies on agricultural companies, and they need some way to make money. If people can just take their technology and grow it again themselves, there is no way for them to recoup their investment and we simply won't have better crops.
  - rjzzleep 13y ago
    > We still have heirloom seeds - anyone who wants to can develop their own varieties and share them as freely as they like. Many thousands of people do this. However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties. just to chime in here. for a majority of indian farmers - partly which triggered the mass suicide by pesticide - they turned out to be not at all as high yielding as was claimed. now you could say, ahhh, but wait a second. they didn't use as much water and pesticide as they were supposed to, and you might be right. but then it depends on your definition of yield. their own crops had a higher yield given the conditions of the soil, and water.
    - hibikir 13y ago
kenster07 13y ago
Well, there are separate issues at play: 1) In a market economy, monopolies should generally be distrusted and prevented whenever possible. 2) There are people who are unsatisfied with the claimed (lack of) health effects of GMO on human consumers. 3) There are people who are unsatisfied with the claimed (lack of) effects that GMO seeds could have on the broader ecosystem.
- zanny 13y ago
  > monopolies should generally be distrusted and prevented whenever possible. You shouldn't just disband monopolies too, you should analyze the environment that let them form in the first place. In a functioning market the only time a monopoly becomes an issue is if they can exploit their position to keep prices above optimal competitive levels, and that means that there are barriers to market entry that need to be considered in policy that prevent price competition against the major player. And usually they are legal in nature, be it patent / copyright, or biased tax law, or blatant exclusive contracts like ISPs.
dominotw 13y ago
>Or we could give protection to enable the development of new seeds and then farmers have the choice to use the old stuff or new stuff. Not after terminator seeds are used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Terminator_seeds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Terminator_seeds http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-seeds-of-suicide-how-monsanto-destroys-farming/5329947 http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-seeds-of-suicide-how-monsan...
- Blahah 13y ago
  Terminator seeds have never been used except in research. It says that in your own link. Monsanto have also made commitments, including to the courts in the USA and Canada, not to ever use the technology.
- hibikir 13y ago
  Even without terminator seeds, replanting seed that you harvested is not necessarily a good idea. For instance, most commercial corn seeds are hybrids, made by crossing two highly inbred plants. This means that the seeds in the bag have pretty much the same DNA as each other. Those plants produce far better than their inbred parents, and they are quite predictable in most agronomic ways. Now, what happens when you get the next generation? When Hybrids cross with hybrids, the actual genetic makeup of the offspring will produce quite a bit more variation. With that increased variation, come less average yields. So even if a farmer didn't sign anything that would stop him from planting the seeds, chances are that a farmer would have higher profits by just buying a bag of seed anyway. Not so much for Soybeans though, but that really is a place where Monsanto has pretty much a monopoly: Roundup protection increases yields so much that non-GMO soybeans are barely planted, because they are far less profitable for the farmer.
  - randomdata 13y ago
    > because they are far less profitable for the farmer. That really depends on the market you are selling into. It is definitely not a hard truth. For instance, we only grow non-GMO soybeans on my farm because they are quite a bit more profitable and seem to get even more profitable each year. We won't even consider looking at GMO soys until that dynamic starts to change. Farmers in other markets might not be selling to the same customers, and therefore might not be able to see the same margins on non-GMOs. At the end of the day, it all comes down to what the consumers are buying. With the tight margins in farming, you'll be out of business in no time if you aren't growing exactly what the customers want.
lotsofmangos 13y ago
If people think it's bullshit that Monsanto can prevent their seeds from being re-used then that's not insane, but I'd politely disagree. They are seeds. They aren't being reused, they are being used, as seeds. Genetic information in the wild cannot be subject to strict intellectual property regulation, when there are things like horizontal gene transfer.
camus2 13y ago
> I think the hate for Monsanto is way, way, way overrated. monsanto == agent orange
- pdkl95 13y ago
  The Monsanto that made Agent Orange hasn't really existed for several decades now, and blaming the current company for the problems associated with Agent Orange about as useful as blaming today's IBM for selling tabulation machines to the Nazis. The current problem with Monsanto isn't their products; it seems they learned some pathological business practices back in the 70s from a newly formed consulting service[1] known as Bane. They changed a lot of their business strategy under their oversight, guided by the consultant's representative: Mitt Romney. [1] http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/09/romney-monsanto-bain http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/09/romney-monsa...
nomailing 13y ago
Do you think it is that easy for a simple farmer to check if their seed is contaminated? I think the article makes a good point, that it is the responsibility of Monsanto to make sure that their seeds do not spread. But I am no expert. But compare it to a corporation that has a patent on some computer code which would distribute itself as a worm and every victim with an infected PC has to pay to the corporation. Only because you have it on your PC does not make you a copyright pirate. There must be clear evidence that you downloaded patented software willingly. So it is Monsanto who has to make sure that the farmers have the tools to prevent Monsanto seeds from growing. If these tools are not freely available I would say farmers should not be liable this.
- hibikir 13y ago
  This is the reason why, if we are to keep allowing patents on genes, we have to be extremely careful on what we allow, and what we don't. For instance, let's take Soybeans. There have been lawsuits out there claiming that someone's Soybean field had been 100% contaminated by Monsanto seeds, so that the fact that all the plants survived Roundup plantings was completely accidental. Given how difficult it is to even cross soybeans on purpose, having an entire field of plants with perfect flowers that get contaminated through pollination is just silly. On something like corn, however, you just can't avoid cross contamination. So if a field has corn that has genes that came straight from a GMO, it's not as if one can prove wrongdoing: It's impossible to prevent that kind of contamination. Ultimately though, we just have to figure out if we believe that patenting GMOs is something that is good for society or not. If I make a computer program and sell it, it's not really all that difficult for me to make money out of it, if people actually want it. If I tried to sell carefully engineered soybean seeds, I would not make much money, because from a few soybeans you can make millions. In two seasons, anyone that bought the seed could just compete with me without any for the R&D cost. So if a world without some kind of protection, major seed research just have to be left to public projects that don't expect any profit. You can't even protect your seed by being the only user, because very often, the seed itself is the output. Good luck selling soybeans without giving away the DNA to make more. And it's not like we could instead change the protections to be all about the insertion of new DNA into a plant: The entire corn catalogue of Roundup ready seeds is probably comes from less than two dozen actual insertions of foreign DNA into regular plants. The tough work is to figure out which ones are actually effective, and to cross them with high yielding regular plants. So I could just take the gene that Monsanto put on a seed and add it to my own strain by using conventional breeding techniques in about 5 years, tops. So yeah, our options are to just stop all research, move it all to non-profits, or allow some kind of patents on seeds. You could make a case for either of the three, but we have to understand that they all have their shortcomings.
seldon 13y ago
Monstanto's own take on Schmeiser: http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/percy-schmeiser.aspx http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/percy-schmeiser.aspx From the 2001 Court Decision[0]: "[146] I find on a balance of probabilities that the growing by the defendants in 1998 of canola on nine fields, from seed saved in 1997 which was known or ought to have been known by them to be Roundup tolerant, and the harvesting and sale of that canola crop, infringed upon the plaintiffs' exclusive rights under Canadian patent number 1, 313, 830 in particular claims 1, 2, 5, 6, 22, 23, 27, 28 and 45 of the patent" [0] http://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fc-cf/decisions/en/item/38991/index.do http://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fc-cf/decisions/en/item/38991/...
netcan 13y ago
I'm somewhere in between. I think there are problems with patents and I'm not sure they can be with us for another 100 years. I also don't think the assessment that there the current scenario which allows big rewards for R&D is a net win is crazy. But overall there is a wider direction of change whether directed or emergent. Our agricultural system producing our food is becoming problematic in many ways. Food is flora and fauna. These things exist in an ecosystem. These controlled super strains can become very dominant and genetically poor. Many major crops are losing genetic diversity. GMO cereals are just a part of it. It's been going on for a long time. Genetic modification is something we started doing hundreds of years before we named it. Modern genetic tech distills it. I'm not sure the long term ramifications of all this can be captured in supply and demand. There is a bigger picture that is probably not going to be clear until it is in retrospect.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
acd 13y ago
I think the criticism of Monsanto is fair. "Agent Orange was manufactured for the U.S. Department of Defense primarily by Monsanto Corporation and Dow Chemical." "According to Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 people being killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth defects" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange Possible connection between Monsanto Roundup and Bee Colony Colapse disorder http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/roundup-bees-zm0z10zarc.aspx#axzz2wA9X9KVp http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/ro...
- rmason 13y ago
  The U.S. defense department took a chemical (aka Agent Orange) that had been used safely for clearing brush from ditches for decades and started spraying it from helicopters without any research being done on its safety. Sure Dow and Monsanto took the money. But they learned their lesson and when the DEA started spraying Paraquat onto cocaine plants in South America Dow sued them to stop. I believe they even threatened to take Paraquat off the market if they lost their lawsuit.
lakax 13y ago
http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org/dirtysecrets/annistonindepth/toxicity.asp http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org/dirtysecrets/annisto...

skriticos2 13y ago

I think the main issue is that Monsanto is cornering the market [1]. Farmers basically have a hard time to buy normal seeds at reasonable price on the market because mostly GMO seeds are offered. It's a bit like Microsoft or ATT/Verizon. Just switch providers.. good luck with that. [1]: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091214/0856327337.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091214/0856327337.shtml

jjoonathan 13y ago
Microsoft uses compatibility and bundling as leverage to maintain their monopoly ATT/Verizon use municipal contracts and large barriers-to-entry to maintain their oligopoly All Monsanto has are patents on their specific crop strains. What prevents a seed producer from going into business other than the benefits of using Monsanto strains? EDIT: ok, after googling around (the techdirt link was broken), it looks like they were bundling http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/monopoly.cfm http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/monopoly.cfm http://www.patentdocs.org/2008/05/monsanto-and-sy.html http://www.patentdocs.org/2008/05/monsanto-and-sy.html
dr8899 13y ago
False. There are several competitors like Dupint, Dow Chemical, and Bayer.
Blahah 13y ago
This is just nonsense, it is extremely easy for farmers to buy non-GMO seed. Not only are there several other huge seed producers (Bayer, BASF, Dupont, Syngenta, Pioneer, etc.) that sell high-quality non-GMO seed, but there is a huge ecosystem of regional cooperative seed producers that make decent seed. Farmers choose GMOs because they really do get more return on their investment. They aren't idiots and they aren't being forced.
randomdata 13y ago
As a grain farmer myself, I don't know this to be true. In fact, the only GMO crop we do grow is field corn because there is no advantage of non-GMO varieties in that crop. Perhaps you could elaborate some more?

rmason 13y ago

One thing that I have observed is there's a certain percent of the population that are worriers. Sometimes they're early in worrying about something that becomes very important to the majority but often times they worry about things that never come to pass. They serve an important purpose as sentinels but on this one the evidence is a mile wide and an inch deep.

danielweber 13y ago

They link to an old opinion piece on schmeiser-v-monsanto but not the up-to-date Wikipedia article.[1] You can tell they are pushing an angle when they pretend that the "contamination" was accidental, and that Schmeiser was hitting his crops with Roundup. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...

atrus 13y ago

It IS bullshit that people are just upset at Monsanto for selling seeds that don't reproduce correctly. Most hybrids fail to reproduce into another hybrid, and people have been selling hybrid seeds for years before Monsanto even existed. I don't think it's right that you can make plants your IP however.

Blahah 13y ago
It's especially bullshit because Monsanto don't produce seeds that don't reproduce. Terminator technology was developed by the United States government and shut down by Monsanto because they thought protesters would go apeshit. Turns out they were right, to the extent that shutting down the tech didn't stop people going apeshit. It's one of the most pervasive myths about GM crops.
aestra 13y ago
Monsanto's seeds reproduce just fine, however if one saves the seeds from their harvest and replants than it is an IP violation. It would be like copying a CD for a friend, very possible but not legal

D9u 13y ago

I see the patenting of life forms as being insidiously evil. In the past we had heirloom seeds which, although proprietary, were not patent protected, so people who shared their superior seed stock didn't run afoul of courts and lawyers. Call me a pitchfork bearing loon but I find patenting life forms to be egregiously reprehensible.

Blahah 13y ago
We still have heirloom seeds - anyone who wants to can develop their own varieties and share them as freely as they like. Many thousands of people do this. However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties. Patents serve the same purpose in farming as they do elsewhere: it makes it worthwhile for companies to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to drive crop yields ever higher. I share your moral outrage at the idea of patenting life, and all my own research as well as all the genetic technology produced by our consortium on the C4 rice project will be made free (as in beer and speech). However, agriculture relies on agricultural companies, and they need some way to make money. If people can just take their technology and grow it again themselves, there is no way for them to recoup their investment and we simply won't have better crops.
- rjzzleep 13y ago
  > We still have heirloom seeds - anyone who wants to can develop their own varieties and share them as freely as they like. Many thousands of people do this. However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties. just to chime in here. for a majority of indian farmers - partly which triggered the mass suicide by pesticide - they turned out to be not at all as high yielding as was claimed. now you could say, ahhh, but wait a second. they didn't use as much water and pesticide as they were supposed to, and you might be right. but then it depends on your definition of yield. their own crops had a higher yield given the conditions of the soil, and water.
  - hibikir 13y ago

kenster07 13y ago

Well, there are separate issues at play: 1) In a market economy, monopolies should generally be distrusted and prevented whenever possible. 2) There are people who are unsatisfied with the claimed (lack of) health effects of GMO on human consumers. 3) There are people who are unsatisfied with the claimed (lack of) effects that GMO seeds could have on the broader ecosystem.

zanny 13y ago
> monopolies should generally be distrusted and prevented whenever possible. You shouldn't just disband monopolies too, you should analyze the environment that let them form in the first place. In a functioning market the only time a monopoly becomes an issue is if they can exploit their position to keep prices above optimal competitive levels, and that means that there are barriers to market entry that need to be considered in policy that prevent price competition against the major player. And usually they are legal in nature, be it patent / copyright, or biased tax law, or blatant exclusive contracts like ISPs.

dominotw 13y ago

>Or we could give protection to enable the development of new seeds and then farmers have the choice to use the old stuff or new stuff. Not after terminator seeds are used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Terminator_seeds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Terminator_seeds http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-seeds-of-suicide-how-monsanto-destroys-farming/5329947 http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-seeds-of-suicide-how-monsan...

Blahah 13y ago
Terminator seeds have never been used except in research. It says that in your own link. Monsanto have also made commitments, including to the courts in the USA and Canada, not to ever use the technology.
hibikir 13y ago
Even without terminator seeds, replanting seed that you harvested is not necessarily a good idea. For instance, most commercial corn seeds are hybrids, made by crossing two highly inbred plants. This means that the seeds in the bag have pretty much the same DNA as each other. Those plants produce far better than their inbred parents, and they are quite predictable in most agronomic ways. Now, what happens when you get the next generation? When Hybrids cross with hybrids, the actual genetic makeup of the offspring will produce quite a bit more variation. With that increased variation, come less average yields. So even if a farmer didn't sign anything that would stop him from planting the seeds, chances are that a farmer would have higher profits by just buying a bag of seed anyway. Not so much for Soybeans though, but that really is a place where Monsanto has pretty much a monopoly: Roundup protection increases yields so much that non-GMO soybeans are barely planted, because they are far less profitable for the farmer.
- randomdata 13y ago
  > because they are far less profitable for the farmer. That really depends on the market you are selling into. It is definitely not a hard truth. For instance, we only grow non-GMO soybeans on my farm because they are quite a bit more profitable and seem to get even more profitable each year. We won't even consider looking at GMO soys until that dynamic starts to change. Farmers in other markets might not be selling to the same customers, and therefore might not be able to see the same margins on non-GMOs. At the end of the day, it all comes down to what the consumers are buying. With the tight margins in farming, you'll be out of business in no time if you aren't growing exactly what the customers want.

lotsofmangos 13y ago

If people think it's bullshit that Monsanto can prevent their seeds from being re-used then that's not insane, but I'd politely disagree. They are seeds. They aren't being reused, they are being used, as seeds. Genetic information in the wild cannot be subject to strict intellectual property regulation, when there are things like horizontal gene transfer.

camus2 13y ago

> I think the hate for Monsanto is way, way, way overrated. monsanto == agent orange

pdkl95 13y ago
The Monsanto that made Agent Orange hasn't really existed for several decades now, and blaming the current company for the problems associated with Agent Orange about as useful as blaming today's IBM for selling tabulation machines to the Nazis. The current problem with Monsanto isn't their products; it seems they learned some pathological business practices back in the 70s from a newly formed consulting service[1] known as Bane. They changed a lot of their business strategy under their oversight, guided by the consultant's representative: Mitt Romney. [1] http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/09/romney-monsanto-bain http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/09/romney-monsa...

nomailing 13y ago

Do you think it is that easy for a simple farmer to check if their seed is contaminated? I think the article makes a good point, that it is the responsibility of Monsanto to make sure that their seeds do not spread. But I am no expert. But compare it to a corporation that has a patent on some computer code which would distribute itself as a worm and every victim with an infected PC has to pay to the corporation. Only because you have it on your PC does not make you a copyright pirate. There must be clear evidence that you downloaded patented software willingly. So it is Monsanto who has to make sure that the farmers have the tools to prevent Monsanto seeds from growing. If these tools are not freely available I would say farmers should not be liable this.

hibikir 13y ago
This is the reason why, if we are to keep allowing patents on genes, we have to be extremely careful on what we allow, and what we don't. For instance, let's take Soybeans. There have been lawsuits out there claiming that someone's Soybean field had been 100% contaminated by Monsanto seeds, so that the fact that all the plants survived Roundup plantings was completely accidental. Given how difficult it is to even cross soybeans on purpose, having an entire field of plants with perfect flowers that get contaminated through pollination is just silly. On something like corn, however, you just can't avoid cross contamination. So if a field has corn that has genes that came straight from a GMO, it's not as if one can prove wrongdoing: It's impossible to prevent that kind of contamination. Ultimately though, we just have to figure out if we believe that patenting GMOs is something that is good for society or not. If I make a computer program and sell it, it's not really all that difficult for me to make money out of it, if people actually want it. If I tried to sell carefully engineered soybean seeds, I would not make much money, because from a few soybeans you can make millions. In two seasons, anyone that bought the seed could just compete with me without any for the R&D cost. So if a world without some kind of protection, major seed research just have to be left to public projects that don't expect any profit. You can't even protect your seed by being the only user, because very often, the seed itself is the output. Good luck selling soybeans without giving away the DNA to make more. And it's not like we could instead change the protections to be all about the insertion of new DNA into a plant: The entire corn catalogue of Roundup ready seeds is probably comes from less than two dozen actual insertions of foreign DNA into regular plants. The tough work is to figure out which ones are actually effective, and to cross them with high yielding regular plants. So I could just take the gene that Monsanto put on a seed and add it to my own strain by using conventional breeding techniques in about 5 years, tops. So yeah, our options are to just stop all research, move it all to non-profits, or allow some kind of patents on seeds. You could make a case for either of the three, but we have to understand that they all have their shortcomings.

seldon 13y ago

Monstanto's own take on Schmeiser: http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/percy-schmeiser.aspx http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/percy-schmeiser.aspx From the 2001 Court Decision[0]: "[146] I find on a balance of probabilities that the growing by the defendants in 1998 of canola on nine fields, from seed saved in 1997 which was known or ought to have been known by them to be Roundup tolerant, and the harvesting and sale of that canola crop, infringed upon the plaintiffs' exclusive rights under Canadian patent number 1, 313, 830 in particular claims 1, 2, 5, 6, 22, 23, 27, 28 and 45 of the patent" [0] http://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fc-cf/decisions/en/item/38991/index.do http://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fc-cf/decisions/en/item/38991/...

netcan 13y ago

I'm somewhere in between. I think there are problems with patents and I'm not sure they can be with us for another 100 years. I also don't think the assessment that there the current scenario which allows big rewards for R&D is a net win is crazy. But overall there is a wider direction of change whether directed or emergent. Our agricultural system producing our food is becoming problematic in many ways. Food is flora and fauna. These things exist in an ecosystem. These controlled super strains can become very dominant and genetically poor. Many major crops are losing genetic diversity. GMO cereals are just a part of it. It's been going on for a long time. Genetic modification is something we started doing hundreds of years before we named it. Modern genetic tech distills it. I'm not sure the long term ramifications of all this can be captured in supply and demand. There is a bigger picture that is probably not going to be clear until it is in retrospect.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

acd 13y ago

I think the criticism of Monsanto is fair. "Agent Orange was manufactured for the U.S. Department of Defense primarily by Monsanto Corporation and Dow Chemical." "According to Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 people being killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth defects" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange Possible connection between Monsanto Roundup and Bee Colony Colapse disorder http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/roundup-bees-zm0z10zarc.aspx#axzz2wA9X9KVp http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/ro...

rmason 13y ago
The U.S. defense department took a chemical (aka Agent Orange) that had been used safely for clearing brush from ditches for decades and started spraying it from helicopters without any research being done on its safety. Sure Dow and Monsanto took the money. But they learned their lesson and when the DEA started spraying Paraquat onto cocaine plants in South America Dow sued them to stop. I believe they even threatened to take Paraquat off the market if they lost their lawsuit.

lakax 13y ago

http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org/dirtysecrets/annistonindepth/toxicity.asp http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org/dirtysecrets/annisto...