Supreme Court hands Monsanto victory over farmers on GMO patents!

[Peter Lemkin]

I have a marriage relative, a really nice, genuine and gentle (and highly intelligent) guy who is an agronomist and who spent his working life in some of the poorest places in the world trying to help local, small farmers develop practises that would benefit them.

I posted this story along with one of my vitrilolic rants about Monsanto's greed, and this is what he said in response:

Calm down! Terminator genes stop genetically modified plants cross pollinating with non-GM plants so the GM component stays where it is and does not proliferate. This protects the considerable investment that breeders have made in developing GM crops AND it satisfies one of the key objections of the anti-GM lobby, that of contamination. Any farmer who has grown hybrid crops such as hybrid maize for the past 60 years has accepted that the seed would not breed true and so could not be used for a second crop. This is a fundamental feature of crop improvement by hubridisation because the process involves maintaining at least two completely separate populations of parents the offspring of which yield better than their parents due to what is known as hybrid vigour. This is a natural phenomenon and commercial farmers have been prepared to accept the restriction since at least the 1940s. Seed of some crops such as wheat and as far as I am aware, rice cannot be economically produced by hybridisation so other breeding methods have to be used. These are not GM crops either. Farmers have been able to continue using the seed from this kind of crop and have traditionally done so but they have to take care to avoid contamination of their seed by seed from different varieties. Breeders do not like the seed they spend a fortune on developing from being grown on but there was not a lot they could do about it. You, for example could plant "Rooster" potatoes from the supermarket in your garden and they would grow once the effect of the sprouting inhibitor that is sprayed on potatoes for food had worn off. Sorry, I rant!

This changes the complexion of this argument considerably.

I still don't fucking trust Monsanto, though....

I'll have to think about his argument; but off the top of my head...not all GM crops have 'terminator genes' - only some. There have already been cases of unintended hybrids and GM crops blowing in the wind or carried by birds etc. to non-GM farms [and growing!]. The other problem is that Montsanto has been given the 'green light' to sue farmers who are victims of Montsanto - not thieves of their products!!! Most non-Monsanto farmers want NOTHING to do with the poison seeds Montsanto sells - and their proprietary pesticides that go along with them [yet another contamination problem from proximity!]. Perhaps the largest problem is not specifically mentioned here, and that is the chemical products and genetic Frankenstein genes set afoot when the Montsanto products move around the world and into the food stream, as well as into the environment. Even insects and birds that feed on the Frankenstein products have been effected - and certainly there have been recorded consequences and many more fears of them down the line with these new chemicals and genes in the environment and food supply to animals, plants, fungi and humans. Its not a good idea to f*** with Mother Nature!