Organic Non-Sense and Non-Science Scores Again
October 11th, 2009
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If you happen to be a farmer who grows sugar beets, you could be in for some trouble if you plan on doing so on public land. On the other hand, if you’re a company like ADM that makes sweeteners from corn, you might be hearing some very sweet news.
BOULDER, Colo. — Famuer Rasmussen Jr. and five other farmers filed what they thought was a routine request to grow genetically modified sugar beets on public land in Colorado’s Boulder County. The county already had allowed genetically altered corn.
But the farmers got an earful.
Complaints from residents and organic food activists concerned about the crops’ safety and local businesses hoping to maintain Boulder as a center for natural and organic products prompted county commissioners to reassess their genetically modified crops policy.
…
Aurora Organic Dairy Chairman Mark Retzloff opposed the altered corn six years ago, but said a lack of public awareness may have led the county to allow it.
“Many of us decided this time we needed to be proactive,” he said. “Last time, it wasn’t made an issue to the public.”
…
“This is all theater for opposition to biotech,” Markwart said.
In September, a federal judge in San Francisco overturned regulatory approval of Roundup Ready sugar beets and ordered a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency to study their environmental impact after the Port Townsend, Wash.-based Organic Seed Alliance and others filed a lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White found the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service violated environmental law by failing to take a hard look at whether the beets could share their genes with other crops through cross-pollination. The agency is reviewing the ruling.
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Organic food interests plan to ask White at an Oct. 30 hearing to bar new plantings of the crop, but Boulder County commissioners are thinking beyond sugar beets.
“Our questions are bigger,” county commissioner Ben Pearlman said. “Do we allow GMO at all? If so, under what circumstances and what do we want grown?”
….
Local farmers say they’ve been waiting for Roundup Ready sugar beets for decades, after having to yank rope-like weeds from sugar beet fields by hand.
“When we were kids, I remember pulling weeds. Sometimes we were glad to go back to school,” joked 54-year-old Boulder County farmer Paul Schlagel, whose family is in its 100th year of harvesting sugar beets.
Though farmers might pay Monsanto $50 an acre on technology fees for Roundup Ready beets, they can save on herbicide and labor while boosting yields, Schlagel said.
“To us, it’s a no-brainer,” he said. “You use less chemicals, less fuel.”
County commissioners now hope to craft a new policy for any GMO in time for the 2011 growing season.
“We want to make sure our open space land is farmed to help us deal with weeds and overall stewardship of the land,” Pearlman said. “We also want management of open space land to be consistent with our environmental stewardship values, which we hold close to our hearts.”
So what we have here would seem to be a relatively simple situation that shouldn’t bother anyone, but for some reason has turned these farmers lives into hell and created a big stink where there really is none. In the US, more than 95% of sugar beets are genetically modified and have been for many years. Few bother growing the old kind because they produce less, are more difficult to grow, cost more, require more work and generally suck compared to the newer genetically enhanced variety, including the so-called “Roundup Ready” beets.
Farmers in Colorado grow these beets on their own land and pay a bit more for the seeds to do so. They’re more than happy to pay extra because the product is better and easier. They produce more beets with less energy, less irrigation, less fertilizer and less cost. The business relationship is mutually beneficial, as all good business relationships should be.
In addition to their own land, farmers in Colorado grow crops on public agricultural land. They pay a fair price to lease the land and have used the land and grow whatever crops they wish on it. In the past, corn, wheat and other crops of both traditional and genetically engineered varieties have been grown on these lands. Now some beet farmers would like to expand their operation onto public land. They planned on simply using the same seeds that they have used with such success for years on their own land.
No big deal, right? Apparently, it is.
Now, some idiots who have no idea how agriculture works, where food actually comes from or what DNA stands for have decided to inject themselves into the issue and make an otherwise non-issue. So is this a victory against the big corporations? Not so much as one against the individual farmers, the food buying public and general sanity. Should this be expanded to cover other crops, then it will effectively end the use of public land in Boulder County for growing food, because they simply can’t compete with genetically enhanced crops.
The fact of the matter is that these products are safe and have been proven safe for years. When it comes to stewardship of the land, the only thing that will be gained by baring these seed types will be that there will be much more tilling, more weeding and thus more erosion of the topsoil.
Either the “Organic” lobby has spent a lot of money on this one or they found an especially inept judge, because the decision that the USDA “Illegally” approved the crops is about as baseless as any decision I’ve seen. The judge, who seems to have no background in this area, says that the USDA failed to adequately take into account the possibilities of cross-pollination onto other crops. That’s pretty amazing considering that the seeds from beet crops are almost never used for producing more plants. One might think that the US Department of Agriculture would know a thing or two about this, but apparently U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White thinks he knows better.
The ruling does not necessarily mean that the crops cannot be grown, but there are likely to be more regulations placed on them and the USDA will be required to do additional “research” before it can once-again declare the crops to be safe for use without regulation or restrictions. Hopefully this will not turn out too restrictive, as some farmers and the Snake River Sugar Co. had assumed they’d be able to grow their crops this coming season and are relying on the genetically enhanced crops to meet their projections. But the issue of whether or not they’ll be able to grow them in Colorado remains another matter entirely.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Enviornment, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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October 12th, 2009 at 12:47 am
I’ve come to the conclusion that rejections of GM are not because objectors ‘misunderstand’ the science (as is so often the conclusion we come to) but is the result of them not trusting those providing and/or funding the science itself. More importantly, many also believe that science is not the be-all and end-all of explanations. It’s these very concerns among the public that have driven democratically elected politicians to take the stand they do against GM.
I would suggest is that irrespective of what the ‘science’ concludes, the GM industry should come to recognize that since the introduction of these crops, it has fundamentally failed to convince the public that GM is safe and
representative of an appropriate shift in agricultural practices. In other words they need to mount a PR effort to help people understand the technology, and stop blocking labeling regulations which just makes them look guilty. Properly done an advertising campaign could have people wanting to buy the GM food, because it’s perceived to be better.
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October 12th, 2009 at 12:51 am
Oh and while I am at it – Here is something that will scare these little people: You have been ingesting GM foods for over 30 years.
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October 12th, 2009 at 1:09 am
Where does the idea come from that big companies are always going to make something harmful? I keep hearing over and over that it’s all about profit and therefore the big corporations want to create poison. What? Kill your customers isn’t good buisiness sense.
But even those who believe that it is simply an issue of them not caring if their product is harmful or not, why is this something that nobody seems to even question?
Every time a company has tried to keep an unsafe product secret it blows up in their face. Unsafe products get companies sued and drive away customers.
You know what happens when a company makes an unsafe product and tries to hide it for profit reasons? Ask Ford. It got out. They were hit with over 200 million in punitive damages. They lost millions of sales and their reputation was destroyed for years resulting in a huge decline in sales.
The fact is that the market forces you to avoid making a dangerous product and punishes those who do severely!
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October 12th, 2009 at 1:11 am
This is not about science – it is about forced conformity. A small vocal minority wants to force thier views of the world on everybody else. It would be nice if we all grew our own food and more in touch with the land like we were 100 years ago – of course you would have to kill off 75% the planet’s population to make that happen (a little fotenote the anti-GM folks forget).
I like to have choice in the marketplace.
I want healthy food (i.e. food that has been irradiated to kill all the e-coli and other nasties)
I want food that is grown without pesticides (because it has been G.E. to resist pests)
I want enough food to feed all the people that currently live here – and teach them about birth control.
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October 12th, 2009 at 2:58 am
“Our questions are bigger,” county commissioner Ben Pearlman said. “Do we allow GMO at all? If so, under what circumstances and what do we want grown?” – The article.
The proper answer is: what do you mean “do we allow”? In a just an free world government parasites wouldn’t own any productive farmland and would not in any position to disallow it.
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October 12th, 2009 at 8:49 am
DV82XL said:
Exactly! (Especially here in Britain, given the numerous food safety scares over the years…)
What do you think of the suggestion that one should not listen to the ranting of the Greens, but instead look at how their targets react. If they’re smug then the Greens are blowing smoke, but if they start squirming the Greens may have a point…
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October 12th, 2009 at 8:59 am
Over on Charlie Stross’s blog, I found a comment from someone who claims that industrialized agriculture is unsustainable because pests and diseases are evolving resistance faster than new pesticides can be discovered.
He/she also opposes GM crops on the grounds that GM technology is usually used either to get plants to produce their own pesticides, or to become resistant to pesticides (to permit blanket application).
Any thoughts?
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October 12th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
George Carty said:
Sure, but not many that should be voiced in polite conversation.
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October 12th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Soylent said:
I’m not entirely sure that is a realistic situation, at least in the United States. There are nearly 200 million acres of public land administered by the National Forrestry Service alone and more administered by the Department of the Interior. This is a good 10% or more of the area of the lower 48 states. In some areas most land is public – nearly three quarters of the land in Nevada is public land.
This is basically large stretches of land that has never been claimed or bought and are in areas that don’t have the population to really own such large tracts of land. Many of these areas have agricultural potential, if they’re irrigated and fertilized, which the farmer would, of course pay for.
There has been a long tradition of use of public land for drilling for oil and gas, mining, logging, grazing and farming. This usually involves some kind of long term leasing agreement. Usually this is all done pretty fairly. There’s just a huge amount of land out there.
There are ways of acquiring it, but that may not always be the best thing for the farmers. If you own the land you pay taxes on it, and that is true whether you use it or not. Therefore, if you end up not farming it for several years because of market conditions, the land ends up costing you a lot of money and providing nothing.
Of course a lot of this depends on the nature of the land. Some of it is considered general purpose and some is considered to be a wildlife refuge or is reserved for military use and some may be administered partially through state and local governments.
This is not exclusive to the US. There are similar systems in Canada and Australia. A very large portion of Australia (basically the entire outback) is not privately owned.
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October 12th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
George Carty said:
Pests have evolved resistance to insecticide and this problem has been known about for a long long time. There are solutions to it. For one thing, insecticide is not the only form of pest control. There are mechanical control measures, like traps and baiting and behavioral controls.
Insecticides can be rotated per season or different insecticides can be used at the same time. This works pretty well because it’s very difficult for organisms to evolve resistance to multiple stressors at the same time. There are also limits to evolution, as certain things are just inherent to organisms. For example, I don’t think there’s much chance of ants evolving the ability to survive being stepped on by a flat hard shoe on a hard surface. In order to do that they’d need some kind of ultra-strong exoskeleton that would be orders of magnitude stronger than what any insect has.
That makes it sound like this is all being done blindly. It isn’t. This is science and it works very well.
Of course, genetic modification is even better in terms of dealing with the evolution of pests. We can take genes that took millions of years to evolve and produce extremely comprehensive protection from fungus or insects and put them in a domestic plant.
There’s also the question of whether defending plants from pests even exerts evolutionary pressure. If it’s something like insecticide that covers the entire area, then maybe. However, why would a fungus experience much evolutionary pressure to evolve the ability to attack domestic plants that have been bread to resist it? There are plenty of other plants all over the place. In fact, not infecting domestic plants could be an advantage, since if a domestic plant is infected, it is more likely to be dug up and thrown out before the fungus can reproduce.
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October 12th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Where does the idea come from that big companies are always going to make something harmful?
Well we see it in almost every movie you can name. And everyone knows the movies tell the truth and they done exaggerate anything. I have seen many people believe something and their source was some movie. And when a movie says big, central, POWER is bad and doing bad things and since we all know how bad our big central government is messing things up (I know it aint true exactly) this reinforces the false belief and bingo—BIG Parma is making us take the evil vaccine to produce weird genetic mutant powers!!!!!
With no real evidence most of the people have been convinced that there is a white beaded fairy in the Sky.
It is nothing to convince them that GM is BAD!!!!
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October 12th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Big companies are not necessarily as powerful as people think. On some occasions they can exert a lot of influence, but no matter how large or powerful, companies can decline or completely fall apart more easily than many would think.
Western Union was once one of the biggest communications companies in the world. Today it’s a much smaller company that does mostly cash transaction services.
Remington Rand was once seen as being an ominously large and powerful company that was destine to control the computer industry.
Woolworth was the worlds largest retailer for a while.
Of course there are the ones destroyed by corruption like Enron and Arthur Anderson
But the point is, in a free market, no matter how large a company is or how successful it has been, its continued existence and power is never guaranteed.
Walmart could be out of buisiness in ten years. That might sound ridiculous, but at one time it would be equally crazy to say that about Pan American World Airlines.
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October 12th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I know it’s not, but it damn well should be. There is no reason at all for good, arable land that hasn’t been deemed a national park or has any other obvious impediments to farming to be public property. There’s no reason at all for uninformed beaurocrats to second guess whether or not GM sugar beets that have already been deemed safe may or may not be planted.
drbuzz0 said:
Ah, well there’s the rub. If you’re paying any kind of significant rent to the government it’s not true ownership; you’re just leasing the land under less restrictive terms.
The government can afford to manage these vast tracts of land because they have true ownership, they do not pay rent of any kind for simply having these lands.
drbuzz0 said:
I know, this plague is world-wide.
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October 12th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Could big-enough corporations stay powerful forever if they bribed the government into doing their bidding? (Of course, they’d have to have all the political parties in their pocket, so that they couldn’t be dealt with at the ballot box…)
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October 12th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
George Carty said:
That would be very hard to pull off in a truly free society. I suppose if they controlled enough they could change laws to turn things into a dictatorship or whatever, but if there was free press and free speech, people would eventually not support it and even if they had all the parties, either some in the parties would revolt and they’d be elected or there would be the formation of new parties or independent candidates.
Of course, they still could likely do it for a while..
But even if the society were closed and controlled, I don’t know about “forever” – even empires fall, and if they did survive all the political and social aspects, well the sun will eventually expand and burn up the earth..
So nothing is really forever.
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October 14th, 2009 at 4:03 am
drbuzz0 said:
Does America really have a free press anymore? Diversity of viewpoints has been stifled by corporate consolidation.
drbuzz0 said:
“Forever” was exaggeration on my point – what I meant was “long enough to do some serious damage”.
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October 14th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Soylent said:
Except, of course, for one minor problem: it’s actually in many cases preferable to lease such land than buy it. It’s not like the government can force people to buy the land.
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October 14th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
George Carty said:
Yes the press is completely free.
Of course there are a limited number of those who control the mainstream press: the big networks and the papers and outlets like that. It’s not that there isn’t freedom, it’s that most of the really big ones are run by the following:
Turner Broadcasting, AOL-Time Warner, Hearst, News Corporation, Clear Channel, ABC-Disney, Viacom
(So actually, there are a good dozen “big” media companies).
If they all sound similar that’s just supply and demand. If people wanted news that was more in depth, more verified or whatever, they would deliver that. The fact that they don’t is simply that the market does not dictate that as being the most lucrative content for ratings.
Big media is not the only game in town. There’s the internet. That ranges from smalltime blogs to well known and well followed ones. However, even small time ones can make a difference if they call a foul and provide evidence of it.
The internet is not the only game in town either. Given there are still some people who don’t really use the internet (my mother, for example, uses the internet, but only barely. She literally does not realize that the monitor and the system unit need to be powered on separately – turning on the monitor won’t turn on the computer and she’s only in her 50’s)
There are small media outlets that use other distribution besides the internet: independently owned television and radio stations (Still a lot of independently owned radio stations – less so for television), as well as small regional newspapers, college newspapers etc.
If you pick up the following papers: The New York Times (NY Times Incorporated), The New York Post (News Corporation), the Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones Corp) and the Advocate (LPI Media Inc), you’ll see there are many different styles.
The New York Times is fairly mainstream, reasonably well verified, sometimes accused of leaning to the left
The Post is unabashedly right of center and somewhat tabloid, known for humerous and overdone headlines
The Wall Street Journal is buisiness-oriented, very matter of fact, very few illustrations or large typeface,
The Advocate started off as a gay/lesbian/transgender publication. Today it’s turned into a relatively low-quality news source that is primarily opinion from hippies and people who don’t take showers as much as they should (kinda like the Huffington Post or something like that)
There’s also the Daily News, which is somewhat tabloid, but not as much as the Post and is primarily concerned with issues local to New York.
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October 15th, 2009 at 12:42 am
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.
If you don’t like what the newspapers say buy one or start your own.
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October 20th, 2009 at 3:27 am
A lot of this conversation makes sense now because we do have the internet, but it was not that long ago that the public was not very engaged in the internet at all, and large corporations and governments could get away with a lot more without meaningful scrutiny. Could Trafigura have gotten away with what they got away with recently even 10 years ago? Most definitely. Some of us remember those times and know to be suspicious.
Where does the idea come from that big companies are always going to make something harmful? I keep hearing over and over that it’s all about profit and therefore the big corporations want to create poison. What? Kill your customers isn’t good buisiness sense.-CybgrnX
Monsanto isn’t about poison, it’s about controlling the world’s food supply. Swapping terminator crops for non-GM crops, swapping “owned” strains of crops(roundup-ready canola in the Schmeiser case in Canada) for “natural” ones, and in general pressuring governments to respect their “ownership” of the very stuff of live that keeps humanity alive. I do not want to have to license the right to my own life, liberty and happiness from a monopoly corporate entity. It’s bad enough we have to pay tax to a government — imagine if Monsanto had a monopoly of the global food supply? There would be two sets of rules of law — one for those in control of Monsanto’s power apparatus, and those outside of this circle of power. In the case of the latter, the former can simply cut off the food supply, and sue you if you try to grow your own food. That is a possible future and one that they seem to be working towards.
Second, even if they were about poison it can make business sense. Poison the poor to produce products aimed primarily at the rich. The market just doesn’t care about the poor; the peasant farmer in rural india, the factory worker in china, the crazy guys without teeth surviving off of food scraps left in the dumpsters in the ghettos of north america, the women and children in abidjan — if a corporation can somehow find a way to “externalize” their poisons that they would otherwise have to pay to reprocess into something useful into these groups, they will. It’s not about killing your customers when they aren’t your customers and will never be able to afford to be.
And third, even if it *was* bad business sense…who said that large corporations were rational? They are bureaucracies — anyone who’s ever worked in a large bureaucratic institution will know that they often do things for no redeemable value whatsoever, either because of the sheer stupidity or internal political and power struggles.
To give three recent examples of reasons why we shouldn’t trust large corporations, to pull from a hat,
1) lowering of health and safety standards for canadian products through the SPP initiatives, directly resulting in a listeriosis “crisis”, lowering competition, and decreasing food and product safety through products containing lead and other unhealthy materials being allowed into the marketplace at all.
2) the very existence of bank/auto company bailouts — if that isn’t theft on the biggest scale in history I don’t know what is.
3) “bank bailout recipients spent bailout money to give working people a rougher deal.
The examples are *endless*. For a reliable source of this stuff, I’d suggest Sean Kennedy’s NewsReal — there’s a lot of crazy you’ll have to shift through to get to it but it’s pretty much all there.
In general, we distrust concentrations of power in corporate hands because in order to do great harm you need to
a) have an organizational structure that allows the efficient allocation of resources (check)
b) have an organizational structure that is ordered to allow benefits to accrue to a minority at the expense of everone else / one that ignores externalities / actively serves to undermine / feed on its surroundings. (check)
Once you have these two things, of which the modern corporation is a clear example, there is nothing stopping great harm from taking place, except for *maybe* market pressure.
To return to the main topic, I’d like to point out that the inconsistent ban in the main article is ridiculous and
@drbuzz0 #12:
Same logic would seem to apply to the British Empire, Genghis Kahn and the Soviet Union — yet you wouldn’t want to be the one person standing as their armies moved on towards your location. Maintaining power throughout the ages is pretty difficult — but centralized power should be frightening, nevertheless.
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October 20th, 2009 at 3:36 am
I’m not a fan of Monsanto, but I don’t see how this would work unless Monsanto bribed governments to pass laws which banned non-GM crops and forced the destruction of their seeds.
Otherwise, Monsanto price gouging on GM crops would simply trigger a return to non-GM crops, wouldn’t it?
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October 20th, 2009 at 4:36 am
@George: what makes you think they haven’t?
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October 20th, 2009 at 11:52 am
themusicgod1 said:
Not exactly an objective source of information.
themusicgod1 said:
Companies of any size are entirely dependent on consumers willingness to buy their products. As soon as that changes or another company, however large or small, offers a better product the company fails. You don’t need to go to war with a corporation to take it down, you just need to do what they do better.
themusicgod1 said:
No, they’re not about controlling the world food supply or diminishing standards or killing the poor or taking over rule of law etc etc. They are a company that makes a product. They produce a product through research and development which farmers willingly buy because it is beneficial to them. They want to continue to improve and expand their product line to get more to buy them.
They’re not the only game in town either. There are many seed producers. Some of them use genetic modification, some use entirely cross breeding techniques. Additionally, farmers can breed their own seeds, if they really want to. There are government and university researchers.
Yes, Montesso has become the biggest player in the beet market because they produce something that nobody else does and nobody else can equal, but they’re not likely to ever corner the market for corn seeds or soy seeds, because those markets already have many companies making genetically improved crops.
Anyway, the patents don’t last forever.
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October 20th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Unless they can get the government to grant them a coercive monopoly.
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October 20th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
George Carty said:
I suppose, although that can only get them so far given that there are other countries where this will not apply. The other thing that makes it difficult is that the public can eventually get fed up with it and in a democracy get new leaders.
It amazes me that the argument that this is a huge worry comes from the extreme left who demand more regulation and management. Historically, the only times that a true coercive monopoly has managed to exist for any period of time have been in fully planned and managed economies.
In the Soviet Union, there was basically only one manufacturer of automobiles. There were different makes: Volga, Pobeda, Zaporozhets that were produced by different design and manufacturing sites, but their production and availability was all under the Soviet industries administration. Not only did they control car production, but the government had strict controls on imports, so you couldn’t even get a forign car without going through them.
Of course it was the same way with everything else besides cars. Food came from a government ministry, fuel did etc etc. Of course we all know what this lead to – cars that fall apart and bread lines when demand for food was high. You could not shop around anyway because prices were set by a central authority.
In this kind of economy, not only was there a monopoly, but even if someone wanted to compete, they could not. If a group of people decided that they wanted to try to start a small manufacturing operation with the hopes of growing it, then the government would only allow very small production of anything, and if you were successful enough to start to actually get buyers and expand, then you’d need permits that would lead to your operation being absorbed by the government.
Of course, China was like this too for a long time.
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October 20th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
George Carty said:
It surprises me that with General Motors, one of the poster-boys for the Big Bad Corporation That Controls Everything, on the ropes, that anyone can still subscribe to this belief.
There are issues with IP rights and GM cultivars, but then there are issues with IP rights in any number of domains these days, and it is obvious that there is going to have to be a major overhaul of both the law and attitudes before this issue is settled. However this debate, and questions over the basic idea of GM crops, and the technology itself must be kept separate. Unfortunately I constantly see the topics confounded in these conversations making it very difficult to come to any consensus.
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October 20th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
DV82XL said:
Indeed, there are some big issues that need to be tackled in the legal sense when it comes to protecting the rights of the companies who own the technology and the proprietary genetic changes while preventing any one entity from gaining too much control or restricting the use of things down the road.
It is my opinion that this should be handled through patent law and not through the more broad copyright laws especially those covered under the DMCA. It bothers me a lot to see designs and technologies being protected by general copyright law. These areas of intellectual property are better addressed through the patent system. Patents have a limited lifespan intended to allow enough time for a party to reap the benefits of their innovation without forever limiting it to them. Patents also are limited in scope. They may give the holder the rights to produce something, but they don’t stop others from using after-market modifications or reusing it, as long as they are not themselves producing a copy of the protected material.
The problem is that there’s no real precedent for GM crops and the caselaw is designed for other things and is being wedged into this area. What we need is legislation that creates a framework to address the IP concerns, keeping it consistent with existing law but eliminating the lack of consensus.
The problem is that any proposed legislation that comes before any legislatures in the world is going to be a lightning rod for special interests who want to load it with restrictions. If it is not loaded with ridiculous restrictions it’ll be seen as being pandering to the horrible big corporations.
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October 21st, 2009 at 8:50 am
re drbuzz0 #24 : everything you just said, with one exception*, would be undermined if you took my source seriously. But I can respect the choice of not taking it seriously — that particular source has been wrong in the past. Finding a source that is both paying attention to monsanto and not distracted by similar ideological problems however might take some time, however. But since I am not providing a source, feel free to discount what I am saying, as I should have one if I expect to be taken seriously.
“It amazes me that the argument that this is a huge worry comes from the extreme left…”
This isn’t very good reasoning. The worry might be valid, the person who is bringing it to you might be a moderate leftist, or even not on the left at all but saying this paints anyone who is worried about the issue as unreasonable in a prejudicial way.
I will accept that patents are finite in time, and that this keeps monsanto from some of the endgames that I have suggested (I know more about the patent system now than when I first learned about monsanto in ‘98 or earlier). However, I seem to remember monsanto having pressured countries to increase their patent term lengths(even if unsuccessfully). It’s not often that it comes up, but there is a movement to make patents the same “forever minus a day” that copyrights are, with the problems that come along with that which you have mentioned. (Part of this comes from treating patents as intellectual property, and trying to make intellectual property one single concept with a single set of laws). I don’t have the WIPO transcripts for this on hand either though, so feel free to ignore me here if you are absolutely concerned about credibility.
Re: DV82XL: #26
It is for this very reason that the “IP” debates *cannot* end well — because the large business interests have an interest in making it turn out a way that is against the democratic interest of the people. I have to wonder how they will scrub our history books of the massive amounts of protest against copyrights and patents the way we are currently treating them, but in the end we will forget that ‘the right to read’ fears were ever even a worry, and that alternatives were even possible.
* The the part about ‘they are only a company and the market can undermine them’ is a separate issue. However, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread there are reasons that the market isn’t going to doing so. GM is a good example — GM is getting bailed out by the public so that it can continue to be the Big Bad Corporation. Nothing has changed, except the whole system is on the verge of collapse.
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