Even someone who owns a CD is allowed to copy it for his/her own use.

Monsanto is not good for our future. They certainly have the right to do business, but they do NOT have the right to come into my back yard and attempt to dictate what I do or do not grow…even if someone else’s GM seed comes into my organic, heirloom yard.

Amy

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I decided not to go into Monsanto’s long and involved history with attempting to bankrupt farmers throughout the world with their patented seeds because this post would have been about 20 times as long, but it has little to do with trying to get-rich-quick. Here’s a couple of articles:

Monsanto Sues Midwest Farmers for Saving Soybean Seeds, http://www.organicconsumers.org/Monsanto/farmerssued.cfm.

And the well-known case of an organic Canadian farmer who battled Monsanto for years because they said he illegally used their GM seeds when the seeds from another farm blew onto his farm (which actually hurt his business because then his crops could not be certified organic):

Percy Schmeiser’s battle, http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/genetics_modification/percyschmeiser.html

As for your point about what could be wrong with genetically-modified foods, I’m not sure where to start. To genetically-modify something that is already chemically-based, and has been modified chemically many times over in its creation, as is the case with medicine, is a completely different beast than genetically-modifying foods (and some argue that the modification of herbs and vitamins into medicine IS in fact harmful, causing side effects that weren’t previously there).

Since the dawn of humans (and really, the animals that existed beforehand), our bodies have evolved to have particular enzymes in order to digest what foods, etc. were available in nature. That means that all the nutrients you get when you eat, say, lettuce — things like beta-carotene, magnesium, and calcium — nutrients that make up your bones, your tissue, your brain, are all “recognized” by the body the moment they touch the saliva in your mouth, which signals your pancreas to start releasing the proper enzymes so you can actually use all the good stuff available in that lettuce.

Say, for instance, that this lettuce has been genetically-modified with a peanut gene, because that peanut has some sort of natural protection against frost. What happens if the person who ends up eating that lettuce is deathly allergic to peanuts? For some people, having allergic reactions to foods they aren’t allergic to has become a reality, and is one of the reasons certain groups are pushing for at least the labeling of GM foods (which we currently do not have in the US).

That is a more mild example of a negative effect–there are larger possibilities that are implicated with GM foods, including cancer, since some experts believe we aren’t able to process and digest these GM foods correctly.

And the belief that larger farms with GM foods are feeding more people are false–studies show that smaller, organic farms are more sustainable, have proper crop rotation, therefore working with the land instead of killing it with pesticides and other chemicals, and is a way to keep food diversification, and us, alive (most large farms have one to two crops, often corn, wheat or soy, and we have such an overabundance of these crops that people are developing allergies to them left and right and the US has tried to force our excess production on developing countries: Eat GM or starve, America tells Africa, http://ngin.tripod.com/forcefeed.htm).

I’ll stop here, because I know this is incredibly long already, and I think Kevin did a good job of handling some of your other points.

Thanks for all your comments and debates; I think the subject of GM foods is important in all of our lives for different reasons.

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Farmers aren’t even in the realm of getting rich quick. We are often talking about eating next week or maybe some day sending a child to university or at least a better life in a country where parents are often forced to give up their children to orphanages due to an inability to provide for them. I hadn’t heard too much about greedy farmers. As a farmer friend of mine always jokes, “My dad left me a million dollars and said, Son, farm until it’s gone.” And that’s in America with the big ole fancy tractors and subsidies. And if these farmers made a mistake and were fooled is the price their entire world? We can shake our heads at those who trusted Madoff, but it is still Madoff who is being held to account for ruining lives.
The Nigerian email hopefuls look foolish and get stung for their mistake in a socioeconomic world where knowledge is readily available and the scam is widely known and understood, but it is unlikely their family starves or they lose everything they own. What do you do when you cannot provide for your family and there is no system to bail you out? Do you watch everyone wither away? Do you do desperate things like steal, sell a child or become a prostitute? We are not talking about America where we can be smug and snort and say Go get a job. That’s not the way it works in a majority of the countries in this world.

Yes, killing oneself is one’s own act obviously. Like Jews in concentration camps hanging themselves. And people who lost everything they have may have to sell their children or watch them starve, so they DO have a choice. We are not talking about the small American farmers here, who also have gotten a real screw job in many ways by the way.

But I am sure Monsanto just didn’t know any better when they set these farmers up with massive debt. I’m sure it wasn’t their intention to make a profit from others’ misfortunes or naivete. Perhaps they lack common sense? Watch next year when shareholder (as opposed to sharecropper) demands “force” them to increase the number of these debts by a nice percentage because this year’s profit just isn’t enough for next year. Those damn little money grubbing farmers always standing in the way of my stocks and all that time they spend lounging around at the country club talking crop yield strategy and chatting around the water cooler about the World Cup of Cricket.

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1. Monsanto may or may not have misrepresented their product (It’s hard to tell from one short reference.), but the farmers also bear responsibility for the purchasing decisions they made. It’s their fault for rushing into (what seems to be) a get-rick-quick scheme without looking into it more fully and realizing what they were getting into. A good analogy would be the people who fall for the Nigerian email scams where you have a long lost dead relative who had $10 million in an African bank somewhere. It’s bad that it happens, but it’s really their fault for not using common sense and careful consideration.

2. Aside from the intellectual property issues, why do you hate GM foods? There is nothing particularly wrong with organic, unsprayed foods, but they’re often more susceptible to insects and may not be easily produced to feed large numbers of people, even though they require similar amounts of labor to grow and distribute. Genetically modified non-food products are used all the time, particularly in medicine. Why not go tell all the diabetics to stop using insulin, or the cancer patients to stop using monoclonal antibodies, because there are genetically modified? That would be ridiculous. Why is food any different?

3. The intellectual property issue is disturbing. But if it’s really such a problem, why hasn’t a competing company engineered a genome that does not terminate? Although that would be a more short-term market opportunity, they could make substantial profits if companies like Monsanto are as horrible as you depict, and their good reputation would help them expand into markets in new regions.

4. “This is sickening. Another example of big business killing off the little guys – this time literally.” — Again, no one likes to see people die, but the farmers committed *suicide* (ie, SELF-killing) secondary to poor decisions that the farmers themselves made. The responsibility for these deaths lies with the farmers.

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http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2009/04/14/me-myself-and-mine-the-philosophy-of-liberty-explained/

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