This is how you spend the evening after you drive your friend, landlord and resident organic farmer to the airport.
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I want more information on the Schmeiser case. It stymies my ability to think critically, because here’s what I distil it down to:
1. Monsanto has a patent on a particular cultivar – one engineered to work with their herbicide.
2. Percy Schmeiser had canola growing in his fields that bore the hallmarks of the patented crop.
3. Percy Schmeiser neither purchased the seed from Monsanto, nor paid a licensing fee.
So there’s conclusion 1: Percy Schmeiser owes Monsanto a licensing fee. At $15/acre, with over 1,000 acres, that’s close to $16,000. Net returns on those acres were about $19,000 (and as Ian Binnie, supreme court judge, pointed out – that’s a lot of work for $3,000). So even if I were to accept conclusion 1 without reservations, my questions:
What the hell is the point of buying into something where the lion’s share of your profit goes to Monsanto?
Except it’s not quite as straightforward to me:
1. The chief “advantage” of the GM canola is its tolerance to the company’s own glyphosate herbicide.
2. Schmeiser never sprayed said herbicide.
3. Schmeiser had no advantage from growing the crop.
4. Release of the crop and attendant higher herbicide use – whether by Schmeiser or anyone else – has led to “superweeds”, necessitating ever stronger herbicides.
So there’s conclusion 2: Even without the lawsuit, Schmeiser got screwed. Percy Schmeiser didn’t take advantage of the special qualities of the GM crop in his fields. Not only that, he – inadvertently or otherwise – helped the company make the conditions of growing crops more difficult overall. Now, I don’t understand the motive – I can, somehow, see the motivation behind growing a crop that requires licensing and skipping out on paying the license fee. I don’t understand why someone would take that risk for no reason at all.
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I don’t care whether or not Schmeiser somehow managed to save a seed he shouldn’t have as per the “should” of an agrichemical giant who expects more than 75% of your profit for using the seed. I don’t even want, so much, to get into the point of patenting living matter. What I care about is a court judgment that rules that if you are found with the patented crop on your fields – regardless of how it got there – the crop belongs to Monsanto. And, apparently, if they have to sue your ass off to get it, you have to pay their court costs too.
Pollen doesn’t respect property boundaries, and weeds evolve. So shouldn’t the agrichemical giants be sued by all of us for creating an environment which essentially makes Canadian canola unmarketable in some of our most lucrative markets as well as giving us a bigger weed problem than ever before?
Doesn’t this remind me of StarLink? Why is the word contamination accepted there, but not here?
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What am I missing?
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I’m not convinced that eating a genetically modified organism is going to have immediate or even intermediate effects on my personal health status. I have a resilient system. In many cases, I think genetic modification achieves what can be done with years of breeding. That’s where my problems begin, though.
1. We do in the space of a year what used to take generations.
2. We are only focused on the genetics in our lab, not on all the other inadvertent impacts we may have on non-food crops and organisms.
3. The year then becomes the generation, in terms of other organisms stepping up their evolution to build resistance. The case of corn borers and Bt-corn comes to mind.
4. We are now doing the exact same thing we’ve always done, breeding – just at a different pace, with a licensing fee attached.
5. Even if you do manage to get those super yields for a year or two, the prices fall – do you really make more money? I accept that you’d make less money if you continued to stick to the other way while your peers went the new way.
Conclusion: it’s not for my good, or the good of the planet, or the good of the farmer, that the genetic modification I’ve seen takes place. My quality of life will not increase with increased shelf life of tomatoes, increased cold tolerance in corn, or herbicide tolerance of wheat. My quality of life may decrease with herbicide residue in the food supply, human-induced evolution at unprecedented speed, and the like.
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This whole mess challenges my critical thinking skills. I know where I stand. But I also hear the arguments of the proponents of this, and they’re not always easy to dismiss. People need to make a living. An individual can only do so much – and may end up in massive debt with a lien on his farm, like Percy Schmeiser.
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Ever since I got a new computer at work, I’ve spent far more money than I’d like to on the software budget. I have to buy new legal copies of stuff that I already had legal copies of – but it won’t work with the latest software. I was happy with my computer two computers ago, except that every time there was a software upgrade, it got relatively slower. I was happy with dial-up internet until everybody went high speed and nobody designed pages with bandwidth as a crucial factor anymore. I got high speed, for a while it made me happy, then it just changed my lifestyle. Not for the better.
Microsoft and Monsanto (and the rest of them, let’s not just vilify Monsanto) have a similar approach to selling product.
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I have a t-shirt, I think of it as my naïve idealist t-shirt because it has a catchy slogan that I doubt was thought out all that well:
“Monsanto: playing god like only the devil can”.
The shirt amuses me, because it’s symptomatic of the vilification of one particular company with perhaps a not-quite-competent PR department. The issues, as far as I’m concerned, are much deeper than one company, and silk-screening that slogan is akin to protesting globalization without being able to tell me what said globalization is. Monsanto has become discourse to some.
But reading through Percy Schmeiser’s website, I’m tempted to buy into the slogan.
And it’s going to be months before we hear a judgment from the Supreme Court on Monsanto vs. Schmeiser.