GE/GMO Industry: Corporate Hijacking of Food and Agriculture

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In other words, "You can report on our study ONLY if you don't validate or verify our claims".

What's that smell? Burning trousers? Burning ORGANIC trousers?

This is a slight veerage away from the topic of GMO into the related issue of patenting seeds.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on February 19 in Bowman v Monsanto, a case about patented seed.

For several years, Bowman had bought soybeans from the grain elevator and planted them. The soybeans that he bought were a mixture of various soybeans including Monsanto's patented soybeans. Monsanto, of course, objected.

In this case, Bowman is seeking a decision by the Supreme Court that Monsanto had no legal justification in keeping him from replanting seed -- that Monsanto's patent rights in the seed had vanished once the seed was sold.

Under patent law, the patent owner's rights are extinguished on any particular item once they sell the item to a user. The user is free to do with it as he likes and may resell it without seeking permission or paying fees to the patent owner. When you buy a stapler, the owners of the patents in the stapler have already been paid and can assert no further ownership claims against buyers of the resold stapler.

In the case of seeds, Monsanto requires buyers to sign a contract that they will not replant the seeds from the plants that they bought. Since Bowman was buying seeds from the elevator rather than Monsanto, there was no such contract. So his claim was that Monsanto's legal patent claims were already satisfied and he was free to do as he wished with the seed he bought from the elevator.

Of course, there is the question of whether or not growing plants from the seed would constitute a manufacturing process of making more of the patented product. If you buy a stapler, you are not free to duplicate it to create new staplers that use any patents that apply to the stapler that you bought. The thing about seed is that planting seed is a normal use of the seed.

The Supreme Court's decision will likely be given in June. Nearly everyone who understands patent law thinks it will be on the side of Monsanto.

There were a couple of issues that weren't addressed in the oral arguments.

The simpler of the two arguments involves marking the product. Have you ever noticed how products often have the patent numbers marked on them? They are there for a reason -- to give you notice of the existence of the patents. If you violate those patents then they can sue for damages from the time you begin to violate those patents. Without the marking, damages apparently cannot be collected for any violations that occur prior to when one is officially notified about the patents.

In the case of seeds, there is no marking of the patents on the seed. You cannot go to the grain elevator and buy seed and have any idea at all about whether or not there are any patents that apply. Therefore, until one is legally informed about the presence of applicable patents, one should not be liable for any damages that result from violating the patents on that seed. Of course, Bowman was notified by Monsanto much earlier that he was violating those patents.

There is, I think, a bigger issue. Congress never authorized the patenting of seed at all. They created a plant patent in 1930, but that only applies to asexually reproducing plants. An example, I think, would be grafting limbs from a pear tree onto and apple tree. The plant patents created in 1930 do not, in any form or fashion, cover plants grown from seeds.

In 1970, Congress looked at the issue of extending patents to seeds and very clearly decided not to do so. Rather, they created a similar process that is different from patents to protect seeds and plants grown from those seeds. This process involves registering the variety with the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) and reserves several rights that would not have been present if they had applied patents instead -- particularly the right to replant the seeds and grow future crops. This is what Congress intended.

The notion of applying patents to seeds was not a lawful creation of Congress, but rather a wild extension of the law to seeds in spite of the clear wishes of Congress by the Supreme Court. It was the Supreme Court, not Congress, that created seed patents, the kind of unacceptable judicial activism that many abhor.

So if you want to blame the control that Monsanto and other seed companies have, don't blame it on Congress. Put the blame on who really did it -- the Supreme Court.

Another of the protections for plants included in Congresses plant variety act -- the preservation of the right of researchers to use the plants in their research and report on them. The patents for seeds that were created by the Supreme Court is to blame.

Why the f**k have the quotes been truncated in the first post? Global Research allow people to quote their articles in full. This is what it says on their site (right under those articles, too, in fact):

I ask the moderators to restore my original post, to its original state. I have NOT breached any copyrights by posting those two articles in full. Not including the articles in full leads to less hits on Google, and getting as many hits as possible is my purpose with this thread. I have not violated any forum rules, with my original post, as the copyright owners themselves allow me to post the articles in the way I did.




Reporting my posts for copyright violations will not win you an argument. I will reply to your "arguments" later, as I currently am in a suicidal state and in no condition to further research this. Reading about this subject depresses the hell out of me. I will, however, reply to one of your "arguments", that was shared by others in this thread. That the use of the word "organic" is ridiculous, as all organisms are organic. Indeed, that is true, but that is to pick on words, as you also could use the word "ecological". In fact, that is the only word you can use, in many languages, including my native language that is Swedish. So, now, please let me hear your so-called arguments for why you should not use the word "ecological", too, hmm? I am absolutely certain that you have several.

You forgot the exclamation mark after 'a sin against Man and God'.

But seriously folks, there is no shortage of food.
There is no shortage of land and there is no shortage of people to till the land to grow that food.

But there is a shortage of money for those who cant afford food.
And there is shortage of credit for those who cant afford to start their own farms.

There is often a shortage of food in places where it is needed. These shortages are often man-made.

There is a shortage of land we can reasonably use for agriculture before we are working at unsustainable levels.

Unless we use GM crops in a sensible, we will either have to reduce the population, or suck up a large loss of biodiversity from natural habitats.

We don't have the resources to examine the permissions of every site that gets quoted here so consequently, a general Fair Use approach is applied to all quotations.
It's also inefficient to duplicate content: this is what URLs help avoid and why they should be used, and surely the purpose of your thread should be to stimulate some sort of discussion here - not increase Google ratings for some other site.
You might also like to consider what kind of an argument is presented where the only content of a post is someone else's research or opinion - it seems rather lazy to do that instead of presenting your own argument and using a few quotes from an online article as support for it, linking to the full article at the end.

Imo, anything that can be said regarding this thread's topic has been said already.

Not everybody can do this for numerous reasons. a lot of it has to do with finachial stability. The reason why the states in the south are the fattest is because everybody there is poor. Unhealthy food is cheaper than the healthy stuff, I suppose if someone was that concerd about the food supply they could go to great lengths to overcome corporate greed but this is mostly impractical for people.

Fresh fruit and veggies are available everywhere in the U.S. at affordable prices. People eat crap either because they do not know what the good stuff is or they are lazy and self indulgent. For those who do not know that the good stuff is, there are plenty of books at the local library from which they can learn.

ruveyn

So this went from grow your own to they are available everywhere? Ok. Have you been shopping for food lately? While you might find like apples for 99 cents a bag every once in awile Fruits and Vegtables are expencive.

The reason why it appears people are lazy is because this is the natural way for humans. Lazy is just a perception, and a moral one at that. Humanity always wants to find the easiest way possible to do absolutely everything, It has nothing to do with being lazy

How anyone could make a statement that absurd is completely beyond comprehension.

It's a bit of a generalisation, but it is generally true- poor people in developed countries are more likely to eat fatty foods.

I take it that you have never been to the South.

Eric don't get your feelings hurt, or take it personally. The world would be a better place if people would learn how not to be this way

I'm not pulling this out of my ass, Go look at the statistics. Google them, And I've lived in the south so I speak from experience.