

India Sues Monsanto for . . . Biopiracy? - tokenadult
http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/12/29/india-sues-monsanto-for-biopiracy/

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trotsky
I don't disagree with Dunning per se, but he misses or intentionally steps
around some significant issues.

The big rise of GM corn in the US was due a gene that made feed corn resistant
to the herbicide glyphosate, which they are the primary world producer of.
This has actually increased herbicide use significantly in both corn and soya
crop where round-up ready is being planted, because now you can over spray
without worry. The gene is patented and requires an IP license for each plant
grown that comes bundled with the official seed.

This changes the farm dynamic considerably, as farmers who traditionally saved
seeds for next years crop are now increasingly dependent on a single company
and their IP portfolio. While the production gains and reduced labor costs are
substantial, this has been tempered by seed license costs that have risen much
faster than inflation.

At some point having too much of your food supply under the control of one
corporation is a national security issue. If trends continue to the point that
little other seed is being produced Monsanto could exert extreme pricing
pressure or worse as production needs to be planned in advance.

This is probably not too big an issue in the US where they could simply be
nationalized if things got out of hand, but what about India? What leverage
would they have if one or two foreign companies controlled a large majority of
their seed stock? Once farming evolves it's very difficult to go back, you
aren't planting as many hectares and you have fewer trained workers and you're
no longer producing the pesticides you need. But if they ignored the patent
they'd definitely face WTO sanctions and be unable to find buyers for exports.

This is where the current fight comes in and gets rather misrepresented. The
case isn't that they stole an Indian eggplant but that they imported the
patented gene without approval from the recently created regulatory body.
Obviously some amount of regulation is required there, as a sovereign state
can't just have anybody walking in and splicing anything they feel like into
sustenance crops. What if some huge chinese pharmaceutical company imported a
drug into the US without any FDA approval and announced their intention to
start human trials. Is there any doubt the government would quickly get an
injunction against them?

He paints it as greedy bureaucrats wanting a handout and that certainly could
be the case. But where the fight got started was over GM cotton that at the
time was unregulated. It's such a good crop that farmers were switching very
quickly and the government became concerned they wouldn't have any bargaining
power left soon. So there were price controls a new regulatory body a sales
ban and more price controls and yet they did lose control of the cotton crop
without gaining any significant concessions.

That's all this probably comes down to - using any legal strategy to delay
things until Monsanto is willing to agree to some concessions. Traditional
price controls or progressive tariffs can have some pretty nasty consequences,
so Monsanto has good reason to not like them. I'm not sure anyone knows the
best way structure some protections, but it's clearly in their national
interest to make sure they're covered. Monsanto could probably end this right
now without any money changing hands by offering India a royalty free license
they could use as a stick to keep the pricing at sustainable levels. As usual
it turns out everyone's greedy.

~~~
jcampbell1
> What leverage would they have if one or two foreign companies controlled a
> large majority of their seed stock?

India has in the past allowed infringement of patented HIV drugs. Why wouldn't
India allow infringement of seed company patents in a crisis? The whole thing
falls down as soon as farmers are told it is okay to break the "pledge".

~~~
Roboprog
Monsanto is large. They (like many other Fortune 500) can use the US
Government to exert much pressure on India to pay the IP tribute for using
forbidden seeds as well as accidentally cross-pollenated varieties (assuming
they are viable). (why maintain a crypto-fascist empire if you're not going to
use it?)

OTOH, India isn't Iraq (et al): they _might_ respond with a big, nuclear-
backed, "F __* YOU!", and get away by infringing like you said.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Owing your seeds to a
company is a bad thing, though.

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lucisferre
Wow the bias inherent in the authors support of GMO (and Monsanto) is
dripping. I mean, at least he's honest about it, but it's hard to keep reading
after the first paragraph or so.

Here is a different bias.

GMO is like a magic word processor that outputs instantly DRM'd books which
then can go out and make all the other books on the same shelf the property of
the author too, which you now have to pay him for.

~~~
fleitz
If you read the details of that particular case it's a lot more complex. GMO
isn't like that because there are lots of genetically modified organisms that
come with out licensing agreements.

One farmer in particular decided to see if he could use normal plants to
reproduce Monsanto seed which he succeded in and then got sued because its a
violation of the agreement he agreed to. The neighboring farmer bs is just a
smokescreen.

All the food we eat is GMO because the genome of a plant naturally changes,
now we just do GMO efficiently. Yes, there are risks, but natural GMO could
produce a terminator gene as well. As much as I don't mind GMO I'm fully in
support of labeling, especially the idea that those that don't use GMO can
label as such.

~~~
loceng
The true issue which is ignored is that diversity in crops must be maintained.
Monsanto wouldn't want this to be a topic though because that would be
contrary to their goals; Diversity means hundreads if not thousands of
variations in neighbouring crops, not just one or a few. If society supports
the smaller farmers, in case their crop is hit that year, then they can
survive financially / pay bills. This is in fact the safest way to do it.

~~~
cmdrreiki
Why is this being downvoted? Are people assuming we can out-engineer nature
forever? Single-breed farming makes for a brittle food chain.

~~~
chc
It seems about as reasonable as assuming nature can out-engineer nature
forever. Classifying changes wrought by man as somehow fundamentally different
than any other changes is a fallacy.

~~~
silentOpen
Man's changes are abrupt and discrete. We are not outside of nature but we
rock the boat pretty hard.

~~~
chc
So essentially, we're capable of making quicker adjustments than most natural
forces? If anything, that should make it easier for us to out-engineer nature,
not harder.

~~~
lutorm
That's like saying that deregulated financial instruments made it easier for
us to out-engineer the market. It _looked_ like it worked, for a while, but it
turned out there were... downsides. When a worldwide monoculture crashes, it's
going to be more difficult to effect a food bailout.

~~~
anamax
Regulated financial instruments are a monoculture.

Besides, what makes you think that regulators get things right? Even if you
ignore regulatory capture, regulators are imperfect, have less information
than market participants have, and have their own goals.

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cmdrreiki
Article seems very confident that farmers will be more able to afford bt
brinjal more than they can currently afford pesticides. Where is the evidence
this skeptic has presented that argues that Monsanto is interested in reducing
its profit streams from Indian farming? Once granted a monopoly on bt brinjal,
no corporation would voluntarily reduce its revenues rather than increase the
price of bt brinjal. Farmer debt incurred from Monsanto-style agriculture is
causing incredible rates of suicide across India, and Monsanto has a legal
obligation to its shareholders to keep it that way.

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gerggerg
_"Compared to old-school, trial-and-error cross pollination, GMO is like using
a word processor instead of a manual typewriter."_

I think that one shitty analogy holds everything the author is trying to
convey. And it's the same lack of reason and actual argument with a blind
approval of technology that any biochem company would love to fill your ears
with.

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JosephHatfield
Monsanto has been suing farmers for years over alleged theft of GMO--it's nice
to see them sued in return. I get the impression Monsanto's legal team is as
over-reaching as that of the RIAA.

~~~
ahelwer
I am involved in the agricultural community, and this sort of crowdsourced
assertion has been bouncing around in the internet echo chamber for years. It
started with Percy Schmeiser:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser)

You can read that yourself and draw your own conclusions (hint: you can't seed
upwards of 90% of your field by driving past it with a truck). This has since
then snowballed into the story of Monsanto employing a vast legal team to
oppress the poor 'simple farmers'. This is patronizing - farmers (outside of
communities that explicitly shun technology) are generally a very well-
informed and technologically adept crowd, well used to hacking together
electronics packages to make their lives easier (a cool example
<http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1254445743>). The whole
motherhood and apple pie callback to the days of yore definitely doesn't hurt
the message though, so it stays around.

Anyway, take a look at the material on both sides of this topic.

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harrisreynolds
Monsanto as a company makes me sick. Their treatment of farmers that choose
not to use their seeds is an abomination. It's like me getting sued for
software piracy b/c the guy sitting next to me is using pirated software and
the wind is blowing in my direction. #reform-patent-laws-please

~~~
masklinn
> Their treatment of farmers that choose not to use their seeds is an
> abomination.

And so's their treatment of farmers who _do_ choose to use their seeds, and
their treatment of populations close to farming communities, as well as their
treatment of... well pretty much everybody once you get down to it[0].

[0] example:
[http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto...](http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805)

~~~
randomdata
_"And so's their treatment of farmers who do choose to use their seeds"_

I grow some RR crops and am not sure what you are referring to here. For the
most part, farmers weren't reusing their seeds to begin with. The people in
the business of genetics do a much better job, which helps keep the farm
profitable.

On my farm, in the last couple of years, we have moved to growing entirely RR-
free soybeans because a market has opened for soybeans free of the gene, but
it limited to few Asian markets that our local distribution network has been
able to capture.

With all the complaints about Monsanto in America, I find it interesting that
the North American market by and large still demands RR-present commodities.
Farmers are left to fill that demand, whether they like Monsanto or not.

