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Comment by technotony | Hacker News Reader

Your allegations miss a crucial detail, Monsanto sued farmers who planted seeds and then sprayed them with herbicide[1]. Ie the farmer knew what he was doing and used the patented trait. Why shouldn’t Monsanto sue over that? Like many things in GMO land the myth that they sue accidental contamination is wrong.

Monsanto has the worst PR team in history, which has made my company’s work much harder, but ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years. Smarter folks than me argue that their actions on Golden Rice meet all the criteria to be considered a crime against humanity[2]

[1] http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/gm-seed-accidentally... [2] http://www.allowgoldenricenow.org/the-crime-against-humanity

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> Your allegations miss a crucial detail, Monsanto sued farmers who planted seeds and then sprayed them with herbicide[1]. Ie the farmer knew what he was doing and used the patented trait. Why shouldn’t Monsanto sue over that? Like many things in GMO land the myth that they sue accidental contamination is wrong.

I disagree that anything is wrong with doing that. The way I see it, he identified that a number of plants were resistant to RoundUp and efficiently figured out which they were.

It's not his fault that Monsanto's business model fails to meet up with the reality that plants have plantable seeds.

> Monsanto has the worst PR team in history, which has made my company’s work much harder, but ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years. Smarter folks than me argue that their actions on Golden Rice meet all the criteria to be considered a crime against humanity[2]

Friend of the earth (lower case without a ™ symbol) sure, but I'm no tree hugger. I'm not against GMOs and think Golden Rice is amazing. I just don't like the idea of imposing licensing restrictions on farmers. It's a dark road that we don't need to go down.

>I just don't like the idea of imposing licensing restrictions on farmers. It's a dark road that we don't need to go down.

For what it's worth I agree with you, but this is a political problem as it's congress that sets those rules. Also within the current regulatory environment, where it costs >$100MM to deregulate a GMO any other business model will be flawed.

My company (www.taxa.com) makes GMO plants which are not regulated for sale in the United States (which some people thing is a bad idea). But because we have so much lower cost of getting to market we've decided to follow a open source model. Our hope is that if we can continuously improve the product people will come back for the next generation version anyway. But we can only have this model because of the way our products are regulated.

> Also within the current regulatory environment, where it costs >$100MM to deregulate a GMO any other business model will be flawed.

So if I wanted to create a GMO and sell it in Argentina, I'd have to pay a premium? At what stage of development does payment occur or is it a tax on sales?

> fails to meet up with the reality that plants have plantable seeds.

This is a terrible argument.

Is Microsoft to blame for Windows piracy because CDs are easy to copy?

These cases aren't accidental - the farmer was very clearly copying the technology and using it to their benefit without contributing to the IP costs.

Its more akin to a company using torrent as their distribution platform, requiring a licensing fee to re-seed the content, and then suing someone for re-seeding or torrenting the file they originally seeded.

No, it's akin to someone paying to license software for a year and then continuing to intentionally use it after the contract has expired.

Farmers almost never grow seed crop. You're making generalizations about an industry you don't know much about.

No, its not. From the original comment in this thread

>sues farmers for re-planting seeds that blew onto their land

The farmers being sued never purchased or sought out the seeds in question. They blew into their land by natural processes (wind) and grew of their own course. The farmers in question then replanted the seeds that were growing in their fields.

At no point did they do anything equivalent to paying or licensing the software. Nor did they intentionally plant the first generation of plants.

Edit: In regards to the generalization comment, I was making my analogy based on the description given by the original comment. I fail to see how I extrapolated beyond the clear meaning of the description.

From the link:

>Fact: Monsanto has never sued a farmer when trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits were present in the farmer’s field as an accident or as a result of inadvertent means. ... The misperception that Monsanto would sue a farmer if GM seed was accidentally in his field likely began with Percy Schmeiser, who was brought to court in Canada by Monsanto for illegally saving Roundup Ready® canola seed.

That's analogous to continuing to use a software license after your agreed-upon contract is up, not torrenting.

It's a terrible argument that one should be able to copyright a plant's genome.

No one can patent a plant's genome.

Patents (and copyrights) are on new genetic stacks, because the development, testing, and field trials put into it involves resources (costs).

> Patents (and copyrights) are on new genetic stacks, because the development, testing, and field trials put into it involves resources (costs).

Because your business has costs does not justify enacting artificial restrictions.

The USPTO exists to protect investments into intellectual property and help ensure economic costs of development are distributed amongst it's users.

If you're going to generalize patents and copyrights as just "a business having costs" then you're grossly oversimplifying it.

> The USPTO exists to protect investments into intellectual property and help ensure economic costs of development are distributed amongst it's users

It could also be looked at, "The USPTO, and Congress, have allowed patent and copyright holders the ability to rent seek far beyond what was ever intended when the USPTO, copyright, and patents were first conceived."

That's why the roundup ready tech patent expired in 2015. IP creators are given a set timeframe to recooperate costs.

You can now replant your roundup ready seeds, toomuchtodo, as much as you want.

A few patents down, 4k-6k more to go.

>Or I wait long enough for an intelligent majority of Congress to invalidate the ability to patent or copyright seeds.

Good luck with that, considering the constitution grants Congress the power to promote scientific progress through granting limited exclusive rights to authors. I doubt they will find invalidating seed patents aligned with promoting scientific progress.

Edit: nice redaction

Tech always wins in the end, and all old men die eventually.

That argument hinges more on copyright than patents, though. A patent on something like Roundup-resistant seeds lasts twenty years. A copyright can last well over a hundred years.

And here I thought the guaranteed monopoly period of a patent -- in order to recover development costs -- was the business' reward for public disclosure of the technology.

Should there be any limits to patents? If not, why not? Because the US government has said so? And that's enforced by privately negotiated treaty with other countries, without the consent of their citizens?

I'd be worried if I didn't think I'd be able to drop seeds into a PCR machine in ~10 years, and dump their genome online in a matter of hours. I'm not worried.

> Because the US government has said so?

Sigh... Law is a social construct. It was decided that it is in the public interest to provide periods of exclusivity in exchange for public disclosure, because afterwards the public can make free use of the information. Otherwise, everything would be trade secrets, and everything would have to be reverse engineered. Things like generic drugs probably wouldn't exist -- if Coke can protect a recipe for 70 years, I doubt the drug companies would have much issue doing the same. And I'm sure there's plenty of technology that strategically stays out of patent space, because it's more valuable without public disclosure.

> And that's enforced by privately negotiated treaty with other countries, without the consent of their citizens?

Are you implying that all law must be ratified by every citizen before being enacted? Because otherwise, your voting for your representatives was your consent.

Sigh? Sigh. You do realize that while law is a social construct, representatives are under no obligation to enact the will of the people, right? And Congress has notoriously low approval ratings? And that only when shamed into taking action they do so? Right.

> Are you implying that all law must be ratified by every citizen before being enacted?

No. I'm implying that government representatives outside the US are voting in favor of laws that are in direct opposition of their citizens' interests (you've heard of the TPP? Of course you have), and that in most cases there is no short-term recourse (short of protests and bloodshed).

Enter stage right "civil disobedience" and the ignoring of copyright law worldwide through online distribution of media. Its already starting to happen with 3D scanning/printing, and will eventually happen with genetic information (including patented seeds).

This is a nitpick, but Coke has many different flavor compounds that are part of the formula, while most medicines contain a single active molecule.

A widespread arms race of decoys and analytical countermeasures is still bad, of course.

Argentina has a democratically elected government. How can you say that the government's treaty agreements were made without the consent of their citizens?

If the artificial gene insert was designed so that it doesn't propogate to the next generation (which is theoretically possible), would you consider this more fair? That is to say, Monsanto wouldn't have to impose any 'artificial rules' because their plant crops are designed to last a single generation.

Interesting question. To be honest, I'm not sure, but I'll be considering it this evening over a beer.

This has been done by breeders for years; no need for any "biotech" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid

Well, in Argentina there are not patents for plants at all (genetically modified or not) if they can reproduce themselves. And for what its worth, Software Patents do not exist in Argentina either.

Intelectual Property is protected by copyright. I leave here a translation of an extract for that law. It only allows "inventions" as something that can have a patent. And in its 6th article, it explicitly excludes the following:

Article 6 - They are not considered inventions for the purposes of this law:

a) Discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;

b) Literary or artistic works or any other aesthetic creation and scientific works;

c) Plans, rules and methods for performing intelectual activities, playing games or for economic and business activities as well as computer programs;

d) Ways of presenting information,

e) Surgical, diagnostics or therapeutic treatment methods, applicable to the human body and animals;

f) The juxtaposition of known inventions or mixtures of known products, variations in their form, dimensions or materials, except in the case of combination or merger so that they can not function separately or that the qualities or functions thereof are modified to obtain an industrial result not obvious to a person skilled in the art;

g) All kinds of living matter and substances preexisting in nature.

Art. 7 - Are not patentable:

a) Inventions whose exploitation in the territory of Argentina must be prevented to protect public order or morality, health or life of people or animals or to preserve plants or avoid serious damage to the environment

b) All existing biological and genetic material in nature or a replica thereof, in the biological processes implicit in animal, plant and human reproduction, including genetic processes involving material capable of conducting its own duplication in normal and free conditions as it happens in the nature.

Then it appears that Argentinian law is in conflict with treaties that the Argentinian government has voluntarily entered into.

Well, most of those treaties are about defending IP, which is possible through other methods.

For example, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent most countries exclude software patents or computer programs, and lots of them are also signatories of many of the same treaties. So, its a very complex situation.

Also, and curiously, it seems that the article 1350 of the Civil Code Of The Russian Federation, is almost the same word by word. So, my guess is that this kind of wording exists in many other countries.

http://civil-code.narod.ru/ch69-art1349-1350.html

PS: I find it amusing to be down-voted just for translating the text of the law. I swear didn't write it, lol.

>PS: I find it amusing to be down-voted just for translating the text of the law. I swear didn't write it, lol.

This is probably because quoting the translated law looked like attempting to intentionally obfuscate.

The very point is that IPR can be defended by using some other name for it than "patent", so quoting a piece of law that says what cannot be "patented" is not relevant when the rights are granted by some other law - and in the case of Argentina they should be, because it is signatory to international convention that obligates it to have such a law.

Seed rights don't have to be protected by "patents". For instance, in my country, the name (translated to English) "plant breeder's right". It has its own piece of legislation, and it is in many ways like a patent, but it is not called a patent. In the US, the same thing is called a patent, but that is just terminology.

It isn't just a mater of terminology. Plant breeder's rights are different from patents and generally give much less power to the rightsholder. For example, the US has them via the Plant Variety Protection Act, but they only give protection to one single variety of plant, they allow researchers to use that variety without having to get a license, and they permit farmers to replant saved seeds. For this reason, US agribusinesses invested a lot of legal resources in convincing the courts to let them take out normal utility patents on plants, which had previously been considered unpatentable. (Plant patents were not the same thing, no matter what Monsanto's propaganda department have been claiming.)

> Is Microsoft to blame for Windows piracy

That isn't a comparable claim. Microsoft is responsible for their choice of business model.

> because CDs are easy to copy?

You shouldn't expect profit when your business model relies on scarcity that doesn't exist in nature. Attempting to impose artificial scarcity doesn't work, for the same reason you cannot make a law that changes gravity. Trying to change laws of nature by fiat only makes you look foolish.

Note that Microsoft can still run a profitable business even when their CDs are easy to copy. They did this for decades. For most of that time, they didn't spend much effort trying to stop piracy; unpaid copies helped maintain their desktop monopoly. If they were successful in stopping piracy, people might have learned about an alternative OS.

It is my understanding that copyright and patents exist exactly to create artificial scarcity so that the owners can extract money. I'm not sure whether it's a good idea, but it seems to work reasonably well for what it was designed to do.

> work reasonably well for what it was designed to do

An argument can be made that copyright and patent worked before the digital era.

The trick that Claude Shannon introduced may have been intended to remove noise, but that's not all it did. Digital encoding allowed data to be repeated indefinitely. Put another way, data was scarce when it gains noise (lower s/n) each time it is re-amplified; Shannon's encoding schemes allowed perfect copies, and thus data was no longer scarce.

> copyright and patents exist exactly to create artificial scarcity

Just because the cost to copy IP today is near nothing doesn't mean that there are not fixed costs into the generation of IP.

Also you're right, patents and copyrights are not there to create scarcity - an IP owner can use a license that allows absolutely everyone to use it. They exist to give the owner a timeframe with which to recooperate costs of IP generation (and yes, the copyright timeframe is too long but patents are reasonable).

So who is the owner of nature? Is it for complete animal kingdom or are we just a co-operating organism in the whole environment. Making arguments on ownership would be too grave against humanity.

> I disagree that anything is wrong with doing that. The way I see it, he identified that a number of plants were resistant to RoundUp and efficiently figured out which they were.

Okay, great, this doesn't matter to you, but surely it's a relevant detail for other people who are deciding whether Monsanto is "evil"? Specifically, for anyone who doesn't already share your set of beliefs about what should be patentable, this is a crucial piece of information.

Seriously, even for those who do believe that plants should not be patentable, "farmer willfully breaks (unjust) patent laws" is a different story than "Monsanto blew seeds onto a farmer's property and then sued him for it."

How exactly is Monsanto supposed to recoupe the initial investment of generating a transgenic crop and getting it through the FDA to ensure its safe for human consumption if they can only charge for the first generation of seeds. The second generation still contains their unnatural transgene insert (the part which is actually under patent).

In corn at least, hybrid vigor usually means the 2nd generation crop isn't very good and farmers almost always buy new seed every year. This isn't true for all crops, but for corn, buying new seed was common long before GMOs.

http://passel.unl.edu/pages/informationmodule.php?idinformat... > The crop produced from open-pollinated seed harvested from a single-cross hybrid will not be as productive as the original single cross.

This is the correct reason - this has been going on since at least Norman Borlaug's work (the Green Revolution), you can't just keep on seeding your seeds you bought, the seed company has to keep on recreating hybrids.

There's a lot of misinformation in this thread, as usual on this topic.

They could have made seeds sterile.

Do you think that books should be copyrightable? Software? Movies? Any sort of digital good?

Licensing restrictions are 100% optional: Nobody is forcing anyone else to plant, say, roundup ready soybeans. It just happens that the seeds that require licensing are that much better than the alternative, an overwhelming majority of farmers plant GMO soybeans. If, say, going organic is more profitable, farmers plant organic crops instead. Farming is a low margin business, nobody is putting a gun to their head one way or the other. If licenses were draconian and not worth it, the farmers would not buy that seed. It's not as if there are compatibility problems if they don't plant what everyone else does!

I would have a big problem with licensing myself if the patents lasted 80 years, but, in practice, by the time a patent goes offline, people were buying better anyway. And if at some point agricultural process slows down enough, then we all get the benefit anyway.

We went down the dark road of licensing restrictions on farmers almost 90 years ago.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Patent_Act_of_1930.

Actually the first patent on a living organism dates back to 1873 when Monsieur Louis Pasteur was awarded U.S. Patent [#141,072](http://patimg2.uspto.gov/.piw?docid=US000141072&SectionNum=4...) with a claim to yeast .

Plant patents didn't cover crops that had to be replanted annually, so the only licensing restriction they imposed on farmers was that they had to get certain varieties of fruit trees and other similar plants from approved breeders (and honestly, I don't think most of them were even that expensive). In 2006 a company did begin using its plant patents on a variety of apple called SweeTango to force farmers to agree to a restrictive contract that forces them to only sell their produce through the apples through them and pay ongoing royalties, but that practice was previously unheard of.

Patenting life is the problem. Seeds should be free and open source.

Monsanto, Dupont, BASF et. al. seed manufactures exploit a court case started by General Electric when they wanted to patent bacteria to clean up oil spills. The US Patent office didn't allow patents on biological material. GE won this case...and then dropped research on the bacteria because it turned out to be horribly damaging to the environment and pretty useless as a product.

This opened the window for many other countries allowing similar patents. Seeds, which were once open and bread in many universities or by individual communities of farmers, were now a totally for-profit capitalistic institution.

Monsanto is evil. They go after farmers who have their crops infected by Monsanto products due to basic wind and cross-pollination. Once a judge rules the seeds have patented DNA, farmers have to dump all their collected seed supply.

You are spewing the official garbage line nonsense. It has nothing to do with science or the safety of GMO (which is an entirely different issue). It has to do with something that was once commons and community now being closed and for-profit for no damn good reason or benefit.

> Patenting life is the problem. Seeds should be free and open source.

Why? Developing new biological technology is no different than developing other kinds of technology. It's difficult, expensive, and if you don't give the people that put in the effort and money to do it then it will never get done in the first place.

Farmers have been selectively breeding crops for thousands of years without help from patents.

Sure, and people have been writing books for almost as long. But we still have copyright law to encourage people to keep doing it.

Copyright law is there to protect your specific writing from being used by others, not to protect writing in general. The internet is pretty clear evidence that plenty of people are willing to write without much care as to monetising via copyright.

And the laws in question here are to protect Monsato's specific seeds from being used by others, not to protect crops in general.

Your original statement was that this work would not happen at all, not that Monsanto specifically would not do the work. I was saying that your copyright analogy doesn't work for you, because plenty of writing still happens.

Just because plenty of writing still happens doesn't mean that George RR Martin spends years of his life writing Game Of Thrones without copyright.

You were saying that the work would not get done, not that Monsanto specifically would not do the work.

There's plenty of other entities that would be interested even without patents. Large agribusiness would be interested in increasing yields (your 'bigger banana'). Health organisations would be interested in dietary components (your 'vitamin A deficiency'), and it's not like research universities are forbidden from doing agricultural research.

Did Monsato create what we know as soy or do you think they took the best seeds at the time and genetically modified them? If we go by the book analogy it's like taking an entire book and adding a sentence and claiming copyright over it.

Like when Sinead O'Connor covered Nothing Compares 2 U and copyrighted her particular recording? She didn't even have to add a sentence!

In all seriousness, I'm sympathetic to the idea that we should be careful about exactly what sorts of advances in biotech should be patentable. There is a legitimate debate to be had about how big the change should have to be to gain protection because obviously all new work is based on the past work of others (and mother nature herself).

But I don't think that admitting that we should be careful about where we draw the line means that we should have no line at all. There is legitimate biotech work that people are doing. Hard work. Expensive work. Good work. If we want this work to happen, then it makes sense to put in some sort of legal protection for it.

Be careful not to put copyright law and patent law under the same umbrella. For example, under copyright law there is no problem if you create a work, then after the event you learn that someone else previously produced an identical work. Under patent law, you're stuffed if you invent something then after the event find a patent that covers your invention, even if you knew nothing of that at the time of invention.

In the Monsato case, the patent covers every instance of those genes, whether they came from Monsanto or not.

Here's an article on the differences between copyright, patents and trademarks:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

However, seed breeder rights are not specific to Monsanto, and not specific to GMO technology. Seed development is expensive work. Breeder rights came to legislation over the past 80 years or so. It is not a coincidence that the Green Revolution and vastly improved agricultural yields started to come about slightly after that.

Interesting! I'd love to read more about this connection.

> then it will never get done in the first place

So... you're saying that crossbreeding of plants and animals did not exist before corporations and patent law? That's just utter, utter, utter nonsense.

There's a big difference in difficulty between crossbreeding plants to get a bigger banana and genetically engineering rice to prevent vitamin A deficiencies.

Well, if you keep on refining it to maintain that elitist view, why not add "on a Tuesday, done by a Saggitarius who drives a Volvo"? "Getting a bigger banana" also takes years of iteration, effort, and failures.

So now that you're saying that patents should only be for difficult things that takes years of education to do, why did you bother to talk about copyright above? You can write trash and it's covered by copyright. Plenty of trash is covered by copyright, stuff that didn't require education, discipline, or talent.

Copyright and patents are meant to protect novel things; how difficult they are to achieve is not really relevant, so sneering at 'that's just a bigger banana' is just elitism.

Copyright and patents are meant to encourage the creation of difficult things. Protecting novel things is the means. Difficult things is the ends.

It's funny you should mention genetically engineering rice to prevent vitamin A deficiencies. That was actually done by university researchers using an EU-funded grant, the terms of which required them to patent it and give exclusive patent rights to a private-sector company. Said company (one of the big agrobusinesses) decided it wasn't commercially viable and shelved it - but they didn't want anyone else making money from it either, so now it's basically useless until the patent expires. They granted a license for "humanitarian use" but it's so narrow as to be almost worthless except as a PR tool to accuse anti-GM activists of wanting third world malnutrition. (Very few of the countries allowed to grow it can actually grow rice, and it forbids import or export.)

To be honest the whole thing was ill-conceived on every level anyway, but corporations and patent law alone were enough to doom it.

No, but that society today recognizes that as worth protecting. People have been writing books for millennia, but now there's copyright.

>if you don't give the people that put in the effort and money to do it then it will never get done in the first place

Perhaps the facilitation of some research should be a function of the government vs. a for-profit endeavor.

Because copyright law cannot more important than feeding people and it obviously should not be. You cannot compare other non-essential technologies with farming on the same level.

Intellectual property rights law can be an important tool in feeding people and helping them in other ways as well. If there is less new development without seed rights laws, there are fewer new breeds and potentially poorer development for the whole of mankind.

There is a balance to reach, and I think e.g. Monsanto has reached out quite nicely. For instance, both by law and contract, subsistence farmers may use even licensed breeds. You don't have to pay licenses to grow your own food. You only have to pay if you are utilizing the IPR commercially.

Same is with medicine: new medicines help curing people of diseases.

Your argument resembles a requirement for farmers to work for free because everyone needs food so it's wrong to charge money for it.

Monsanto is doing what would traditionally take farming communities hundreds of years in the span of decades. There is value in incentivizing research and product development in that. Furthermore the patents expire in a timeframe of two decade so the greater community still is able to have superior harvests within a timespan of decades instead of centuries.

Monsanto existing is a net positive given how long traditional techniques would take. It is being closed and made for profit because it takes millions of dollars worth of investment to make these improvements. There should be incentive to do this.

That's a coherent argument, but you've moved the goalposts a bit. The comment at the root of this thread suggests that Monsanto opportunistically sues farmers who are victimized by having Monsanto seed blown onto their fields.

They do not.

Before we move on to all the other arguments against Monsanto, we should probably dispose of that one.

> Seeds should be free and open source.

That's one idea. Another idea is that genetically modified seeds should be just as patentable as anything else.

I'm willing to consider arguments in favour of either position, but you haven't really put forth an argument in favour of yours.

>> Seeds should be free and open source.

> That's one idea. Another idea is that genetically modified seeds should be just as patentable as anything else.

Those two statements are not incompatible, and I would agree with the resulting conclusion.

"Monsanto is evil. They go after farmers who have their crops infected by Monsanto products due to basic wind and cross-pollination. Once a judge rules the seeds have patented DNA, farmers have to dump all their collected seed supply."

They don't. They go after farmers that intentionally selectivily breed those "infected" seeds. The defendents never tried to argue that it was just accidental cross-pollination.

Many of the objections would be immediately put to rest if the patent was released to a global health or other ngo that could oversee and license it without restriction.

Patenting the food supply is one of the scariest things for the developing world. Certainly vitamin A deficiency is a real problem but we are then trading that problem for giving one company absolute power over a group of people with very few resources to defend themselves.

For what it's worth.

Monsanto have now agreed to provide royalty-free licenses for its technologies to help fast-track the further development and distribution of the rice.

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2560613/pdf/1110...

To developing countries only. I didn't see how a country is deemed no longer developing, so it makes me think it's just the classic pusher tactic: the first crop is free.

Once a developing country's economy has become entangled with the crop, start charging rent.

The IMF typically determines the developing country status based on HDI, and when countries graduate to developed status.

They actually licensed it to low-income, food-deficit countries as defined by the FAO, which means that countries have to both be below a minimum GDP per capita and grow less calories of food than required to feed their population. (The pilot project was in the Philippines, which has since been retroactively removed from the list due to a re-estimation of their GDP.) Most of those countries can't grow rice for climate reasons. Worse, the estimates of its usefulness assume that a rather large proportion of people's calories come from golden rice, which obviously isn't possible - and it's of questionable effectiveness even then.

The Phillipine government has since largely solved their vitamin A deficiency problem through a lower-tech and cheaper approach: vitamin supplements.

I am not involved with Monsanto or the organizations you mentioned. From my position it looks like both sides take their contributions very seriously. One wants to safe humanity. The other tries to preserve earth and everyone else on it. Judgment should be left to future generations. Even then it might not accurately reflect our actions today. Such is life.

What we all can do today is respect our opponents. Their values do not align with ours. That does not make them evil. Let’s call them misguided.

The problem is, for organizations like Greenpeace, they require that their supporters think the opponent is evil. When you can't engage your opponent on the facts, engage them on an emotional level, and accuse them of moral decrepitude -- then you'll never need to respond to their stances.

This is a common tactic on the far left and far right:

"You can't just ban all abortions, what about rape?" "Baby killer!"

"Clearly some abortions are unconstitutional, like once the baby is viable." "Misogynist!"

"You can't just have completely open borders, it would bankrupt the safety net." "Racist!"

"You can't just close the borders, lots of industries rely on immigrant labor." "Shill!"

Golden rice fixes vit A deficiency, but nothing else. Since the target populations tend to have a general pack of nutrition, and not just a vit A deficiency, it seems odd to release a patent encumbered GMO (golden rice has something like 70 patents from 30 companies).

Camapigning from the hippies, but also from WFP and WHO, mean that terminator genes aren't going to be used, and that farmers will be allowed to reuse the seed, and that the manufacturers will do more testing.

Especially since you're probably going to continue supplementing iron and zinc and iodine you may as well keep supplementing with vit A and not releasing the GMO.

If a population is going to grow and eat rice anyway, it may as well be the rice that provides vitamin A. It's not like the vitamin A is free either; better to be rid of an external dependency when possible. Whole teach a man to fish thing...

Yes why does the man not own all the third world's land or at least everything that can grow on it, and make all the world's farmers into sharecroppers held hostage by the innovative capitalist who privatized nature? Why? Slavery has many forms, this is but one of them. Seeds are free, they have always been free, and we should tell capitalist to work out a different model if they wish to operate in this field which has been open source and libre for million of years.

I can't believe there is people disagreeing with that here... Like if copyright law was somehow more important than feeding people...

It's because you haven't thought it through. Should farmers be paid for their work? We are indeed saying that commercial rights of farmers are more important than feeding people (i.e. taking from farmers for free and giving to people).

Farmers have almost no leverage ... It's one of the lowest paid and most difficult job of the modern world. In practice, in relation to what they produce, they are already paid really close to zero so I'm not sure what's your point. You cannot seriously compare farmers with a global company like Monsanto.

And I'm talking about copyright/patent laws here, not wages, so it's even less related.

Economic (and other) incentives matter. They matter so much that even if some thing is "common good", you may have to pay for it.

Farmers produce food and have property rights to their products; they can then sell food (or donate). Companies produce new plant varieties, and they have intellectual property rights to their products which they can sell (and sometimes they donate as well).

If you cannot have IPR to new seed breeds, there is less economic and other incentive to create new ones, and you'll have less development of technology.

And the very reason that mankind has less hunger today than it has ever had (in proportion to population, and also in absolute terms in hundreds of years) is development of technology.

(By the way, farmers generally don't get wages; they get earnings, like companies do.)

Yes exactly, I agree with that. That's why there is inherently a conflict between what the market should provide as a goal (openly reusable seeds) and the incentives to create them (making them private is the only way to properly get money out of it).

That's why, because of this conflict, I'm not advocating for private company to product seeds, it's one of those markets (like health-care or public infrastructure) where the incentives will never be align whatever law you put in place. I would therefore advocate to move seeds to public research.

And I also agree with the technology part but none of what I can think of has similar problems to the seeds.

> These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry

I feel this is also a very short-sighted comment to make. These groups are a symptom of a problem that the industry(ies) create. The fact that they slow development in certain areas are a result of malpractice on the corporate level driving people to hold certain opinions.

Calling them "evil" is just as misguided as calling Monsanto "evil".

If your patented robot walks onto my land and starts doing my bidding, I'm suddenly at fault? Crazy.

Don't forget - their seed contaminated his pure strain. Why shouldn't he benefit from their sloppiness? Is he supposed to suffer the contamination and not, at least, gain from the traits of the new strain?

> ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years.

All of that can be true without stopping "Monsanto is Evil" from being accurate.

Incorrect. Your source [1]monsanto.com is their PR.

The Schmeisers did not use Roundup and so owed Monsanto no money - ruled the Canadian Supreme Court in 2004. (Schmeiser vs Monsanto) - but their unpatented seeds did belong to Monsanto.

It will be interesting to see how this is decided when plants have genes from multiple IP holders.

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