India Sues Monsanto for . . . Biopiracy?

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.

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.

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.