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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

This may be naive, but why isn't the market protecting farmers? Are subsidies involved?

Why don't they just use normal seeds or other seeds? Weren't these limitations known ahead of time? Why did the farmers make a deal with the devil? Why can't they switch back?

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It's my understanding Monsanto isn't a company that relies on free markets. They use lawyers heavily. If their seeds blow from a customer's farm to a non customer's farm and the non customer doesn't actively try to remove the Monsanto seeds, they sue. They are like the seed mafia.

And do they win such claims? Seems to me the farmer whose field was polluted should be able sue for damages instead?

Your average farmer doesn't have the resources required to field a lawsuit against a multi-national company.

Then that seems to be a flaw in the law system. Still, even if they don't start it, why would the company win frivolous claims?

Surely you don't think that frivolous claims are never won?

Not sure, certainly they shouldn't be won as a rule. Maybe there are exceptions, but it shouldn't be just a case of whoever hires the most expensive lawyers wins.

There's a massive gulf between "shouldn't" and "isn't". :/

So basically you are saying the legal system (in the US?) is worthless?

Draw your own conclusions.

"Monsanto won its case against Parr, but the company, which won't comment on specific cases, has stopped its legal action <edit>for PR reasons</edit>against the Runyons."

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-4048288.html

"If their seeds blow from a customer's farm to a non customer's farm and the non customer doesn't actively try to remove the Monsanto seeds, they sue"

Got a source for that claim?

There's an article on huffington post which conflicts with the claim: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/28/monsanto-lawsuit-or...

"The Runyons say they signed no agreements, and if they were contaminated with the genetically modified seed, it blew over from a neighboring farm.

"Pollination occurs, wind drift occurs. There's just no way to keep their products from landing in our fields," David said.

"What Monsanto is doing across the country is often, and according to farmers, trespassing even, on their land, examining their crops and trying to find some of their patented crops," said Andrew Kimbrell, with the Center For Food Safety. "And if they do, they sue those farmers for their entire crop." "

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-4048288.html

Just enter "monsanto sues farmer" into your favourite search engine. The wealth of results, mostly partisan in nature however, would suggest that this is a significant issue.

Not sure about the US but it's possible he's referring to Monsanto vs Schmeiser, a Canadian case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...

In that case, Schmeiser's field was contaminated by his neighbour's field which was planted with Roundup resistant Canola seed.

"... on the balance of probabilities, the defendants infringed a number of the claims under the plaintiffs’ Canadian patent number 1,313,830 by planting, in 1998, without leave or licence by the plaintiffs, canola fields with seed saved from the 1997 crop which seed was known, or ought to have been known by the defendants to be Roundup tolerant and when tested was found to contain the gene and cells claimed under the plaintiffs’ patent. By selling the seed harvested in 1998 the defendants further infringed the plaintiffs’ patent."

Right, so it's not that they'll sue you if their seeds blow onto your property, it's that they'll sue you if their seeds blow onto your property, you harvest, separate and and save the seeds from the plants that grow, then you plant 'em.

I'm still not sure that counts as infringement, but hey, who am I to disagree with a Canadian court's interpretation of Canadian law?

One thing, that Huffington Post article doesn't quite contradict the claim. It says:

"The court ruling said there was no likelihood that Monsanto would pursue patent-infringement cases against the organic farmers, who have no interest in using the company's patented seed products."

So long as the organic farmers didn't replant the contaminated seed or sell it, they are safe from lawsuits. If a farmer does replant the seed and benefit from the use of weedkiller resistance, they can expect to be sued.

So what are they supposed to do? Sort through the seeds one-by-one? The problem isn't that Monsanto is necessarily asking for anything that is obviously crazy, it's the implementation that causes problems.

It's a lot like software patents in some sense. You can't actually insulate yourself from infringement.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto...

Google is your friend. Here's one of many:

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-4048288.html

Got a source for that claim?

Who needs a source (or nuanced facts, for that matter) when you've got such an impossibly sticky narrative? True or not, Monsanto will always be known as the people who sued over their seeds.

Which is a shame, because there are plenty of perfectly good reasons to hate Monsanto without delving into half-truths.

Agreed. There's the whole moral question of patenting life.

It's a complicated issue.

Since the government started de-regulating many agricultural practices and allowing for the patenting of organisms, argribusiness intensely lobbies Congress to the point that they control agricultural policy.

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-4048288.html

Basically, the genetics of modified crops are patented. So if the wind carries corn pollen from your neighbor's farm to your organic cornfield, your crop will pick up some patented genetic characteristics. Then Monsanto's people come and sue you for using their intellectual property.

Monsanto also acts to squelch competition. They purchased companies that make specialized equipment designed to clean and prepare non-hybrid seeds for storage, and shut down manufacturing. They also send people out to buy up old equipment used for seed cleaning, and if you are found have infringed on Monsanto's intellectual property, they'll have the court seize your seed-cleaning equipment.

Can you point to a case where some random pollen got into a neighbor's farm and they got sued. Please read the Schmeiser case before linking to it. It's pretty simple. Monsanto in the past would be tipped off when farmers would buy a lot of roundup without buying roundup ready seeds. It's usually a big tip off that you are using saved seeds, which is explicitly against both the agreements farmers sign, and patent law.

It's a poisonous loop. Initially the yields will be high with seeds of Monsanto because what ever modification done will be effective. This results in depression of prices and farmers have to compete on volume to make decent profits. Since normal seeds can't do that, all farmers are forced to use GM seeds. Once majority of farmers shift to GM seeds, farmers go back to earning the same profit while paying extra for monsanto. And more importantly, if they lose the crop for any reason (very common in India due to droughts/floods), they will go underwater and might even lose their land on which they take loans every year. This leads to suicides. This is exactly what happened with BT cotton which is one of the reasons why Indian govt blocked BT brinjal.

It seems like a hit piece. There's no reference to it in any major publication. I have no idea how this politically-charged website and article got on HN.

Because not enough people have flagged it.

I'm not seeing a problem. Check the hyperlinks in the article, they go to more reputable orgs.

Because, for some time now, "the market" thinks there is more value in patenting agriculture and making money out of it than in helping agriculture.

And "the market" is right. In the short term :)

If GM seeds are so horrible for farming business, our cost of living should skyrocket. Farms which don't use GM seeds should benefit. Plus, the farmers should simply pass the price hike to consumers.

The only way this makes sense to me is either GM seeds are subsidized, or a significant % of farms switched all at once.

Or your "should" statements are too simplistic?

Farmers don't really set the price at which they are selling their production.

edit:grammar

Why does anyone make a bad business arrangement? Farmers aren't the first entrepreneurs to misunderstand the limitations placed on them by contract, or to accept those limitations in exchange for fast liquidity.

Monsanto has genetically-modified (and patented) crops that produce 2x or more per acre of land. Sometimes they're the only way to make land profitable.

To me, that sounds like a market problem. I routinely pay more than twice the going rate for standard produce precisely because I recognize the problem cheap produce presents. I'm not suggesting that most people would make the same decision, but then most people aren't aware of the legal battles occurring in the fields where that food was grown.

Eventually, something must give. Either cheap, GMO food will prevail (likely) or it'll fall (unlikely). Either situation will result in much higher food prices, either from more expensive farming methods or from companies like Monsanto being at liberty to extract more from the consumers who now have no alternatives.

Farmers in the United States in particular are mostly in a commodity business and the market for non-GMO products is relatively small so there is not room for all, most, or even a large minority of farms to accept the lower productivity of non-GMO crops for higher prices.

On top of that the situation is still more complex, crop variety research in everything but Wheat and Oats is dominated by private industry so their interest is to ensure that any new varieties fall under the patent protection regime that GMO crops offer because the protections are better than plant-breeders rights. (Also I disagree with the 2x difference posted above but do agree that the divergence has become substantial.)

In addition because the global fertilizer business is effectively a cartel fertilizer prices have nothing to do with the costs of production but instead what the market will bear. (Natural gas is a key element and has been near all-time lows for quite a while but fertilizer prices are relatively high.) So the fertilizer companies are pricing to ensure that you must stay on the highest-productivity path in order to stay above water.

Finally, the vast majority of modern farmers in North America have gone from being cooperative-oriented to more pro-market and largely believe that this current state of affairs is somehow in their best interests -- what is good for agribusiness is good for farmers. It is my humble opinion that the market is totally broken and farmers are very ineffective at working together to counter-balance the powers of the large corporations in the industry.

Because the market isn't rational. Often it will choose cheap over sensible. This is one of those cases. What Monsanto offers is very cheap. It hasn't been demonstrated to be safe by any independent studies and the company itself is a nightmare to work with but it's cheap. Sometimes that trumps all.

Technically, at the start of all this crap, if the property rights of the farmers were respected (your crud got in my field, pay up) then this whole chain of events would have gone quite differently.

I recall reading (can't remember where, I'm afraid) of instances of Monsanto buying up competing seed stocks and destroying them.

Monopoly, in other words.

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