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I see the patenting of life forms as being insidiously evil.

In the past we had heirloom seeds which, although proprietary, were not patent protected, so people who shared their superior seed stock didn't run afoul of courts and lawyers.

Call me a pitchfork bearing loon but I find patenting life forms to be egregiously reprehensible.

We still have heirloom seeds - anyone who wants to can develop their own varieties and share them as freely as they like. Many thousands of people do this. However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties.

Patents serve the same purpose in farming as they do elsewhere: it makes it worthwhile for companies to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to drive crop yields ever higher.

I share your moral outrage at the idea of patenting life, and all my own research as well as all the genetic technology produced by our consortium on the C4 rice project will be made free (as in beer and speech).

However, agriculture relies on agricultural companies, and they need some way to make money. If people can just take their technology and grow it again themselves, there is no way for them to recoup their investment and we simply won't have better crops.

> We still have heirloom seeds - anyone who wants to can develop their own varieties and share them as freely as they like. Many thousands of people do this. However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties.

just to chime in here. for a majority of indian farmers - partly which triggered the mass suicide by pesticide - they turned out to be not at all as high yielding as was claimed.

now you could say, ahhh, but wait a second. they didn't use as much water and pesticide as they were supposed to, and you might be right. but then it depends on your definition of yield.

their own crops had a higher yield given the conditions of the soil, and water.

Great, if the GMO yields less, the farmer doesn't buy it again, and then the market deals with the problem.

Definition of yield? Bushels per acre, or kg per hectare. There's not much of an issue there. The same plant might yield very differently in different fields, just like it yields differently each year. If you are conducting trials, you have to plant a bunch of stuff together vs well known controls. Something that yields 140 bushels per acre on average might give you just 58 in the wrong year. Just look at what happened to most of the US fall crop in 2012.

Now, if you plant a variety of plant that does well in X conditions, and you actually plant it in Y conditions, then yeah, pick between changing the condition or using a different variety.

> Great, if the GMO yields less, the farmer doesn't buy it again, and then the market deals with the problem.

sounds great. you're assuming that most people are critical of these crops. have any means to research what was mentioned(ie. internet). and have the means to recover from these loans, but if they did why would they need the loans to buy these crops to begin with?

The farmers' suicides in India caused by GMO has been debunked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India#G... http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17881/are-gmo-cr... http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/nov/05/gmcrops-i... http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v27/n1/full/nbt0109-9.html

Patents serve the same purpose in farming as they do elsewhere: it makes it worthwhile for companies to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to drive crop yields ever higher.

This rest on the assumption that the patent system is the best way to structure a market and incentivize agricultural R&D.

What, in your opinion, is the best way to structure a market and incentivize agricultural R&D?

More accurately, it rests on the assumption that the patent system actually available now is the best way to structure this market activity. But I don't see GMO opponents offering better incentive structures, I see them making up non-scientific arguments that make no sense.

> it makes it worthwhile for companies to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to drive crop yields ever higher.

I'd figure higher crop yields are incentive enough to invest in higher yield seeds. As in, smart farmers would invest profits into developing better seeds to give them more reliable or higher yields. It doesn't require an artificial profit motive attached to the development of seeds themselves if they are a net gain.

That is the same argument I have against big pharma - drugs are useful because they abate symptoms or cure disease. That right there is a motivator to develop drugs - attaching artificial profit motives to their development don't change the fundamentals.

> smart farmers would invest profits into developing better seeds

There are several problems with the economics in your response.

Specialization is good, economically speaking: farmers should concentrate on being good farmers, not on trying to oversee research projects in far-off universities or labs. By having a market, it's also possible for companies to bring new products to market without charging the farmers a dime unless the products are actually any good.

This is also what's known as a coordination problem. Each farmer's profits are probably not that high, so one of them on their own is not going to be able to fund this research. So how do they coordinate their work? Markets provide a pretty good answer.

Also, as Blahah mentions, the lack of patents means that there is a free rider problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods

Thanks for linking - I've thought about all these things, but didn't know the terms. Accessing the literature is basically impossible without knowing to call them 'coordination game' or 'free rider problem'.

I doubt many farmers in the entire world are operating on margins that allow them to invest in anything that doesn't return very soon.

Consider...

Company A spends 5billion developing a new variety that yields high, and sells it at price X. With no protection of the IP, Company B can pirate the technology and sell it for price X/10. A farmer can buy the the pirated version just once, and he'll thereafter have no expense to lay out on seed purchase.

Any farmer who tries to do the right thing and invest in the seeds from the company doing the research will be out of business in a year, outcompeted by those wiling to pirate. Company A loses its 5billion investment and exits the market.

> However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties.

Are GMO crops really consistently high yielding? I've heard of some statistics that showed this wasn't actually the case. I don't have any source at hand, but I recall reading that in Europe, where GMO crops are far more restricted than in the US, crop yields actually grew faster over the past decades than in the US, where GMO crops are common.

Also, monoculture makes your crop awfully vulnerable to new diseases. Genetic diversity is much more robust.

Generally speaking, GMO crops are lower-yielding than heirloom varieties, unless you apply the requisite fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides. With the addition of those chemicals the GMO crops perform better since they are more tolerant of excess nutrients, and better able to convert the excess nutrients into the desired product.

So if you want to reduce reliance on chemicals (which I do), then GMOs are a bad idea?

Personally I'm a big fan of projects that use more natural ways of fighting weeds and pests. I've read about some very effective programs that reduced pests by planting a specific plant around the crop fields, or (re)introducing a predator of that pest.

What do you mean by chemicals? all food production uses chemicals.

If you want to reduce monoculture, then monoculture is a bad idea :)

Maybe someone could research and patent a fungus or virus that only attacks roundup-ready plants? I wonder how much Monsanto would pay to bury that...

   If people can just take their technology and grow it again themselves, there is no way for them to recoup their investment and we simply won't have better crops.

Thousands of years of selective breeding refutes the above statement.

It's not always about ROI. Some of us just like variety. I do agree with your sentiment, it's just the legal aspects that I dislike.

Oh for a world without money & greed!

Hi pitchfork bearing loon, feel free to mention specific moral axioms behind your opinion at your own leisure.

They aren't patenting life forms, rather their modifications to life forms.

> In the past we had heirloom seeds

In the past we didn't have genetic engineering technology that could beat the "heirloom" mixture of selective breeding and snake oil. Now we do, and it has to be funded somehow or society doesn't benefit from that technology.

Why pick on Monsanto though? Dupont, Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, just to name a few, all have seed patents of their own.

> I see the patenting of life forms as being insidiously evil.

Why?

I think the main issue is that Monsanto is cornering the market [1]. Farmers basically have a hard time to buy normal seeds at reasonable price on the market because mostly GMO seeds are offered.

It's a bit like Microsoft or ATT/Verizon. Just switch providers.. good luck with that.

[1]: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091214/0856327337.shtml

Microsoft uses compatibility and bundling as leverage to maintain their monopoly

ATT/Verizon use municipal contracts and large barriers-to-entry to maintain their oligopoly

All Monsanto has are patents on their specific crop strains. What prevents a seed producer from going into business other than the benefits of using Monsanto strains?

EDIT: ok, after googling around (the techdirt link was broken), it looks like they were bundling

http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/monopoly.cfm

http://www.patentdocs.org/2008/05/monsanto-and-sy.html

False. There are several competitors like Dupint, Dow Chemical, and Bayer.

This is just nonsense, it is extremely easy for farmers to buy non-GMO seed. Not only are there several other huge seed producers (Bayer, BASF, Dupont, Syngenta, Pioneer, etc.) that sell high-quality non-GMO seed, but there is a huge ecosystem of regional cooperative seed producers that make decent seed.

Farmers choose GMOs because they really do get more return on their investment. They aren't idiots and they aren't being forced.

As a grain farmer myself, I don't know this to be true. In fact, the only GMO crop we do grow is field corn because there is no advantage of non-GMO varieties in that crop. Perhaps you could elaborate some more?

They link to an old opinion piece on schmeiser-v-monsanto but not the up-to-date Wikipedia article.[1]

You can tell they are pushing an angle when they pretend that the "contamination" was accidental, and that Schmeiser was hitting his crops with Roundup.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...

One thing that I have observed is there's a certain percent of the population that are worriers. Sometimes they're early in worrying about something that becomes very important to the majority but often times they worry about things that never come to pass. They serve an important purpose as sentinels but on this one the evidence is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Do you think it is that easy for a simple farmer to check if their seed is contaminated? I think the article makes a good point, that it is the responsibility of Monsanto to make sure that their seeds do not spread. But I am no expert.

But compare it to a corporation that has a patent on some computer code which would distribute itself as a worm and every victim with an infected PC has to pay to the corporation. Only because you have it on your PC does not make you a copyright pirate. There must be clear evidence that you downloaded patented software willingly. So it is Monsanto who has to make sure that the farmers have the tools to prevent Monsanto seeds from growing. If these tools are not freely available I would say farmers should not be liable this.

This is the reason why, if we are to keep allowing patents on genes, we have to be extremely careful on what we allow, and what we don't.

For instance, let's take Soybeans. There have been lawsuits out there claiming that someone's Soybean field had been 100% contaminated by Monsanto seeds, so that the fact that all the plants survived Roundup plantings was completely accidental. Given how difficult it is to even cross soybeans on purpose, having an entire field of plants with perfect flowers that get contaminated through pollination is just silly.

On something like corn, however, you just can't avoid cross contamination. So if a field has corn that has genes that came straight from a GMO, it's not as if one can prove wrongdoing: It's impossible to prevent that kind of contamination.

Ultimately though, we just have to figure out if we believe that patenting GMOs is something that is good for society or not. If I make a computer program and sell it, it's not really all that difficult for me to make money out of it, if people actually want it. If I tried to sell carefully engineered soybean seeds, I would not make much money, because from a few soybeans you can make millions. In two seasons, anyone that bought the seed could just compete with me without any for the R&D cost. So if a world without some kind of protection, major seed research just have to be left to public projects that don't expect any profit. You can't even protect your seed by being the only user, because very often, the seed itself is the output. Good luck selling soybeans without giving away the DNA to make more.

And it's not like we could instead change the protections to be all about the insertion of new DNA into a plant: The entire corn catalogue of Roundup ready seeds is probably comes from less than two dozen actual insertions of foreign DNA into regular plants. The tough work is to figure out which ones are actually effective, and to cross them with high yielding regular plants. So I could just take the gene that Monsanto put on a seed and add it to my own strain by using conventional breeding techniques in about 5 years, tops.

So yeah, our options are to just stop all research, move it all to non-profits, or allow some kind of patents on seeds. You could make a case for either of the three, but we have to understand that they all have their shortcomings.

I think the criticism of Monsanto is fair.

"Agent Orange was manufactured for the U.S. Department of Defense primarily by Monsanto Corporation and Dow Chemical."

"According to Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 people being killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth defects"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange

Possible connection between Monsanto Roundup and Bee Colony Colapse disorder http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/ro...

The U.S. defense department took a chemical (aka Agent Orange) that had been used safely for clearing brush from ditches for decades and started spraying it from helicopters without any research being done on its safety.

Sure Dow and Monsanto took the money. But they learned their lesson and when the DEA started spraying Paraquat onto cocaine plants in South America Dow sued them to stop. I believe they even threatened to take Paraquat off the market if they lost their lawsuit.

Well, there are separate issues at play:

1) In a market economy, monopolies should generally be distrusted and prevented whenever possible.

2) There are people who are unsatisfied with the claimed (lack of) health effects of GMO on human consumers.

3) There are people who are unsatisfied with the claimed (lack of) effects that GMO seeds could have on the broader ecosystem.

> monopolies should generally be distrusted and prevented whenever possible.

You shouldn't just disband monopolies too, you should analyze the environment that let them form in the first place. In a functioning market the only time a monopoly becomes an issue is if they can exploit their position to keep prices above optimal competitive levels, and that means that there are barriers to market entry that need to be considered in policy that prevent price competition against the major player. And usually they are legal in nature, be it patent / copyright, or biased tax law, or blatant exclusive contracts like ISPs.

It IS bullshit that people are just upset at Monsanto for selling seeds that don't reproduce correctly.

Most hybrids fail to reproduce into another hybrid, and people have been selling hybrid seeds for years before Monsanto even existed.

I don't think it's right that you can make plants your IP however.

It's especially bullshit because Monsanto don't produce seeds that don't reproduce. Terminator technology was developed by the United States government and shut down by Monsanto because they thought protesters would go apeshit. Turns out they were right, to the extent that shutting down the tech didn't stop people going apeshit. It's one of the most pervasive myths about GM crops.

Monsanto's seeds reproduce just fine, however if one saves the seeds from their harvest and replants than it is an IP violation. It would be like copying a CD for a friend, very possible but not legal

I'm somewhere in between. I think there are problems with patents and I'm not sure they can be with us for another 100 years. I also don't think the assessment that there the current scenario which allows big rewards for R&D is a net win is crazy.

But overall there is a wider direction of change whether directed or emergent. Our agricultural system producing our food is becoming problematic in many ways. Food is flora and fauna. These things exist in an ecosystem. These controlled super strains can become very dominant and genetically poor. Many major crops are losing genetic diversity. GMO cereals are just a part of it. It's been going on for a long time. Genetic modification is something we started doing hundreds of years before we named it. Modern genetic tech distills it.

I'm not sure the long term ramifications of all this can be captured in supply and demand. There is a bigger picture that is probably not going to be clear until it is in retrospect.

Monstanto's own take on Schmeiser: http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/percy-schmeiser.aspx

From the 2001 Court Decision[0]:

"[146] I find on a balance of probabilities that the growing by the defendants in 1998 of canola on nine fields, from seed saved in 1997 which was known or ought to have been known by them to be Roundup tolerant, and the harvesting and sale of that canola crop, infringed upon the plaintiffs' exclusive rights under Canadian patent number 1, 313, 830 in particular claims 1, 2, 5, 6, 22, 23, 27, 28 and 45 of the patent"

[0] http://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fc-cf/decisions/en/item/38991/...

If people think it's bullshit that Monsanto can prevent their seeds from being re-used then that's not insane, but I'd politely disagree.

They are seeds. They aren't being reused, they are being used, as seeds.

Genetic information in the wild cannot be subject to strict intellectual property regulation, when there are things like horizontal gene transfer.

> I think the hate for Monsanto is way, way, way overrated.

monsanto == agent orange

The Monsanto that made Agent Orange hasn't really existed for several decades now, and blaming the current company for the problems associated with Agent Orange about as useful as blaming today's IBM for selling tabulation machines to the Nazis.

The current problem with Monsanto isn't their products; it seems they learned some pathological business practices back in the 70s from a newly formed consulting service[1] known as Bane. They changed a lot of their business strategy under their oversight, guided by the consultant's representative: Mitt Romney.

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/09/romney-monsa...

>Or we could give protection to enable the development of new seeds and then farmers have the choice to use the old stuff or new stuff.

Not after terminator seeds are used.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Terminator_seeds http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-seeds-of-suicide-how-monsan...

Terminator seeds have never been used except in research. It says that in your own link. Monsanto have also made commitments, including to the courts in the USA and Canada, not to ever use the technology.

Even without terminator seeds, replanting seed that you harvested is not necessarily a good idea. For instance, most commercial corn seeds are hybrids, made by crossing two highly inbred plants. This means that the seeds in the bag have pretty much the same DNA as each other. Those plants produce far better than their inbred parents, and they are quite predictable in most agronomic ways.

Now, what happens when you get the next generation? When Hybrids cross with hybrids, the actual genetic makeup of the offspring will produce quite a bit more variation. With that increased variation, come less average yields. So even if a farmer didn't sign anything that would stop him from planting the seeds, chances are that a farmer would have higher profits by just buying a bag of seed anyway.

Not so much for Soybeans though, but that really is a place where Monsanto has pretty much a monopoly: Roundup protection increases yields so much that non-GMO soybeans are barely planted, because they are far less profitable for the farmer.

> because they are far less profitable for the farmer.

That really depends on the market you are selling into. It is definitely not a hard truth. For instance, we only grow non-GMO soybeans on my farm because they are quite a bit more profitable and seem to get even more profitable each year. We won't even consider looking at GMO soys until that dynamic starts to change. Farmers in other markets might not be selling to the same customers, and therefore might not be able to see the same margins on non-GMOs.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to what the consumers are buying. With the tight margins in farming, you'll be out of business in no time if you aren't growing exactly what the customers want.