News | Patent insanity
In view of the expense of development, limited successes and customer rejection of GM crops, the only reason to continue with the technology is because its outcomes can be protected by patents.
With patents on crops, the biotech companies can control what is on the seed and agri-chemical market and how they are used, in other words it can control farming practice.
To control farming practice is to control food and trade. Both esseantial to life and very lucrative.
Shortly, the industry plan to control pharmaceuticals through their production from GM crops, and so patent and control health care (if anyone doubts this, one social scientist recently walked out of the World Health Organisation after 17 years of devoted service because it has become a victim of transnational corporations; see www.i-sis.org.uk/LULALTD.php).
At the same time, the biotech sector is set to take control of industrial chemicals through their production from GM crops, and so control manufacturing.
And then, it plans to control our fuel supply through its production from GM crops, and so control distribution. With GM you can control transport and travel, and so any country which has trade or dealings with any other country.
If this seems far-fetched, look at what has been happening in America:
- “Monsanto has filed dozens of patent infringement lawsuits asserting... patents against American farmers, many of whom are unable to hire adequate representation to defend themselves in court. The crime these farmers are accused of is nothing more than saving seed from one year's crop to replant the following year ... Monsanto has used heavy-handed investigations and ruthless presecutions that have fundamentally changed the way many American farmers farm. The result has been nothing less than an assault on the foundations of farming practices and traditions that have endured for centuries in this country and millennia around the world, including one of the oldest, the right to save and replant crop seed.” (TheCenter for Food Safety, September 2006)
- “Monsanto's aggressive assertion of its patents is not only obnoxious and offensive to the core fabric of American life and culture, it is also causing substanial public harm. It appears as though Monsanto want to tocontrol all of America's farmland and, unfortunately, the patent system is providing them the perfect means to accomplish that goal by bullying independent and family owned farms right out of existence.” (The Public Patent Foundation, September2006)
- Patents on life-forms are beyond reason. Living organisms are fluid systems which evolve, reproduce and interact with each other and everything around them. Their genes change. GM versions will evolve, reproduce and interact too, and their genes will change, in many cases, much faster than is compatible with stable evolution or with a stable environment.
When (not if) man-made genes turn up in you, or in your gut flora, could YOU become patented?
STOP THE INSANITY of patents on life. Sign the global appeal against patents on seeds:
www.no-patents-on-seeds.org