The Monsanto arguments…
Patents and lawsuits and corporate greed, oh my!
Anti: Monsanto is evil and they sue people because crops get cross-pollinated!
Me: Monsanto is a giant company just like Coca Cola. Coca Cola sues people for trying to create products similar to coca cola or even using a name that sounds close to theirs. Is that wrong?
You’ve read all of the stories about how they sue people over crop cross pollination etc. Monsanto also speaks for itself on this issue.
Anti: But they patent their seeds so farmers can’t reuse them and are forced to buy more seeds from them!
Crops are patented because millions of dollars went into creating them, similar to how iPhones are an investment for Apple. There are non-GM crops that are patented and have the same type of agreements not to re-use the seed, but no one gets mad about them, not even farmers, because they always have a choice of who they buy their seed from. They aren’t forced to buy seed from anyone. There are several large seed companies to choose from.
Patents only last a certain amount of time, anyway. The first patented type of glyphosate-resistant Roundup Ready corn just went off-patent after 10 years. Anyone can now buy it, generic version or brand version, and save the seed or farm it however they desire.
It’s in a farmer’s best interest to buy new seed every year because if they didn’t it would be like inbreeding purebred dogs. Inbreeding results in bad recessive traits appearing. The seed they can buy is equivalent to buying a show dog that’s been carefully bred from a diverse gene pool. If you bought two of those show dogs that are brother and sister, as the seeds would be, and bred them together, you would get some undesirable results. In crops this means lower yields and consequently less income for the farmers.
Yes, this is a very different system compared to how things used to be done where farmers saved their seed for the next year. People also used to grow their own food, but it became so much more convenient to let the professional farmers do the work for us and pay to buy our groceries at the store instead. Some farmers still do save their seed and grow it the next year, but others are now paying the professional plant breeders to do the genetics work so they can focus on the myriad other processes it takes to grow food on a large scale.
Anti: GMO’s are just made by Monsanto to make money because they’re greedy and want to sell more pesticides.
Me: Look at how GM crops actually reduce the amount of pesticide needed to create a healthy crop for this farmer and this farmer and so many other farmers who have said the same thing, they just haven’t been written about in ‘The Times’ recently. That’s not making Monsanto or any of the other major pesticide companies more money.
