Chilling effects: GMOs
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This is so scary to me! I’ve been aware of the huge risks of cross-pollination, but I had no idea of the patent infringement issue. That is absolutely ridiculous. Do you see any solutions out of our current situation? Sometimes it seems we’ve gone too far down the path to find our way back. Very sad.
Thank you for sharing this important and informative information.
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Yes, I DO see a way out of this situation, but I have no hope at all that it will be implemented.
FIRST, though, I want to apologize for having responded to your comment before I approved it for others to see. That was simply an oversight and I hope you will forgive me.
1) lawsuits for such ‘patent infringement’ should not be allowed on the legal notion that the infringement was wholly involuntary, resulted in loss to the infringer and would have been resisted if the technology existed to do so at a reasonable price.
2) lawsuits for crop contamination should be permitted to the aggrieved agricultural producer who can show that a particular GMO strain has caused his fields to lose their ‘organic’ status or otherwise resulted in loss of crop value (such as limiting sale of the produce from that field to GMO permissive states, with a resultant loss of pricing flexibility)
3) The United States should drop all support for such research (much of which is carried out in tax-funded universities) and forbid marketing of the fruits of that research within its borders. With no locally salable output, the funds for research would dry up faster than a drunk with red lights flashing in the rear-view mirror.
4) the United States, in recognizing its obligations to the world at large, should forbid the export of GMO seeds and forbid the dissemination of GMO research.
5) an interim step might be to simply require that all products containing GMOs be prominently labeled as such. It won’t hurt the consumer to have the facts readily at hand. A simple “Contains GMOs” or “GMO Free” assertion near the weight statement and in the same font / size would suffice.
None of these are going to be enacted, but I think that they would ‘do the trick’. OTOH, in China, they sometimes just shoot the CEO or department official who screws up. That, also, might work and I don’t think it likely that liberal-minded political activists would object to the execution of a dozen or so corporate heads a year. Moreover Obama might see this as a way to deflect criticism of how he’s doing so far.
This stuff, if I remember my High School science, was supposed to be kept under glass until it was ‘known safe’ … with the onus on the producers to establish its safety. Rigorous, rigorous, rigorous safeguards were promised. At the time, it was recognized that these crop scientists were playing God without enough information. Well, they still do not have enough information, but we do know this: GMO crops do not outproduce the crops they replace. Instead they underproduce them by about 7% and require a LOT more in the way of chemical inputs and seed prices have shot through the roof. This is seen in the mass suicides of farmers in India.
So, instead of answering world hunger, they answer corporate greed. They dangle a chimera of high output but the real-world numbers do not support the claims. We are being, quite literally, fed a lie.
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