(September 14, 2016 at 11:39 am)Minimalist Wrote: Monsanto is hardly the white knight.
https://www.rt.com/usa/monsanto-patents-...rmers-547/
Quote:"The Supreme Court failed to grasp the extreme predicament family farmers find themselves in," said Gerritsen, an organic seed farmer in Maine. "The Court of Appeals agreed our case had merit. However ... safeguards they ordered are insufficient to protect our farms and our families."
In addition to Monday’s news and the appeals court decision against them, the plaintiffs - many of them non-GMO farmers and who make up over 25 percent of North America’s certified organic farmers - also lost a district court case.
“If Monsanto can patent seeds for financial gain, they should be forced to pay for contaminating a farmer’s field, not be allowed to sue them,” said Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now!, in a statement “Once again, America’s farmers have been denied justice, while Monsanto’s reign of intimidation is allowed to continue in rural America.”
“Monsanto has effectively gotten away with stealing the world’s seed heritage and abusing farmers for the flawed nature of their patented seed technology,” said Murphy. “This is an outrage of historic proportions and will not stand.”
No, but those farmers were being idiots. Firstly, Monsanto doesn't sue, and has never sued (to my knowledge) any farmer who had Monsanto seeds blown onto their land. Monsanto does sue (for good reason) farmers who attempt to replant Monsanto seeds from previous crops. A lot of farmers have claimed that the seeds blew onto their lands, but these claims never held up in court.
Secondly, the idea that if Monsanto can patent seeds, they should be forced to pay when those seeds contaminate a farmer's field is just about as ridiculous as it gets. Patenting something doesn't mean the company is responsible for how consumers use that product. Plenty of patented things can be used to murder people, but that doesn't mean the victim has a right to sue the company that made the murder weapon. Monsanto aren't responsible for the wind, and they aren't responsible if a farmer's seeds are blown to another farm.
