“The strain was developed by Monsanto to make wheat resistant to the company’s own industry-leading weed killer.”
Monsanto developed a strain of wheat that made practicable the continued use of RoundUp, a Monsanto product you seem to be defending. Yet you want Monsanto sued to extinction.
What am I missing?
A lot.
I deal with native plant habitat restoration. I get rid of weeds, some 125 species of weeds. Our property is the cleanest piece of land on the West Coast of the US. I did it to establish in law the superiority of private environmental management as an alternative to government regulation and to serve as a research center for study of native plant systems. I'm saying this because I want you to understand that I'm something of a weed expert, albeit in a non-industrial setting.
Historically, I used a fair bit of RoundUp in addition to half a dozen other herbicides. Glyphosate (the active ingredient in RoundUp) is the DDT of herbicides: cheap, effective, and safe, a once-in-a-century invention. The people of the United States granted Monsanto a patent on glyphosate that the people enforced for 34 years. Glyphosate is now public domain.
With the development of RoundUp Ready genetics, Monsanto is cross pollinating all sorts of weeds with RoundUp Ready genes. So far, what it has meant is that people have to use more RoundUp for it to be effective. We have already seen those genes showing up in compositae such as horseweed. Compositae are among the most genetically plastic of plants. Among them are dandelions, thistles, and the tarweed tribe, the latter of which includes plants that are toxic on range land, especially Senecio and Dittrichia. Yet over the long term, this development represents a potentially devastating impact to weed control with serious implications for crop production and habitat on a continental scale.
Monsanto has dealt a mortal blow to the value of that now public good, thus forcing everyone to buy more RoundUp or their newer patented, more hazardous, and less effective alternatives. In a way, what they have done is just like what Zeneca did with DDT when that patent ran out. They got Ruckleshaus to ban DDT despite an official finding that it was virtually harmless to non-target species. That forced everybody to buy organophosphate on which Zeneca had a patent. Organophosphate is far more toxic, so now that it's running out and has been shown destructive to workers they've sold that patent to a shell corporation in Arizona.
And so it goes. Worse, Monsanto has been suing producers who have had their crops pollinated by Monsanto's genes! So in effect, they have been a bully and a bad neighbor. As things are, American exporters have been harmed by this development and I hope they sue the hell out of Monsanto.
Yet the final player in all of this is the FDA and the USDA, who approved of these products. Then there's the EPA which mandated totally unnecessary gasoline oxygenates. Control of these regulations has been a feeding trough of corporate interests at the expense of the public. So the real message is, don't expect a politicized regulatory system that socializes risks to deliver cost effective and objective judgments.
You are not missing anything. The lawyers lining their pockets with mo santos profits are simply leading the ignorant in the charge against private enterprise. These ventures give the left wing nuts big money. It’s global warming with another name to make money for the left.
The farmer was trying to clear his field. He couldn’t because the corn wouldn’t die. Bottom line, they’ve created an unkillable monster. Imagine having to go in and harvest the mutant corn before it goes to seed. Of course, you’ll miss some so that will grow next season and you’ve got to go back in there and maybe have to dig each up by hand. Wanna talk costs? Then consider that the wind or birds cross pollenate your neighbor’s field, then his neighbor’s field, and so on and so on. What happens when this gets out of control? Monsanto is creating monsters of every variety of fruit and vegetable that goes onto your children’s dinner plates. This is similar to having cattle growth hormones in your kids’ milk. Science has overstepped. Just because they have the knowledge to do this doesn’t mean they should.
Then there’s the problem with Monsanto suing and financially ruining those neighbors who had their crops cross pollenated by Mother Nature.