The Napster pirates of transgenic biotech

2001 was a bad year for bollworms in Gujarat. The pink larval creatures infested cotton fields across the Indian state, devastating harvests.

But some fields, remarkably, were mostly immune. Mayhco, an Indian seed company partially owned by Monsanto, became suspicious. Mayhco and Monsanto had been striving for years to get permission to sell genetically modified Bt cotton in India -- a strain that produces its own anti-bollworm insecticide -- but the application had been fought at every step by India's vigorous anti-GM activists and was undergoing lengthy trials. Sure enough, after testing the cotton, Mayhco determined that it contained the Monsanto-patented gene Cry1ac.

To this day, no one seems to be quite sure exactly how the Bt gene got into the seeds sold to the Gujarat farmers under the brand name Navbharat151. D.B. Desai, the owner of the Navbharat seed company and a well known breeder, claims it was an accident, the result of contamination from test plots in another Indian state where the trials of genetically modified cotton were being conducted. His critics say he is being criminally disingenuous, that he must have knowingly stolen cotton seeds from the trials and interbred them with other cotton strains. To Monsanto, D.B. Desai is a new breed of thief, a biotech pirate.

But to the farmers of Gujarat, he's Robin Hood, the man who took genetic modification technology from the rich, and gave it to the poor. Because while the dispute as to the origin of the seeds hasn't been settled, there's been little doubt as to their effectiveness. Yields are up, pesticide use is down, a state of affairs that continues to the present; even though Desai was arrested and Navbharat forbidden from selling the contested seeds.

But it's what has happened after the ban on Navbharat151 that is really intriguing. As farmers are wont to do, they saved their seeds, and discovered that the second generation was also resistant to bollworm depredation. Some even experimented with interbreeding the Navbharat151 genetic line with other strains of cotton particularly suited to Gujarat conditions, and came up with new strains that proved effective. Local seed companies sprang up to commercialize the descendant breeds. And even though Mayhco-Monsanto has since been allowed to sell its own cotton seeds, the local bootlegged versions have proved more popular. And why not? According to reports, they're much cheaper, and, from the point of view of local farmers, perform as well or better than the "official" alternatives.

Good luck to all companies nowadays who expect to reap untold billions of dollars from owning intellectual property rights...they're going to need it.

Entirely aside from the flat-earther attacks on GM technology, Monsanto earned a lot of ill will from its intended customer base by legal overreach on the intellectual property issue. There have been cases in which Monsanto sued farmers after windblown seed sprouted in their fields. The real-estate model of IP just isn't working.

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