It’s a very interesting societal issue, because what is good for an individual farmer could be very bad for society as a whole.
Each farmer, making their own decision, can clearly see that, so long as Monsanto exists, the price of their seeds is less than the cost of treating their crops and losing crops to damage prevented by Monsanto’s seeds.
So, they will of course buy the seeds. There’s no reason not to, because the seeds maximize their profit. Plus, even if they wanted to try something else, they have to compete with other farmers who by using the seeds can undercut prices and gain greater yields.
However, from a societal viewpoint, it is a very bad thing to cut back on the diversity of food crops (which is what happens if everybody buys the same type of seeds). It is bad to become dependent on the ability of a company to create new seeds each year that will counter any new threats.
If some disease gets around Monsanto’s admittedly clever biologists, it could wipe out a large portion of the crops, whereas before the differing crop types were an impediment to a disease, which couldn’t attack all the differing crops.
So, we have a “tragedy of the commons” situation, where pure capitalism doesn’t work for the good of society, since it cannot appropriately value the cost of a wide-spread catyclism.
The question is what to do about it. You can ignore it and just hope. You can count on enough skeptical and worried people to avoid Monsanto seeds and breed diversity so that the risks are minimized, hoping that there are enough altruistic people. You could try to legislate the diversity and protections that are lost, by limiting how many of each type of seed can be sold, or the amount of sterile seed that can be sold.
All of the solutions are risky in one way or another. One thing you could do that might be minimally intrusive would be to require monsanto to keep one year’s supply of non-sterile versions of their seeds, comparable to the last year’s sale of sterile seeds. If no disaster strikes, those seeds can be discarded each year, and replaced with the next year’s seeds (I don’t know how long seeds keep). If there is some disaaster, the seeds can be distributed to all monsanto customers, they can plant the non-sterile versions and we are back in business.
Were you to go to your favorite organic foods grocery and buy the best looking chemical free, organically grown apple you could find, dry the seeds and plant them, what would grow would bear no resemblance at all to the apple you got the seeds from.
That was very well put!
If it helps us, we could envision a situation in which Microsoft licenses its Windows operating systems on a year-to-year basis, and then one year decides to get out of the business altogether, causing all licenses to expire and all Windows computers to cease functioning, crippling much of the nation’s infrastructure and endangering our very security.
In such circumstances, neither an individual’s nor a corporation’s patent right can be reasonably construed as trumping the rights of our nation. This is the same reasoning behind the (admittedly-distatesful) doctrine of eminent domain. For when the protection of individual rights endangers the very society created for such protection, things have really gotten out-of-whack.