Posted on 05/31/2013 8:44:34 AM PDT by opentalk
- A strain of genetically modified wheat found in the United States fuelled concerns over food supplies across Asia on Thursday, with major importer Japan cancelling a tender offer to buy U.S. grain.
Other top Asian wheat importers South Korea, China and the Philippines said they were closely monitoring the situation after the U.S. government found genetically engineered wheat sprouting on a farm in the state of Oregon.
The strain was never approved for sale or consumption.
Asian consumers are keenly sensitive to gene-altered food, with few countries allowing imports of such cereals for human consumption. However, most of the corn and soybean shipped from the U.S. and South America for animal feed is genetically modified.
"We will refrain from buying western white and feed wheat effective today," Toru Hisadome, a Japanese farm ministry official in charge of wheat trading, told Reuters
(Excerpt) Read more at mobile.reuters.com ...
Patents are 20 years. You should bring yourself up to speed.
http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DevelopmentApprovalProcess/ucm079031.htm#How many years is a patent granted for?
Nope. Drug patents are thirty years thanks to Bush. They can be renewed for another ten years after the first term expires. And you’ve begged the question once again. How long *should* they be and how do you know? You said limited patents were good. How do you what the limit should be?
The extension is based on patent time eaten up by the FDA approval process. I don’t see anything wrong with that, seems a fair way to deal with a lengthy approval process.
15-20 years seems about right. One generation.
I have created and profit from intellectual property and I can tell you right now, I would have not made the effort, not lifted so much as a pinky if I then had to give it away free.
Period, end of story. I’d go Galt and screw every frickin mental vampire that wants to suck out my creativity for their benefit and leaving me jack.
Pretty sure I’m not alone in that feeling.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1388888/GM-food-toxins-blood-93-unborn-babies.html
GM firms claimed toxins were destroyed in the gut
Toxins implanted into GM food crops to kill pests are reaching the bloodstreams of women and unborn babies, alarming research has revealed. ....93 per cent of blood samples taken from pregnant women and 80 per cent from umbilical cords tested positive for traces of the chemicals.
It is not necessary to experiment with mixing genes from completely dissimilar organisms in order to have a “biosciences industry”. Or, at least, it is not necessay to introduce them into the environment and food supply chain. It is also not necessary to allow ip protection for every unique combination of DNA that Monsanto, et al “invent”.
Common sense informs us that the absence of such combinations occurring naturally, regardless of your epistemological paradigm about the origins of life, doing so will lead to outbreaks of disease and famine. Either God designed these life forms and warned that they were designed to begat kind after kind (which, incidentally, is the presupposition of Louis Pasteur, father of microbiology), or they represent combinations which did not acheive survival-of-the-fittest status which will have completely unpredictable (though predictably negative) impacts on the ecosystem they are introduced into.
Free enterprise is a conservative value. Hard work and innovation are as well. Intellectual property is a subjective means of fostering the success of these values as expressed in the constitution. But ip laws must be shepherded by wise leaders rather than as a means of picking winners based on political alliances. The founders could not have envisioned patents for DNA, but traditionally these protections have excluded mathematical formaulas and things that exist in nature. What we are seeing is an exploitation of ip laws by companies like Monsanto which go against the intent of ip law which is supposed to encourage rather than stifle innovation.
If anyone wants to be on or off the Agenda 21 ping list, please notify me by Freepmail. It is a relatively low volume list in which we have been exploring the UN Agenda21 and related topics. We have collected our studies with threads, links, and discussions on the Agenda 21 thread which can be found here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2738418/posts
NEW ACTION THREAD:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2863065/posts
Post 128 of the Action Thread is a summary of the history of Agenda 21, “what they are doing”, “what to do about it” and a good bibliography for further reading.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.