By Aviva Shen
for ThinkProgress
On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a 75-year-old soybean farmer’s appeal against biotech giant Monsanto, in a case that could permanently reshape the genetically modified (GM) crop industry.
Monsanto is notorious among farmers for the company’s aggressive investigations and pursuit of farmers they believe have infringed on Monsanto’s patents. In the past 13 years, Monsanto has sued 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses, almost always settling out of court (the few farmers that can afford to go to trial are always defeated). These farmers were usually sued forsaving second-generation seeds for the next harvest — a basic farming practice rendered illegal because seeds generated by GM crops contain Monsanto’s patented genes.
Monsanto’s winning streak hinges on a controversial Supreme Court decision from 1981, which ruled on a 5-4 split that living organisms could be patented as private property. As a result of that decision, every new generation of GM seeds — and their self-replicating technology — is considered Monsanto’s property.
Unfortunately, second- and third-generation seeds are very hard to track, which may explain why Monsanto devotes $10 million a year and 75 staffers to investigating farmers for possible patent violations. Seeds are easily carried by birds or blown by the wind into fields of non-GM seeds, exposing farmers who have never bought seeds from Monsanto to lawsuits. Organic and conventional seeds are fast becoming extinct — 93 percent of soybeans, 88 percent of cotton, and 86 percent of corn in the US are grown from Monsanto’s patented seeds. A recent studydiscovered that at least half of the organic seeds in the US are contaminated with some genetically modified material.
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Does anyone remember agreeing to give biotech corporations a monopoly or full ownership of our food chain? Owners should be responsible for keeping their dogs on a leash so to speak. Monsanto should be there in every field personally gathering every seed and placing it in bags and chasing every bird dropping that might contain their product or they are unfit for ownership. That would be my insight.
Once a product is sold to someone else that other person owns it and how that got changed is insane. Direct recreation or coping of intellectual property should not be legal. This has no bearing on the fact that these plants and animals breed themselves naturally the way life always does. The fact that a biotech came in and added a noes or cut off an arm so to speak does not change the fact that life will breed however it chooses. Patenting life is not the same as patenting a product that was in fact invented from scratch and fully invented by man and does not reproduce through breeding without the help of man, but instead it is directly and fully made by a man each time. A man should only own the plant he waters while he waters it and nurtures that plant or animal.
The idea of patenting life needs to be revoked. A biotech company is a nonliving entity provided with a charter that allows it to do business and make money. It has no heartbeat, cannot reproduce living offspring, has no life or death, ethics or morality, respect, love or hate and cannot even exist without the living on It’s on at all and only officially is allowed on a sheet of paper. A corporation should not be allowed to patent the living or control “real” life. A nonliving entity should not be allowed to patent the living.