A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
The moratorium is actually since 2000, but only since 2006 in its current form. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology
Thankfully, no country, much less any multinational corporation, would ever dare cross the UN's nonbinding, unenforceable moratorium. Can you imagine how stern the tone of the statement of condemnation would be, once it was worded such that a reasonable plurality of countries would agree to back it?
There would totally be an open letter and dozens of people would sign it
GMO skepticism or not, Monsanto is one of the most evil companies in the world and a perfect example of what makes the profit motive such an inefficient organizer of production and distribution
They make more money suing farmers for accidentally growing patented crops from natural seed dispersal mechanisms.
No they don't. There's never been any legal action taken for accidentally growing GM crops.
I know that you feel that you are correct because by the strict definition of the word suing, there may never have been a lawsuit, but most laymen are going to understand suing to also include being threatened with a lawsuit and settling out of court.
Does anyone else feel like this entire post and most of the comments are coming straight from a Monsanto bot/shill factory?
You've never been on reddit? If someone mentions Monsanto anywhere, the thread gets flooded with shills. There are whole subreddits devoted to finding posts to shill.
I'm the guy on the left just because until for-profit corporations are reigned in I don't trust them with control of anything.
They're not sterile, but they will sue you if they find you've been growing seeds from last year's crops.
Or if your neighbours crops have germinated in your lands
I don't think they've successfully sued anyone for that. The few cases I saw last time I looked people were intentionally germinating or saving/selling seeds.
So uhh... hypothetically if one were to live next to a cornfield and acquire some seeds from said field cough somehow cough, would those purely hypothetical seeds grown in one's garden then constitute corn piracy?
Asking for a friend of course.
You wouldn't download a corn would you?
Saving seed for the farms own use is expressly allowed under plant variety protection and patent laws in the U.S.
This is why the seed companies created contracts that they require all growers to sign before being allowed to purchase GMO crops. The prohibition from saving seed is from the signed agreement not from the patent or PVP.
Say if you got grain from the farmer for your bird feeder. Then if you happen to use the grain as seed to plant some for next year's bird feeder
completely legal. You are not bound by the agreement between the farmer/seed company. Unless you try to sell the grain/seed to another person. Then you are in violation of the seed companies patent in the U.S.
Remember that corn shows a severe amount of inbreeding depression. So the F2 plant will not produce as much as the farmers F1 did the year before.
That is a reason why most farmers like to purchase seeds every season anyways. It's way more predictable and you may want to change the strain depending on many variables.
Farming, especially commodity crops like wheat, is an extremely risky business. Taking out some risk is often worth it.
Modern farming is way more complicated and scientific than most people realize. The portrayal of farmers as bumbling idiots in popular media is not helping.
This hard, sugarless, unripe tomato sure is red though
At this point, I barely even buy tomatoes to put into food anymore. If mom's been growing them in her greenhouse any given year, I'll eat a few off the vine. The stuff in stores? Ehh, it barely has flavour.
Source that research was banned since the 90s? All I'm aware of is that they aren't available commercially and sale and field testing of terminator seeds has been banned since the 00s.
Yeah they weren't banned in the 90s. They were developed in the mid 90s with a patent filed in 1998. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a moratorium in 2000, recommending that governments block field testing and commercial use of terminator seeds, but didn't yet ban research. In 2006 they expanded the moratorium, explicitly prohibiting field trials and emphasizing risks to biodiversity and farmers rights.
Also, most farmers use hybrid crops, which you already can't save, because they're hybrids. (You can save them, but they're not going to produce the same plants you get them from).
Whether a plant species is hybridized has little effect on whether it grows true from seed or only via cuttings.
Wild maple trees for example do not grow true from seed.
Wild maple trees for example do not grow true from seed.
How do they reproduce?
Finally. FINALLY. My ulcer grows every time I hear someone quote that list of evil things Monsanto does. Even though yes, they are evil.
Monsanto doesn't even exist anymore. It was bought out by the totally not evil company Bayer a while back.
Of course Bayer has suffered quite a bit of indigestion over gobling up that morsel over the years.
the totally not evil company Bayer
Ah, yes, the totally not evil company that (together with BASF and Hoechst, forming the cartel IG Farben) developed chlorine gas for use in world war I.
The same IG Farben which was the single largest donor to Hitler's election campaign, and main contributor to the construction of Auschwitz, where they produced synthetic petrol and rubber for use in the war and performed all manner of human experiments, including testing their own Zyklon B gas.
The same company that decades after the war was still chaired by well known nazis, and profiting from chemicals developed at Auschwitz.
Yeah, I'm sure Monsanto is in good hands, and feels right at home there.
See, totally not evil, yep no evil enterprise here, just the happy little aspirin people, no horrific evil history to be seen La de da t.... 🎶