Update, 14 May. Don’t try planting your seed corn. The U.S. Supreme Court just handed down a unanimous verdict upholding Monsanto’s position on the patent for its Roundup Ready products. Wired has the story.
Original post. Flathead food safety advocates will hold a March Against Monsanto from 1200–1700 on Saturday, 25 May 2013, in Kalispell’s Depot Park. Like minded activists around the world will be holding similar events in their communities. If the party includes tea, it will be organic.
Monsanto may be best known for genetically modifying soybeans to resist Roundup™, a herbicide manufactured by Monsanto. Roundup Ready seeds are sold tightly wrapped in legal paper:
Monsanto sells these herbicide resistant soybeans to farmers and licenses the herbicide resistance technology to seed producers. In their Technology Agreement, Monsanto limits the use of their seeds and technology to a single season and prohibits supplying it to a third party or replanting second generation seeds. Second generation seeds are the product of soybean plants grown from original seeds. Although the Agreement generally prohibits growers from selling second-generation seeds for replanting, Monsanto does allow growers to sell them to local grain silos to be used as animal feed or sold as a commodity. Commodity seeds are a collection of many different types of seeds from local growers that are purchased for a variety of uses, such as replanting or as livestock feed.
So much for the practice of saving some of your corn crop for next season’s seed. Under the Monsanto principle, you can eat your seed corn, but you can’t plant it.
That rankles. So does the level of detail on genetic modifications on food labels. Just possibly, if you really knew what was in that package of frozen soyburgers, you might decide it was too risky to eat.
There’ll be more information on that and other subjects at the 25 May march in Kalispell.