FARMERS WIN A ROUND AGAINST ROUNDUP

Oh, the pleasure, the glee, nay, the schadenfreude it gives me to announce that, in the words of Progressive Moderate over at Daily Kos, “Monsanto has just had its ass handed to it.”

Four Monsanto patents for genetically modified crops have been rejected by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on the grounds that Monsanto has been using the patents “to harass, intimidate, sue - and in some cases literally bankrupt - American farmers.”

Monsanto’s been using these patents to file patent infringement lawsuits against farmers who can’t afford to hire adequate legal counsel to defend themselves. The farmers’ alleged crime? Saving their seeds from the last year’s crop to plant the next season’s, as farmers have done since, well, forever.

How does this constitute patent infringment? Because Monsanto’s GMO crops have a nasty habit of trespassing and tainting non-GMO crops. And Monsanto has an equally nasty habit of sending private investigators to snatch seed samples from non-GMO farmers to test for evidence that the farmers have “stolen” Monsanto’s patented seeds.

Take the case of Percy Schmeiser, a seventy-five year old Canadian canola farmer whose case has been well documented (see, for starters, Schmeiser's own website, or Deborah Koons Garcia’s documentary The Future of Food or Sandor Katz’s book The Revolution Will Not be Microwaved.)

Schmeiser’s non-GMO canola crop was contaminated by Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola when the winds carried pollen from neighboring farms that were growing the patented, genetically modified canola. Monsanto sued Schmeiser for patent infringement and demanded monetary damages.

As Katz describes it, Monsanto’s lawsuit was an attempt to force Schmeiser to “pay for the privilege of having his seeds contaminated.”

Incredibly, Monsanto won, although the Canadian Supreme Court later ruled, magnanimously, that Schmeiser hadn’t actually profited from copyright infringement and therefore owed no monetary damages.

Monsanto allocates a big chunk of change—$10 million in 2005, according to the Center for Food Safety--just to prosecute (or, really, persecute) farmers, filing ninety lawsuits of this nature against farmers in twenty-five states in that year alone.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office determined that Monsanto was not entitled to any of the patents based on evidence submitted by the Public Patent Foundation, a not-for-profit legal services organization. The Ag-Ip-News Agency quoted PUBPAT's Executive Director Dan Ravicher:

“We are extremely pleased that the Patent Office has agreed with us that Monsanto does not deserve these patents that it has used to unfairly bully American farmers. Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end of the harm being caused to the public by Monsanto's aggressive assertion of these patents, which threatens family farms and a diverse American food supply."

But the threat extends well beyond the boundaries of our own family farms. Monsanto is in fact out to control the world’s seed supply, aided and abetted by our own government, and that’s not just me talking out of my tinfoil hat.

As Katz documents in The Revolution Will Not be Microwaved, investigative reporter Greg Palast dug up State Department documents from February 2003--a month before we invaded Iraq--that suggest a strategy was already in place to use seed and plant patents to undermine Iraqi farmers’ self-sufficiency and force them to depend on “the high tech global seed market, while imposing the legal framework to permanently disempower local farmers,” as Katz writes.

Oh, and by the way? In the processing of democratizing Iraq by way of bombs and brutality, we managed to wipe out the bulk of Iraq’s seed stocks, resulting, according to an FAO report, “in the loss of almost all generations of seeds of all crops.” We did the same thing in Afghanistan, too, although I guess we overlooked the poppy seeds.

So forgive me for gloating over Monsanto’s misfortune. Here’s hoping it’s a sign of a sea change that’s not too late to stop our amber waves of grain from going GMO.