A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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The moratorium is actually since 2000, but only since 2006 in its current form.
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?
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
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.
also the 30 bagged lunches...
They make more money suing farmers for accidentally growing patented crops from natural seed dispersal mechanisms.
They make their money from royalty payments for GMO traits. It's up to 3x more profit than they get off the seed alone.
Does anyone else feel like this entire post and most of the comments are coming straight from a Monsanto bot/shill factory?
That's what I love about small social media outlets like Lemmy. The big corporations just don't bother monitoring and influencing us, it's not worth it. We can speak freely here. You can just tell me your real name and where you live, without fear of someone abducting your family.
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.
Why invent technology to control people when you can just use the law?
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.
Yea, they're evil enough with the pesticides, and the hostile takeover of farms. We don't need to make the genetic engineering they're doing, which is actually good work, to also be thrown under the bus
I would agree if they didn't use their non-sterile plants to take over small farms around their huge ones by suing for theft when farmers used part of the previous crop that had been pollinated with the Monsanto GM pollen. They didn't buy that genome so it was stolen... Fucking wankers.
Don't we already have enough real shit to worry about tho?
Yeah, except the vast majority of seeds are infertile, meaning they can't be replanted, means the "good ol boys" can't survive.
Where the fuck do people come up with this shit?
No the "vast majority" of crops are not infertile. They are hybrids. Farmers buy the seeds because of a genetic phenomenon called heterosis AKA hybrid vigor. It takes expertise and a shit ton of money to make hybrid seed. If growers could get the same performance from saving their own seeds only an absolute dumbfuck would buy seeds from a seed company.
Now there are a few species that hybrids can only be made by taking advantage of mutants that have male sterility genes. The resulting hybrids are still fertile (produce viable female gametes) but need an outside source of pollen. Examples: onions, sunflowers and carrots.
The only "sterile" seed sold is seedless watermelon aka triploid seed. Seedless watermelons are only sold because the market demands it thanks to a push by the USDA after being created in Japan pre-WW2. The margins on seedless watermelon seed are often 40-50% less than hybrid diploid seed. And don't get me started on the research cost - 14-15 generations for a new female line versus 7-8 for seeded types.
Most hybrids do not produce fertile seeds. You can test it out if you want but it doesn't work. I used to work for a seed company. Beyond that, without fertilizer the soil itself is dead in the vast majority of farming land.
I have planted seeds from round up ready soy beans. They grew just fine for my needs, which wasn't farming. Farmers have also planted harvested hybrid seeds, Monsanto sues the ones they catch, because it's a contract violation for those that bought seeds.
Stop your bullshit.
Not only are they fertile, it is standard protocol to purchase competitors hybrid F1 seed and produce F2 seed in most species (except corn). Eventually plant breeders create inbreds (self-pollinating for 6+ generation's). These inbreds are the used to make new F1 hybrids. In Europe this is referred to as "plant breeders rights".
In corn they have to get a little bit more creative. Corn breeders have to keep distinct genetically distant breeding pools to maintain heterosis in their the resulting hybrids. They pull traits from a competitors hybrid utilizing backcross breeding into their breeding pools.
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.
Isn't one argument against GMO that they could spread and outcompete other crops? In that case a terminator gene would even be a good thing?
That's exactly why the original terminator gene was a joint USDA-ARS /delta-pine effort. The USDA-ARS was looking for ways to prevent GMO species from escaping and causing issues.
You know the shit that actually happened. For example -
Creeping Bentgrass
https://www.opb.org/news/article/gmo-grass-oregon-creeping-bent-scotts-monsanto/
Wheat -
https://www.nature.com/articles/499262a
Corn/teosinte
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167880918301075
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.
I don't think you quite understand what a hybrid for annual crops is. Hybrids in trees are fundamentally different. Same word different meaning.
Apples are a prime example.