BBC: Seed battle heads to supreme court (Monsanto)

[NashVegas]

A single farmer from the Canadian Prairies is preparing to take on a mighty biotech corporation in his country's Supreme Court.
..
Mr Schmeiser's battle with Monsanto dates back to 1998, when it accused him of planting the company's genetically modified canola (oilseed rape) on his land without permission, and demanded that he pay it the same fee required of those growing GM crops under contract.
...
Mr Schmeiser's lawyers will argue in the Supreme Court that companies have no right to patent an entire plant, and they have been heartened by a recent ruling from the same court involving the "Harvard Mouse".

In that case, Harvard University claimed a patent on a mouse genetically altered to make it more susceptible to cancer for use in medical research, but the court ruled that a "higher life form" could not be classed as an invention.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3116713.stm

[LEFTofLEFT]

1. Thank God for the Canadians

NO PATENTS ON LIFE FORMS

[Sophree]

2. My brother runs a Vitamin store

The pharmaceutical companies are trying to get patents on EVERYTHING.

People are starting to wise up and are tired of paying through the teeth for overpriced drugs when they can achieve the same results NATURALLY.

And it's cutting into their profits.

Anti-depressants are derived from St. John's Wart.
Kava Kava- muscle relaxer
Valerian root- anti-anxiety
Etc, etc.

Practically any prescription drug can be substituted with something from the vitamin store. I'm not saying that people should do this without Dr. supervision. I wish there were more Drs. of Naturopathy because regular Doctors have tunnel vision and in many cases have an unholy alliance with the pharm. industry.

On edit: to explain the connection to the thread topic. Agribusiness and Pharmaceutical companies have FAR too much power.

[1monster]

3. Niacin for high blood pressure and cholesterol reduction.

My bp was going up and up. Hit something like 154/98 and a bit higher for several weeks in a row when I heard about a regimen to bring it down.

I started taking 500mg of niacin three times a day, two apsirin in the morning and at bed time, drinking orange juice and eating bananas. Three weeks later my bp is 128/82 and hopefully going down still more.

Compare that with the high cost of many blood pressure meds...

As for Monsanto, I would dearly like to see them get a figuretive stick in the figurtive eye. I'm still royally ticked off at them for contaminating our milk supply with all their drugs/homones to make cows produce more milk. They are destroying our food supplies, not making it better.

On another note, if I buy flower seeds at the store, I pay for them. If I then plant and cultivate those flower seeds, I collect the seeds they produce at the end of the summer for planting next season. I do not pay for those seeds again. I think that Monsanto is morally wrong here. They own the original seed, but not the plant that grows and produces from it.

[depakid]

4. Watch those nutraceuticals- some are dangerous

taken in therapeutic doses, St. John's Wort can cause photo sensitivity and it's in a class of drugs called MAO inhibitors that require SERIOUS dietary precautions to avoid harming yourself.

Kava is hepatoxic (meaning that it is harmful to the liver) Studies are underway abroad to determine the extent of the danger.

So far as I know, valerian is safe, but it makes many people drowsy and damn, does it STINK!

[jamesinca]

13. Most of your anxiolytics will cause drowsiness

But on the same ide, magnesium is a muslce relaxant. What is given to women in premature labor, Magnesium Sulfate. What is in Doans extra Strenght back ache pills, magnesium. Like you said you need to take things in moderation. alcohol is good in moderation, but it does make for some smelly puke if not.

[NickB79]

5. Question: did he purposely plant the seed, or did it accidentally grow?

I know that a farmer was sued by Monsanto several years ago for GM seed growing on his land that had gotten there by falling off a passing truck that he never planted intentionally. Is this the same man, or a different farmer who purposely saved seed from the previous years crop and replanted it?

Another question: are any non-GM crops, such as various hybrid corn varieties, patented? I thought I read somewhere that they are, due to the trouble the seed companies go to to crossbreed and develop them. If this is true, why is that any different than holding patents on GM crops?

[Eloriel]

6. Hybrids

I don't know if they're patented or not, but there's a built-in mechanism that makes trying to save seeds not worth the effort (for the most part): if you use this year's crop of seeds from hybrid plants, next year's crop will NOT be "true" to the hybridized variety. They revert back to one of the parents, or some less desirable mixture of parents' traits.

Eloriel

[glitch]

7. same guy - never planted the seed, considers it contamination

Percy Schmeiser grew wheat and canola on the Canadian prairie for 40 years before the Monsanto corporation knocked on his door. They sued him for 'stealing' patented seed that had contaminated his own crops, and he has taken his fight against corporate abuse and genetic contamination all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court. Hear Percy Schmeiser discusses his personal crusade against the world's largest producer of genetically engineered crops.


“I stood up to them because I believe that a farmer should never give up the right of being able to use his own seed...my grandparents came from Europe in the late 1890s to open this land, to be free, and to grow what they wanted to grow. Now we are going back to a feudal system that they left" - Percy Schmeiser

from http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=6477 an mp3 where he tells his story. It's heartbreaking.

[NashVegas]

8. Feudal System

Percy knows the score. If any other farmers are on to it, they aren't saying too much.

Agribusiness is turning our farmers from landowners into serfs and tenant farmers.

[arikara]

9. He didn't want the contamination, he saved his own seed for decades.

This is how easy it is for these frankenseeds to contaminate the food supply. This is a terrible story. These corporations have gotten way out of hand with the government's collusion here in Canada as well as the US.

*********

Percy Schmeiser is a farmer from Bruno, Saskatchewan Canada whose Canola fields were contaminated with Monsanto's Round-Up Ready Canola. Monsanto's position is that it doesn't matter whether Schmeiser knew or not that his canola field was contaminated with the Roundup Ready gene and that he must pay their Technology Fee.

http://www.percyschmeiser.com/

I heard a clip with him on Amy Goodman's show too. It made me cry.

[DemBones DemBones]

10. They seized his entire crop and all the seeds he had saved,

ending forty years of his own experimentation aimed at improving his crops. Monsanto has won in the courts so far but I hope that Canada's Supreme Court will correct this outrage. Monsanto trespasses on farmers' land to look for evidence that they have patented plants growing in their fields. Corporations are out of control when they do this sort of thing.

If you're not a Kucinich supporter, please encourage your candidate to commit to refusing to allow Monsanto and the US government to bully the rest of the world into accepting GM foods -- and to commit to labeling for all GM foods sold in the US. Kucinich is already on the job on these issues but other Dems need to raise them, too.

This is our *food* we're talking about. Not enough studies have been done to prove GM foods are as safe or even as nutritious as non-GM foods, and there are always "escapes" of experimental GMOs, like the plants that founds their way into Percy's fields. Already, over 600 piglets born to GM sows (they were modified with genes from cows) were marketed and sold as pork products for human consumption BY MISTAKE. All the piglets were supposed to be DESTROYED for safety reasons. :mad: :scared:

[Vitruvius]

12. Montsanto, by seizing the farmer's seeds stole his INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

and his 'forty years of his own experimentation aimed at improving his crops'.

But big business is allowed to steal intellectual property from the rest of us all-the-time. They've been ripping off inventors, recording artists, software innovators, and plant breeders and farmers from day one.

But God forbid some teenager should download an MP3. That's a felony.

One law for the rich. Another law for the rest of us.

Heil Bu$h*!

[KT2000]

11. Loving Canada and Canadians

Good for this man!! Good for Canada too!
Did you know that Monsanto has a business plan, with the assistance of Arthur Anderson Consulting, that calls for them controlling the world's seed supply in 20 years? The plan is to flood the market with GM foods so that people will just give up on their objections.
These people must be stopped.

This is dangerous stuff - not tested on humans and there are a lot of things that can go wrong once inside the body. They don't really even know enough about how proteins work to even know what is going to happen.
If it wasn't for Canada and Europe we would be swamped with even more of this frankenfood than we are - but is on its way.

Eat organic and thank the Canadians

[arikara]

14. Don't thank us for stopping GM foods

Our government is right in there playing with the big boys of Monsanto. Most Canadians don't want GM foods but the government even refuses to require labelling.

On edit:
One more thing, I haven't heard this story mentioned yet on the CBC, only the BBC is covering it so far.

[nuxvomica]

15. It's not only potentially dangerous, it may cause a famine some day

These deliberate mutations could result in a widespread strain that is susceptible to a disease or pest. So what if their GMO wheat is grown across the planet but is discovered too late to be susceptible to an obscure fungus? I've read that the WTO et al. are forcing 3rd-world nations to plant GM crops even though they haven't been conditioned to those climates. Could we some day be in danger of losing an entire season's crop everywhere?