The seeds are typically the product; e.g. corn, soy, canola.
So the seeds resulting from harvest are not destroyed but sold to be processed into flour, feed, etc.
The issue is farmers saving seeds for planting vs. selling them as product, not saving them vs. destroying them.
In the ordinary course of farming (including with GM seed), farmers only destroy seeds if they have become tainted/moldy/dirty/etc. and unsuitable for consumption.
I agree that it would be better to keep and plant moldy seeds, because while it's impossible to pick out the bad ones and use them as food, they may still grow. But given modern techniques this could result in uneven field density which would be a problem without manual thinning.
I agree also that in some cases it might be more efficient for farmers to save seed on site, and to license the technology year by year and manufacture their own seeds for personal use (so they pay a fee rather than buy new seed, to save transportation costs etc.). It's possible that monsanto offers a contract like this. However, due to cross-pollination, the seeds a farmer saves may not be a pure strain so might not be as disease resistant or have as good yield. Farmers probably prefer to start fresh to prevent those issues and ensure good quality seed rather than risk the harvest. It doesn't take much seed to grow a lot of food, so the costs of buying new seed wouldn't be much different from licensing your own saved seed from Monsanto.
Steve Wagar wrote: ↑Fri Oct 13, 2017 1:04 pmAnd they have at time used their power to ruin farmers who did nothing wrong.
That one is a myth, it's based on Percy Schmeiser:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Schmeiser
He intentionally grew Monsanto seed as determined by several courts. That article contains only Schmeiser's account, but the courts were very skeptical and believed that he purchased the seeds and lied about it (although this hasn't been proved). There's more detail in the article on the court case itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeiser
All claims relating to Roundup Ready canola in Schmeiser's 1997 canola crop were dropped prior to trial and the court only considered the canola in Schmeiser's 1998 fields. Regarding his 1998 crop, Schmeiser did not put forward any defence of accidental contamination. The evidence showed that the level of Roundup Ready canola in Mr. Schmeiser's 1998 fields was 95-98% (See paragraph 53 of the trial ruling[4]). Evidence was presented indicating that such a level of purity could not occur by accidental means. On the basis of this the court found that Schmeiser had either known "or ought to have known" that he had planted Roundup Ready canola in 1998. Given this, the question of whether the canola in his fields in 1997 arrived there accidentally was ruled to be irrelevant. Nonetheless, at trial, Monsanto was able to present evidence sufficient to persuade the Court that Roundup Ready canola had probably not appeared in Schmeiser's 1997 field by such accidental means (paragraph 118[4]). The court said it was persuaded "on the balance of probabilities" (the standard of proof in civil cases, meaning "more probable than not" i.e. strictly greater than 50% probability) that the Roundup Ready canola in Mr. Schmeiser's 1997 field had not arrived there by any of the accidental means, such as spillage from a truck or pollen travelling on the wind, that Mr. Schmeiser had proposed.
I believe Schmeiser was lying, and that he acquired and intentionally planted GM seed and pretended it was inadvertent for publicity (which he has been milking ever since).
Schmeiser is a politician and a public figure, and stirring up trouble with Monsanto is his claim to fame and has become his career, as he's a sought after speaker in the anti-GMO world.
Monsanto has more explanation, and cites court rulings. More importantly, their policy is pretty clear:
https://monsanto.com/company/media/statements/gmo-contamination-lawsuits/
It is truly as simple as this: Monsanto has a long-standing public commitment that “it has never been, nor will it be, Monsanto’s policy to exercise its patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits are present in a farmer’s fields as a result of inadvertent means.”
They have no interest in bad PR or alienating their customers by suing people for doing something accidental. The suit only happened after Schmeiser refused to negotiate settlement. He wouldn't stop growing their GM seed, and he wouldn't pay licensing fees; Schmeiser claimed he owned the GM seed because it fell on his land and so he could grow and sell it all he wanted.
If he had just said, "sorry, it was an accident, I won't save seed from that field next year" they would have dropped it. They probably even would have paid to clean up his field as they later agreed to do.
Steve Wagar wrote: ↑Fri Oct 13, 2017 1:04 pm
The problem is that capitalism needs to be regulated by mechanisms that preserve the public good, and representative democracy as we know it is not particularly good at that because it rests on 3 bad assumptions: (a) that representatives represent the interests of their constituents instead of moneyed interests, (b) that elected representatives with no qualifications are now experts, and (c) that voters with no qualifications are qualified to elect their representatives. The biggest flaw in all of these assumptions is not so much that people are ignorant as that they presume people will act rationally, when the truth is that the truth is easily obscured and thus people are easily manipulated.
I agree it's a problem in many industries. I think the GM industry is pretty benign, but this is a serious issue in other situations like with the oil industry where they have funded propaganda and basically convinced Republicans that global warming is a hoax and convinced Democrats that the only viable competition (nuclear) is too dangerous. Politicians are not well educated enough to rule on these issues, nor is the general population (how many people understand climate science or nuclear physics?).
Fortunately when it comes to GM tech and the implications of patents and yield, farmers are pretty well educated on these topics and know what they're doing, and because they make up a big voting block they have a lot of sway to prevent corporate abuses in plant agriculture... the flip side of that is that farmers are themselves abusing the country by extracting substantial subsidies from government as bribes and promoting animal agriculture. There's no real risk of farmers being duped or controlled by GM companies because they're well informed and in control.
Steve Wagar wrote: ↑Fri Oct 13, 2017 1:04 pm
In theory, farmers can wait for the patents to expire and then be able to keep their own seeds going forward, but that would depend on being able to find someone who kept the original patented seeds without planting them, and then planted them to make more.
There are lots of patent expired seeds available, but they're inferior. The thing is that the newest patented seeds are literally better, and it's worth the price to buy them because they get a better harvest and more disease resistance (remember we're in evolutionary warfare with diseases). It's like, why would you use a first generation iphone for "free" when the newest one is so much better and not really that expensive? It would be false economy to use the old seeds. New ones are just worth it in terms of the bottom line, otherwise GM companies couldn't sell seed.
Even if they weren't available, you could make them if you really wanted them. It's not just the seed, but the technology to make the seed which is patented. Once those technology patents expire, it's relatively easy to engineer the traits (or better). It would be a big investment for a single farmer, but graduate students do this kind of thing and a farmer's collective could easily fund it if they wanted a particular GM trait.
Steve Wagar wrote: ↑Fri Oct 13, 2017 1:04 pm
And while Monsanto may not sell pesticide-ready seeds to promote pesticide sales, they do sell them because farmers like them, and that is not good news for the planet. We need ways to encourage farmers to stop using dangerous pesticides.
I think enforcement at the government level is the best way. The EPA and FDA already regulate these things pretty well.