Genetically Modified Canola Spreads To Wild Plants 414
eldavojohn writes "A research team conducting a survey has found that about 86% of wild canola plants in North Dakota have genetically modified genes in them, and 'two samples contained multiple genes from different species of genetically modified plants.' Canola usually has little competition when cultivated but does not fare well in the wild. The Roundup Ready and Liberty Link strains of genetically modified canola appear to be crossing over to wild plants and helping it survive. The University of Arkansas team claims that the ease in which genetically modified canola has 'escaped' into the wild should be noted by seed makers like Monsanto because this is proof that it will happen."
Reader n4djs notes that Monsanto has been known to sue farmers for patent infringement when their crops unintentionally contain genetically modified plants.
Weeds? (Score:4, Interesting)
So what's the risk of gene transfer giving us "Roundup Ready" kudzu, poison ivy, etc. in the near future?
Evolution in action (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mansanto Took the Bees to Court (Score:3, Interesting)
You may have figured out the cause of colony collapse disorder. It's actually Monsanto enforcing restraining orders on the bees.
Frankly, I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to actually be behind something like CCD. If they wipe out natural bees, they could launch genetically modified bees that you'd have to buy from Monsanto every year.
That company needs to be shut down for the good of humankind.
unintentionally? (Score:5, Interesting)
Reader n4djs notes that Monsanto has been known to sue farmers for patent infringement when their crops unintentionally contain genetically modified plants.
This might have happened, but the Percy Schmeiser case is not such a case. The Supreme Court of Canada found that Schmeiser deliberately harvested and planted his field with seed which he knew had Monsanto's genetic modifications.
It rather scares me that one of the leading anti-GMO spokesmen is someone who deliberately planted his field with genetically modified seed and then lied about it when he got caught.
Monsanto clean up? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like someone should send them a bill for cleaning it up.
Well two things (Score:5, Interesting)
1) They do a hell of a lot of trials on GM plants. They do a hell of a lot of trials on plants period, but more on GM plants because additional agencies are involved in oversight.
2) We've always been modifying plants for a long time.
If you think the foods you get in the store are "natural" as in "The state in which they exist without human involvement," then you are wrong. We've been doing crude genetic engineering for hundreds of years. It started as simply using plants that were more desirable. If a particular plant was more desirable than others, its seeds got more use. It got refined a bit when Gregor Mendel helped everyone understand how genetic traits work. People got better at cross pollinating plants to get desired traits, and doing things like grafting (cutting off a part of a desired plant and fusing it to another).
As an example, go look up a wild banana. They are not what you find in the supermarket, they are squat, thick, and full of hard seeds. That is how bananas were in the wild. They were engineered by humans, though various means, to be easier to hold and have no seeds. There wasn't any direct genetic manipulation, they were created before that, but it was selective engineering of their genetics going on.
What is going on now is just a further refinement of that. Now there is more direct control over the desired genes, and there is less chance undesired traits make it in. No, it is not 100% risk free. Nothing in the world is. However it is pretty safe over all. You may notice that people are not dying from this, we haven't had an epidemic of many people becoming ill or dying because a genetically engineered food was introduced that had adverse side effects.
Caution is needed, of course, as with anything we do. However fear is unwarranted is is basically just Luddism, just fearing things because they are new.
Re:Some background. Food inc. (Score:5, Interesting)
The funniest thing is that in their response to the film Monsato even directly admits they require farmers saving seed to provide "samples for testing".
In other words, we aren't an arm of government, we have no legal authority to "require" a private citizen to do anything whatsoever ... but if you don't we'll bankrupt you in court.
Face it, Monsanto is the BP of their particular sector of the economy. Both need to be taken down a few notches, if not outright disbanded and their assets sold off.
Puzzling questions (Score:5, Interesting)
Say I'm in my basement (well, I'm always there so that's a given) and I "create" a dandelion that is resistant to all known forms of weed killer and I release it with a giggle into my back yard, obviously in a few months/years every dandelion in the neighborhood is of my variety. Is this illegal?
How about if I only like to look at grass that is purple (ignoring the fact that purple grass would probably just up and die, but for arguments sake lets say it thrives) and I release that into the wild, maybe by throwing a few seeds along all the borders of my property with the intent that it will cross the property line? How about if I didn't mean for it to do so? Is that illegal?
Now say I run a company that makes weed killer and I release a variant that is _only_ susceptible to my weed killer? Is this illegal?
I'm not arguing for or against what Monsanto is doing and merely questioning the legality of releasing modified plants into the wild, of which can reproduce on their own for my personal benefit (monetarily or asthetically). I'm honestly curious here.
Oh the irony......... (Score:2, Interesting)
Canola was created by man by selectively breeding varieties of rapeseed to produce an edible oil product. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canola)
So Monsanto genetically modified it, to promote the use of Round-UP (tm) - not to improve individual plant yields/nutrition, but to make it easier to control weeds. 80%+ farmers have planted it, and now it has escaped into the wild.
Re:Monsanto scares me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: unintentionally? (Score:2, Interesting)
Schmeiser deliberately harvested and planted his field with seed which he knew had Monsanto's genetic modifications.
That may be a valid point when Monsanto-supplied GM crops are grown on 'isolated' fields, and those genetic traits are easily told apart from your own saved seeds and/or naturally occurring ones.
But how about when those modified genes are 'everywhere'? When your own saved seeds include them, even if you would not select at all? When it becomes impossible to find naturally occurring varieties without those genes? Should Monsanto still have a right to sue when it becomes impossible to avoid using crop with their genes in it? When their modified genes have spread so wide that naturally occurring species all have those genes? When selecting crops based on weedkiller-resistance is no different from weighing one naturally occurring species against another naturally occurring one (on whatever selection criteria a farmer may use) ?
Perhaps that would be a short-term fix to problems like these: patent any gene you want, but once it gets out in the wild, lose any protection. That would be a big incentive for companies to keep tabs on where their GM stuff is going. And thus, avoid polluting neighbor fields or roadsides with GM-modified crop (which as we know, is impossible to prevent in the 1st place).
Re:capitalism again. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a difference; Unfortunately there's substantial empirical support for the theory that free markets "breed" companies of increasing size which at some point gain enough power to change the rules in their favor, leading to the kind of monopoly support systems we have today (copyright, patents, bureaucratic requirements). Limiting the market power of a single company is seen as communist, anti-market behavior, yet it is the only way a healthy market can survive without creating the negative consequences and ultimately degenerating into a corporate dictatorship.
it is as simple as this : it is social dynamics. if society itself does not collectively agree on and establish order and therefore limit the freedoms of each and all so that they wont infringe on others' freedoms, elements within society rise to power and establish order in that fashion. society doesnt like chaos. it ends up in order. whether the order is going to be one that is collectively decided, or, one that will be decided by minorities, is the choice.
Re:Mansanto Took the Bees to Court (Score:1, Interesting)
GMO and Monsanto (and others alike) is just plain contamination of the earth, which we will have to pay dearly in a not so distant future by two means:
1. License to the GMO companies.
2. Sick and distorted genes and spoors that will exterminate all natural plant life.
The way these companies are promoting their products, is on the promise of richer crops, more income and healthier world and people. The truth is really the opposite. Sawing Monsanto seed costs 4 times more than the usual crops. The crops will not get 4 times greater. People will suffer from sickness, injuries and bodily disorder because of the manipulation of food.
Re:In fact (Score:4, Interesting)
And that statement is as useful as saying "A green sky would lead to plants growing poorly."
We do not, and never have had, a completely unregulated free market. What we do have in the US, and in all other free countries, is a fundamentally free market. This means people are free to choose to work in the field they please, and that prices, products, etc are generally set by free market principles. The result is the most efficient, least corrupt economy humans have yet been able to create.
Trying to spin it doesn't change the reality. The free market works. That does not mean it is a be-all, end-all, that does not mean that regulation is not useful and necessary. It does mean that so far, we've got nothing better, regardless of if you like that fact or not.
You can't know that the free market works, since we've never had a free market, as you claim.
Or, you could take the reality that there was a completely free market before governments got organized, and apparently people hated it enough to organize governments.
Re:Well two things (Score:2, Interesting)
Food allergies are on the rise and they seem to correspond with Genetically engineered foods. Soybeans are a particularly good example. Google it.
That's it. I quit Slashdot. If I didn't despise you idiots so much, or want to ensure that my children live in a world where your voices weren't the only ones left, I would off myself now.
Why don't you weed-smoking vaccines-cause-autism and HIV-doesn't-cause AIDS motherfuckers go live somewhere in the wild Amazon. Shit... I'll pay out of my own pocket to send you there.
Re:capitalism again. (Score:1, Interesting)
Heh. You picked the one line out of that wiki paragraph that doesn't match any of the others. (The others are things that fascists actually were/are, whereas that line is something a fascist once claimed as a goal but didn't implement). In fascism, corporations serve the government/military "or else".
The rest of your observation is correct, though. It can be generalized further. It doesn't matter what the details of the mechanism of business is (personal or corporate, for modern examples, or being the primary creditor to the King or the Pope for older examples), nor does it even matter what the original government was (it can happen in monarchies with hereditary nobility, it can even happen in "communist" countries). If money is power, then those who gather money also gather power. Eventually the power of the monied eclipses the power of the old government, without also absorbing whatever responsibilities that government had (to the people, to the law, or to anything else). It's a failure mode of any large enough group of humans. The solutions are generally the same in all groups; restrict the concentration of money/power, use estate taxes to prevent wealth (and therefore power) from being an absolute hereditary right; do everything you can to make sure that money is NOT equal to power.
The example I like to use in copyright/patent troll discussions is this: the end goal of any business over a certain size is to increase their market to include all people, and reduce what they have to produce (and any other expenses, like employees) to nothing, until they are effectively levying a tax on the entire population, which the government collects for them, and for which they do *nothing at all* in exchange. Like having to pay The Microsoft Tax on computers that didn't even come with Windows.
Re:capitalism again. (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism [wikipedia.org]
Re:capitalism again. (Score:3, Interesting)
Free Markets are based on low barrier to entry markets dealing with informed customers. If you have those two things, everything else will follow.
Capitalism, by contrast, is based on the regulation of individual exchanges to the benefit of the corporations and the governments.
Capitalism is where the means to production are held in private hands. Capitalism is incompatible with the free market when the barriers to entry are high. Take, say, pay TV. To compete on a national scale you either have to build a wired infrastructure covering the country, or launch a satellite. As such, it may be very capitalistic, but it isn't a free market. Competitors can't enter the market easily if the providers overcharge. The "freedom" to do the exchange is unrelated to the market being restricted to where the market isn't free. For homemade chairs, the market is free and it is capitalistic. You have to own some bamboo or whatever to make your chair, but the cost to entry is low.
In a capitalist system, such as ours has been becoming since the 1890s, the corporations exchange money and other support with the government for the government's ability to protect the corporations from competition.
And you'd like the systems before that, where corporations hired murderers to kill their competitors without government intervention? The government can enforce a free market. And private ownership of land is anti-free market. Say you want to be able to sell corn. Well, if there were no government regulations on it (the thing you are associating with capitalism), you'd still need land. That's a serious barrier to entry. When all the land is owned, and the land is being used by your future competitors, why should they sell you any? They won't, and so land-ownership crushes the free market.
Because in the end, property rights are nothing more and nothing less than the consequences of saying, "I own myself, and no one else does."
Are you one of the loonytarians that think that all rights come from the right to own land? That seems silly to me when, at the time this country was founded, there was no right to own land and many people couldn't own land. And when you look in the Constitution, you have the right to be secure in your land, but not the right to acquire it (one may presuppose the other, but then when you look elsewhere, there are often very restrictive rules on land ownership, like only citizens may own land, or certain pieces of land, or Jews can't own land, or whatever). Those rules were quite common elsewhere at the time, and if they really wanted to guarantee it, they'd have included it. Women owning land at that point in time was very uncommon and illegal in many places in the world. And, since women couldn't own land, then they'd have no rights at all, since those "property rights" are the basis of all other rights, right?
Of course, revoking "personhood" from corporations would fix almost all of this. They should be a recognized legal entity for persistence of contracts (you sign the contract with GE, not with Bob in accounting) and to protect investors who have no say in the running of the company more than an annual vote from losing more than their investment. The existing "corporate veil" should result in not the action of everyone being not-guilty because they couldn't pin it on one, but to charge everyone that knew with criminal conspiracy.
Re:capitalism again. (Score:3, Interesting)
But even if a farmer deliberately cross-bred the seeds (and clearly, not all farmers involved did this): Shouldn't he be allowed to do whatever he wants with the seeds he bought? If Monsanto doesn't want buyers of their seeds to cross-breed them, why don't they create a product that doesn't offer that feature?
Actually, Monsanto's contract with farmers who buy the seed precludes them from using it as a seed crop. By deliberately cross - breeding crops with Monsanto's genes farmers violate the patent; whether such patents should be allowed is another issue.
That feels kind of like jailbreaking an iPhone to me; Apple doesn't want me to do it and they won't offer support if I do it, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal for me to do it.
Just as you own your iPhone, farmers own the seed they buy - and can do what they want with that batch; grow it, eat it, feed it to cattle, let it rot. But, just as you can't take the iOS in your iPhone and sell iPhone clones; farmers can't raise future generations from Monsanto patented seed.
Re:Some background. Food inc. (Score:4, Interesting)
You have to make the right choice, regardless of the consequences. If he hadn't pressed the button, it could have ended up hurting someone, and they have rules. You follow them even if, as in that one, it wasn't a catastrophic failure (it wouldn't have ended up reaching the orbit necessary so it would have been worthless, but it almost certainly wouldn't have harmed anyone either). But BP (and everyone else in the oil industry) doesn't see the harm. They aren't held responsible for spills around Africa or many places in Southeast Asia. They are only "responsible" in the North Sea (better than the US) and the US. Most rig workers with decision power aren't local. So they may get rotated from Africa to the US and living on a rig, they may not take that into account. This wasn't the largest spill. But it got the most press because it was so preventable and so close to a very retribution-oriented and rich country.
Yeah, they screwed up and need to be held responsible. But to blame BP for these actions and not the oil industry as a whole indicates some manner of naivety. It could have been any of them, it just happened to be BP first.
Compare that to Monsanto. They are evil. They should simply have all of their IP revoked by Congress. No need to mess with anything else, and the investors get what they deserve (one of the things I don't like about mutual funds is that I'm probably an investor in Monsanto).
Re:For pedantry's sake (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>It's not patent infringement, it's willful theft of DNA that is the property of Monsanto.
For those who think this is a joke, go watch the video "Food Inc" especially the second half. They interview a number of farmers who did nothing wrong, but were sued by Monsanto because their DNA-modified lants had cross-pollinated with the natural wheat (or corn or soy plants). These farmers were driven into bankruptcy trying to defend themselves (according to the video).
It's equivalent to if RIAA started mailing-out copies of songs to random people's computers, and then sued that person for "possession of intellectual property", even though said person did nothing wrong.
Re:Mansanto Took the Bees to Court (Score:3, Interesting)
Geez, what kind of world am I living in?
Your living in a capitalistic world that is being overran and controlled by corporations.
While Capitalism isn't bad, uncontrolled corporations with power to influence policy & law makers is bad, very, very bad.
Corporations exist to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. That is it. Anything else is secondary.
And when you don't regulate corporations, don't limit their power, you get corruption, and lots of companies doing what they want to make money and not caring about the long term outcome.
Sad part is, i'm not being funny, sarcastic, or talking shit. This crap is real and has been happening all around us.
Re:capitalism again. (Score:3, Interesting)
One situation in Canada always comes to the forefront of my mind when discussing the patenting of genes that creates ownership of crop seeds:
There was a family that had been farming for generations (rapeseed I believe) who banked their own seed each year. Since they had the equipment and knowledge, they often helped others bank their seeds also (I assume for a fee). However, Monsanto frowns upon seed banks because people only license the gene in the seed (for such things as making plants Roundup Ready) and banking seeds means you are producing and using the gene without license. Thus they wanted his activity to stop even though, as long as he did not bank any seeds from plants grown from Monsanto's plants, he was doing nothing illegal.
Fortune smiled on them one day when they found their gene in his crops. Did they have permission to enter his land and take plants to test? No, but how do you stop someone from trespassing on hundreds if not thousands of acres of farmland. They sued the farmer and forced him to destroy the seed bank his family had maintained for generations. If I recall correctly, it was not the farmer breaking their law that caused the incident - it was the neighboring farmer who used Monsanto's seeds (and did not bank his seed) that spilled a bunch of genetically modified seed on the road and into the farmer's field.
That is why I do not think they should be allowed even 7 years of protection. I am not saying the nightmare scenario of Monsanto going over an area and intentionally spraying seed to shut down these farmers will happen - but I find that kind of potential power to be frightening and easily abused. Yes, I believe more in social democracies than democratic republics or socialist states - as such I believe the State, through its university system, should be the one to be investigating such technologies for the benefit of the entire society and not a corporation for the profit of its shareholders
Re:Mansanto Took the Bees to Court (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, Znork, nearly hit the head of the nail in his answer to CCD (minus the joke about the restraining order).
Australian research has shown that Bees that collect pollen from genetically modified plants that were modified to contain the genes for Bacillus thuringiensis (aka Bt) often experience an autoimmune response (i.e an allergic reaction). Bt kills certain species of caterpillar, a really pest for food growers. The Bt does not kill the bees, but in some, the Bt pollen engenders an auto-immune response.
Unfortunately, the auto-immune response disorientes the Bee and it has a difficult time finding its way back to the hive. This is the critical part for if the worker bee cannot get back to the hive within a certain time frame, it dies. One of the symptoms of CCD is that Bees go missing from the Hive.
More recent research ( http://www.commonground.ca/iss/225/PDFs/earthday6.pdf ) is further highlighting the link to the Bt gene in the modified crops as the cause of the Bee disappearance. So yes Monsanto is harming the Bees in unintended ways.
Here is the real nightmare scenerio as a result, if the world looses its population of pollinating insects, some experts predict that humans will be on a quick path to extinction as our current global food production systems still rely heavily on this aspect of the Natural World.
Food for though (pardon the pun!).