This judgment establishes powerful legal precedent globally, affirming that the ancient right of farmers to save and share seeds supersedes commercial interests, reshaping the legal balance of power between communities and agribusiness worldwide.
Unless I have missed something huge, if this were about crops bioengineered to be sterile, they wouldn’t even need to take action to prevent seed sharing, because the seeds would be sterile.
Most GM crops aren’t sterile, and for that Monsanto and others sue farmers for having crops “they didn’t pay the rights to have” - people are also sued because crops from other farms grew on their land through natural means (like animals and wind carrying seeds).
The World According to Monsanto is a pretty shocking documentary, it’s from 2008 and I’d bet there are tons of more awful things that happened since then.
Usually the problem with heavily engineered seeds from agribusiness is that they’re sort of unstable from generation to generation. They have their seed plants set up just so so that the generation they sell is at an engineered local maxima point of sorts, and then subsequent generations from that aren’t reliably that anymore, and trend towards more normal variations of the crop. They can still technically be reused, with somewhat lower yields in subsequent generations.
It’s sort of like how a lot of fruit trees don’t grow from seed right and need grafting to produce desirable fruit, just less dramatic since most annual seed crops are more stable in general because if they weren’t they’d not have been cultivated to begin with.
Also the agribusinesses are very shitty about it, because their goal is control: a farmer leaving their sales ecosystem is a threat to the stranglehold they want to exert on them, they just can’t legally bully them for dropping their product and sourcing unrelated seeds but they can bully them for reusing the seeds they’ve purchased (and they try to establish a monopoly on seed sales as best they can, to ensure farmers can only go along with them and then have to be dependent on them too). They want this faustian bargain: the farmers get a higher yield crop for obeying them indefinitely, and a lower yield crop and legal threats if they don’t keep submissively playing along.
deleted by creator
Unless I have missed something huge, if this were about crops bioengineered to be sterile, they wouldn’t even need to take action to prevent seed sharing, because the seeds would be sterile.
Most GM crops aren’t sterile, and for that Monsanto and others sue farmers for having crops “they didn’t pay the rights to have” - people are also sued because crops from other farms grew on their land through natural means (like animals and wind carrying seeds).
The World According to Monsanto is a pretty shocking documentary, it’s from 2008 and I’d bet there are tons of more awful things that happened since then.
deleted by creator
Usually the problem with heavily engineered seeds from agribusiness is that they’re sort of unstable from generation to generation. They have their seed plants set up just so so that the generation they sell is at an engineered local maxima point of sorts, and then subsequent generations from that aren’t reliably that anymore, and trend towards more normal variations of the crop. They can still technically be reused, with somewhat lower yields in subsequent generations.
It’s sort of like how a lot of fruit trees don’t grow from seed right and need grafting to produce desirable fruit, just less dramatic since most annual seed crops are more stable in general because if they weren’t they’d not have been cultivated to begin with.
Also the agribusinesses are very shitty about it, because their goal is control: a farmer leaving their sales ecosystem is a threat to the stranglehold they want to exert on them, they just can’t legally bully them for dropping their product and sourcing unrelated seeds but they can bully them for reusing the seeds they’ve purchased (and they try to establish a monopoly on seed sales as best they can, to ensure farmers can only go along with them and then have to be dependent on them too). They want this faustian bargain: the farmers get a higher yield crop for obeying them indefinitely, and a lower yield crop and legal threats if they don’t keep submissively playing along.