The issue isn’t whether they’ll be arrested for planting traditional seeds, the issue is whether patent law should recognize life forms, which apparently under the old Iraqi code it did not. Now that it does, and if Monsanto does get a beachhead in Iraq, using Monsanto seeds will give farmers a production edge over the farmer who doesn’t. Hold outs, those who use the traditional seeds, will normally find themselves with lower yields and at a competitive disadvantage compared to farmers using the Monsanto patented crops. The reason for this is at it’s base chemical, not genetic, because the new crops are highly resistant to the toxic effects of Monsanto’s signature herbicide, Roundup, and this allows massive use of the toxin on a scale that would ordinarily be prohibitive, because along with the weeds and other living elements in the soil the product would also kill the farmer’s cash crop as well. No longer. Now roundup can be applied in such heavy quantities it has led researchers to dub the practice Chemo-farming, after the non dissimilar therapy for cancer sufferers that attempts to kill cancer cells but all too often winds up killing many of the patients as well. Roundup migration to other fields (called “drift”) causes serious problems, where farms are small and the other fields are held by different owners. These innocent farmers who use herbicides in a totally different manor, if at all, now find their precious water tainted and their traditional crops “inadvertently” killed by the chemical, forcing them into the same burdensome financial cycle where they have to buy the new seeds and now Roundup in turn. Not to mention the problems associated with the health effects of cumulative exposure on the people themselves. While it’s highly touted as a product that “breaks down fast” it’s still the leading cause of illness, at least among California landscape and farm workers where it ranks as numbers one and three respectively.
So far from being this ridiculously simple equation the corporation mouthpieces would have you believe, “Don’t like Patent Seeds, don’t use ‘em!” turns out, as usual to be cynical sloganeering. The effects go way beyond the decisions of isolated individuals applying these engineered products on their own plots. By creating this system in patent law they can very well damage traditional farming, with a little knowledge of human behavior it’s relatively easy to craft laws in such a fashion that create dependence on chemo-farming along with the multi national conglomerates and the world leaders (and police and court systems) supporting and enforcing it, and ultimately that’s the only point of the exercise from the corporations’ point of view.
Creating in essence a class of serfs where you once had not rich but at least independent farmers is an underhanded practice the wealthy and powerful have regularly encouraged and often notoriously accomplished. So while nothing in law may directly prohibit growers from husbanding seeds and using traditional crops the system does stack the odds so far in favor of the conglomerates it all but accomplishes the same thing.
- js.
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