Cede Our Seeds?

[mahnmut]

Hey, my beloved procrastinators! It's been a while since we had our last installment of ridiculously over-simplified and unbearably polarized hypothetical situations, inspired by the NationStates online game - you know, that place where you're the benevolent ruler of your own fictional state, which you're completely free to shape as you please,

Comments

[johnny9fingers]

After being torn between options one and three I eventually plumped for three. But should McShanto's products escape their genetic confines, I would limit their ability to sue farmers for using their genome without a license. If runoff is a problem it should be McShanto's not ordinary farmers.

Not sure I'd want to eat the corn though, I'll stick to picking the stringy bits out if my teeth.

[garote]

While we're banning stuff, we should also ban that other horrible monstrosity of human genetic meddling: the donkey!

Further experimentation on these horrible mutants is an abomination, and we are way behind the times by allowing it to continue. Greek historian Herodotus had it right, when he talked in dark tones of a donkey successfully breeding with a horse, calling it an ill omen of Xerxes' invasion of Greece in 480 BC. (I am not making that up.)

[johnny9fingers]

I do rather think there is a difference between selective and cross-breeding, and inserting a chain of scorpion poison chromosomes into corn DNA to limit predation. But minimising hyperbole, and exaggeration aside, being a classicist, and having read my Herodotus, I agree with you that donkeys mating with horses is no problem and in hindsight any concern about such is risible; still the father of history got some things right. But such seems true of all thinkers, great and small. (For that matter, as another different example from a different period, when Thomas Aquinas speaks of unnatural acts, he seems to miss examples from nature which contradict his thesis. Even the great amongst us cherry-pick to bolster their theses

[garote]

They why throw your support behind chemical-based genetic rights management? "GRM" is exactly the angle Monsanto is chasing, to back its ugly lawsuits and revenue stream.

[garote]

The real-life situation this is drawn from involves a pesticide that dramatically improves crop yield, allowing the farmer to make enough extra profit to offset the cost of both the pesticide and the new seed. This hypothetical assumes - apparently - that the fancy buttery non-stringy corn sells for a higher price than the regular type. If farmers decide it's worth the risk of using a genetic monoculture crop that is potentially much more vulnerable to local pest varieties, then they can go ahead and do that. The yield will be lower, but the selling price will be higher, so apparently it will balance out. What's the problem

[htpcl]

And your vote is? ;-)

[garote]

Well I suppose I'd have to go with #2, since that one isn't asking for anything except to allow engineered sterilization.

[johnny9fingers]

But here's the thing I do know: Monsanto's use of the court system to protect it's "patented" genes is complete fucking bullshit. Their genes are useless without being embedded in an extremely complicated self-replicating machine that is about as "in the public domain" as anything could ever be, considering how long agriculture has been around. They package their "product" in a self-replicator and sell it, and then get pissed off then a nearby farmer's crop cross-pollinates with it? The farmers should be suing THEM. For fucking up their irreplaceable seed stocks that are bred over generations to grow successfully in their region's soil and climate. Let's see fucking Monsanto replace THAT in a lab.

*ahem* *cough* I mean McShanto.Absolutely. And the previous paragraph is pretty incontestable too