It’s performance horticulture.
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I don’t see the comparison between art and this. The geneticists are payed for their work. Why the hell should Pepsi be so fundamental to the funding for that kind of research and why the hell should they as a corporation own the results? Because capitalism? So… and… I’m aware that’s just how it is, but at the same time I really do see a big difference between an individual making a single work of art and a team of salaried researchers working over a span of 10 or 20 years towards a product that may or may not be realized and whose complex production scale has more to do with optimal profits than with any other consideration that could be made along the entire chain even if that has to be to the detriment of human society.
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Maybe the local PepsiCo agent is running a scam?
Dump unmarked cheap seed potatoes on the market, go round and shake down the farmers later.
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Just waiting for fully DRM’d food where if I don’t pay some corporation a fee that I starve to death. Great. 
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That is a nice photo, but I think Cory was making a point-- it’s not just Gandhi, it’s Gandhi illegally making salt, another necessity for life that the British authorities had controlled and taxed.
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That flavorlessness is probably part of what they bred for.
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… seeking $150,000 each in damages.
$150,000 in damages for each potato?!?!
Or am I reading that wrong?
It bears repeating in this thread because so many people keep saying it. This isn’t about people saying that you can’t grow potatoes. This is a specific species that has been extensively designed to have certain properties that the designer wanted. The properties for a chipping potato are: shape, texture, color, and resitance to specific diseases and pests. Only those latter properties would be beneficial for someone not wanting to make chips out of the potato. And there are plenty of other potato species that have the same resistances but better shape and texture for non-chip uses.
With regards to your ‘partial’ arguement, how is that different than an artist creating a painting? Did they invent paint? Did they invent brushes? Did they invent the idea of painting?
This is not true and it would be nice if people would stop repeating it.
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Or, as Monsanto says:
“We would never do such a thing as we have repeatedly done, we would never ever do that!”
Perhaps the most complete story is here:
"The idea, however, is inspired by a real-world event. Back in 1999, Monsanto sued a Canadian canola farmer, Percy Schmeiser, for growing the company’s Roundup-tolerant canola without paying any royalty or “technology fee.” Schmeiser had never bought seeds from Monsanto, so those canola plants clearly came from somewhere else. But where?
Canola pollen can move for miles, carried by insects or the wind. Schmeiser testified that this must have been the cause, or GMO canola might have blown into his field from a passing truck. Monsanto said that this was implausible, because their tests showed that about 95 percent of Schmeiser’s canola contained Monsanto’s Roundup resistance gene, and it’s impossible to get such high levels through stray pollen or scattered seeds. However, there’s lots of confusion about these tests. Other samples, tested by other people, showed lower concentrations of Roundup resistance — but still over 50 percent of the crop.
Schmeiser had an explanation. As an experiment, he’d actually sprayed Roundup on about three acres of the field that was closest to a neighbor’s Roundup Ready canola. Many plants survived the spraying, showing that they contained Monsanto’s resistance gene — and when Schmeiser’s hired hand harvested the field, months later, he kept seed from that part of the field and used it for planting the next year.
This convinced the judge that Schmeiser intentionally planted Roundup Ready canola. Schmeiser appealed. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Schmeiser had violated Monsanto’s patent, but had obtained no benefit by doing so, so he didn’t owe Monsanto any money. (For more details on all this, you can read the judge’s decision. Schmeiser’s site contains other documents.)
So why is this a myth? It’s certainly true that Monsanto has been going after farmers whom the company suspects of using GMO seeds without paying royalties. And there are plenty of cases — including Schmeiser’s — in which the company has overreached, engaged in raw intimidation, and made accusations that turned out not to be backed up by evidence."
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Fair enough, but many of us are understandably worried about the implications of holding proprietary rights over a food source.
Do you know more about this story than everyone else here, because the CNN story doesn’t have much detail. I think a lot of us are assuming the farmers are pretty poor (farming only a few acres), and recognize the problem that hunger has always been in large parts of the world. Whether this species is better for chipping or not probably doesn’t matter to someone who is hungry. And where did these farmers get the potato, industrial espionage? More likely they found a potato somewhere and made cuttings. It just smacks of taking food out of someone’s mouth for principles of the market and not morals.
Humans invented the idea of painting and treat it as something nobody holds the exclusive rights to. One could argue the ancient Inca “invented” the potato by cultivating it, so perhaps we should all give a portion of our potato-based profits to Peru? It may be that holding proprietary rights over a food source is not something the human race wants to keep pursuing in the future. Everyone knows what McDonald’s “special sauce” is (it’s basically Russian dressing with some extra bits) and it hasn’t hurt their sales.
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It bears repeating that food should not be a commodity. Period. Not that people can’t make money off the sale of food, but when the markets come to dominate the production of food, it has dire consequences for small farmers. In many cases where small farmers are working nearby to agribusiness farms, these are people who have been pushed into a monoculture by the corporatization of the local farming economy. These are long standing historical patterns. Almost anyone who has written on the issue of the commodification of farming have noted this in the modern era.
Do YOU know what they have access to? Do YOU think that these are people trying to horn in on the global chip market, rather than grow food for themselves and for the local marketplace? Unfortunately, the article doesn’t really say… But historically, it’s not been uncommon for small farmers to be pushed into a monoculture, where they end up depending on a single crop, instead of being able to grow what their family needs and selling the rest to the community.
You need to talk to various news outlets who have been talking about a similar issue for a while now, with pollen from agribusinesses ending up in neighboring farms… @docosc posted plenty of evidence that they indeed have sued people who ended up with their strains in their fields…
The core problem here, which is my concern, is where does this road lead us to, where all our food crops come from patented seeds owned by corporations?
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Give them an inch, and they’ll take 20 miles.
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This is it right here, this is the question. Holding a patent or trademark on a living creature is not something the human race has any experience with until now. Should we not question the long term implications?
I understand, companies like Monsanto invest time and money in ‘their’ plant, but they invest time and money in lots of projects that don’t come to fruition. If the world decides this isn’t a wise practice then they take a loss. Too bad. If profits were more important than human health and well-being then we wouldnt have the FDA.
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I only know what I’ve read, but I have read more than the article CD links because that seemed prudent. It’s way to easy for a writer to have a bias either intentionally or unintentionally.
From RT which isn’t a reputable news source, but this seems a fairly inconsequential part of the story, so maybe they’re right, they claim the farmers farm 3-4 acres of potatoes on their farms. Before anyone thinks “that’s small” keep in mind that one acre of land can produce 45000lb of potatoes a year. So, a 3-4 acre plot is not a small “I feed my family” farm, it’s going to be selling those potatoes. That’s where PepsiCo has an issue with this. Who are they selling those potatoes to (and were did they get the potatoes they grew in the first place?) The original Reuters story says that PepsiCo offered to settle with the farmers if they would only stop growing that particular species of potato. They went further to say that they could grow it, but they’d have to enter into the same deal that other growers do–a guarantee to purchase the crop and a guarenteed purchase price for the crop. The reports say that the farmers refused both offers.
To be clear, you don’t find this species of potato lying around in the market, the only people who have the potatoes are PepsiCo and their contracted farmers. The farmers are required to see all the potatoes that they grow (of this species) to PepsiCo. Short of theft or some other shady goings on, you can’t get your hands on these potatoes. To have several (nine or four depending on the reporting) farmers producing it means that someone has been breaking their contract.
On the topic of should we be able to pattent/copright/etc. a living organism, then that’s a fine discussion to have. My arguement is that the law is currently what it is and from what I can find, PepsoCo has a reasonable case, has tried to be nice about it, but had no other options left.
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Right? What is the goal and who benefits? What are the implications of that, over the long term? Who loses out and how do they lose out?
I once heard someone describe a corporations (or a university or a government or other long last, large scale institution) as being there to carry out long term projects for the good of humanity (which is admittedly a very optimistic view of what they are, and I’m less inclined to be so generous!). If what a corporation is doing it’s not in the interests of all of us, why should they be allowed to do it to the exclusion of other options?
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Just look what happened when Bob Dylan got so annoyed at the crumbs his girlfriend left after eating potato chips in bed that he wrote a song about it:
“Lays, lady, Lays…Lays across my big brass bed.”
Hugely popular song.
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Interesting. I will keep that in mind for when I am trapped alone on Mars.
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