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Farmers advance in their suit against Monsanto
10 Feb 2012 10:03 AM
Monsanto is getting a taste of its own medicine; the company is being taken to court.
In this corner, we have a corporate biotech giant with a tighter grasp on the agricultural Monopoly board than your over-enthusiastic little sister on game night. (Their patented genes are in more than 80 percent of the soybeans, corn, cotton, sugar beets, and canola seeds grown in the U.S.) And in this corner, 83 scrappy plaintiffs representing non-GMO seed producers, farmers, and agricultural organizations who say they want the biotech company to stop suing and threatening them. While most are organic, not all of them are.
The latter group — led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and referred to in the lawsuit as OSGATA et al. — has turned to a strategy Monsanto has been using for a while now: the courts. Although they certainly aren’t the first sustainability-minded folks to take their struggle to the courts, their suit, filed last March, has a sweet sense of irony.
As we reported last March, when the lawsuit was first announced, OSGATA et al. is fighting an old battle against Monsanto’s so-called “seed police” and their practice of suing farmers for patent infringement because pollen or seeds from a farm growing GMO plants nearby drifts onto their land.
~snip~
Monsanto is getting a taste of its own medicine; the company is being taken to court.
In this corner, we have a corporate biotech giant with a tighter grasp on the agricultural Monopoly board than your over-enthusiastic little sister on game night. (Their patented genes are in more than 80 percent of the soybeans, corn, cotton, sugar beets, and canola seeds grown in the U.S.) And in this corner, 83 scrappy plaintiffs representing non-GMO seed producers, farmers, and agricultural organizations who say they want the biotech company to stop suing and threatening them. While most are organic, not all of them are.
The latter group — led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and referred to in the lawsuit as OSGATA et al. — has turned to a strategy Monsanto has been using for a while now: the courts. Although they certainly aren’t the first sustainability-minded folks to take their struggle to the courts, their suit, filed last March, has a sweet sense of irony.
As we reported last March, when the lawsuit was first announced, OSGATA et al. is fighting an old battle against Monsanto’s so-called “seed police” and their practice of suing farmers for patent infringement because pollen or seeds from a farm growing GMO plants nearby drifts onto their land.
~snip~
http://grist.org/industrial-agriculture/farmers-advance-in-their-suit-against-monsanto/
9 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
the government as being "held hostage" by Monsanto. I perceive the government as being a fawning synchopant of Monsanto 
