These stories have all basically been debunked. Monsanto did sue farmers. But they did so in cases where they had evidence that those farmers were not only planting IP-encumbered seeds, but also spraying them with Roundup. You can't do that accidentally: if your seeds aren't genetically modified, Roundup kills your crop.
I do not think granting someone an exclusive right to sell their new cultivar for 20 years is particularly dangerous, especially when existing variants don’t disappear. I like that someone was incentivized to grow Pink Lady and Cosmic Crisp apples back in the 90s and 2010s and I struggle to see where any cruelty was involved.
And this isn't even a cultivar. It's a commodity crop in which the only difference between ordinary seeds and Monsanto's seeds is that you could use Monsanto's Roundup pesticide on them without killing them. The seeds were literally just a utility for using a specific Monsanto herbicide system.
I can't wait for all the usual Monsanto fanboys to start popping up with comments that show how wildly ignorant they are, with comments like "we need this tech to feed everyone!"
1)Hunger is entirely artificial and is a problem of US farm bill policy and trade policy (not to mention using food to produce fuel that provides less energy than the energy required to grow it.) We pay farmers to grow and then till the food into the ground. Or to ship it to a warehouse where it rots. Massive amounts of food are thrown away by supermarkets. The list goes on.
2)European farmers, who cannot use Roundup or a large swath of other pesticides and herbicides, *have greater per-acre productivity.
I just found out that farmers spray enough of the chems to kill all the plants off so they can be harvested at the same time. They aren't applying it just to grow, they then pump it full of them and then we eat that. No wonder why people are getting sick from it.
1)Hunger is entirely artificial and is a problem of US farm bill policy and trade policy (not to mention using food to produce fuel that provides less energy than the energy required to grow it.) We pay farmers to grow and then till the food into the ground. Or to ship it to a warehouse where it rots. Massive amounts of food are thrown away by supermarkets. The list goes on.
2)European farmers, who cannot use Roundup or a large swath of other pesticides and herbicides, *have greater per-acre productivity.