Friday, June 11, 2004

An evil plot to take over...

So I've got this idea on how to take over the world.

Well, perhaps not the world, but certainly the grain production of the US and Canada.

Well, I wouldn't take over the production, but Monsanto certainly could. And it wouldn't cost very much at all. In fact, it'd cost very little, perhaps a few hundred dollars in seed.

You see, they recently won a lawsuit against a small Canadian farmer. I don't know the specifics, none of the little news blurbs give any real specifics. So, perhaps this farmer was stealing the grain. Shame on him.

But what if he wasn't. What if he was doing his own thing, growing his own corn, and the corn was fertilized by pollen from some other farmer's field that was using Monsanto's Roundup-resistant corn. This farmer, through no fault of his own, would now have corn that contains the "patented" gene for Roundup resistance.

Not that this specific farmer would have ever known, because he doesn't use Roundup!. Yet, according to the courts, he's responsible for keeping his field clear of the patented corn. This farmer is just doing what farmers have done for thousands of years: growing his crop, keeping a chunk of the seed for next year's planting, and selling the rest.

So all Monsanto has to do to take over most of the corn/grain production is to simply hire some crop dusters to fly low over a bunch of fields and scatter the patented grain in fields - or even just the pollen if you do it during the right season.

Over time, the patented grain is going to intermingle with the normal grain, and whamo! Bring out the lawsuits because everyone is growing your patented grain.

This is probably going to happen anyway, the crop dusters would just speed up the process.

That's the scary part of the GMO food. Not that I think we're going to die because of some mutant gene. It's probably not going to happen any times soon. However, what if it did happen. What if one of the GMO grains did turn out to be horribly bad, causing birth defects in babies or something. By the time we would know, the grain would be out there, cross-polinating with the normal grain. Forever contaminating the food source.

Plus, you couldn't ever get rid of it, because it'd be Roundup resistant.

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