Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2013, as news written as the Bowman v. Monsanto hearing ended. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously for Monsanto in May 2013, not June as the article expected. Bowman’s age of 75 is as of 2013.
The US Supreme Court is to rule on the well-known lawsuit Monsanto brought against a farmer. Vernon Bowman, a 75-year-old farmer from Indiana, was sued in 2007 by the controversial company Monsanto. Bowman lost in court, but he appealed and, thanks to various citizen initiatives, the Supreme Court has agreed to review the case and hear the farmer out. (Update: as I was starting to write this, the hearing was coming to an end, and we are told the justices appeared hostile to the farmer’s arguments. They will rule in June.)
Remember that Bowman was sued because Monsanto said the farmer was infringing its patent: when farmers buy the seeds, they sign an agreement to use them only once. The resulting crop can be sold for other purposes, such as food or fuel, but not to grow a new generation of seeds. From Monsanto’s point of view, what Bowman did is like a farming version of Napster.
Say you are a Hollywood studio and you spend millions making a film. You sell hundreds of copies, and one of the buyers makes hundreds of copies of the DVD and sells them. That is against the law, and for Monsanto, the seed issue is exactly the same.
Many industries have come out in support of Monsanto: the software industry association representing companies such as Intel and Microsoft, biotech firms, and other soybean growers who fear that the price of Monsanto’s seeds could soar if it loses this case, and that it could stop investing in innovation.
If Monsanto loses, it “would effectively eliminate the incentive to discover and develop new genetically modified plants,” according to the American Intellectual Property Law Association.
Of course, Monsanto doesn’t play fair
Unlike the DVD example, where if you don’t like one DVD you can buy another and use the same player, Monsanto’s seeds and its innovative, powerful and destructive chemicals (pesticides) have been called “Attila products”, because wherever they fall, not even the grass grows back.
In other words, once you have bought Monsanto’s seeds and sprayed the famous pesticide on your fields, if you want to plant new seeds the following year, they will probably have to be Monsanto’s almost by necessity, since, according to some farmers, the fields are left useless for other kinds of crops.
That brings us to the environmental damage these products could be causing. I’ll go further: Monsanto, backed by the scientific community, has said on several occasions about its seeds, and about ingesting the “poison”, that “there is no study showing it can be harmful to health.”
That typical politician’s language is basically the equivalent of saying “there is no study that therefore states and guarantees that its products carry no health risk.” It sounds like the same thing, but it isn’t.
“Monsanto and its products are to agriculture what subprime mortgages were to the economy: sooner or later, they will take their toll.”
We wish Vernon Bowman the best of luck, although he is unlikely to win, as there are many giants backing Monsanto. We will find out in June.
Featured image: United Soybean Board, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
