I personally would just like to hear why Monsanto isn’t trampling on the preeminent right of a free society, the right to property. what’s being described is a phenomenon I’ve never thought about before.

Seriously, you’re a property rights guy, right?

With the low world food supplies, higher yields won’t make much, if any, of a dent in prices. In fact, the last crop report had a greater supply than previously thought, and wheat and soybeans rallied. A better measure to look at is to compare the average yield per acre and the average cash price FOB Duluth or New Orleans. The key drivers in food prices are the value of the USD , exports, supplies on hand, and cost of carry. This country is so export driven as far as ag products is concerned, it’s not even funny. I remember in 1973 when Russia bought our crop in the futures markets, then we had a bad crop, so they sold it back to us at a huge profit, and made a great trade. It was the trade of the century, a work of art.

Oh yes, the genie is out of the bottle. Unfortunately, there’s research beginning to show that Round Up is quite bad for humans (not the active ingredient, but the proprietary blend of ingredients to make the product). It is not generally an issue, because we used to spray it on things we wanted to kill. With RoundUp Ready, the plant can absorb the chemical and not die.

GM is probably not directly responsible for pollinator death or amphibian population crashes.

Higher yields only mean lower crop prices/higher government subsidies which does not help farmers at all. In fact, it pushes them towards ever more extreme measures to lower costs per bushel/acre/whatever.

Nature won’t lose an arms race…not over the long run.

Whether you like GM products or not, the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no turning back.

From personal experience, Monsanto’s Genuity VT Triple Pro is a superior corn, and offers excellent yields and bugs and blight just hates this wonderful product. Although some traits of the seed are meant to be in combination with Monsanto’s other products, with the triple stacking, this corn variety offers a natural repellent to pests which reduces waste. Monsanto better watch their lead, as DuPont’s Pioneer Seed Company is working hard on some fascinating R&D to make better seeds via the GM route. The seed companies are really slugging it out with this one. Pretty soon, we’ll find the GM applications commonplace in livestock, with C@rgill doing some groundbreaking work with turkeys.

Jeff

Consider the legislative background against which GM products are developed. There are few countries that allow trials and it is astonishingly expensive to comply with all the red tape. And worse, mid-way through your expensive trial, Greenpeace activists turn up and destroy the crop.

Since 2000, only 54 GM crop trials have been allowed in the UK. Almost all of them were vandalised.

There are virtually no small businesses that could afford to see their efforts destroyed and their investment wasted in this fashion. Far better to enter other fields. And so, the only companies that can afford to persevere against the international opprobrium heaped on GM producers are very, very large ones. The very legislation designed to protect people from the domination of the industry by major corporations entrenches major corporations.

I’m all in favour of labelling and letting the market decide. But the problem is not just that Monsanto is dominant, but that “environmental” lobbyists are complicit in that dominance.