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How about a culture war outside the traditional red/blue conflicts for a change?
The Guardian ("I read it for the math problems") reports on the decision by a court in the Philippines to ban golden rice, a GMO plant designed to combat vitamin A deficiency. The NGO arguing for a ban (aside local farmers) was Greenpeace.
[https://www.supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-letter_rjr.html](168 Nobel laureates) have called on Greenpeace to stop campaigning against golden rice in 2016. Here is a discussion on EA forums.
Now historically, I have not been vehemently opposed to Greenpeace. When I was a kid in the 1990s, they were protesting French above-ground nuclear weapon testing, which seems fair enough. While pro-NPP myself, I think there are solid arguments to be made for opposing nuclear power (like proliferation risk and long-term disposal of used-up fuel elements), but I can't understand why you would target NPP before you would target fossil fuel power generation.
The steelman of the Greenpeace argument would be that allowing patent-encumbered GMOs will be a foot in the door for pushing more GMOs on rural farmers which will eventually result with Monsanto owning the small farmers. The situation for GMOs is not unlike the situation for software: expensive to develop, but cheap to copy. As a free-software advocate, I very much would prefer outcomes where the companies who develop the software/GMOs do not end up with a stranglehold on the end users due to copyright or (even worse) patent laws.
At least for software there exist alternatives like FLOSS. From reading the FAQ of golden rice, it looks like they could not develop their product without using technologies patented by biotech companies, so they got to them to agree to waive licences for farmers who make less than 10k$ per year, which is their target audience. This is still far from ideal (better would be a blanket free licence for golden rice, or constraining biopatents so much that you do not have to ask Japanese Tobacco to licence your rice plant, or perhaps abolishing them altogether), but does not seem like a terrible deal -- especially if you have a local court system which is rather pro small farmers.
So my conclusion is that Greenpeace's opposition is unreasonable and they have been become one of these organizations who advocates for policies which are deeply unpopular (like PETA, or "always believe the woman" groups) in the wider population as members race to signal how committed they are to their cause.
At least patents expire in a reasonable(-ish) amount of time.
I also don't see how you could copyright a GMO, as at least to my non-lawyer eyes, it's not a form of expression. But I've been wrong about what lawyers will come up with, and courts will indulge, many times before. Certainly there's been enough discussion here about what they've done with terms like "speech" and "commerce"; it's as bad as the situation with terms like "racism" and "oppression" and arguably even more creative, so I don't want to push that point too hard.
I think simply embedding a copyrighted artwork in junk DNA will probably not fly in court. But if software can be copyrighted, I don't think there is a reason why GMOs -- whose design also involves some stylistic decisions -- can't be. I hope I am wrong about this, though.
The reason that patent law is widely considered more evil than copyright law in software is that avoiding copyright infringement is often a very easy task (the exception being APIs and the like). If you have a copyrighted bubblesort library, I can simply decide not to use your library and write my own implementation. By contrast, if you have patented bubblesort (depending on the sanity of the patent system in question, you might have to patent a specific instance of bubblesort which affects something specific in the real world), then every other implementation is infringing.
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First they patent the modified genome, then they patent the novel protein derived from the modified genome. That alone doubles the timespan. At least that's what I recall reading a long time ago..
Neither of which is copyrighting it. Yes, of course they can patent them. That's not at all the same thing.
Yeah, but it looks like in biotech you can get exclusivity for 2x long as for anything else.
Not that patents have any point these days - Chinese just copy everything and DGAF.
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Well. I also agree with that steelman. I have my doubts that greenpeace is so rationally principled through and through.
But yes. GMO patents should be outlawed, along with software patents, and probably copywrite in general. We need to be building foundational rights for an age of human and post-human coexistence.
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As far as I can tell, Greenpeace has never been reasonable, and their anti-nuclear power campaigns are evidence of Just Not Being Willing To Be Happy With Anything, Ever. Seriously, the only alternative at scale to nuclear power is fossil fuels unless you have particularly fortuitous geography. Greenpeace also does things like protest against sustainable fisheries and cross-pollinates heavily with hardcore nuts like animal rights groups, to the extent of providing some amount of cover for ecoterrorists.
Campaigning against golden rice therefore is just another case of Don't Want Anything To Get Done. I'm critical of this tendency in my ingroup; I'm far less sympathetic of it in far-outgroup types like greenpeace.
To channel Hlynka again, then, Greenpeace is on the extreme end of traditionalism/conservatism and their attitude towards
the industrial revolution and its consequencesoil pipelines is (predictably) the exact same as a certain other US group's attitude towards abortion clinics.I don't think it's a surprise that countries defined by liberalism, specifically France, treats Greenpeace the way they do.
Their goal might seem hyper-reactionary. If I were to try to create a coherent extrapolation, I'd almost characterize it as "humanity should abandon the use of metal and depopulate down to 10,000 people who all live in East Africa".
But their attitude and methods are very progressive. They don't frame it as replacing our existing culture, so they're not radicals. But they look around, see things in the world that they don't like, and push for changes to get rid of them, regardless of the effect of those changes. (Wishful thinking helps here: "what bad effects?") IMO, that's progressivism at its purest.
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I don't think it's traditionalism/conservatism. I think they just want to be unhappy.
There's a joke about an old Jewish man taking a customer satisfaction survey. He says "I am very upset". "Why?" "I couldn't complain." "But you said you're upset" "Exactly, I couldn't complain."
My mental model of big parts of the environmental movement, greenpeace very much included, is a lot like that old Jewish man. They just want something to be conspicuously upset about, either so they can be professional protestors instead of having to get real jobs that involve, like, actual work, or to have an excuse to be the center of attention, or because they're mentally ill, or to sleep with true believers, or whatever. There's environmentalists doing actual environmental protection stuff, sure. But greenpeace doesn't want a solution, they want to veto things. There's a difference.
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Defining Greenpeace as part of traditionalism/conservatism, like Hlynkas redefinitions, moves us to a position of less understanding and unnecessary confusion.
Highly liberal USA doesn't do so. Liberal Britain is following zero carbon targets even under the Torries, who aren't a conservative party. Liberal Germany has strong Green party and anti nuclear policies. So it is false that this is due to liberalism. Rather than blaming conservatism and praising liberalism for what Greenpeace a group that liberals are more sympathetic towards, the reality is that the French are more pro nuclear than many other peoples and they appreciate better that it worked well for them. You could say that the French in general including French liberals are more pro nuclear, and more hostile towards Greenpeace, but you can't praise liberalism and blame conservatism in general.
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GMOs cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. or anywhere else I know of. They can be patented, but the length of a patent term in most countries is 20 years. Golden Rice 2 was developed in 2005, so unless there's a newer version that Wikipedia doesn't mention, any possible patents will expire next year at the latest. Also, if a country considered patents a big concern it seems like the solution would be to not respect GMO patents or to specifically ban patented GMOs, rather than not allowing GMOs in general, which would reduce the incentive for companies to develop GMOs but still allow you to free-ride and to use GMOs with expired patents like golden rice will soon be.
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Monsanto hasn't even been a thing for the last 6 years (seriously, they wound up in 2018). You'd expect the greens to have noticed by now...
You are technically correct. However, Monsanto was acquired by the pharma giant Bayer, who decided to discontinue the Monsanto brand. If instead they had gone bankrupt or be acquired by a company which imposed a drastically different business model, things would be different, but this looks to me like an acquisition followed by a corporate rebranding while keeping the same business practices.
In a similar vein, I will continue to say "acquired by Google/Facebook" instead of "acquired by Alphabet/Meta", "posted on twitter" instead of "posted on X", "addicted to heroin" (which is a trademark which has not been used for almost a century) instead of "addicted to diacetylmorphine", "Blackwater" instead of "academi" and so on.
Bayer is going to go bankrupt because of Monsanto; they’ve lost like 80% of their value since 2016 because of Americans suing them for Roundup unknowingly potentially causing cancer and the settlements could be tens of billions. Of course now people are getting scared that if the Roundup business collapses farmers will have to buy weed killer from China, where the manufacturers are safely immune from that kind of frivolity.
Is there any good evidence of the harm of glyphosate in reasonable quantities? I haven't done a literature review myself, but I've seen reports of questionable research on the "causes harm" side, but also that it's anecdotally safer than most of the alternatives.
No, but American courts are notorious for handing out ruinous fines to foreign corporations for spurious reasons.
And then the same Americans howl loudly when the EU fines American tech companies large amounts for minor mistakes (not saying the EU are justified in what they do, but sauce for the goose and all that).
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3M and Johnson and Johnson also just had multi billion dollar settlements based on very thin evidence. It's kind of depressing since all that will do is move those jobs over seas and deny consumers access to new products.
There need to be clear caps on fines/penalties/payments courts can order companies to make that can only be overridden by Congress. Anything more than 10% of US annual revenue, for example.
This would also provide bad incentives, because it would cap the risk of decisions with huge negative externalities. 10% of revenue times the probability of getting caught is basically nothing, so unless your action is going to cause a big enough stink to move Congress to act, you are in the clear.
As an analogy, suppose we capped the fines and damages for gross negligence of humans at 10% of their annual income. This would provide terrible incentives: people could speed by near kindergardens, throw empty glass bottles from skyscrapers, operate on patients while drunk and the like secure in the knowledge that the worst outcome will cost them no more than they spend on vacations.
Corporations already have huge advantages over natural humans through diffusion of responsibility and their liabilities being mostly limited to their assets (so the risk to their investors is limited). For Thalidomide, the corporate death penalty (i.e. bankrupting a company through fines and damages) seems like an appropriate outcome.
Of course, glyphosate is very far from Thalidomide, but caps on damages are not the answer.
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I’m with the ban for the same reason that GreenPeace is. Not only are we burdening these small farmers with patent law (and I’m not sure if Golden Rice has terminator genes that prevent replanting saved seed) but because of the potential for cross pollination, you can’t really make it optional. If my rice is pollinated by Golden rice, I now have the patented genes in my rice, and unless there are strong laws to the contrary (which I doubt) Monsanto can easily collect royalties from people who never chose to grow Golden Rice in the first place, and worse are not allowed to save seed (as the permits to grow that rice requires you to buy the seed every year). In a lawful democracy like America or various European countries, it’s difficult but at least possible to build in protection for small farmers. I doubt it would be so in a developing country with a much higher corruption index.
Golden rice was developed by a non-profit in collaboration with universities. It doesn't have terminator genes (indeed, no crop with terminator genes has ever been sold, the technology was essentially abandoned in the early 2000s).
It does include patented genes, but patent law is national, not international. Only 12 of the patents are applicable outside of America, and all 12 have been waived by their owners. Any farmer who buys golden rice seeds can replant them forever.
Greenpeace isn't opposed to Golden Rice because they're worried about farmers' welfare. They're opposed to it because of their knee-jerk technophobia.
Not sure if there's some terminological M&B going on here with 'Terminator', but lots and lots of commercially bred seed produces sterile plants?
Basically any lawn grass you buy will not reproduce from seed, and as pertains to Montsanto -- the 'Roundup Ready' portfolio is also like this. (and I think that Montsanto does/did market them 'Terminator' for this reason?)
While (as the chosen name indicates!) this was indeed developed in the 90s, AFAIK it's deliberate (to prevent the RR crops from hybridizing with other plants, producing RR weeds (which would be Very Bad for the no-till agriculture model) -- and an ongoing feature of RR seeds?
Conventional sterile or non-true-breeding hybrids aren't based on "terminator" genes. Roundup Ready plants are also not based on "terminator" genes (and they DO crossbreed, which has been the basis of several lawsuits cementing Monsanto's bad reputation)
Well I know -- but the point (as with much of the GMO discussion) not whether you arrive at the endpoint by conventional methods of modifying the genome (ie selective breeding I guess) or scary gene insertion (with scary names!) -- it's that the seed is sterile so small-time farmers are forced to buy seed every year instead of saving their own.
(TBH the hybridization concern seems like a pretty good reason to include such a gene to me -- RR weeds would have a much larger impact on global agriculture than bankrupting some farmers in India, and the sterility gene (by its nature!) seems unlikely to leak into wild genomes?)
That hybrids are sterile or don't breed true is more of a side effect of the process than a deliberate thing; I believe that most staple crop cultivars were not hybrids when the whole controversy with terminator genes started.
Plants are kinda promiscuous but they aren't so promiscuous as for crops to crossbreed with weeds in most cases. So you don't get roundup-ready weeds from crossbreeding with roundup-ready crops. Unfortunately you do get glyphosate-resistant weeds through normal mutation and (not-so-natural) selection, and we already have.
To be clear it's not something I'm losing sleep over -- just that it seems like a legitimate thing for people designing novel organisms to be worried about, and I'd rather that they worry about it than not. (It would be better if they didn't name their GMO projects after robot assassins though)
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Is anyone actually trying to enforce bio patents against Indian farmers? Is this a real thing that's really happening, or is it just fantastical speculation?
And isn't golden rice exempted from patent enforcement anyways? The relevant patent holders have agreed to not try to enforce their patents against asset-free 3rd world farmers.
what is stopping them from changing their minds in the future when their situations change (revenue streams diminish, are acquired by a more aggresive patent holder, etc.)?
Enforcing patent laws against Indian subsistence farmers is taking a loss because it costs money to try and they don't have anything to give you.
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Patent laws are national, not international.
My understanding is that once a variant has been donated to say, Bangladesh, it cannot be 'undonated' unless Bangladesh's government decides to issue a patent there.
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Google tells me that Indian farmers make around $225 per month. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. And my vague understanding of Indian norms is that they casually disregard American-style patent laws in order to shamelessly steal the drugs we make at enormous cost. So I really doubt there's any ability or will to target Indian farmers.
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