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Our daily loaf -- does Monsanto get dibs? At one of my daughter's birthday parties a precocious 7 year old spat on his fingers and then marked the part of the cake he wanted (and got). This is Monsanto's strategy for wheat, a grain which is, well, engrained in our culture, part of human civilization since the dawn of the agricultural age. The product of ten thousand years of farming knowledge, the seeds by which our collective life is nourished represent one of the last great commons, the embodiment of a collective knowledge which can be shared by farmers around the globe. This is not a small matter. How societies feed themselves is as basic as it gets. And agricultural surplus funded the rise in arts, education, technology and indeed almost every aspect of our culture. Farmers around the world are dependent on seed saving. Yet with a simple patent for "RoundUp Ready" wheat, Monsanto can mark the genome of this grain exactly as if they put a barcode into the DNA -- and just as easily as the 7 year old marked my daughter's birthday cake. The patent right means the company can put its "dibs" on a farmer's seed. The farmers may no longer be able to save seed for next year's crop unless they pay Monsanto it's technology licensing fee. This robs farmers of a right; this is fact, not speculation -- the company has sued and collected in both Canada and the U.S. Can farmers opt to just ignore this? No, because wind blows the patented genes from one field to the next. Monsanto almost has a patent on the wind! And because it's trivially easy for every seed company to reshuffle the genetic code and so put their corporate dibs on the bounty of nature, corporate-patented genetic code will tend to proliferate -- it's a money maker for seed companies even if not for farmers. It's time to stop it now. To protect the right to save seeds -- as well as the right to grow organic crops -- Sierra Club hopes that farmers will join environmentalists in opposing GE wheat. Corporate patented, hacked-for-profit genetic code can harm nature, too. Wheat has many close cousins in nature and the genes will spread. If this product is introduced, there will be dozens more and those genes will re-assort in unpredictable ways, not only in farmers' fields but also in the wilder places of nature. That's why Sierra Club is joining the fight against corporate dibs on our daily bread. Please help by signing our message!
Jim Diamond, M.D.
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