Testbiotech calls for a stop on patents on seed, plants, farm animals and food

This week a global action is started against patents on seed, plants, farm animals and parts thereof including gene sequences and food. Over 100 organisations from all over the world are alerting the public and warning of the dangers of increasing monopoly rights on basic resources of farm and food production. Seed, plants and farm animals as well as food production chains are becoming progressively subject to monopoly rights imposed by worldwide patents. More and more patents have been filed, even including claims on conventional breeding of plants and animals. These are actually being claimed by industry as their inventions!

If this trend is not stopped, these developments will impact on farmers, small-scale breeders, food producers and consumers. Leaving the control over seeds to multinational corporations means leaving decisions on choice in the food market and the way food is produced to those whose first aim is to make a profit, not provide food security. Farmers in particular are increasingly dependent on agrochemical and seed corporations. Breeding is becoming more difficult as access to genetic resources is hampered by the restrictions that patents impose. This situation will result in fewer innovations urgently needed for food safety.

The US company Monsanto recently filed patent application WO2008021413, which – in more than 1000 pages - makes 175 claims to misappropriate various gene sequences and genetic variations, especially in soy and maize. Monsanto even goes as far as to explicitly claim all relevant maize and soy plants inheriting those genetic elements and its uses in food, feed and biomass.
In a further patent application, WO 2009011847, Monsanto makes broad claims covering methods for cattle breeding, for the animals themselves as well as “milk, cheese, butter and meat”. These patents and many others filed by various companies such as Dupont and Syngenta are the reason why Testbiotech is calling upon politicians and patent offices around the world to ensure that such patents cannot and will not be granted.

https://www.testbiotech.org/en/node/352

Gus: In the toon at top I inserted something rather innocuous: MODIFIED LIKE GOD DID NOT INTEND TO... I am an atheist, but I am trying to rally all the religious people around the world against this patenting of life forms — whether as food or otherwise. Religious people in churches, in mosques, in temples should be up in arms about what science and greed is doing to god's work... Go go go, fight these patents... Make them suffer! 

The major point of tampering with the seeds of crops has nothing to do with yield improvement but all to do with the "ownership of the seeds"... This is done by creating a system of weed killer, promises of better returns in conjunction with "patented" seeds. Original seeds thus eventually disappear or are contaminated with the pollen of patented seeds, making it easy to pollute and control the system...

Gene patents are a matter of enormous public interest and concern to the medical community to ordinary Australians who are shocked to find that their genes are owned by an unknown corporation."  

Ms Gilsenen said they will be considering their options after considering the judgment in detail.

"It has long-term consequences for research and genetic testing and the patent is preventing other companies doing research that might help save lives," Ms Gilsenen said.

In 2013, a nine judge panel in the US Supreme Court ruled that genes extracted from the human body were not eligible to be patented.

Patent lawyer and Adjunct Professor in the School of Law at Murdoch University, Dr Luigi Palombi, said the Federal Court's "decision ignores the bedrock principle of 400 years of patent law".

"Only an invention can be the subject of a patent. The decision ignores the scientific facts. It ignores good policy. And it ignores common sense. Australian ingenuity in the biological sciences is now handcuffed by this decision," he said.

"How is it possible that the US Supreme Court unanimously came to the exact opposite result in only three months? Despite the attempt by the Full Federal Court to try and differentiate the precise claims between the Australian and US patents that Myriad has over the BRCA 1 genetic mutations, the so-called invention is the same.

"At the end of the day, the Australian patent claims pieces of genetic material (BRCA 1 gene mutations) extracted from the human body are an 'invention'. How is that something anyone invented?

"American scientists, universities and companies now have the freedom to ignore patents over isolated biological materials that are not 'markedly different to any found in nature', but Australian scientists, universities and companies cannot.

"This decision reinforces the need for the Australian Parliament to change patent law in Australia."

The Australian Cancer Council (ACC) has released a statement saying that gene patent laws needed to be changed to protect healthcare consumers from gene monopolies.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-05/court-dismisses-gene-patent-appeal/5722202

Pity... It's obvious that these judges have no idea about the concept of what they are promoting. THEY ARE SIMPLY WRONG when they say: "expressions such as the work of nature or the laws of nature are unhelpful when dealing with claims of a kind in this case"... That takes the cake of dumbness and idiocy in the understanding of the mechanics of the world... Genetics should be a public domain. A natural public domain. the decision of these judges is like telling god "Sorry mate, but life is not your property anymore..."

As I am an atheist, I would still maintain that life is the property of nature — that is public natural domain, no matter how fiddled with by technology. The big pharma and techo firm needs to find other source of revenue than to patent the non-patentable.

These Judges live in ivory towers that are protected by either idiotic laws or by narrow-minded understandings of such. They read too many law books and spend not enough time looking at nature.

My views... and prepared to defend them to the last free monkey standing.

See article at top...

In trying to swallow Syngenta, Monsanto is putting its money where its mouth isn't—that is, it's contradicting years of rhetoric about how its ultimate goal with biotech is to wean farmers off agrichemicals. The company has two major money-making GM products on the market: crops engineered to carry the insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, which is toxic to certain insects but not to humans; and crops engineered to withstand the herbicide glyphosate, an herbicide Monsanto sells under the brand name Roundup.

The company markets both as solutions to farmers' reliance on toxic chemicals. Bt crops "allow farmers to protect their crops while eliminating or significantly decreasing the amount of pesticides sprayed," Monsanto's website declares; and its Roundup Ready products have" allowed farmers to ... decrease the overall use of herbicides."

Both of these claims have withered as Monsanto's products have come to dominate US farm fields. Insects and weeds have evolved to resist them. Farmers have responded by unleashing a gusher of pesticides—both higher doses of Monsanto's Roundup, and other, more-toxic chemicals as Roundup has lost effectiveness.

Monsanto's lunge for Syngenta and its vast pesticide portfolio signals that the company thinks more of the same is in the offing.

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/05/monsanto-syngenta-merger-45-billion-pesticides

Imagine for a second that we'd allowed more poisons to be used on this planet from about 60 years ago?... The place would be awash with dangerous crap everywhere, from DDT to agent orange and what has not been used yet but could have been... Maybe this would have been a good thing... Humanity would have gone bonkers and degenerate, many of us would have died off or be unable to reproduce — and nature would have changed itself to cope for a while, until the poisons "disappeared"... 

See toon at top

The contest was to see how much of the weed killer could be detected in their urine. Around 140 parliamentarians submitted urine samples that will be analyzed over the coming week. The anonymous results will show how much of the substance the European political representatives have in their bodies.

The stunt, led by parliamentarians from the Green party, was meant to put pressure on their peers ahead of a controversial vote on a resolution calling for the European Union to pull authorization for the substance when its 15-year review comes up in June. The parliamentarians say recent studies linking the weed killer to cancer mean a reauthorization is too risky.

http://www.dw.com/en/pissing-contest-over-glyphosate-in-europe/a-19185554