Genetic pollution: Scam of the century?

"Oops. Sorry, we contaminated your seedstock, cultivated over thousands of years. Forever. And it looks like you're going to have to pay us to grow our crap, er crop, now."

Too bizarre? too evil? too simply unbelievable? It's not. Happens all the time. And it's even landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

The ramifications of this scam of the century are spelled out with characteristic verve by Tom Philpott, the author of Bittergreens Gazette who now spends most of his blogging hours posting on Grist.

The Wall Street Journal came out with a terrific page-one article documenting "genetic pollution" -- the damage caused when genetically modified crops cross-pollinate with conventional crops.

The article leads with an organic farmer in Spain whose sells his red field corn at a premium to nearby chicken farmers, who prize the product because it "it gives their meat and eggs a rosy color." (I'd be willing to bet that rosy color also translates to higher nutrition content.)

Now the farmer is screwed -- his seeds, carefully bred over time, have become contaminated by GM corn from nearby farms. The rich red color of his corn, like his premium, has vanished into the ether.

The article goes on to document devastating cases of genetic contamination in Oaxaca, Mexico -- birthplace of corn and home to ancient germplasm lineages; and also in the United States, where 45 percent of corn and 85 percent of soybeans are genetically altered.

The issue is: Who is legally responsible for such contamination -- i.e., who pays the damages when a farmer like the above-mentioned Spanish one loses his hard-earned premium? Who pays up when a corn culture that dates back thousands of years faces sudden extinction?

The issue will be huge as the battle lines around GM are drawn. In the last ten years, the number of global acres planted with GM crops has risen from zero to about one billion -- perhaps the most rapid spread of new technology in agriculture's 10,000-year history.

Monsanto has taken the offensive in the U.S. As a recent report from the anti-GMO stalwart Center for Food Safety shows, Monsanto operatives scour the countryside in commodity-agriculture areas, investigating farms that haven't bought Monsanto traits for intellectual-property violations, often based on tips from informants. When Monsanto's goons find GM traits on a farm that hasn't paid up, the company sues -- even despite the distinct possibility of genetic contamination. In other words, Monsanto seeks damages from farms that its traits might have damaged.

This kind of thing leaves me floundering for a word that denotes chutzpah taken up about seven orders of magnitude!

Read the whole article...