Owning DNA
From a Slate article about Genetically Modified (GM) food:
“Even if GM companies do manage to improve crops that truly matter for food security, these miracle seeds won’t help if they’re not accessible to poor farmers. That means companies must either price seeds cheaply enough for farmers to buy each year or stop objecting when poor farmers save and reuse the seeds the following year. Today, Monsanto and other seed companies object strenuously to seed saving, which they call “seed piracy” and which they claim deprives them of profits. Yet seed saving is central to food security for the billions of farmers too poor to buy new seeds every season. More to the point, while pirated profits are a real issue among wealthy Western farmers, it’s a bogus concern in the developing world, where poor farmers were never going to buy new seeds—and certainly not expensive GM seeds—every year anyway.
In fact, many critics believe the GM industry’s objections to seed saving have less to do with lost profits in the developing world than with the industry’s long-term goal of owning, literally, the seed sector. When seeds are conventionally bred, breeders don’t own them—anyone can use or improve the seeds. But genetic modification allows a company to claim property rights over a particular DNA blueprint and to charge a licensing fee for each and every copy—much as Microsoft now claims an interest in each and every copy of Windows. By relaxing its proprietary zeal and allowing seeds in the developing world to be “open source,” the GM industry could do much to bolster claims that it is really trying to help poor farmers.”