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Sewing the Seeds of Insecurity
The Future of Our Food Supply
An ill-wind blew across Percy Schmeiser's land in
1996. Today in his 70s, the third-generation Saskatchewan, Canada, farmer has
been growing and improving his own canola (oil seed) crops for 40 years. Each
year, he would save some of his harvested seed for planting the following year.
Though some farmers in the surrounding area were growing Monsanto's patented,
genetically modified (GM) Roundup Ready canola, Schmeiser was not. He was
growing his own, but the wind blew and bees flew, both apparently carrying
grains of GM pollen from neighboring fields into Schmeiser's crop. Or maybe it
was GM seed transported from surrounding farms that often blew off trucks
traveling the roads adjacent to Schmeiser's land. No matter. Without his
knowledge or consent, errant, patented Monsanto genes had apparently been
incorporated into some of the Schmeiser family's 1997-harvested canola seed.
In 1998, the farmer planted over a thousand acres of his land with the seed he
had saved from the previous year's crop. A hired Monsanto investigator analyzed
samples of canola plants taken from Percy Schmeiser's land, and the company
found evidence of its patented genes in the plant tissue. When Schmeiser refused
to pay Monsanto fees for use of its patented herbicide resistance technology,
technology he neither bought nor wanted, Monsanto sued him. According to a
report on the trial (www.percyschmeiser.com< |
