Percy Schmeiser
|
72-year-old Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser is taking
Monsanto to the Supreme Court. In 1998, Monsanto accused
Schmeiser of planting their patented genetically-modified
canola without paying a fee. He said he'd only done what he
did every year: collect seeds from his own crop to plant. This
made scientists aware of the fact that GM seeds were being
spread by the wind into fields where they weren't planted.
The GM plants take over because they're stronger and more
resistant to insects, meaning we may soon have no non-GM
varieties of these crops left.
Schmeiser says, "I was very concerned, because we realized
that there was contamination of the pure seed we had been
developing for half a century. We said to Monsanto when we
received the lawsuit, 'If you have any GMOs in our pure seed,
you should be liable and there should be a lawsuit against you
people.'"
The judge in the original case ruled that it didn't matter how
the seed got into Schmeiser's field, he had infringed the
company's patent rights simply by growing and harvesting it
without permission. It made no difference that, since he
didn't use Monsanto's Roundup weed killer, he didn't benefit
from the GM plants, which were modified to withstand
spraying with the pesticide.
Stuart Wells, of the Canadian National Farmers' Union,
says, "I suspect that there are a lot of farmers who are not
even reporting contamination to Monsanto because they
don't want a company with the control they have to know
that they have been polluted?[or else they] might end up in
the sort of trouble that Monsanto is heaping on Percy
Schmeiser."
Schmeiser has had to mortgage his land to pay his legal fees
during the last 5 years. He says, "We felt that what we were
fighting for was not only for ourselves, but for farmers around
the world, for their right to use their own seed. That's why
we stood up to them."
According to Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, if we something
goes wrong with the GM version of one of our staple foods,
and we have nothing left to replace it with, it could lead to
our final hour.
For more information, click here.
