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A letter to Monsanto (June 25, 2001 – CropChoice opinion) –
Dear CropChoice,
The other night, I had a dream in which I was a farmer. In my dream I wrote a letter to Monsanto. It went like this:
Dear Sir or Madam:
I am a grain farmer and this year have been concerned about the presence
of RR canola in my wheat and canola fields. As I have never used your
patented RR canola, I have to presume that RR seed somehow was spilled
on my property, or that RR pollen drifted onto my property or
was carried by bees. As I also grow conventional canola (i.e. non RR), I am concerned that it might also be contaminated with the RR gene.
Alarming as this is, what is even more alarming is the fact that, if
there is RR contamination of my canola crop, the proceeds from the sale
of my whole crop could be confiscated by your company if you were to
find this out. I know this to be the case, because I have read the
official judgement report for the case where you took Percy Schmeiser to
court. You won the case on the grounds that he was guilty because he
sold his crop for grain (not for seed) knowing full well that his crop
was contaminated with your patented RR canola. It did not matter that
he did not want this RR gene on his property, and that losing his crop
because of contamination ruined the breeding program that he had been
developing for more than 20 years.
Now, I do not want to suffer the same fate. I know that there is a spy
system to catch people like me, and that your agents can sneak onto my
farm and take samples that are unwitnessed and can even obtain samples
of my grain without my approval from an elevator or a seed cleaning
plant. Again, I know this for a fact because this is what happened in
the Schmeiser case.
So, I am asking you to come and inspect my crops and provide me with a
written report of your findings. If there are any RR plants in my wheat
or canola crops, I would like these to be removed because I have my own
breeding and selection program, and I keep my seed from year to year, so
do not want it contaminated with RR canola. In fact, if you can not
remove the RR contamination, I may have to take recourse to legal
action.
If you discover RR canola, I would like you to provide me with a
statement saying that I requested you to inspect my crop, as well as a
written report of the results of this inspection, to guarantee that I
will not be taken to court and have to surrender all the proceeds of the
sale of this crop to your company.
Because of its lengthy seed dormancy interval, RR canola seed can
persist in my soil for a number of years. Of course, my land will also
be continually at risk from further unwanted contamination from
neighboring land. Thus, regardless of the outcome of the above tests, I
would request that your company inspect the whole of my property
annually, starting this year, and provide me with your test results. If
there is any RR canola contamination on any occasion, I would want you
to entirely eradicate it, and to pay me for any reduction to my harvest
resulting therefrom.
Yours sincerely,
DB | |
