Reminds me Paolo Bacigalupi's stories, "Wind-up girl", "The calorie men" and others. He's created a dystopian world of GM crops being the only viable food source on the planet.
All your food is owned and locked up by major corporations under patent law, for profit purposes which are protected and in league with the government. I have a moral problem with it. Yeah it doesn't really impact me but it impacts poor Mexican farmers and a lot of people in the 3rd world.
The Plant Patent Act excludes "sexual and tuber-propagated plants" - basically, pretty much all the crops you have to replant each season aren't covered, though it does restrict the propagation of fruit trees and the like. Prior to GMOs, sexually-propagated crops like corn were covered by the Plant Variety Protection Act, which is much less restrictive than the utility patents on GMOs - for example, it allows farmers to save and replant seeds, which is illegal with GMOs.
To cut a long story short, plants were ineligible for utility patents (in the US at least) because they were considered "products of nature". However, the US Supreme Court decided that because GMOs existed, plants now count as something made by man rather than a product of nature and could be patented - including non-GMO ones produced using traditional breeding techniques that were previously not patentable. It's a strange decision and I'm not sure I follow their logic, but it's the law now.
The dystopian part of it, in "The Calorie Man," at least, is the implication that the global crop blight that wiped out all non-GMO crops was engineered and spread by the GMO companies, which then inherited near-total control over the economy and, thus, the government.
...of cows, pigs and chickens that we slaughter and eat.
If people were willing to eat primarily vegetarian, we'd be perfectly able to feed everyone with regular crops. The article even said as much...China's inability to feed its population stems from their love of meat.
We do not have a food supply problem. We have never had a food supply problem. We have distribution problems, and allowing a handful of US companies to expand that distribution problem is the stupidest thing humanity could do.
The "usual sense of the word" is a politically charged and unscientific one. There is nothing special about merging genes in a lab versus merging genes by forcing plants to grow together in a field. The end result is the same: a hybrid plant.
I don't find this argument convincing. That's like saying, there's nothing special in the Manhattan project, we could as well try putting different combinations of materials in the same room and wait for them to randomly recombine into an atomic bomb.
The article specifically talks about taking genes from bacteria (tolerance to certain chemicals, for instance) and splicing it into crops. This isn't quite the same as cross pollination.
From the submitted article: "Today, it’s estimated that 92 percent of American corn and 94 percent of American soybeans are GMOs, almost all of it produced by Monsanto or DuPont Pioneer, and again, nearly half of the seed sold globally."
Those weren't patentable in the same way. (Selectively bred varieties were covered by plant patents and plant breeder's rights, but those are a lot narrower in scope than the utility patents that apply to GM crops.)
Can you elaborate on the difference between plant patents and utility patents which you feel is harmful?
Plant patents last for 20 to 30 years and are quite robust. The main exemptions are for seed saving (irrelevant for hybrid crops), use as a progenitor (irrelevant to transgenics which vary at a single locus), and for compulsory licensing.
With the exception of the latter issue, these aspects have no bearing on GM. Seed saving would be an issue in crops that typically are not grown as hybrids. However, utility patents are shorter in duration and require disclosure. There's nothing stopping someone else from going out to find germplasm with a similar trait and generating their own construct. With advances in technology, this becomes ever easier to do. The supreme court's ruling on the BRCA genes makes it quite clear that this is permissible and would not be restricted by a utility patent.
In my estimation, a utility patent is less restrictive.
You yourself point out an important difference - plant patents cover a single variety, utility patents cover every variety with a particular gene, no matter how it got there. (And the ability to save seeds is not "irrelevant for hybrid crops" - yes, you lose most of the benefits of having a hybrid variety, but farmers do it anyway because for some plantings the cost saving is worth the loss in yield.)
What's more, there's also quite a nasty patent thicket covering the techniques used in creating GM crops, so you can't just dodge the problem by going out and creating your own GM plant. It's one of the reasons golden rice was doomed to fail - it requires patent licenses from something like 30 companies because of the techniques it uses, including all the big biotech corps. Its creator managed to get heavily restricted free licenses for them because it made a good PR weapon against anti-GMO activists (his explanation), but the conditions make it pretty much useless. Only subsistence farmers or countries which can't grow enough calories to feed their population are legally allowed to grow it, and out of the latter I think only the Philippines even has the right climate to grow rice.
