By ICTMN Staff
In a lawsuit against lawsuits, a coalition of organic farmers and farms are trying to curtail a giant agribusiness’s practice of suing them for patent violations that the farmers claim are completely unintentional.According to the farmers, genetically-modified crops—corn, for example—can find their way into the organic farms’ crops. For the farmers, this is a contamination—after all, the selling point of their product is that it is not a genetically modified organism, or GMO, and the presence of genetic modification can threaten its organic status.“We consider the threat of contamination from GMO crops to be significant,” Jim Gerritsen, an organic seed farmer in Maine and president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association OSGATA, told the Los Angeles Times. “And the reality is that the organic market will not tolerate anything that has GMO content, either by design or by contamination.”Here, though, is the kicker: Monsanto has been known to sue these organic farmers for patent infringement. According to the L.A. Times article, it has sued more than 100 farmers for infringement, and these suits may be responsible for the drastic changes in the composition of the farming industry. A report at RT.com says that “Unable to afford a proper defense, competing small farms have been bought out by the company in droves. As a result, Monsanto saw their profits increase by the hundreds of millions over the last few.”Read the rest of the story at Organic Farmers to Monsanto: We Dont Want Your Seeds Anyway! – ICTMN.com.
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