Monsanto v. Percy Schmeiser. A disturbing story to which I was originally pointed by jimwich, here summarized on Tompaine.com. 40% of farmers in Western Canada, including farmer Percy Schmeiser’s neighbors, grow generically modified canola. Pollen from his neighbors’ fields blew onto his land and, when Monsanto took seed samples from his canola crop without his permission and found “their” genes, they sued under Canadian patent law that makes it illegal to re-use patented seeds without a licensing agreement. Now Schmeiser is forced to pay thousands of dollars in royalties on GM seeds found on his land without his having bought the seeds or benefited from their inadvertent presence in his crop (they were engineered to be resistant to a Monsanto weed killer Schmeiser does not use). IMHO, this story, perhaps the first of many in Monsanto’s promised draconian crackdown on “seed-savers”, illustrates the real disaster of agribusiness giants’ taking proprietary control of crop genomes through GM. Placing the burden of assuring non-contamination with GM materials on the individual producer is an insidious means of crushing independent competition. This is far more worrisome than speculative and largely misplaced concerns over direct biological effects of engineered genes on the foodchain.