If you think the abbreviation “GM” stands for a car company, well, that’s so 20th Century of you. We’re talking about genetic modification of foods here.
I’ve been unenthusiastic about the genetics trend in agriculture for a while. Do we want Big Agribusiness companies such as Monsanto to take the plants God invented, making slight modifications, and turn them into patented products to sell back to the very countries — often poor countries — in which the plants were found in the first place? Who has the right to patent a genome in the first place?
These products offer some superior characteristics, but if adopted, they seem to have a downside: they add to the pressure against more varied agriculture in favor of large-scale single-crop farming: a practice that can drive out local varieties, reduce biological diversity, and make local self-sufficiency in food production impossible. That sounds like a risky change. Sometimes these companies have even planned to sell seeds “programmed” to germinate once and produce sterile offspring; this would ensure that farmers cannot gather usable seed from the crops they raise. These practices are what give the “globalization” phenomenon a bad name.
Today’s news, though, is not like that. Scientists at Cornell have announced a hardier strain of rice — holding up better against salt water, cold, and drought. And here’s the good-news part of the story: instead of licensing the technique and turning it into a cash cow, they have announced they intend to release it for free use.
The Cornell researchers are patenting the new rice strain, but Garg said they will then release it for general use.
“We want to put this into the public domain so people everywhere can use it,” he said.
Bravo!