From: Ken Clements (Ken@Innovation-On-Demand.com)
Date: Sun Aug 13 2000 - 16:49:22 MDT
GBurch1@aol.com wrote:
> [This appeared as an anonymous "call to action" on one of the
> anti-genengineering lists I monitor: ]
>
> A message to the elves of the night
>
> The destruction of GE crops is on the rise in North America. In the past
> six months there have been numerous assaults on GE crops in Maine,
> Vermont, Minnesota, California and British Columbia. This is a perfect
> example of a case where the enemy is weaker than one might think. Test
> crops are easy to destroy, anyone can cut down a crop, yet the destruction
> of test crops costs seed companies considerable time.
I smell a business plan in here. It is very hard to make money in farming (I
have watched my eldest sister try to do so for 40 years). However, I suspect
someone could make a bundle by providing secure farm facilities to the GMO
research companies. That way they can subcontracting out this problem. The
grower could charge them 100x what it would cost to grow the crops on ordinary
farms, but they would be glad to pay it to be out of this loop, and have their
investment secure.
As I indicated in an earlier post, this would be ripe for abuse. I suspect
that in the name of security, the grower would not reveal the farm locations
to the researchers, but just show some kind of meeting specifications. This
means someone who almost, but not quite, understands the possible interactions
puts the farm in a place "safe" from the neoluddites, but not safe from the
kind of environmental dangers that only the brightest of the researchers can
understand. The GMO company would claim that they were not accountable for
where the subcontractor put the farm.
I do not think it is a good thing, but if subcontract high security GMO
growers were on the Idea Futures, I would buy some.
-Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:30:25 MST