Nok et slag er tapt i makten over maten!

Kommentar knyttet til kulturverksartikkelen Makten over maten, av Emma Gerritsen.

- Miljøministeren tillater genmodifisert mais: http://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/re...

Dette er ikke først og fremst et helsespørsmål, slik som ministeren forsøker å fremstille det, men et maktspørsmål. Skal makten over maten tilhøre allmenningheten eller korporasjonene?

- Beware the Corporate Takeover of Seed Under Many Guises: http://permaculturenews.org/20...

Privatiseringen og korporativiseringen av frøet er et voldsomt angrep på en av historiens og alle kulturers viktigste allmenning, frøallmenningen. Vi snakker her om en rasering og utslettelse av en av sivilisasjonens mest sentrale allmenninger siden mennesket første gang grep om sigden! 

- The Corporate Enclosure of Seeds Intensifies: http://bollier.org/blog/corpor...

Fra David Bolliers artikkel:

In a sign of how far the forces of enclosure have come, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that re-using seeds that are patented, knowingly or not, amounts to an act of piracy. Of course, re-using seeds has been the tradition in agriculture for millennia, just as re-using songs and text is an essential element of culture.

No matter. The masters of "intellectual property" hold the whip hand, and they don't want us to re-use and share seeds as the natural course of things. If you think that a farmer ought to be able to use the seeds from one crop in the next season, you are entertaining illegal ideas. (Just be happy that Google doesn't have access to your mind yet -- although Google Glass may be a leading gambit!)

The Supreme Court case involved 75-year-old farmer Hugh Bowman, who bought bean seeds from a grain elevator and planted them in his fields. Since nearly all soybeans are now genetically engineered to be pesticide resistant, Bowman suspected, correctly, that the beans he bought might also be Roundup-resistant like the earlier generation of seeds. It turns out they were – and so Bowman grew them several seasons, using the next generation of seeds each time. But here’s the catch – the original generation of seeds are patented, and he didn’t pay Monsanto for the right to use the second-generation of seeds for planting. 

This amounts to an act of intellectual property theft, according to the Court, because farmers should not presume to have the right to re-plant seeds from prior harvests. Companies like Monsanto now hold property rights in seeds, and they don’t like the competition from the commons. The commons is the radical idea that the abundance of nature (self-reproducing plants) ought to be shareable. 

It is a sign of the bankruptcy of liberalism that it now joins the Court's pro-business majority in sanctifying the propertization of life itself. Writing for the Court, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that Monsanto’s patents extend into future generations of seeds. In effect, the very generativity of the seeds can be owned. She said that without this reach-through protection of property rights, farmers could get something for nothing – and Monsanto would not get its due rewards for its innovation. 

Funny, I didn’t realize that Monsanto had invented the regenerative properties of seeds. Did Justice Kagan stop to think that without the gifts of nature or the innovations of millions of farmers acting as commoners, Monsanto would never have had a new seed to “invent”? Isn’t something due to the commons in return? Apparently not."

Vil oppfordre til å lese hele artikkelen av Bollier.

Den amerikanske bonden er i ferd med å totalt miste makten over maten. Bonden blir som en husmann under Monsanto. Eller enda verre, da husmannen i det minste fikk lov å benytte egne frø, og tross alt var del av en frøallmenning.

En slik framtid ønsker miljøministeren, og ikke minst landbruksminister Sylvi Listhaug for norske bønder. En bonde som ikke har mer kontroll over maten enn kassadama på Rema. Er det en slik framtid vi ønsker?

I alle fall ikke for leserne av Kulturverk. Takk for en viktig artikkel i rett tid!