Editor’s note: The following post was part of an April Fools Joke. Go here for more details.

By William Harvey:

Hello readers, I am William Harvey, the Director of Global GMO Policy at Greenpeace International. In exchange for support of this blog’s continued operations, I will be posting regularly at Biofortified, and my office staff will monitor and moderate the continued discussion. We have made a few minor changes to the look of the blog. Now for my first blog post.

Everyone knows that every Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are patented by corporations. There is not a single GMO that can be grown without the explicit permission through a signed contract. This puts the power in the hands of multinationals, taking it away from the indigenous people of Hawaii, Southeast Asia, Africa, and even farmers in the U.S. are having their right stripped away. The right to save seed is fundamental to growing food, and anything that removes this right is morally wrong.

This is why Greenpeace has a strong stance against genetic modification, because as a corporate technology it inherently requires that farmers be unable to save seed. We also seek to eliminate hybrid crops, because these are another method for maintaining the dominance of seed companies over farmers. Hybrids do not breed true – and so farmers have to keep re-buying seed. Recently, we have added seedless watermelons to our growing list of ‘farmer suicide’ foods, because the triploid seeds must be purchased every year.

As we have learned from cases such as Schmeiser v Monsanto, the biotech companies will stop at nothing to prevent farmers from saving their seeds.

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