You may have heard about Monsanto’s donation of $4 million worth of seed to Haiti. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of confusion about exactly what’s happening. In this post, I hope to help clear up some of the biological questions up as well as addressing some of the intellectual property questions. If you have specific questions about Monsanto*, I hope you’ll bring them to Monsanto’s blog Beyond the Rows or ask some of the many Monsanto employees on Twitter such as @Mica_MON and @JPlovesCOTTON.
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More on Hybrid Hate
While the comments on Anastasia’s excellent post about the hybrid seed donation situation in Haiti continue to flow in, I thought I would make a few extra comments about the situation that I thought were interesting, and highlight some comments of others.
The first thing that occurs to me in this discussion about the hybrid seed is that there still is a lot of misinformation flying around about it. Beverly Bell, who ‘sounded the alarm’ about farmers supposedly planning to buy and then burn the donated hybrid seed, continues to make stuff up about the situation. While Monsanto never offered to donate GE seeds, Bell claims that the Haitian Agricultural Ministry rejected such an offer. Ronnie Cummins from the Organic Consumers Association assumes it to be true and expands upon the tall tale:
However according to Monsanto, they never offered GE seeds, ever.
Bell and Cummins both repeat the claim that hybrid seed cannot be saved, or is worthless to save. Also not true. The traits of saved hybrid seed will have a distribution of combinations of their parents’ traits, but will still grow. I would like you to watch this short video which contains an interview with an “Agronomist” named Mark who is taking part in apparent protests against Monsanto in Haiti.
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