A Canadian canola farmer fighting for patent rights to genetically altered seeds that grew spontaneously on his property will discuss his ongoing legal battle tonight at 7 p.m. in the Agate Hall auditorium.
Speaker Percy Schmeiser is currently engaged in a legal battle in the Canadian Supreme Court with Monsanto, a corporation that develops and markets genetically modified seeds. The company sued him for patent infringement when seeds from its “Roundup Ready Canola” drifted onto his farm.
The keynote speech, titled “David v. Goliath: Patent Law and the Might of Monsanto,” is part of a one-day symposium being held today and is sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.
The symposium, dubbed “Malthus, Mendel, and Monsanto: Intellectual Property and the Law and Politics of Global Food Supply,” will feature experts in patent law, plant genetics and agriculture. The convention takes its name from Thomas Malthus, an English economist who theorized that world population tends to multiply faster than the food supply, and Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk and botanist widely considered the father of genetics.
The symposium will explore how extending intellectual property rights to seeds affects farmers, and how recent Supreme Court decisions and new technologies threaten global food security and genetic diversity, according to a University press release.
“Over the past two decades, genetic engineers have created and patented improvements in seeds used to grow staple crops,” said Keith Aoki, University law professor and conference organizer. “New international agreements establish the global scope of those patent rights and have allowed a decreasing number of multinational corporations to capture much of the global agricultural market with their patented seed.”
Aoki said four or five corporations could end up with a lock on the global seed supply.
Second-year law student J.J. Haapala, who helped organize the event, is studying the intellectual property laws of agriculture and is also a local farmer.
“I think it’s important to look at this relationship between farmers and (seed) breeders,” Haapala said. “Setting up this artificial distinction has worked to our disadvantage.”
He said that during the last 100 years, growers have been divorced from developers in the United States.
“With the green revolution, the seed became seen as a transport device for breeder’s products,” Haapala said. “Instead of breeding seeds regionally to match climate, we suddenly had blanket crops.”
The lecture and conference is part of a two-year effort by the Wayne Morse Center to explore “The Changing Geopolitical Order: Implications for Peace and Stability.”
“Rapid shifts in the supply of the world’s food certainly has implications for global peace and stability,” Wayne Morse Center Interim Director Caroline Forell said.
The one-day symposium is already sold out, but tickets are still available for Schmeiser’s lecture, which is open to the public. Admission is $5. Agate Hall is located at 1787 Agate St.