I don’t get the corporate or government monopoly of food. I’ve worked in agriculture for the last 37 years and every year I am exposed to an increasing pool of ag product suppliers. Monsanto Round-up came off patent several years ago and there are dozens of generic glyphosate products on the market. The protection of intellectual property when it comes to seed is no different than patents on software or copy rights on music. There would be no incentive for research and development without and economic return. The patent on Golden Rice was voluntarily rescinded as a humanitarian gesture.
Why are they restrictions seeds in Europe and trying to regulate back yard gardens here in the us.
Actually, patents on seeds, as currently constituted, are different from software patents and from music copyright. Neither software patents nor copyrights claim monopoly rights over the results of natural processes — the generation of seeds by plants grown from patented seed — simply on the basis that the natural process might have produced a copy of the patented product. (Not being in agriculture, but having a flower garden with some reseeding annuals, I find it improbable that the patented gene-insertions will breed true.)