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It's shocking how such a basic practice is still illegal in many places. Monsanto is truly evil
Makes sense why India told the Americans to fuck off with this. I'd rather have low quality produce than be reliant on proprietary vegetables.
I read the article and all I can say is, wow. I figured this was a decision against something like we have in the US where farmers get sued when they seed save from transgenic plants or their crops get fertilized by GM crops and wind up with those patented genes in the next generation. But this law was just straight up against saving seed outside the seed breeding system. Fuck all the way off with that, I can't post a post Federal enough to describe a proper fate for people who want to rent seek off the DNA of life.
I hate Monsanto with about 1% of my total hatred. Since I can probably only keep track of about a hundred things, give or take, that means I’m hating them as much as I theoretically can.
Capitalism with the “break stuff” motto and the thing they are breaking is part of the building blocks of all agriculture. They can’t contemplate the scale of the thing they are attempting to steal.
I wouldn’t say it’s that good news because whatever seeds exist in Kenya unless personally cultivated have been modified by the big companies that have bioengineered them to not be able to fertilize.
Unless I have missed something huge, if this were about crops bioengineered to be sterile, they wouldn't even need to take action to prevent seed sharing, because the seeds would be sterile.
Usually the problem with heavily engineered seeds from agribusiness is that they're sort of unstable from generation to generation. They have their seed plants set up just so so that the generation they sell is at an engineered local maxima point of sorts, and then subsequent generations from that aren't reliably that anymore, and trend towards more normal variations of the crop. They can still technically be reused, with somewhat lower yields in subsequent generations.
It's sort of like how a lot of fruit trees don't grow from seed right and need grafting to produce desirable fruit, just less dramatic since most annual seed crops are more stable in general because if they weren't they'd not have been cultivated to begin with.
Also the agribusinesses are very shitty about it, because their goal is control: a farmer leaving their sales ecosystem is a threat to the stranglehold they want to exert on them, they just can't legally bully them for dropping their product and sourcing unrelated seeds but they can bully them for reusing the seeds they've purchased (and they try to establish a monopoly on seed sales as best they can, to ensure farmers can only go along with them and then have to be dependent on them too). They want this faustian bargain: the farmers get a higher yield crop for obeying them indefinitely, and a lower yield crop and legal threats if they don't keep submissively playing along.