No excuses to be against science now: Monsanto patent expires

By ACSH Staff — Aug 03, 2015
What excuse to be anti-science will environmental groups use now that they can no longer claim it's about corporations? Monsanto's early patents on GMOs have started to expire.

Environmentalists, who throughout the early 2000s rode a wave of public relations framing their part of the political spectrum as more scientific, have seen the tables turn this decade.

Books like Science Left Behind and The End of Doom have instead shown that on truly pressing science issues such as food, energy and medicine, vehement opposition was funded primarily by anti-science groups like Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, and others.

After the anti-science mentality that infested environmental groups was exposed, political consultants scrambled to shore up their base in science academia - a base that was increasingly turning on the anti-vaccine, anti-energy and anti-GMO beliefs of the fringe elements that were hiding under the science umbrella. The solution: Claim it was not a distrust of science, but a distrust of corporations.

It wasn't very convincing, and did little good as the tide gradually turned. Now, even sympathetic states like California have turned down warning labels on GMOs and have used government to check the runaway anti-vaccine sentiment within their borders.

Meanwhile, GMOs have skyrocketed in popularity:

Credit: USDA Credit: USDA and Technology Review

Now the anti-corporation excuse is disappearing also: Roundup Ready soybeans, early GMOs, have been around for 20 years so the early patents are starting to expire, leading to the first generic GMOs off-patent seeds that cost half as much and which farmers are free to save and replant.

Without a corporation to vilify, environmental groups are now naked in their distrust of agricultural progress. That is good for the American public and even more so for the poor in developing nations, who have been manipulated and deceived by developed world elites out to raise money using fear and doubt.

We needn't worry about Monsanto either, they have Roundup Ready 3 undergoing approval.

Read more on GMOs by the American Council on Science and Health here.

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