"If you didn't catch the news on Thursday: Monsanto, the much-reviled transnational agriculture consort, will cease its attempts to bring more genetically modified crops into the European farming market. Monsanto has one GM crop approved to cultivate in only a few places in Europe, the corn MON810, while BASF Plant Science, a smaller GMO concern owned by the massive German chemical company BASF, has one GM potato approved. That's it and going forward, that will be the end of it. At least for Monsanto. That's good but not because it's keeping GMOs out of Europe.
It's good because it's keeping a giant, ugly corporation that means bad things for agriculture and the future of food on Earth out of Europe. Practically, Monsanto weilds outsize influence on matters of food/food chain safety and punishes small/smaller farmers, both by owning and, thus, dictating the planet's agricultural markets and through nasty shit like GMO patents. Patents are one of the genuinely bad things about genetic modification generally and give purveyors like Monsanto the ability to totally patent an organism, from lab onward. Plant patents are nearly a century old in the United States—historically applying to hybrid plants, e.g. old-school genetic modification—but until recently still allowed farmers to save and use seeds. Not anymore. Thus, we wind up with situations like last fall's SCOTUS ruling against an Indiana farmer busted for using Monsanto seeds."
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