Open access farming? What?

Some days I read something that makes me want to howl until the skies fall and shatter.

In this short but dizzying editorial about a subcomittee at Davos adressing African food insecurity, the writer says that Hugh Grant ( the CEO of Monsanto, the super extra evil agricultural company, not the floppy haired charming film star) agreed with the rest of the panel that there were huge issues with ensuring African food security.

"Yes, he said, new crops could help Africa - but only if the world finds a way to get the technology to a continent that cannot pay for it. He pointed to the model of the pharmaceutical industry, which restricted the distribution of HIV retroviral drugs and limited research into malaria, both essential to Africa's needs, on profit grounds.

But what other model is there? The new idea to emerge from the meeting was that the agro-industrial complex needs to let go, not put all its faith and future profits into patents but share skills. The model might be the open-source software industry, which has its big players but does not restrict access or development.

Could Linux be a model for farming? Monsanto might find the transition hard to make. But a world in which all food is produced from seeds owned by a handful of big companies is not one that would be good for Africans, or for anyone else." LINK

Great Scott. Not to sound totally naive here, but when did agricultural patents become so pervasive that people are looking for business models to get around them? Shouldn't food production be, well, always open source? At the farm where I worked, some plants would come with labels warning that propagation was illegal, but these were decorative (and I must say flimsy seeming plants- that Little Wonder campanula died almost immediately every time we had it in) and of course I know about Monsanto's steady war against farmers(including their plan to patent pigs), but I had assumed, apparently naively, that a. Monsanto wouldn't go after the starving- talk about blood from stones, and that b. there were still unpatented crop seeds out there so that food production would not be an illegal act.

I guess I'm making myself sound stupid- I did know that it's illegal to save seeds, I did know that the big agro companies will go after you if you do- I just hoped that they weren't going after desperate and starving peoples for trying to grow food. But after watching big pharma try to charge those same people for retroviral drugs to combat HIV, Hugh Grant must have felt inspired.

And some days, I wish I believed in hell.