Some plants are genetically engineered when they are a seed to be exactly similar in some way. For example, some plants are engineered to be resistant to week killer such as “Round Up”. When a company patents these genetically engineered seeds, a farmer must buy the seeds from the company that produces them if they want to grow this type of plant. However, this can cause a large conflict with farmers. The seeds can easily be blown by the wind or transported on a bird onto a farmers plot of land and begin to grow there without the farmers knowledge. The genetically engineered plants look identical to the non-genetically engineered plants. If the company who has made the patents discovered that their seeds are growing on the farmers land, they can sue them for illegally growing their patented seeds. In this type of situation, the farmer is helpless. There is nothing they can do or say to get them out of the fine they have to pay for illegally growing the seeds even though they have no previous knowledge that they were growing. It is these large, corporate companies that are causing small landowners that have been farming for years, to go bankrupt or be forced to change their crop.
I think that genetically engineered crops are not a good direction for our world of agriculture to be headed. What happened to the days when farmers farmed their crops from the land and didn’t get their seeds from a science lab? It upsets me to hear that small town farmers are being taken to court for something they had no knowledge over. They have lived their lives in the fields, and that is being taken away from them. Plant seeds should not be patented because they are from the land, and everything from the land should be shared with everyone.
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