Labelling
We - the consumers of GM - are being treated like guinea pigs. We demand to know what we are eating, for the food that comes from chemical industrial agriculture is neither equivalent to what we grow at home or that we used to buy in green grocers. Labelling of all GM food is not an unreasonable demand - it is our right.
Patents
The issuing of patents on GM seeds gives corporations unrestricted power over non-GM seeds. It encourages GM companies to contaminate the food chain until all non-GM seeds have GM genes. It works in the same insidious way that European colonisation spread disease throughout native populations and caused those populations to collapse. That’s what GM threatens to do to heirloom seeds and non-GM open pollinated seeds. Thousands of years of selection destroyed because the US won’t regulate GM seeds. It establishes in law superior rights similar to those of the divine right of monarchs over their subjects that took hundreds of years to overturn. There is no basis of morality or ethics if a GM farmer can contaminate a neighbours crop and destroy the livelihood of a non-GM farmer without redress.
Power
Using the foundation stone of seed patenting, Monsanto has increased sales and profit by 500-600% in about 10 years with sales of $11.3 billion in 2008. Buying up scores of seed companies (including the world’s largest company, Seminis, and its huge seed bank) it has become the world’s largest seed company. It is now so big and litiguous its provision for litigation is $272 million (2008) - which exceeds the sales of all but 6 of the largest seed companies! This amount is effectively to fund law suits (my guess is against one in every 40 of its customers - i.e. farmers). How’s that for customer relations!