Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Sure, there are issues with GE. No one wants to see a few companies in charge of the world’s food supply, so who owns the seed is a real concern. But this too won’t last. As the wife-and-husband team of University of California at Davis plant pathologist Pamela Ronald and UC Davis organic farming expert Raoul Adamchak described in their book Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food: “It [GE] is a relatively simple technology that scientists in most countries, including many developing countries, have perfected. The product of GE technology, a seed, requires no extra maintenance or additional farming skills.” This means that GE is already democratic, provided that we can learn to share the intellectual property. This hasn’t happened yet (or not in any great measure), but in a recent speech given at the Long Now Foundation, author and organic activist Michael Pollan called for an open source movement for GE crops. Stewart Brand agrees, arguing that “if Monsanto throws a fit, tell them that if they’re polite, you might license back to them the locally attuned tweaks you’ve made to their patented gene array.”