From Rapid Rise in Seed Prices Draws U.S. Scrutiny — William Neuman, New York Times:

“The company’s patent on the Roundup Ready trait in soybeans expires before the 2014 planting season, meaning that, just as in the pharmaceutical business, rivals would be free to sell a cheaper version. Farmers would also be free to save seed from one year to the next, a money-saving step they are now barred from taking”

So far the fallout from GMO crops has had more to do with forcing farmers into expensive, option-limiting relationships with monopolistic suppliers, and less to do with the human-health problems or ecological contamination that franken-food campaigners warned about. (So far, the nature of those problems is such that they could be real and we wouldn’t know about it yet.) I’m pleased and surprised by the suggestion that we may already have outlasted some of the legal aspects of the GMO agricultural era. Legal seed-saving, and relatively cheap Roundup-Ready-esque crops are not solutions to the majors failings of the western agricultural system, but they sound like major improvements in their own right.