NGO's fury at Monsanto's patent
''The patent claims are based on tomatoes that have a natural resistance to a fungus called Botrytis cinerea. The tomatoes originally used for this patent come from the international gene bank, Gatersleben in Germany. The resistance that was researched was already known in these plants, which were simply crossed with other tomato plants,'' explains a communiqué. For the NGO's, this patent illustrates how easy it is for companies such as Monsanto to bypass constraints and limitations with patent laws. ''Knowing that simple crossing techniques are not patentable, Monsanto has deliberately reiterated the patent over the examination period in order to give the impression that genius genetic techniques were implicated (…)''.