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The problem with the African village analogy is that the scenario of using the patent to unethically acquire farmer's land by bankrupting them with lawsuits would not serve the interests of the corporation.
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Which corporation? I can easily see African biotech corporations and
multi-national agricultural corporations having the same majority
stockholders. I can also envision a corrupt government setting it up
at the local level so that the farmers get sued by the *distributor* rather
than the company, an in-country enterprise owned by someone with
big land ownership ambitions and an inside track to whoever makes the
laws.
The patents and intellectual property treaties between countries enable
this kind of legal aggression against the assets of small farmers by larger
companies.
What does Monsanto or some African seed producer of cultivars
with patented genes get out of it? They sell a lot of seed to one big
customer who can pay every year instead of to a lot of little customers
who cannot necessarily pay if there was a drought or a war or a plague
of locusts the year before.
(I cannot turn up the document I read that described the distribution
of GMO Canola in his fields in 1998 with a 5-minute Google search,
and that is all the time that I am willing to spend on it.)
I consider the fact that pollen containing patented genes can blow into
your field and pollute the seeds of an open-pollenated crop that you
grow and save seeds from and that can get you sued by a seed
producer to be a fatal economic defect in the technology. They should
not be able to sell it if they cannot control reproduction of it.
edit: It still has be be able to be pollenated from within the same
field and still be glyphosate-resistant, so I guess male-sterile
would not work without jumping through some hoops. The trick
would be to make it so that the Roundup Ready pollen can only
produce seeds when pollenating Roundup Ready flowers.
That would remove the problem with polluting other people's OP
crops with the patented genes and eliminate the patent lawsuits.