Farmers are sympathetic figures deeply tied into national culture. They use this to their advantage. That's how we have tens of billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies and any company that tries to hold farmers to contracts become the target of populist rage.
This suggests a third way out: they could change their name.
For a growing number of people, the name "Monsanto" may as well be "Diablo". For better or worse, labels are abstractions for humans to comprehend the world, and they often influence our thinking in ways we don't perceive and can't resist. Just look at how destructive labels have been throughout history.
So if your name means evil, then changing it may be a way out.
This isn't as unrealistic as it sounds. The only reason I'd thought badly of Monsanto was due to the tales of (sometimes exaggerated) horror from the people around me. But if Monsanto does their rebranding with some finesse, and completely abandons their old name, then it wouldn't be as easy for the general public to merely lead each horror story with, "So here's what that company, formerly Monsanto, used to do..."
In fact, they'd likely have to qualify the horror story with "used to do" (as opposed to "currently acts this way") since a new label would force most people to think of them as a new company, whether or not they realize it. "New label = new thing" is practically hardwired into our brain, and the effects reveal themselves when we communicate.
Otherwise smart people are just blindly angry about GMOs for some reason. It's really disappointing.
How well did that work for Xfinity?
Well, https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=xfinity
"XFINITY by Comcast"
Changing one's name doesn't work if you merely add to it.
http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2007/12/gmo_...
https://www.signaturemd.com/modern-poison-are-genetically-mo...
Not one person I know who is against GMO foods is uneducated about it - quite the opposite... they aren't interested until they start researching the topic. I couldn't care less until my wife started researching it (due to severe reactions by family members). Before then, the only thing I had against GMO was fishy-tasting tomatoes.
Another problem I have with mass deployment of GMO crops is the reduction of active species. Imagine what a simple blight would do to our food supply. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
There is room for debate here, but one certainly does not have to be ignorant to regard Monsanto as "evil".
Here's a hypothetical question: Imagine that Monsanto only sued the farmer if his crop was contaminated AND he used Monsanto's Roundup-Ready herbicide (or a generic equivalent that specifically targets Monsanto crops like Roundup does). Also imagine that he could keep the 'organic' label by showing that there was only a small amount of contamination. In this scenario would you still consider Monsanto to be evil?
Sadly, you and I are not "Roundup Ready" and don't have any mods to our endocrine system to help us cope with eating it and the additives (surfactants) used to bind it to crops.
I get a lot of flack for this in political circles but I think that IP law is a field which has more importance for the future regarding individual rights than, say, abortion. We are talking about IP-based monopolies here over crops, medical tests, and the like, and the scope of these patents is just unprecedented. I don't know what to call those who want such power other than evil.
The Supreme Court has been pretty good recently on these issues, for example overturning patents on recommended results in medical tests (and therefore allowing competing ways of measuring the same thing), greatly restricting uses of secondary patents in medicines and the like. Now they are considering two cases:
1) When you patent a self-replicating technology, is the patent exhausted when the product self-replicates, particularly when the purpose of the patented object is self-replication (patented soybean seeds have the purpose of producing more soybean seeds and that's what they are sold for the purpose of doing). I suppose this would have some implications regarding home rose gardens and the ability to legally share patented clones but aside from emerging transgenic crops the implications are not very heavy.
2) Can a part of the human genome in the abstract be patented? Who owns your genes? I think this must necessarily follow that these can't be patented from Prometheus v. Mayo (decided last year, no IANAL) because that case held that you couldn't patent what the result of a drug test meant. But if this can't be patented, then surely patents on crops are exhausted after first sale.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...
What I can see from a cursory look at the court documents is that the court dismissed on grounds of irrelevance his claim that he neither used roundup nor any similar herbicide on the crop in question.
Second, I have yet to hear a serious argument against the tech that Monsanto is producing. I hear a lot about how they're raping the poor farmers, but, as far as I know, those farmers aren't being forced to do business with Monsanto. I'm pretty sure they've chosen to do business with Monsanto because their seeds produce higher yields at lower prices. That sure seems like a positive to me. I also hear a lot of arguments that are basically various forms of "I think this tech sounds icky."
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...
If you read your own post, you'll see that you claim that every case involves: a) a contract b) a breach of mentioned contract
Yet you seem to reference a case in which there was no contract between Monsanto and the farmer, thus contradicting the aforementioned universal claim a.
Can you explain this seeming paradox? Or are you just abusing the language to paint a pretty picture?