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All right. If this last installment of this series on lab-grown cocoa doesn't light your hair on fire, you're using PFAS flame retardant for hair product. When cacao genes edited by Mars Candy Company drift in pollen onto a neighboring cocoa farm in Ghana and fertilize a farmer's trees, who owns the resulting seedlings? Well, the court says Mars does. So, not only does a native cocoa farmer get control of his gene pool stolen from him, he could eventually lose ownership of his entire

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tree inventory. Any gene added Mars makes to cacao using licensed CRISPR technology becomes Mars intellectual property. And Mars isn't alone. There are more than a thousand CRISPR patents right now at the US Patent Office that have agricultural application. The Supreme Courts of both Canada and the US have ruled that ownership of the physical plant is no defense against a patent claim. The patent on the gene trumps the farmer's property rights to the plant on his own land that he owns. Now, apply that to West Africa. Côte

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d'Ivoire and Ghana have an estimated 2 million smallholder cocoa farmers. The average farmer earns less than $2.15 a day. Mars, on the other hand, is privately held with about $55 billion in annual sales. Most cacao varieties can't successfully fertilize themselves. Some plants can. So, the pollination system that makes the chocolate industry possible is the same system that has no biological defense against engineered pollen from a neighbor's plantation. If that's a gene-edited Mars plantation and

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they choose to sue for patent infringement, even if a Ghanaian farmer wins in court, the cost of fighting is more than he'll earn in his lifetime. So, here's what I think the fix should be. If a company patents a gene edit, require it to be incapable of spreading by natural pollination. Build the fence into the seed or don't plant it. Across eight years of development, I can't find a single published statement about how Mars plans to keep their genetic modification from spreading to the next

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generation of cacao seedlings everywhere. And God forbid something goes wrong. The technology exists to contain it, but the Berkeley Mars team has not used any of it. Look, a rancher can't let his bull get through the fence and breed the neighbor's herd. In every other industry, the owner of the hazardous thing pays the cost of keeping it contained. The polluter pays. Patented genetic should follow the same rule. If you own the gene, you own the fence. This needs clear regulatory language cuz it's going to keep coming

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up. A multinational company patents something, lets it reproduce uncontrollably, and then sues the farmer it spreads to. Call that what you want, I call it legalized theft.