Actually, it does consider exactly the point you think it does not, in the paragraph that I am quoting below, for your convenience:

Opponents of GURTs seem to think that massive influxes of foreign pollen are the norm. They’re not. And I certainly wouldn’t want to accept, even as a gift, seed from someone who knew so little about farming and seed saving that they couldn’t even maintain their own varieties. Cross pollination from a different field is a fascinating and rare source of diversity in farmers’ fields, not the norm. GURTs pose absolutely no threat to farm-saved seed. In fact, I believe that they can enhance genetic diversity (by maintaining the separation between varieties), improve seed quality (for the same reasons) and have no impact at all on the livelihoods of poor farmers.

In the wake of scares about pollen drift from GMOs there are actually scads of studies that measure it in different ways and under different circumstances for different crops.

Some day I might feel like reviewing some of those, but in the meantime, please tell me where you get the idea that “a great deal of … seed” could be affected by GURT-containing pollen.

I’d had a few conversations that week that had me steaming a little, and I was venting a little, I think.

No, my point was that I think a fair amount of the hostility towards GURTs stems from a general hostility towards plant IPR’s. Compound that with the hostility towards transgenics that’s out there as well, and you have a technology pretty much guaranteed to upset people. (I actually think a not insignificant chunk of the hostility towards transgenics also stems from the fact many people are uncomfortable with the idea of people owning it, but maybe that’s a different conversation).

These same people generally have no problem with the idea of patents for, say, car parts, or hard drives, or toaster ovens. But there’s this idea that since nature invented strawberries, then I can take no credit for any variety of them I might generate (or “discover”, as one person pointedly informed me was the best I could do, as I could not actually create new strawberries myself).

Especially now that many of the public breeding programs have been essentially gutted, if not discontinued entirely, we’re stuck with the same system which more or less works okay for, say, car parts, hard drives, and toaster ovens. That’s capitalism, and while it has its faults, it’s what we’ve got, and if people want to pretend that it doesn’t apply to plant breeding, pretty soon there won’t be plant breeding, at least not to any serious, expensive extent.

Sorry, just felt like griping. I’m biased, of course, but I kind of feel like plant breeders don’t get their due in our society…

Therefore anyone opposing transgenic GURTS must also oppose seedless watermelons derived through polyploidy. By the very nature of triploid watermelons, which are generated artificially from induced tertraploids crossed with diploids, you cannot save seeds from them… because they are seedless. If someone made a transgenic seedless watermelon, it would be the same sort of thing. So when it is derived through one method it is perfectly ok, but another method and it is evil?

Another interesting contradiction that I note is that anti-GE proponents often say that transgenic crops are risky because they can cross-pollinate and contaminate other people’s seeds. As Jeremy points out, then they should be in favor of GURTs because they would for the most part prevent this from happening. The demand for near-100% separation is encouraging the development of GURTs to solve this ‘problem.’

Finally, there is a really bizarre notion going around. That GURTs would spread around the world and kill of traditional varieties. This goes against the basic biology involved. If it produces infertile seeds, it cannot spread.

I find it hard to believe that anyone who fights for and understands small farmers on the margins of society would think that they might be a target for the companies that would like to sell seeds containing GURTs. Maybe, I suppose, but really, how much of a market would those farmers represent?

Anyway, if you’re right, and I start seeing provisos like that, I promise I’ll consider thinking about supporting them.

Unfortunately, it seems that public perception of GURTs (as evidenced by Terminator technologies) damns them as the worst sort of GMOs because they smuggle in a seemingly malign dependence on the “big bad guys”. Contentious stuff, but it’s difficult to put down conspiracy theories in this domain.