Like you describe in your article, my first two reactions were the following:

A - Bio-piracy against Monsanto? Indian cotton farmers liberating, and experimenting with, a "closed-source" technology that belongs to an "evil" corporation? Creating their own plants freely? Yay! Power to the people!!

B - Oh wait... That means even more genetically-engineered strains of cotton out there?! Yuck! Danger, Will Robinson!

Seriously, though, this could turn very nasty very fast. Two scenarios come to mind, and I am sure other readers will contribute their own as well...

First scenario is: the pests that were so efficiently eliminated by the GMO cotton strains acquire their own resistance and start proliferating again, forcing farmers to use more and more pesticide to eliminate them.

This, in turn, forces the pest to adapt to the pesticide and/or to new adverse genes, and so on and so forth... Evolution becomes an arms race.

Second scenario is: what if the GM cotton turns out to have adverse health effects on people who buy, or wear, it? And how long before we discover these effects?

While a part of me feels great that some people have been empowered by what the article calls bio-piracy, another part fears they may be playing with fire, the kind of fire these farmers certainly don't need.

No, it isn't. It's evolution in action.

Evolution produced DNA, and the cotton plant, and the bollworm -- and us, really smart monkeys who have figured out how to manipulate the above to our own ends. Granted, some of the not-so-smart monkeys will whine about it, and other not-so-smart monkeys will try to figure out how to control how other monkeys use it, but the really smart monkeys will keep doing what they always do: making things better for all the monkeys, whether the rest of the monkeys understand it or not. There is nothing unnatural going on here; manipulating the rest of nature is what we smart monkeys naturally do.

Messy, sure. Evolution is messy. All of nature is messy. But it's also glorious.

Great Line.

Corporations will be unable to control how their biotech is used.

No! You think? You mean, living plants can just spew seeds to the winds to land where they will? Egads, who'd a thunk it?

Corporations like Monsanto have made their bed by messing with genetics, and now they have to lie in it. A little thought to the fact that Nature is not controllable would have kept them from ever even trying to "patent" living things. It's an idiotic concept to begin with, even more blinkered than the idea of "intellectual property".

Seeds get out. Genes get out. Organisms reproduce, and reproduction is messy. The systems may work very well in a lab, but the second you move into the real world, all the controls go out the window. They don't like the fact that farmers are experimenting on their own with the tools Monsanto sold them? Tough. They can just suck it up and face facts. It was a foolhardy idea to begin with. I certainly have no sympathy for them whatsoever.

Next time, maybe they'll think about things like this before they go sinking millions of dollars into illusions of "owning" things that cannot be owned.

This, in turn, forces the pest to adapt to the pesticide and/or to new adverse genes, and so on and so forth... Evolution becomes an arms race.

I'm not sure if the above comment is meant to suggest that this is something new, but in case that is what is being suggested, I just want to point out that this dynamic is as old as life itself.

The "arms race" paradigm is a major (and interesting) part of evolutionary theory...sometimes it is called "the red queen effect" (after the Alice in Wonderland character).

We can't avoid using pesticides out of the fear that pests will develop resistance -- the worst-case scenario is that the the pesticide becomes worthless, in which case we are no worse off than if we had never used it. By using the pesticides that we have, we'll at least get a temporary benefit from them.

Furthermore, the solution to pesticide resistance is not to apply more pesticide, it is to apply different pesticides. Each pesticide has a different mode of action, and resistance to one pesticide is not connected to resistance to other pesticides.

I guess you folks have not heard of the Canadian farmer who saved his GMO polluted rapeseed and was sued by Monsanto all the way to the Canada supreme court. That is one of the big aims of intellectual property rights globalization.