Thursday, Dec 3, 2009 by Klaus

Dinner’s on Monsanto

“It’s food! Really.”

“It’s food! Really.”

“We are an agricultural company,” begins Monsanto’s marketing spiel. And wouldn’t you trust the company who invented aspartame and bovine growth hormone to invent food for you? How about if that company also helped develop Agent Orange? The fact is that you’ve probably eaten food genetically enhanced by Monsanto in the past day alone, and they’ve learned a lot since the Agent Orange days.

There’s a lot of money to be made if you own both the lock and the key that opens it. Chemicals are Monsanto’s game, so if I told you that they owned both the poison and the antidote you might call it pragmatism. But Monsanto’s real coup was licensing its genetically-modified seeds to the world’s farmers based primarily on the promise that Monsanto’s GM seeds produce higher yields. Cleverly, Monsanto has engineered these seeds to be resistant to their “broad-spectrum” herbicide called Roundup, which is the second half of the bargain.

This alone puts Monsanto in a profitable position, but there’s even more money to be made. Being that farmers can’t own Monsanto’s patented seeds, they must instead license a new batch after each harvest. This turns the ancient practice of seed-saving into a crime, and in response Monsanto has dispatched undercover crop police to root out (ahem) the criminal farmers, and try them for violation of intellectual property rights, patent infringement, and seed piracy.

Still, you can see why farmers would be tempted by Monsanto’s siren song. If you don’t believe that biotechnology has real environmental and health benefits, just ask Monsanto — they have an army of scientists ready with the findings. But the plants that grow from Monsanto’s seed stock don’t keep to themselves. Just as Monsanto’s representatives have infiltrated the upper echelons of our government, Monsanto’s plants produce their own seeds and pollens, and it’s not long before surrounding crops are bombarded by foreign DNA, leading to contamination of the natural surrounding ecosystem, bizarre mutations, and new vulnerability to disease. (This doesn’t just apply to Monsanto, of course. In 2002 a corn engineered by Prodigene to produce pharmaceutical medicines contaminated corn and soybean fields in Iowa and Nebraska.)

Still, farmers remain upbeat about the promise of Monsanto’s products.

[Monsanto’s] seeds represent “probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years,” said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.

(via washingtonpost.com)

The dinosaurs might have said the same thing about that meteor.

categories: agri-insanity, corporate shenanigans


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