“It’s food! Really.”

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.

» Share on Facebook

take your choice: to breathe it, or to drink it or to eat it? it’s treachery and it’s fucking surreal:

“There’s a trade-off,” says Rebeckah Freeman (email), a governmental affairs director for the American Farm Bureau Federation. “Do you want your fruit and vegetables to look pretty or do you have a social issue with these pest-management tools?”

wtf? The USA Today article lists a host of the reported ills including this:

“People were vomiting and coughing,” says the mother of seven. “People told me they didn’t know if they were going to live or die.”

chances are, you’re eating it:

Diener, the California farmer, thinks agriculture will slowly wean itself from reliance on toxic chemicals. But even though organic farming is the industry’s fastest growing sector, it’s only about 2% of production. Use of less-risky pesticides is up sharply but still accounts for less than 1% of the market. “We can’t do social good for anybody unless we make a profit,” he says.

circling…

» Share on Facebook