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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Next Battleground: The World's Food Supply
  • Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:50:05 -0600


The Next Battleground: The World's Food Supply
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Next-Battleground--The-by-Deb-Della-Piana-080713-916.html
July 14, 2008 at 04:17:05
by Deb Della Piana Page 1 of 2 page(s)

Picture the scene: A stranger walks into a small-town country store and
accuses the owner of planting seeds in violation of his company's patent.
When the store owner protests that he has done no such thing, the shady
visitor leaves, all the while yelling that his company is big and will make
the store owner pay. The company continues on with its harassment, utilizing
private investigators who film farmers sowing their seeds, infiltrating
community meetings and working informants. Some of the company's employees
pretend to be surveyors. Others are more brazen and attempt to bully farmers
into signing papers that will give them access to their private records.
Sounds like the basis for a great screenplay, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it's
really happening all across rural America. And the company we're talking
about is none other than Monsanto. Filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin has exposed
Monsanto's evil empire in a new documentary that will probably never be aired
on American television.

For years, farmers have been planting seeds in the spring for harvest in the
fall. After the harvest, it is common practice for farmers to reclaim the
seeds and clean them for replanting in the spring. The U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office traditionally refused to award patents to seeds because they
were considered a life form with far too many variables to patent. That all
changed in 1980 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, extended the
patent law to cover “a live human-made microorganism.” Although the ruling
applied to a bacterium developed by a General Electric scientist to clean up
oil spills, the precedent was set and the door was opened. Monsanto walked
through that door and never looked back.

Monsanto developed and patented a genetically-engineered seed that resisted
it's own weed killer, Roundup, giving farmers a convenient way to control
weeds without harming their crops. However, what Monsanto gave itself is the
gift that keeps on giving. Because the seeds are patented, farmers who buy
these genetically-modified seeds must sign an agreement not to reuse the seed
or sell it to other farmers, changing the face of farming forever. That means
that farmers must now buy new seed every year. The increase in seed sales,
combined with the increased sales of Roundup, has been a boon for Monsanto.
Most of the farmers comply with the terms of the Monsanto contract. However,
some farmers truly do not realize what they've gotten into and do not
understand that they cannot reuse the seeds. Others will ignore the terms of
the contract, preferring not to throw away perfectly good seeds. Even farmers
who do not use Monsanto genetically-altered seeds and do not want to use them
can fall victim to Monsanto's strong-arm tactics when water, wind or birds
deposit the unwanted seeds in their fields. There is no way to visually tell
one seed or plant from another; laboratory analysis is required. Monsanto
will gladly send out its army of shady operatives to pull samples from farm
fields for testing in order to protect its profits. If it is confirmed by
laboratory analysis that the crop in your field came from Monsanto seeds, it
won' t matter that you did not put them there. It won't matter if you do not
want them there. All that matters is that they are there, and Monsanto will
do what it must do to protect its patent.

The ruthless pursuit of the world's food supply

During the 1990s, Monsanto declared itself a 'life sciences' company,
spinning off its chemical and fibers operations. After yet another
reorganization in 2002, it presented itself as an 'agricultural' company.
While its PR machine positions Monsanto as a leader in the fight against
world hunger, the simple fact is that it's all about profits. It's not like
Monsanto is donating genetically modified seeds to combat world hunger. In
fact, just the opposite is true. Monsanto knows that if it it owns the seed
market, it essentially controls the food supply. To that end, it has spent
the last decade buying up over 50 GM and traditional seed companies around
the globe. It squeezes its farmers for everything it can get, and it protects
its patents with a ruthless pattern of litigation.

Since the mid-90s, Monsanto has sued 150 U.S. farmers for patent
infringement. The most prevalent 'crime' involves the violation of a
technology agreement that prevents farmers from saving seed from one season
to plant the next season. Overseas, Monsanto's behavior has not been much
better.

In 2005 a criminal investigation concluded that a Monsanto consultant visited
the home of an Indonesian official and handed him an envelope containing a
wad of hundred dollar bills. This bribe was in exchange for the official
bypassing environmental impact studies on Monsanto's genetically-modified and
highly toxic cotton plant. Under any other administration this criminal act
would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However, Monsanto was
allowed to cut a 'deferred prosecution agreement' with the Justice Department
to avoid a criminal trial. Instead, Monsanto paid a million dollar fine and
agreed to government oversight of its operations. Given the present
administration, this amounts to no oversight at all, of course.

In India, an indigenous seed company, Navbharat Seeds Pvt. Ltd. of Gujarat
brought a bollworm-resistant seed, Navbharat-151, to market in 1999.
Navbharat-151 is preferred by Indian farmers because it is a conventional
seed and was not produced by genetic engineering. In 2001, Monsanto claimed
to have found its Bt. cotton gene in some of the fields of Navbharat-151
cotton and accused the Indian farmers of Gujarat of producing pirated seed
via cross-fertilization of their Bollgard plant with Navbharat-151. However,
the Monsanto seeds did not become commercially available in India until 2002.
The only way this cross-fertilization could have occurred was through genetic
pollution, or unless Monsanto was providing its seed illegally to Navbharat
Seeds prior to 1999. This is just another example of the way Monsanto uses
propaganda and public relations to attempt to extract royalties from
unwitting farmers. It should be noted that Monsanto's field trials began
illegally in India in 1998, and the company was taken to court by the
Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) for violating
the Indian Environmental Protection Act. Legal action notwithstanding, many
Indian cotton farmers have fallen hopelessly into debt because of Monsanto's
illegal and ruthless practices. Many have committed suicide.

On March 7, 2008, International Women's Day, dozens of Brazilian women
occupied the research site at the Monsanto facility in Sao Paulo, destroying
the greenhouse and Monsanto's experimental plots of genetically-modified
corn. The protesters were members of the international farmers' organization,
La Via Campesina, who took exception to the Brazilian government's decision
to legalize Monsanto's genetically-modified Guardian® corn, just weeks after
France banned it due to environmental concerns and potential human health
risks. The farmers object to seed patenting because it keeps poor farmers in
debt to the corporations owning the seed patents and takes away the farmers'
freedom to keep and share seeds. Brazilian farmers also believe that
Monsanto's GM crop threatens biodiversity and Brazil's native seed varieties,
and violates the rights of small farmers and consumers by contaminating
organic and conventional crops.

This is Monsanto's master plan. Introduce its genetically-modified seed and
sit back while it contaminates fields grown with traditional seeds. Once that
has happened, Monsanto claims their seeds have been pirated. It is not only
happening in India and Brazil. It is happening in Mexico, where the origin
for maize has been deeply contaminated by Monsanto's GM seeds, Africa and
Paraguay. Monsanto's reach has even extended to Iraq, a country we have
already devastated through war. One of L. Paul Bremer's final acts was to
establish an order preventing farmers from reusing 'protected' (or patented)
seeds. The world is easy to contaminate, but hard to police, so the next
logical step for Monsanto, of course, was development of the so-called
'terminator' or 'suicide' seed.

In 2006, Monsanto purchased a company called Delta & Pine Land. Conveniently,
this is the company that has been working with our own U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) on genetically engineered seeds since 1983, and one of the
main projects has been the 'terminator' or 'suicide' seed. These seeds have
been genetically modified to 'commit suicide' after one harvest season,
preventing farmers from saving or reusing the seed. This would mean that
Monsanto can save money because it will no longer need to employ its cadre of
thugs to strong-arm farmers into submission.

How did Monsanto get where it is?

How did a company that manufactured Agent Orange (used as a defoliant during
the Vietnam war), PCBs and dioxin, and left in its wake 50 known Superfund
sites, come to control 90% of the world's GM seed market? The short answer is
that it has always had more than enough help from the U.S. Government. In
2006, Monsanto donated $106,500 to federal candidates with 32% going to the
Democrats and 68% to Republicans. While this number may seem insignificant,
it's the approximately $4 million it spent on lobbying that helps them curry
favor with the government.

Monsanto, more than any other U.S. Company, is a master at using the
government's unethical 'revolving door' policy. In 1991, Michael Taylor, was
appointed deputy commissioner of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA).
He had previously been an attorney at Monsanto. While in his government
position, Taylor made key decisions that allowed the government to approve GE
crops without proper testing and consumer labeling, in spite of the fact that
there were (and still are) serious concerns about their safety. Taylor then
returned to Monsanto to work in 'long range planning.' He is just one of the
many Monsanto employees who have conveniently found their way into government
positions, and then returned to the private sector after accomplishing their
tasks.

Because Monsanto successfully prevented labeling of food packages, consumers
do not know that 60-70% of the food on store shelves, including cereals,
snack foods, and even baby foods, contain some type of genetically-modified
ingredients. These ingredients also frequently turn up in animal feed. How
safe are they? Because they were never appropriately tested, nobody really
knows. Some of the potential problems include introduction of allergens and
toxins into foods, antibiotic resistance, accidentally changing the nutrient
content of crops and the creation of 'superweeds' and other environmental
risks. Of these potential risks, allergens and toxins are the most dangerous.

While responsibility for regulation falls to the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the FDA. However,
industry experts say that the green light is given mostly by the companies
developing the technology. It is no surprise, then, that Monsanto owns 90% of
the domestic genetically-modified seed market. (The rest is split among other
companies, including Dow Chemical and Syngenta AG.) The FDA has a unique
policy for determining the safety of GM foods: Genetically-modified foods
simply need to be 'substantially equivalent' to non-modified foods. This is
hardly a scientific approach.

In the meantime, Monsanto's unregulated march to control the world food
supply continues with its recent announcement of the purchase of Marmot SA,
which operates Central America's largest corn seed company. This purchase
will solidify Monsanto's position as the leading corn seed supplier to the
Latin American and Central American regions. Monsanto's assault on the public
food supply now moves to milk. Its synthetic Recombinant Bovine Growth
Hormone, known as rBGH, has been banned for health reasons in every
industrialized country except the United States, of course. Oakhurst Dairy of
Maine, like many other milk suppliers, has been responding to the desire of
American consumers and providing milk free of rBGH, and they have been
labeling their containers as such. Monsanto sued Oakhurst to prevent them
from telling their customers that the milk is free of the Monsanto chemical.
Faced with intense pressure from a multinational corporation and rising legal
costs, Oakhurst was forced to settle out of court.

In spite of this, Monsanto's ruthless march to control the world's food
supply continues unabated, financially devastating America's small
family-owned farms, putting untested food on our shelves for unwitting
Americans to consume, and generally wreaking worldwide havoc.





  • [Livingontheland] The Next Battleground: The World's Food Supply, Tradingpost, 07/25/2008

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