By Charlotte Silver / Al Jazeera / Alternet
Last week Monsanto announced staggering profits from 2012 to celebratory shareholders while American farmers filed into Washington, DC to challenge the Biotech giant’s right to sue farmers whose fields have become contaminated with Monsanto’s seeds. On January 10 oral arguments began before the U.S. Court of Appeals to decide whether to reverse the cases’ dismissal last February.
Monsanto’s earnings nearly doubled analysts’ projections and its total revenue reached $2.94bn at the end of 2012. The increased price of Roundup herbicide, continued market domination in the United States and, perhaps most significant, expanded markets in Latin America are all contributing factors to Monsanto’s booming business.
Exploiting their patent on transgenic corn, soybean and cotton, Monsanto asserts an insidious control of those agricultural industries in the US, effectively squeezing out conventional farmers (those using non-transgenic seeds) and eliminating their capacity to viably participate and compete on the market. (Until the end of 2012, Monsanto was under investigation by the Department of Justice for violating anti-trust laws by practicing anticompetitive activities towards other biotech companies, but that investigation was quietly closed before the year’s end.)
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With glyphosate (the active ingredient in RoundUp) now off patent as of a few years ago, how could Monsanto be “dominate” with that product? Does not make sense. Many other glyphosate herbicides out there. Yes, Monsanto’s RoundUp was the only game in town but that changed when their patent on glyphosate expired.
Please do not be fooled by corporate propaganda- GMO crops are not safe, they are not better for the environment, they do not reduce pesticide usage (quite the contrary), they are all around bad news. Do not be fooled into the belief that the only way we will be able to feed the millions of starving people around the world, this is a lie designed to manipulate emotions.
Organic agriculture is the solution to so many of our woes.
Mansanto must be stopped…Not sure how but I will not be buying any GMO foods. At least not knowingly. Spread the word people to only support the small organic farms!
Watch “Food Inc.” for further evidence of Monsanto’s evil.
Very good documentary.
Expose Monsanto and & US Govt connections. See the link and “Like” Facebook
Excerpt from organicconsumers.org
Monsanto, Dupont & Obama
Obama and Corn
President Obama knows that agribusiness cannot be trusted with the regulatory powers of government. On the campaign trail in 2007, he promised: We’ll tell ConAgra that it’s not the Department of Agribusiness. It’s the Department of Agriculture. We’re going to put the people’s interests ahead of the special interests.
Tom Vilsack
But, starting with his choice for USDA Secretary, the pro-biotech former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, President Obama has let Monsanto, Dupont and the other pesticide and genetic engineering companies know they’ll have plenty of friends and supporters within his administration.
President Obama has taken his team of food and farming leaders directly from the biotech companies and their lobbying, research, and philanthropic arms:
Michael Taylor, former Monsanto Vice President, is now the FDA Deputy Commissioner for Foods.
Roger Beachy, former director of the Monsanto-funded Danforth Plant Science Center, is now the director of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Islam SiddiquiIslam Siddiqui
Vice President of theMonsanto and Dupont-fundedpesticide-promoting lobbying group, CropLife, is now the Agriculture Negotiator for the US Trade Representative.
Rajiv Shah, former agricultural-development director for the pro-biotech Gates Foundation (a frequent Monsanto partner), served as Obama’s USDA Under Secretary for Research Education and Economics and Chief Scientist and is now head of USAID.
Elena Kagan, who, as President Obama’s Solicitor General, took Monsanto’s side against organic farmers in the Roundup Ready alfalfa case, is now on the Supreme Court.
Ramona Romero corporate counsel to DuPont, has been nominated by President Obama to serve as General Counsel for the USDA.
A new strain called TrueFlex patented canola, requiring double the amount of RoundUp WeatherMAX patented chemical spray to protect it, will be ready to market in 2014. TrueFlex is a newly engineered species of “plant” which seems not surprisingly to be having difficulty selling itself to even 6 willing international markets (required before it can go commercial in Canada). I can’t even remotely imagine choosing to eat vegetables cooked in TrueFlex sprayed and sprayed again by WeatherMAX, versus steaming vegetables in water or roasting them. But such is the way of the world and biotech is implicated everywhere, to the point of being powerful enough to deny Serbia entry into the WTO “unless it rethink its trade policies concerning GMO’s”. Imagine the nerve of Serbia to choose to keep itself to non-GMO markets ;)
The wheat genome has now been mapped and found to be 6 times more complex than the human genome. It is a complex plant whose secret (the ancient Egyptians called it sacred) ability to sustain human life is not yet even suspected by science. Indigenous, original, complex wheat could be totally obliterated over a few harvests if it is cross-pollinated by a GM variety. Gene species-jumping through cross-pollination is very real. We are witness to the entire evolution of prairie food crops and grasses becoming unalterably genetically contaminated over 15 years. The new “controllers” of life becoming the plant patent-holders (…am I reading this right? afraid so.) who will breed whatever genetic quirks they want to in whatever breed of crop they want to, and then call these genetic aberrations “plants”. This by some is considered a troubling development.
These are very incredible and highly under-reported developments in food, nutrition, farming, agriculture, life on earth. It’s all happening under our watch ushered in with pleasant sounding press releases. I understand that incredible pressures are being put to bear on farmers who just want to do the right thing, but who see what their neighbours are doing, what the media is saying (or not saying), who hear the pitch from their seed provider, who listen in the coffee shop, who read the industry magazine…what are they “supposed” to think when guys next door are ringing the till, even at the cost of rendering their soil microbe-dead with spray-resistant “plants”? Currently in Canada and the US, we don’t even label products with GMO’s in them. Other countries won’t even import the stuff, here we gobble it down without a clue as to what we are eating.
Yes, many other companies sell glyphosphate since Monfatto’s patent on Roundup expired. So Monfatto came up with GMO crops…. Farmers growing GMO crops are bound by contractual agreement to use Monfatto’s Roundup as a weedkiller.
Thus fattening Monfatto’s profits.
Now that wheat farmers spray their crops just before harvest with Roundup to dry out the wheat, the wheat we eat is a triple Roundup treat.
Why was it closed? That alone deserves investigation.