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Wednesday, October 29, 2008 

Frakenfood

Monday, 25 August 2008 GreenMuze Staff
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Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are the by-products of splicing genes from one species into the DNA of another, explains Aaran Stephans, founder of Nature's Path Foods. Numerous environmentalists and scientists believe the creation of GMO technology is fraught with unknown dangerous and serious long-term consequences for our health and the environment.

The American-based Say No to GMO organization describes genetically modified crops and foods as '…a new technology that forces genetic information across the protective species barrier in an unnatural way.' Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) explains how with GMO technology, '…any gene from any plant, animal, bacterium, fungus or virus can be inserted into the DNA in reproductive cells of any other organism.' Frances Moore Lappé, author and food advocate, questions genetically modified foods' place in our society with; 'None of us called for genetic manipulation of seeds. Not one of us said, yes, this new technology will benefit me, my family, and my community'.

Most North Americans aren't even aware that they are consuming genetically modified foods at every meal.

Regardless of citizen input, biotech companies are making it their business to systematically industrialize the world's natural food supply into genetically modified Frankenfoods. Unfortunately, most North Americans aren't even aware that they are consuming genetically modified foods at every meal.

Not All GMO Foods Are Created Equal

Crops can be engineered as 'pesticide crops' designed to produce a pesticide within the plant. Seeds of Deception author Jeffery M. Smith explains many genetically modified crops are 'herbicide tolerant crops', crops that have been genetically engineered to be tolerant of specific herbicides, for example numerous GM crops are Roundup Ready® (a registered trade-mark of Monsanto). 'Virus Resistant Crops' are crops engineered to resist specific viruses, like some brands of US squash and papaya. 'Terminator Seeds or Crops', are very controversial in North America; these seeds have been modified to restrict their own use. PANNA explains, '…Terminator seeds grow 'normally', but produce sterile seeds, forcing farmers to buy new seed each year instead of being able to save, share and breed them'.

Terminology
GE: Genetically engineered
GM: Genetically modified
GMO: Genetically modified organisms
Terminator Seeds: Seeds that become sterile after one use

Follow The Money

By controlling the entire food production chain from genetically modified seed (with built in pesticides or resistance to certain pesticides also owned by the biotech companies) to farmers signing contracts to use specific pesticides on their crops to terminator seeds that become sterile after one use, the genetically modified food stream is a multi-billion dollar business that benefits no one but the companies who engineer, patent and control the engineered foods. Monsanto currently owns more than 91% of the genetically modified food market, according to Jeffery M. Smith.

Health Effects

Human health ramification of various types of genetically engineered (GE) food is of growing concern for many nations around the world. Some of the possible dangers from ingesting genetically engineered foods include; increased allergies; allergies to soy have increased by 50% in the UK which is believed to coincide with soy imports from the USA, transferring allergens; many individuals have developed allergies after consuming foods containing unlabeled allergens in the GE foods, ingesting toxins; much of the GM crops are either herbicide ready or are sprayed with pesticides. There is also the very real possibility of lowered nutritional quality in GE foods when consuming foods designed to become sterile after one use or involving heavy applications of pesticides.

The USA is the largest producer of genetically engineered crops. 75% of US soybeans, 25% of corn, 72% of cotton are genetically engineered in the USA.
—Pesticide Action Network North America

Environmental Effects

Increased pesticide use with genetically modified crops is a serious concern. According to PANNA, 'Despite biotechnology industry PR about eliminating pesticides, virtually all genetically engineered crops are either designed to work in concert with conventional pesticides or do themselves contain pesticides'.

Greenpeace International reports spreading GE crops could contaminate non-GE environments and food crops for future generations in an unforeseeable manner. Greenpeace adds 'Their release is 'genetic pollution' and is a major threat because GMOs cannot be recalled once released into the environment.'

GE crops are a threat to crop diversity. GE Free New Zealand believes the recent contamination of Mexico's indigenous maize stock with GE crops is a warning of what may happen around the world if the same Biotech companies push for global commercial release of GE crops. Greenpeace explains, 'Crop genetic diversity is critical to the continuing development of varieties resistant to new pests, diseases, changing climatic and environmental conditions.'

Animal Effects

Increasingly, non-organic North American farm animals are being fed genetically modified grains and feeds. Unless otherwise specifically labeled as non-organic or GMO free, most animal food supplies contain at least some component of GE grains such as soy or corn. Yet numerous anecdotal observations from farmers demonstrate when animals —both wild and domestic —are given free choice between GE or natural feed, the animals always choose the natural feed. However, when animals are given no choice but to consume genetically modified foods or starve to death, they choose to consume the GMOs.

The only way to ensure you are not ingesting genetically modified ingredients is to consume organic food.

Wild creatures like bees, birds and butterflies are experiencing the negative ramifications of ingesting genetically modified crops. Jeffery M. Smith reports the problem isn't so much that the GM crops directly reduce insect and bird friendly weeds, but '…it's the herbicide they are engineered to withstand that does the damage.' Jeffery M. Smith describes, of the estimated 70 million acres of GM food planted around the world; about 80% have had their DNA altered to survive applications of herbicide.

Genetically Modified Future

Although currently the most common genetically modified crops are corn, soy, canola and cotton, Frankenfood giant Monsanto (the makers of Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War) has no intention of stopping there. All American milk (and diary products made from milk), unless otherwise labeled, contains Monsanto's rbGH (bovine growth hormone); the rbGH is injected into cows to increase milk production.

Past experiments with GMOs have included potatoes that created their own insecticide, tomatoes crossed with a cold water flounder engineered to resist frost, pigs that produce a human growth hormone, cotton that produces its own pesticide called Bt and a highly toxic yeast designed to increase fermentation.

North American consumers are going to have a lot more foods to avoid in the future. According to PANNA more genetically engineered foods are on their way: '…approvals have been granted for thousands of new field trials of genetically modified plants. Foods being readied for market include: genetically engineered fish and seafood, lettuce, melons, peas, rice, wheat, strawberries, raspberries, pineapples, bananas, apples and pigs'.

North America Has No Labeling

Although the European Union introduced legislation that food with more than .9% genetically modified content needs to be labeled for consumers, no such rules exist in North America. The only way to ensure you are not ingesting genetically modified ingredients is to consume organic food. However not all organic food companies test for genetically modified ingredients in their foods.

North American consumers are going to have a lot more foods to avoid in the future. According to PANNA more genetically engineered foods are on their way: '…approvals have been granted for thousands of new field trials of genetically modified plants. Foods being readied for market include: genetically engineered fish and seafood, lettuce, melons, peas, rice, wheat, strawberries, raspberries, pineapples, bananas, apples and pigs'.

Check Your Labels

Jeffery M. Smith includes a list of some of the most common locations of GMOs in his best-selling book Seeds of Deception; foods containing GM soy or corn derivatives or GM vegetable oils include: infant formula, bread, cereal, salad dressing, hotdogs, margarine, mayonnaise, crackers, cookies, chocolate, fried foods, chips, veggie burgers, meat substitutes, ice cream, protein powder, tofu, soy sauce, tomato sauce, alcohol, peanut butter, and pasta. For a complete list visit: www.seedsofdeception.com

What You Can Do

  • Try to avoid eating North American processed foods
  • Support farmers that use non-genetically modified crops
  • Buy organic foods
  • Buy organic cotton
  • Contact companies directly to ask if their foods contain genetically modified ingredients
  • Contact your federal government and tell them you demand all genetically modified foods be clearly labeled
  • Lobby your government to refuse Terminator Seed technology
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Doomsday Seed Vault" in the Arctic
Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don't

by F. William Engdahl

Global Research, December 4, 2007

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One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can't be accused of is sloth. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the world's richest man from being the largest shareholder in his Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto monopoly in software systems for personal computers.

In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest 'transparent' private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status. A gift from friend and business associate, mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of shares in Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates' foundation into the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual budget of the United Nations' World Health Organization.

So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at.

No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world's most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map).




On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the 'doomsday seed bank.' Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.


Doomsday Seed Vault

The seed bank is being built inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island near the small village of Longyearbyen. It's almost ready for 'business' according to their releases. The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one meter thick. It will contain up to three million different varieties of seeds from the entire world, 'so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future,' according to the Norwegian government. Seeds will be specially wrapped to exclude moisture. There will be no full-time staff, but the vault's relative inaccessibility will facilitate monitoring any possible human activity.

Did we miss something here? Their press release stated, 'so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future.' What future do the seed bank's sponsors foresee, that would threaten the global availability of current seeds, almost all of which are already well protected in designated seed banks around the world?

Anytime Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto and Syngenta get together on a common project, it's worth digging a bit deeper behind the rocks on Spitsbergen. When we do we find some fascinating things.

The first notable point is who is sponsoring the doomsday seed vault. Here joining the Norwegians are, as noted, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the US agribusiness giant DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred, one of the world's largest owners of patented genetically-modified (GMO) plant seeds and related agrichemicals; Syngenta, the Swiss-based major GMO seed and agrichemicals company through its Syngenta Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation, the private group who created the "gene revolution with over $100 million of seed money since the 1970's; CGIAR, the global network created by the Rockefeller Foundation to promote its ideal of genetic purity through agriculture change.

CGIAR and 'The Project'

As I detailled in the book, Seeds of Destruction, in 1960 the Rockefeller Foundation, John D. Rockefeller III's Agriculture Development Council and the Ford Foundation joined forces to create the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, the Philippines.1 By 1971, the Rockefeller Foundation's IRRI, along with their Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and two other Rockefeller and Ford Foundation-created international research centers, the IITA for tropical agriculture, Nigeria, and IRRI for rice, Philippines, combined to form a global Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR).

CGIAR was shaped at a series of private conferences held at the Rockefeller Foundation's conference center in Bellagio, Italy. Key participants at the Bellagio talks were the Rockefeller Foundation's George Harrar, Ford Foundation's Forrest Hill, Robert McNamara of the World Bank and Maurice Strong, the Rockefeller family's international environmental organizer, who, as a Rockefeller Foundation Trustee, organized the UN Earth Summit in Stockholm in 1972. It was part of the foundation's decades long focus to turn science to the service of eugenics, a hideous version of racial purity, what has been called The Project.

To ensure maximum impact, CGIAR drew in the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Development Program and the World Bank. Thus, through a carefully-planned leverage of its initial funds, the Rockefeller Foundation by the beginning of the 1970's was in a position to shape global agriculture policy. And shape it did.

Financed by generous Rockefeller and Ford Foundation study grants, CGIAR saw to it that leading Third World agriculture scientists and agronomists were brought to the US to 'master' the concepts of modern agribusiness production, in order to carry it back to their homeland. In the process they created an invaluable network of influence for US agribusiness promotion in those countries, most especially promotion of the GMO 'Gene Revolution' in developing countries, all in the name of science and efficient, free market agriculture.

Genetically engineering a master race?

Now the Svalbard Seed Bank begins to become interesting. But it gets better. 'The Project' I referred to is the project of the Rockefeller Foundation and powerful financial interests since the 1920's to use eugenics, later renamed genetics, to justify creation of a genetically-engineered Master Race. Hitler and the Nazis called it the Ayran Master Race.

The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The same Rockefeller Foundation created the pseudo-science discipline of molecular biology in their relentless pursuit of reducing human life down to the 'defining gene sequence' which, they hoped, could then be modified in order to change human traits at will. Hitler's eugenics scientists, many of whom were quietly brought to the United States after the War to continue their biological eugenics research, laid much of the groundwork of genetic engineering of various life forms, much of it supported openly until well into the Third Reich by Rockefeller Foundation generous grants.2

The same Rockefeller Foundation created the so-called Green Revolution, out of a trip to Mexico in 1946 by Nelson Rockefeller and former New Deal Secretary of Agriculture and founder of the Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company, Henry Wallace.

The Green Revolution purported to solve the world hunger problem to a major degree in Mexico, India and other select countries where Rockefeller worked. Rockefeller Foundation agronomist, Norman Borlaug, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work, hardly something to boast about with the likes of Henry Kissinger sharing the same.

In reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. As Henry Kissinger declared in the 1970's, 'If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.'

Agribusiness and the Rockefeller Green Revolution went hand-in-hand. They were part of a grand strategy which included Rockefeller Foundation financing of research for the development of genetic engineering of plants and animals a few years later.

John H. Davis had been Assistant Agriculture Secretary under President Dwight Eisenhower in the early 1950's. He left Washington in 1955 and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business, an unusual place for an agriculture expert in those days. He had a clear strategy. In 1956, Davis wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review in which he declared that "the only way to solve the so-called farm problem once and for all, and avoid cumbersome government programs, is to progress from agriculture to agribusiness." He knew precisely what he had in mind, though few others had a clue back then--- a revolution in agriculture production that would concentrate control of the food chain in corporate multinational hands, away from the traditional family farmer.3

A crucial aspect driving the interest of the Rockefeller Foundation and US agribusiness companies was the fact that the Green Revolution was based on proliferation of new hybrid seeds in developing markets. One vital aspect of hybrid seeds was their lack of reproductive capacity. Hybrids had a built in protection against multiplication. Unlike normal open pollinated species whose seed gave yields similar to its parents, the yield of the seed borne by hybrid plants was significantly lower than that of the first generation.

That declining yield characteristic of hybrids meant farmers must normally buy seed every year in order to obtain high yields. Moreover, the lower yield of the second generation eliminated the trade in seed that was often done by seed producers without the breeder's authorization. It prevented the redistribution of the commercial crop seed by middlemen. If the large multinational seed

companies were able to control the parental seed lines in house, no competitor or farmer would be able to produce the hybrid. The global concentration of hybrid seed patents into a handful of giant seed companies, led by DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto's Dekalb laid the ground for the later GMO seed revolution.4

In effect, the introduction of modern American agricultural technology, chemical fertilizers and commercial hybrid seeds all made local farmers in developing countries, particularly the larger more established ones, dependent on foreign, mostly US agribusiness and petro-chemical company inputs. It was a first step in what was to be a decades-long, carefully planned process.

Under the Green Revolution Agribusiness was making major inroads into markets which were previously of limited access to US exporters. The trend was later dubbed "market-oriented agriculture." In reality it was agribusiness-controlled agriculture.

Through the Green Revolution, the Rockefeller Foundation and later Ford Foundation worked hand-in-hand shaping and supporting the foreign policy goals of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and of the CIA.

One major effect of the Green Revolution was to depopulate the countryside of peasants who were forced to flee into shantytown slums around the cities in desperate search for work. That was no accident; it was part of the plan to create cheap labor pools for forthcoming US multinational manufactures, the 'globalization' of recent years.

When the self-promotion around the Green Revolution died down, the results were quite different from what had been promised. Problems had arisen from indiscriminate use of the new chemical pesticides, often with serious health consequences. The mono-culture cultivation of new hybrid seed varieties decreased soil fertility and yields over time. The first results were impressive: double or even triple yields for some crops such as wheat and later corn in Mexico. That soon faded.

The Green Revolution was typically accompanied by large irrigation projects which often included World Bank loans to construct huge new dams, and flood previously settled areas and fertile farmland in the process. Also, super-wheat produced greater yields by saturating the soil with huge amounts of fertilizer per acre, the fertilizer being the product of nitrates and petroleum, commodities controlled by the Rockefeller-dominated Seven Sisters major oil companies.

Huge quantities of herbicides and pesticides were also used, creating additional markets for the oil and chemical giants. As one analyst put it, in effect, the Green Revolution was merely a chemical revolution. At no point could developing nations pay for the huge amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They would get the credit courtesy of the World Bank and special loans by Chase Bank and other large New York banks, backed by US Government guarantees.

Applied in a large number of developing countries, those loans went mostly to the large landowners. For the smaller peasants the situation worked differently. Small peasant farmers could not afford the chemical and other modern inputs and had to borrow money.

Initially various government programs tried to provide some loans to farmers so that they could purchase seeds and fertilizers. Farmers who could not participate in this kind of program had to borrow from the private sector. Because of the exorbitant interest rates for informal loans, many small farmers did not even get the benefits of the initial higher yields. After harvest, they had to sell most if not all of their produce to pay off loans and interest. They became dependent on money-lenders and traders and often lost their land. Even with soft loans from government agencies, growing subsistence crops gave way to the production of cash crops.5

Since decades the same interests including the Rockefeller Foundation which backed the initial Green Revolution, have worked to promote a second 'Gene Revolution' as Rockefeller Foundation President Gordon Conway termed it several years ago, the spread of industrial agriculture and commercial inputs including GMO patented seeds. 

Gates, Rockefeller and a Green Revolution in Africa

With the true background of the 1950's Rockefeller Foundation Green Revolution clear in mind, it becomes especially curious that the same Rockefeller Foundation along with the Gates Foundation which are now investing millions of dollars in preserving every seed against a possible "doomsday" scenario are also investing millions in a project called The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

AGRA, as it calls itself, is an alliance again with the same Rockefeller Foundation which created the "Gene Revolution." A look at the AGRA Board of Directors confirms this.

It includes none other than former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as chairman. In his acceptance speech in a World Economic Forum event in Cape Town South Africa in June 2007, Kofi Annan stated, 'I accept this challenge with gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and all others who support our African campaign.'

In addition the AGRA board numbers a South African, Strive Masiyiwa who is a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. It includes Sylvia M. Mathews of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Mamphela Ramphele, former Managing Director of the World Bank (2000 – 2006); Rajiv J. Shah of the Gates Foundation; Nadya K. Shmavonian of the Rockefeller Foundation; Roy Steiner of the Gates Foundation. In addition, an Alliance for AGRA includes Gary Toenniessen the Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation and Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation.

To fill out the lineup, the Programmes for AGRA includes Peter Matlon, Managing Director, Rockefeller Foundation; Joseph De Vries, Director of the Programme for Africa's Seed Systems and Associate Director, Rockefeller foundation; Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation. Like the old failed Green Revolution in India and Mexico, the new Africa Green Revolution is clearly a high priority of the Rockefeller Foundation.

While to date they are keeping a low profile, Monsanto and the major GMO agribusiness giants are believed at the heart of using Kofi Annan's AGRA to spread their patented GMO seeds across Africa under the deceptive label, 'bio-technology,' the new euphemism for genetically engineered patented seeds. To date South Africa is the only African country permitting legal planting of GMO crops. In 2003 Burkina Faso authorized GMO trials. In 2005 Kofi Annan's Ghana drafted bio-safety legislation and key officials expressed their intentions to pursue research into GMO crops.

Africa is the next target in the US-government campaign to spread GMO worldwide. Its rich soils make it an ideal candidate. Not surprisingly many African governments suspect the worst from the GMO sponsors as a multitude of genetic engineering and biosafety projects have been initiated in Africa, with the aim of introducing GMOs into Africa's agricultural systems. These include sponsorships offered by the US government to train African scientists in genetic engineering in the US, biosafety projects funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank; GMO research involving African indigenous food crops.

The Rockefeller Foundation has been working for years to promote, largely without success, projects to introduce GMOs into the fields of Africa. They have backed research that supports the applicability of GMO cotton in the Makhathini Flats in South Africa.

Monsanto, who has a strong foothold in South Africa's seed industry, both GMO and hybrid, has conceived of an ingenious smallholders' programme known as the 'Seeds of Hope' Campaign, which is introducing a green revolution package to small scale poor farmers, followed, of course, by Monsanto's patented GMO seeds. 6

Syngenta AG of Switzerland, one of the 'Four Horsemen of the GMO Apocalypse' is pouring millions of dollars into a new greenhouse facility in Nairobi, to develop GMO insect resistant maize. Syngenta is a part of CGIAR as well.7

Move on to Svalbard

Now is it simply philosophical sloppiness? What leads the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to at one and the same time to back proliferation of patented and soon-to-be Terminator patented seeds across Africa, a process which, as it has in every other place on earth, destroys the plant seed varieties as monoculture industrialized agribusiness is introduced? At the same time they invest tens of millions of dollars to preserve every seed variety known in a bomb-proof doomsday vault near the remote Arctic Circle 'so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future' to restate their official release?

It is no accident that the Rockefeller and Gates foundations are teaming up to push a GMO-style Green Revolution in Africa at the same time they are quietly financing the 'doomsday seed vault' on Svalbard. The GMO agribusiness giants are up to their ears in the Svalbard project.

Indeed, the entire Svalbard enterprise and the people involved call up the worst catastrophe images of the Michael Crichton bestseller, Andromeda Strain, a sci-fi thriller where a deadly disease of extraterrestrial origin causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood threatening the entire human species. In Svalbard, the future world's most secure seed repository will be guarded by the policemen of the GMO Green Revolution--the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, Syngenta, DuPont and CGIAR.

The Svalbard project will be run by an organization called the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT). Who are they to hold such an awesome trust over the planet's entire seed varieties? The GCDT was founded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Bioversity International (formerly the International Plant Genetic Research Institute), an offshoot of the CGIAR.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is based in Rome. Its Board is chaired by Margaret Catley-Carlson a Canadian also on the advisory board of Group Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, one of the world's largest private water companies. Catley-Carlson was also president until 1998 of the New York-based Population Council, John D. Rockefeller's population reduction organization, set up in 1952 to advance the Rockefeller family's eugenics program under the cover of promoting "family planning," birth control devices, sterilization and "population control" in developing countries.

Other GCDT board members include former Bank of America executive presently head of the Hollywood DreamWorks Animation, Lewis Coleman. Coleman is also the lead Board Director of Northrup Grumman Corporation, one of America's largest military industry Pentagon contractors.

Jorio Dauster (Brazil) is also Board Chairman of Brasil Ecodiesel. He is a former Ambassador of Brazil to the European Union, and Chief Negotiator of Brazil's foreign debt for the Ministry of Finance. Dauster has also served as President of the Brazilian Coffee Institute and as Coordinator of the Project for the Modernization of Brazil's Patent System, which involves legalizing patents on seeds which are genetically modified, something until recently forbidden by Brazil's laws. 
 
Cary Fowler is the Trust's Executive Director. Fowler was Professor and Director of Research in the Department for International Environment & Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He was also a Senior Advisor to the Director General of Bioversity International. There he represented the Future Harvest Centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in negotiations on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources. In the 1990s, he headed the International Program on Plant Genetic Resources at the FAO. He drafted and supervised negotiations of FAO's Global Plan of Action for Plant Genetic Resources, adopted by 150 countries in 1996. He is a past-member of the National Plant Genetic Resources Board of the US and the Board of Trustees of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, another Rockefeller Foundation and CGIAR project.
 
GCDT board member Dr. Mangala Rai of India is the Secretary of India's Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE), and Director General of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR). He is also a Board Member of the Rockefeller Foundation's International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which promoted the world's first major GMO experiment, the much-hyped 'Golden Rice' which proved a failure. Rai has served as Board Member for CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), and a Member of the Executive Council of the CGIAR.

Global Crop Diversity Trust Donors or financial angels include as well, in the words of the Humphrey Bogart Casablanca classic, 'all the usual suspects.' As well as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, the Donors include GMO giants DuPont-Pioneer Hi-Bred, Syngenta of Basle Switzerland, CGIAR and the State Department's energetically pro-GMO agency for development aid, USAID. Indeed it seems we have the GMO and population reduction foxes guarding the hen-house of mankind, the global seed diversity store in Svalbard. 8

Why now Svalbard?

We can legitimately ask why Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation along with the major genetic engineering agribusiness giants such as DuPont and Syngenta, along with CGIAR are building the Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic.

Who uses such a seed bank in the first place? Plant breeders and researchers are the major users of gene banks. Today's largest plant breeders are Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Dow Chemical, the global plant-patenting GMO giants. Since early in 2007 Monsanto holds world patent rights together with the United States Government for plant so-called 'Terminator' or Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). Terminator is an ominous technology by which a patented commercial seed commits 'suicide' after one harvest. Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed.

This clever genetically engineered terminator trait forces farmers to return every year to Monsanto or other GMO seed suppliers to get new seeds for rice, soybeans, corn, wheat whatever major crops they need to feed their population. If broadly introduced around the world, it could within perhaps a decade or so make the world's majority of food producers new feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed companies such as Monsanto or DuPont or Dow Chemical.

That, of course, could also open the door to have those private companies, perhaps under orders from their host government, Washington, deny seeds to one or another developing country whose politics happened to go against Washington's. Those who say 'It can't happen here' should look more closely at current global events. The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not. 

These private companies, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical hardly have an unsullied record in terms of stewardship of human life. They developed and proliferated such innovations as dioxin, PCBs, Agent Orange. They covered up for decades clear evidence of carcinogenic and other severe human health consequences of use of the toxic chemicals. They have buried serious scientific reports that the world's most widespread herbicide, glyphosate, the essential ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide that is tied to purchase of most Monsanto genetically engineered seeds, is toxic when it seeps into drinking water.9  Denmark banned glyphosate in 2003 when it confirmed it has contaminated the country's groundwater.10

The diversity stored in seed gene banks is the raw material for plant breeding and for a great deal of basic biological research. Several hundred thousand samples are distributed annually for such purposes. The UN's FAO lists some 1400 seed banks around the world, the largest being held by the United States Government. Other large banks are held by China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea, Germany and Canada in descending order of size. In addition, CGIAR operates a chain of seed banks in select centers around the world.

CGIAR, set up in 1972 by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation to spread their Green Revolution agribusiness model, controls most of the private seed banks from the Philippines to Syria to Kenya. In all these present seed banks hold more than six and a half million seed varieties, almost two million of which are 'distinct.' Svalbard's Doomsday Vault will have a capacity to house four and a half million different seeds.

GMO as a weapon of biowarfare?

Now we come to the heart of the danger and the potential for misuse inherent in the Svalbard project of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation. Can the development of patented seeds for most of the world's major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?

The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920's, has embodied what they termed 'negative eugenics,' the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines. Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, 'we want to exterminate the Negro population.' 11

A small California biotech company, Epicyte, in 2001 announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault. Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. Astonishing to learn was that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto.

In the 1990's the UN's World Health Organization launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of women in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 45, allegedly against Tentanus, a sickness arising from such things as stepping on a rusty nail. The vaccine was not given to men or boys, despite the fact they are presumably equally liable to step on rusty nails as women.

Because of that curious anomaly, Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization became suspicious and had vaccine samples tested. The tests revealed that the Tetanus vaccine being spread by the WHO only to women of child-bearing age contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told.

It later came out that the Rockefeller Foundation along with the Rockefeller's Population Council, the World Bank (home to CGIAR), and the United States' National Institutes of Health had been involved in a 20-year-long project begun in 1972 to develop the concealed abortion vaccine with a tetanus carrier for WHO. In addition, the Government of Norway, the host to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault, donated $41 million to develop the special abortive Tetanus vaccine. 12

Is it a coincidence that these same organizations, from Norway to the Rockefeller Foundation to the World Bank are also involved in the Svalbard seed bank project? According to Prof. Francis Boyle who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by the US Congress, the Pentagon is 'now gearing up to fight and win biological warfare' as part of two Bush national strategy directives adopted, he notes, 'without public knowledge and review' in 2002. Boyle adds that in 2001-2004 alone the US Federal Government spent $14.5 billion for civilian bio-warfare-related work, a staggering sum.

Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright estimates that over 300 scientific institutions and some 12,000 individuals in the USA today have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare. Alone there are 497 US Government NIH grants for research into infectious diseases with biowarfare potential. Of course this is being justified under the rubric of defending against possible terror attack as so much is today.

Many of the US Government dollars spent on biowarfare research involve genetic engineering. MIT biology professor Jonathan King says that the 'growing bio-terror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population.' King adds, 'while such programs are always called defensive, with biological weapons, defensive and offensive programs overlap almost completely.' 13

Time will tell whether, God Forbid, the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Bank of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation is part of another Final Solution, this involving the extinction of the Late, Great Planet Earth.

F. William Engdahl is the author of Seeds of Destruction, the Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation just released by Global Research. He also the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd.. To contact by e-mail: info@engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net. 

William Engdahl is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). His writings can
be consulted on www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net and on Global Research.
Special Introductory Online Offer

Click to order William Engdahl's book:

Seeds of Destruction


NOTES

1 F. William Engdahl,Seeds of Destruction, Montreal, (Global Research, 2007).

2 Ibid, pp.72-90.

3 John H. Davis, Harvard Business Review, 1956, cited in Geoffrey Lawrence, Agribusiness, Capitalism and the Countryside, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1987. See also Harvard Business School, The Evolution of an Industry and a Seminar: Agribusiness Seminar, http://www.exed.hbs.edu/programs/agb/seminar.html.

4 Engdahl, op cit., p. 130.

5 Ibid. P. 123-30.

6 Myriam Mayet, The New Green Revolution in Africa: Trojan Horse for GMOs?, May, 2007, African Centre for Biosafety, www.biosafetyafrica.net.

7 ETC Group, Green Revolution 2.0 for Africa?, Communique Issue 94, March/April 2007.

8 Global Crop Diversity Trust website, in http://www.croptrust.org/main/donors.php.

9 Engdahl, op. cit., pp.227-236.

10 Anders Legarth Smith, Denmark Bans Glyphosates, the Active Ingredient in Roundup, Politiken, September 15, 2003, in organic.com.au/news/2003.09.15.

11 Tanya L. Green, The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger's Genocide Project for Black American's, in www.blackgenocide.org/negro.html.

12 Engdahl, op. cit., pp. 273-275; J.A. Miller, Are New Vaccines Laced With Birth-Control Drugs?, HLI Reports, Human Life International, Gaithersburg, Maryland; June/July 1995, Volume 13, Number 8.

13 Sherwood Ross, Bush Developing Illegal Bioterror Weapons for Offensive Use,' December 20, 2006, in www.truthout.org. 

Click to order William Engdahl's

Seeds of Destruction




 
F. William Engdahl is a leading analyst of the New World Order, author of the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order,' His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. 

 

Pre-Publication Reviews of Engdahl's Seeds of Destruction

What is so frightening about Engdahl's vision of the world is that it is so real. Although our civilization has been built on humanistic ideals, in this new age of "free markets", everything-- science, commerce, agriculture and even seeds-- have become weapons in the hands of a few global corporation barons and their political fellow travelers. To achieve world domination, they no longer rely on bayonet-wielding soldiers. All they need is to control food production. (Dr. Arpad Pusztai, biochemist, formerly of the Rowett Research Institute Institute, Scotland)

If you want to learn about the socio-political agenda --why biotech corporations insist on spreading GMO seeds around the World-- you should read this carefully researched book. You will learn how these corporations want to achieve control over all mankind, and why we must resist... (Marijan Jost, Professor of Genetics, Krizevci, Croatia)

The book reads like a murder mystery of an incredible dimension, in which four giant Anglo-American agribusiness conglomerates have no hesitation to use GMO to gain control over our very means of subsistence... (Anton Moser, Professor of Biotechnology, Graz, Austria).

CLICK to order Engdahl's book

Seeds of Destruction


 Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl
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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

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The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com

www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.

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Wednesday, May 07, 2008 

Current mood:  sad
Category: Life

:: Making a killing from hunger ::

The production of Meat, Biofuels, chemicals, the lack of oil, use of the car,
the economy and selfish politics are the problem to world hunger


How to help stop world hunger:
Go vegetarian, travel only by bicycle / foot / public transports, boycott GMOs
stop using chemical products, save energy, make donations and do volunteer work

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/hunger.jpg

 

We need to overturn food policy, now!

BY GRAIN

logoFor some time now the rising cost of food all over the world has taken households, governments and the media by storm. The price of wheat has gone up by 130% over the last year.[1] Rice has doubled in price in Asia in the first three months of 2008 alone,[2] and just last week it hit record highs on the Chicago futures market.[3] For most of 2007 the spiralling cost of cooking oil, fruit and vegetables, as well as of dairy and meat, led to a fall in the consumption of these items. From Haiti to Cameroon to Bangladesh, people have been taking to the streets in anger at being unable to afford the food they need. In fear of political turmoil, world leaders have been calling for more food aid, as well as for more funds and technology to boost agricultural production. Cereal exporting countries, meanwhile, are closing their borders to protect their domestic markets, while other countries have been forced into panic buying. Is this a price blip? No. A food shortage? Not that either. We are in a structural meltdown, the direct result of three decades of neoliberal globalisation.

Farmers across the world produced a record 2.3 billion tons of grain in 2007, up 4% on the previous year. Since 1961 the world's cereal output has tripled, while the population has doubled. Stocks are at their lowest level in 30 years, it's true,[4] but the bottom line is that there is enough food produced in the world to feed the population. The problem is that it doesn't get to all of those who need it. Less than half of the world's grain production is directly eaten by people. Most goes into animal feed and, increasingly, biofuels – massive inflexible industrial chains. In fact, once you look behind the cold curtain of statistics, you realise that something is fundamentally wrong with our food system. We have allowed food to be transformed from something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods into a commodity for speculation and bargaining. The perverse logic of this system has come to a head. Today it is staring us in the face that this system puts the profits of investors before the food needs of people.

Market realities

The policy makers who have shaped today's world food system – and who are supposed to be responsible for averting such catastrophes – have come out with a number of explanations for the current crisis that everyone has heard over and over again: drought and other problems affecting harvests; rising demand in China and India where people are supposedly eating more and better than in the past; crops and lands being massively diverted into biofuel production; and so on. All of these issues, of course, are contributing to the current food crisis. But they do not account for the full depth of what is happening. There is something more fundamental at work, something that brings all these issues together, and which the world's finance and development chiefs are keeping out of public discussion.

Nothing that the policy makers say should obscure the fact that today's food crisis is the outcome of both an incessant push towards a "Green Revolution" agricultural model since the 1950s and the trade liberalisation and structural adjustment policies imposed on poor countries by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the 1970s. These policy prescriptions were reinforced with the establishment of the World Trade Organisation in the mid-1990s and, more recently, through a barrage of bilateral free trade and investment agreements. Together with a series of other measures, they have led to the ruthless dismantling of tariffs and other tools that developing countries had created to protect local agricultural production. These countries have been forced to open their markets and lands to global agribusiness, speculators and subsidised food exports from rich countries. In that process, fertile lands have been diverted away from serving local food markets to the production of global commodities or off-season and high-value crops for Western supermarkets. Today, roughly 70% of all so-called developing countries are net importers of food.[5] And of the estimated 845 million hungry people in the world, 80% are small farmers.[6] Add to this the re-engineering of credit and financial markets to create a massive debt industry, with no control on investors, and the depth of the problem becomes clear.

Agricultural policy has completely lost touch with its most basic goal of feeding people. Hunger hurts and people are desperate. The UN World Food Programme estimates that recent price hikes have meant that an additional 100 million people can no longer afford to eat adequately.[7] Governments are frantically seeking shelter from the system. The fortunate ones, with export stocks, are pulling out of the global market to cut their domestic prices off from the skyrocketing world prices. With wheat, export bans or restrictions in Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and Argentina mean that a third of the global market has now been closed off. The situation with rice is even worse: China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, India and Cambodia have banned or severely restricted exports, leaving just a few sources of export supply, mainly Thailand and the US. Countries like Bangladesh can't buy the rice they need now because the prices are so high. For years the World Bank and the IMF have told countries that a liberalised market would provide the most efficient system for producing and distributing food, yet today the world's poorest countries are forced into an intense bidding war against speculators and traders, who are having a field day. Hedge funds and other sources of hot money are pouring billions of dollars into commodities to escape sliding stock markets and the credit crunch, putting food stocks further out of poor people's reach.[8] According to some estimates, investment funds now control 50–60% of the wheat traded on the world's biggest commodity markets.[9] One firm calculates that the amount of speculative money in commodities futures – markets where investors do not buy or sell a physical commodity, like rice or wheat, but merely bet on price movements – has ballooned from US$5 billion in 2000 to US$175 billion to 2007.[10]

The situation today is untenable. Look at Haiti. A few decades ago it was self-sufficient in rice. But conditions on foreign loans, particularly a 1994 package from the IMF, forced it to liberalise its market. Cheap rice flooded in from the US, backed by subsidies and corruption, and local production was wiped out.[11] Now prices for rice have risen 50% since last year and the average Haitian can't afford to eat. So people are taking to the streets or risking their lives to journey by boat to the US. Food protests have also erupted in West Africa, from Mauritania to Burkina Faso. There, too, structural adjustment programmes and food-aid dumping have destroyed the region's own rice production, leaving people at the mercy of the international market. In Asia, the World Bank constantly assured the Philippines, even as recently as last year, that self-sufficiency in rice was unnecessary and that the world market would take care of its needs.[12] Now the government is in a desperate plight: its domestic supply of subsidised rice is nearly exhausted and it cannot import all it needs because traders' asking prices are too high.

Making a killing from hunger

The truth about who profits and who loses from our global food system has never been more obvious. Take the most basic element of food production: soil. The industrial food system is a chemical-fertiliser junkie. It needs more and more of the stuff just to keep alive, eroding soils and their potential to support crop yields in the process. In the current context of tight food supplies, the small clique of corporations that control the world's fertiliser market can charge what they want – and that's exactly what they are doing. Profits at Cargill's Mosaic Corporation, which controls much of the world's potash and phosphate supply, more than doubled last year.[13] The world's largest potash producer, Canada's Potash Corp, made more than US$1 billion in profit, up more than 70% from 2006.[14] Panicking now about future supplies, governments are becoming desperate to boost their harvests, giving these corporations additional leverage. In April 2008, the joint offshore trading arm for Mosaic and Potash hiked the price of its potash by 40% for buyers from Southeast Asia and by 85% for those from Latin American. India had to pay 130% more than last year, and China 227% more.[15]

 

A imagem "http://images.businessweek.com/story/08/600/0501_mz_26food.jpg" não pode ser mostrada, porque contém erros.

 

Table 1. Profit increase for some of the world's largest fertiliser corporations

..TR> ..TABLE>

Source: Compiled from corporate reports

While big money is being made from fertilisers, it is just a sideline for Cargill. Its biggest profits come from global trading in agricultural commodities, which, together with a few other big traders, it pretty much monopolises. On 14 April 2008, Cargill announced that its profits from commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were 86% higher than the same period in 2007. "Demand for food in developing economies and for energy worldwide is boosting demand for agricultural goods, at the same time that investment monies have streamed into commodity markets," said Greg Page, Cargill's chairman and chief executive officer. "Prices are setting new highs and markets are extraordinarily volatile. In this environment, Cargill's team has done an exceptional job measuring and assessing price risk, and managing the large volume of grains, oilseeds and other commodities moving through our supply chains for customers globally."[16]

Table 2. Profit increase for some of the world's largest grain traders


Company

Profits 2007 (US$ million)

Increase from 2006
(%)

Potash Corp (Canada)

1,100

72%

Yara (Norway)

1,116

44%

Sinochem (China)

1,100

95%

Mosaic (US)

708

141%

ICL (Israel)

535

43%

K + S (Germany)

420

2.8%

..TR> ..TABLE>

Source: Compiled from corporate reports
*Data is for Marubeni's Agri-Marine division only.
Absent from this list is Louis Dreyfus (France), a private agricultural commodities trader with annual sales in excess of US$22 billion, which does not report its profits.

Managing and assessing are not so difficult for a company like Cargill, with its near monopoly position and a global team of analysts the size of a UN agency. Indeed, all of the big grain traders are making record profits. Bunge, another big food trader, saw its profits of the last fiscal quarter of 2007 increase by US$245 million, or 77%, compared with the same period of the previous year. The 2007 profits registered by ADM, the second largest grain trader in the world, rose by 65% to a record US$2.2 billion. Thailand's Charoen Pokphand Foods, a major player in Asia, is forecasting revenue growth of 237% this year.

The world's big food processors, some of which are commodity traders themselves, are also cashing in. Nestlé's global sales grew 7% last year. "We saw this coming, so we hedged by forward-buying raw materials", says François-Xavier Perroud, Nestlé's spokesman.[17] Margins are up at Unilever, too. "Commodity pressures have increased sharply, but we have successfully offset these through timely pricing action and continued delivery from our savings programmes", says Patrick Cescau, Group CEO of Unilever. "We will not sacrifice our margins and market share."[18] The food corporations don't seem to be making these profits off the back of the retailers. UK supermarket Tesco reports profits up 12.3% from last year, a record rise. Other major retailers, such as France's Carrefour and the US's Wal-Mart, say that food sales are the main factor sustaining their profit increases.[19] Wal-Mart's Mexican division, Wal-Mex, which handles a third of overall food sales in Mexico, reported an 11% increase in profits for the first quarter of 2008. (At the same time Mexicans are demonstrating in the streets because they can no longer afford to make tortillas.[20])

It seems that nearly every corporate player in the global food chain is making a killing from the food crisis. The seed and agrochemical companies are doing well too. Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, reported a 44% increase in overall profits in 2007.[21] DuPont, the second-largest, said that its 2007 profits from seeds increased by 19%, while Syngenta, the top pesticide manufacturer and third-largest company for seeds, saw profits rise 28% in the first quarter of 2008.[22]

Such record profits have nothing to do with any new value that these corporations are producing and they are not one-off windfalls from a sudden shift in supply and demand. Instead, they are a reflection of the extreme power that these middlemen have accrued through the globalisation of the food system. Intimately involved with the shaping of the trade rules that govern today's food system and tightly in control of markets and the ever more complex financial systems through which global trade operates, these companies are in perfect position to turn food scarcity into immense profits. People have to eat, whatever the cost.

The urgent need for a policy rethink

The larger backdrop to this perverse food market situation is the global financial system, which is now teetering on its flimsy axis. What began as a localised housing loan collapse in the US in 2007 has unravelled into something far more serious, as people realise that the emperors of the global financial system have no clothes. The world economy is living on debt that no one can pay. While central bankers and Lear jet executives try to patch the holes and restore confidence, the underlying truth is that the system is close to bankruptcy and no one in power wants to take the necessary tough measures: not the IMF, nor the World Bank, nor the leaders of the world's most powerful nations. Not much more than public relations glitter can be expected from the G8 meeting in June.

Similar problems lie at the heart of the food crisis: an ideologically driven elite has forced countries to wrench open markets and let the free market run, so that a few megacorporations, investors and speculators can take huge payoffs. Many countries have lost that most basic power: the ability to feed themselves. This loss, coupled with the corruption that plagues our countries and trading systems, shows that neoliberalism has lost any legitimacy that it might once have had. It is a measure of how out of touch these ideologues are that many now openly call for more trade liberalisation as a solution to the food crisis, with some even proposing that the rules of the WTO be changed to prevent countries from imposing export restrictions on food.[23]

The World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, has tried to win the world over with his call for a "New Deal" to solve the hunger crisis, but there is nothing new about it: he calls for more trade liberalisation, more technology and more aid. Today's food crisis is the direct result of decades of these policies, which must now be rejected. While immediate action is necessary to lower food prices and to get food to those who need it, we also need radical changes in agricultural policy so that small farmers around the world gain access to land and can make a living from it. We need policies that support and protect farmers, fishers and others to produce food for their families, for the local markets and for people in cities, rather than money for an abstract international commodity market and a tiny clan of corporate boardroom executives. And we need to strengthen and promote the use of technologies based on the knowledge and in the control of those who know how to grow food. To put it another way, we need food sovereignty, now – the kind that is defined and driven by small farmers and fisherfolk themselves.

Social movements around the globe have been struggling to promote such a reversal of strategy, only to be dismissed as unrealistic and backward by those in power, and often violently repressed. The glimmer of hope in this crisis is that the situation can be reversed. Peasant organisations have concrete proposals about what needs to be done to resolve the crisis in their countries, and governments should listen to what they are saying. Already some governments are talking of a policy change towards food self-reliance.[24] Others are starting to question the fundamental rationale of pushing for more free trade. Neoliberal hawks at the top of the global food policy pyramid have lost whatever credibility they may think they once had. It is time for them to move out of the way so that the visions of food sovereignty and agrarian reform that come from the grassroots can take their place and get us out of this hellish mess.

Source: http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=39

Going further:

References

1      Bloomberg, quoted by the BBC, London, 14 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7344892.stm

2      BBC, "Action to meet Asian rice crisis", London, 17 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7352038.stm

3       See http://www.riceonline.com for daily reports. With many Asian rice exporters out of the game, needy countries from Asia and Africa are turning to the US market where prices are going through the roof.

4       Brian Halweil, "Grain harvest sets record, but supplies still tight", Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5539

5      Katarina Wahlberg, "Are we approaching a global food crisis?", World Economy & Development in Brief, Global Policy Forum, 3 March 2008,

6      Food policy expert interviewed on Radio France International, Paris, 20 April 2008.

7      "UN food chief urges crisis action," BBC, London, 22 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7360485.stm

8      Sinclair Stewart and Paul Waldie, "U.S. food producers, speculators square off", Globe and Mail, Toronto, 23 April 2008,

9      Ibid. and Paul Waldie, "Why grocery prices are set to soar", Globe and Mail, Toronto, 24 April 2008,

10     Paul Waldie, "Why grocery prices are set to soar", op cit.

11    Bill Quigley, "USA role in Haiti hunger riots", ZNet, US, 23 April 2008,

12    World Bank, "Can the world market for rice be trusted", Box 1 on p. 52 of "Philippines: Agriculture Public Expenditure Review," Technical Paper, World Bank, Washington DC, 2007, http://go.worldbank.org/TGRSK19300

13    Potash and phosphates are two of the main ingredients in chemical fertiliser.

14    David Ebner, "Saskatchewan: A lot more than wheat" Globe and Mail, Toronto, 11 April 2008,

15    John Partridge and Andy Hoffman, "China deal sends Potash soaring" Globe and Mail, Toronto, 17 April 2008,

16    "Cargill income up sharply in third quarter", World Grain, Kansas City, 14 April 2008,

17    "Tightening belts," The Economist, London, 10 April 2008,

18    Jonathan Sibun, "Unilever profits surge despite price pressures," Daily Telegraph, London, 3 November 2007, http://...com/6p8tcx; and, "Get set for more price hikes: Unilever chief," Business Standard, India, 16 March 2008, http://...com/694cqn

19    Foo Yun Chee, "Major European retailers post higher profits for 2007," Reuters, 6 March 2008, www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/06/business/RETAIL.php

20    Associated Press, "Wal-Mart de Mexico's 1Q profits rise 11 percent on higher sales, cost controls," 8 April 2008,

21    Monsanto, Annual Report, 2007.

22    DuPont, Annual Report 2007, and "Syngenta anuncia cifra negocio en progresión 28 por ciento primer trimestre", EFE, 22 de abril 2008,

23    Isabel Reynolds, "WTO should pressure food exporters – Mandelson", Reuters, 23 April 2008,

24    See, for example, recent comments from West African farmers and officials: Noel Tadégnon, "Le ROPPA préconise une pression sur les autorités politiques pour soutenir l'agriculture africaine," APA, 23 April 2008, http://www.apanews.net/apa.php?article61599; and, "Réunion extraordinaire du Conseil des ministres de l..UEMOA, hier : 200 milliards pour freiner la flambée des prix," Le Nouveau  Réveil, Abidjan, 24 April 2008, http://www.lenouveaureveil.com/a.asp?n=290011&p=1903

 

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Company

Profits 2007 (US$ million)

Increase from 2006 (%)

Cargill (US)

2,340

36%

ADM (US)

2,200

67%

ConAgra (US)

764

30%

Bunge (US)

738

49%

Noble Group (Singapore)

258

92%

Marubeni (Japan)

90*

43%*

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Monday, June 18, 2007 

Current mood:  annoyed
Brave New Hay
FEATURE ARTICLE - June 11, 2007 by Matt Jenkins

Is Monsanto erasing the line between what is natural and what is not?

NAMPA, IDAHO

On an unseasonably cold afternoon in early May, Paul Rasgorshek is making the rounds of his farm, some 3,000 acres perched in the lava-rimmed country on the edge of the Snake River. Wet clouds scud out of the Owyhee Mountains, and from behind the wheel of his pickup, Rasgorshek juggles the two-way radio and the Nextel cell phone that he uses to coordinate the farm's 17 employees. Then he eases the truck to a stop to take a close look at the future of farming.

A new field of alfalfa plants pokes up green and lush from the rough ground, surrounded by what Rasgorshek, with the slightest trace of a savoring grin, calls "the dead carcasses" of freshly killed weeds. Farmers here can typically get about three good years out of their alfalfa fields before weeds begin taking over. Then, they often use an herbicide called Roundup to — in a euphemism that makes them sound like botanical mafiosi — "take out" the alfalfa and clear the field for another crop.

Roundup is a potent plant killer, but the alfalfa in Rasgorshek's field has been genetically engineered to be immune to the herbicide. That feat of agricultural alchemy allows farmers to spray their fields without damaging the crop itself. "It's just amazing that you can spray something over the top of the alfalfa, and it doesn't kill it," Rasgorshek says.

Behind this revolution in farming is Monsanto, the storied, St. Louis-based chemical company. Monsanto not only manufactures Roundup, but also genetically engineered the Roundup-resistant gene into the alfalfa that Rasgorshek began growing three years ago. Today, "Roundup Ready" alfalfa is planted on some 220,000 acres nationwide, and Rasgorshek is an unapologetic genetic-engineering loyalist. "In today's agriculture, if you just sit back, you're not gonna survive," he says. "If you don't change with the times, you're gonna go down."

Yet Rasgorshek is growing what is at least temporarily an illegal substance. On May 3, a federal district judge banned the sale or planting of Roundup Ready alfalfa until the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducts a full environmental impact statement on the crop. It is the first time such a rigorous review has ever been required of a genetically modified crop, and the ruling could have significant implications for all such crops, which now cover the vast majority of the nation's farmland.

Over the past decade, genetic engineering has profoundly transformed American agriculture. Monsanto stands at the forefront of that endeavor. Today, roughly half of the U.S. corn crop, three quarters of the cotton, and 85 percent of the soybeans are genetically modified in some way.

Alfalfa — the favored fare of dairy cows, beef cattle and health nuts — is an unlikely flash point for the controversy over genetically modified crops. Yet the legal fight over Roundup Ready alfalfa attests to just how far Monsanto's massive foray into crop genetics has reached — and it is just one piece of a pair of larger, interrelated controversies in which the company is now entangled.
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One centers on the environmental impacts of genetically modified crops. Evidence is mounting that such crops, which were introduced after undergoing only cursory review, have led to the appearance of "superweeds" that have themselves mutated to survive Roundup herbicide and threaten to impose new costs on farmers and the environment. And, while the long-term human health implications of those transformed crops are still not understood, there are reports that Monsanto's proprietary genes have contaminated traditional and organic crops, transforming the very nature of the food we eat.


Genetically modified alfalfa stands up to the weed killer Roundup, here being sprayed on an Idaho field. Mike Shipman/blueplanetphoto.com
But Monsanto is also embroiled in a second controversy. The company has intervened not only in the genetic architecture of the nation's food and feed crops, but in the very business of American farming itself. Monsanto now faces mounting legal challenges from its seed-growing competitors. It appears that the saga of Roundup Ready crops is ultimately less about genetic manipulation than about corporate power. Through a comprehensive scheme of takeovers, acquisitions and alleged strong-arming of competition, Monsanto is building an empire. Along the way, it seems to be erasing the line between what is genetically engineered and what is not.
The active ingredient in Roundup is a chemical called glyphosate. First introduced in 1976, the herbicide is, unlike earlier generations of pesticides, relatively safe because it targets a metabolic pathway found in plants but not animals. Monsanto's patent for the chemical gave it de facto monopoly control over the glyphosate market, and in 2000, half of Monsanto's $5.5 billion in sales came from Roundup. But the patent was about to expire, opening the door for other companies to start manufacturing and selling glyphosate themselves.

Four years earlier, however, Monsanto unveiled the first in its stable of Roundup Ready crops, which promised the company a way to maintain its lock on the glyphosate market. In fact, some of Monsanto's foes now argue, the entire Roundup Ready enterprise has been as much about engineering the market as it was about engineering the crops themselves.

The rough sketch of the story goes back to the 1980s, when, during a routine survey of the waste piles at a Roundup-manufacturing facility in Louisiana, Monsanto scientists discovered mutants: bacteria that — thanks to the evolutionarily intense selective pressures of the environment in which it lived — had become immune to Roundup.

If it were possible to insert the Roundup-resistant gene from the bacteria into crop plants so they could be doused with weed killer without sustaining any damage themselves, the continued demand for Roundup was practically guaranteed. Sensing a moneymaker, Monsanto extracted that gene from the bacteria; eventually, the company devised a way to hitch the gene to another type of bacteria, which was then used to shoehorn the gene into crop plants.

Then, as Daniel Charles recounts in his 2001 book Lords of the Harvest, Monsanto lifted a page from Microsoft's book: "A seed was hardware, like the electronic circuits of a computer; Monsanto's gene was the software that it could turn into a useful tool. Just as Microsoft licensed its Windows operating system to computer makers, which in turn sold the entire package to consumers, Monsanto could license its genes to a wide variety of seed companies. Those companies would breed the gene into many different varieties of plants and sell those seeds to farmers."

After gaining quick regulatory approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Monsanto first licensed the Roundup-resistant gene to a company called Asgrow and the seed giant Pioneer Hi-Bred, which inserted them into soybeans and released them in 1996. Roundup Ready cotton and canola followed in 1997; Roundup Ready corn in 1998.

In the years since, Roundup Ready crops have been a huge commercial success, and they have transformed Monsanto as well. The company that made its name in chemicals now makes far more money from seeds than herbicides: Last year, 70 percent of Monsanto's $3.5 billion profit came from seeds, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.


Paul Rasgorshek. Mike Shipman/blueplanetphoto.com
"I do a lot of thinking when I'm in a tractor," says Jerry Tlucek, who runs a dairy south of Nampa. "And I like to be with God — you know, just the Lord and me." Tlucek was the first farmer in the country to grow Roundup Ready alfalfa hay, and his fields are a sort of testament to the promise of biotechnology: They stand emerald-green and surreally flawless amid the sagebrush and cheatgrass here. "I won't plant conventional alfalfa again. I've never seen anything like this," says Tlucek. "(Roundup) will kill every weed in there, and it won't kill one blade of alfalfa."
Alfalfa's humble bearing belies its agricultural importance. It is the fourth-largest crop in the nation, after corn, soybeans and wheat; in the 11 Western states, alfalfa is grown on about 5.6 million acres, or nearly a quarter of the total farmland. A dairy cow can eat as much as six tons of alfalfa a year, and the plant is also an important feed for beef cattle and horses. Seven percent of the alfalfa produced in the U.S. is eaten directly by humans in the form of sprouts; smaller amounts go into pellets of the sort fed to pet rabbits; and alfalfa is one of the main sources of nectar for honey production.

Monsanto turned its attention to alfalfa in 1998. A year later, it licensed the Roundup Ready gene to a company called Forage Genetics International, which is owned by the Land O'Lakes dairy cooperative and based about 10 miles from Rasgorshek's farm, in Nampa. Monsanto then licensed 21 seed companies to sell the seed developed and grown by Forage Genetics; those companies include Pioneer and Croplan Genetics, itself another Land O'Lakes subsidiary. (Monsanto and Forage Genetics both declined requests for interviews for this story.)

Under a federal law enacted in 2000, genetically modified organisms are regulated as "plant pests" until the U.S. Department of Agriculture is certain they pose no danger to crops, public health or the environment. In 2004, Forage Genetics submitted a request to the USDA to "deregulate" Roundup Ready alfalfa so it could be grown commercially. The same year, the company contracted with Rasgorshek and several other farmers in Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado to begin growing several thousand acres of Roundup Ready alfalfa seed that would be bagged and sold to hay growers. A little more than 14 months after Forage Genetics and Monsanto asked the USDA to deregulate Roundup Ready alfalfa, the department issued an 18-page environmental assessment and, on June 27, 2005, cleared the crop for commercial planting. Today, more than 3,000 farmers now grow it on some 220,000 acres nationwide, including at least nine of the 11 Western states.

Phil Geertson, who runs a small seed business in Idaho, is something of a heretic in the temple of genetic engineering. "There are people who feel that doing that type of work is sort of within God's realm, and it is not something that humans should be doing," he says. "I'm not a religious person, but I think there's something just inherently wrong with this — that they can take different species and combine 'em the way they wanna combine 'em."

Geertson, along with other growers, argues that now that the Roundup Ready gene has been set loose in the world, it will be impossible to contain. In fact, he says it has already set off a wave of dire consequences. Last year, like Martin Luther nailing his theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Geertson printed up 100,000 copies of a flier with a cover that screams, "Roundup Ready Alfalfa is a Very Bad Idea!" Then he had it inserted in farm newspapers throughout the country.


Jerry Tlucek feeds his dairy cows Roundup Ready alfalfa in Melba, Idaho. Tlucek was the first farmer in the country to grow the genetically modified plant. Mike Shipman/blueplanetphoto.com
In his brochure, Geertson began by pointing out that there can be up to 1.6 ounces of weed seed in a 50-pound bag of alfalfa: "If Roundup is used for weed control in alfalfa seed fields, the weeds left in the field are resistant or will develop resistance to glyphosate. The resistant weeds will survive and their seeds will be harvested with the alfalfa seed" — and, Geertson believes, they will spread with every bag of Roundup Ready alfalfa seed sold. "This cropping system," he wrote, "will accelerate the proliferation of glyphosate-resistant weeds."
In fact, evidence is accumulating that the older Roundup Ready crops such as soybeans and cotton — and the increased use of Roundup that has accompanied them — have subjected weeds to such intense selective pressure that they, like the sludge-dwelling bacteria from which Monsanto's scientists first extracted the Roundup-resistant gene, have become resistant to the herbicide. Roundup-resistant horseweed has appeared in Delaware and Tennessee; Roundup-resistant ragweed in Missouri; and Roundup-resistant ryegrass in California. Farmers are increasingly being forced to turn to older, more potent herbicides to control weeds — but even those chemicals sometimes offer little relief. In some parts of Georgia, where Roundup Ready cotton is widely grown, farmers have been reduced to pulling Roundup-resistant Palmer amaranth — a weed so tough that it can damage mechanized cotton harvesters — by hand.

For the farmers in Idaho, weed resistance is only one worry. Some local alfalfa growers are also concerned about the agricultural equivalent of secondhand smoke: genetic contamination when bees transfer pollen between genetically modified and conventional varieties of the plant. A bee, says Jim Briggs, another Nampa-area farmer who grows conventional alfalfa seed, is "an independent beast of Mother Nature that you can't control. They can go anywhere and potentially contaminate the whole industry." Transgenic contamination is of particular concern for organic farmers, who have successfully argued that the national organic standards should exclude genetically modified crops.

In Idaho, Forage Genetics and seed growers agreed to separate Roundup Ready seed fields from conventional ones by at least 900 feet, to minimize the transmission of pollen by leafcutter bees. Yet alkali bees can fly as far as one mile and honeybees as far as three; freak weather such as thunderstorm downbursts can blow bees even farther afield. There is already evidence that the 900-foot isolation distances aren't enough. In fact, at least one conventional seed company claims that its seed became contaminated even before Roundup Ready alfalfa was deregulated.
<br>Woodland, Calif.-based Cal/West Seeds says it discovered the Roundup Ready gene in conventional alfalfa seed that a farmer in Wyoming was growing for the company in early 2005, after one of Forage Genetics' seed growers planted Roundup Ready alfalfa less than 200 feet away. The same year, Cal/West claims to have found contamination in seed grown in California and Washington. Last year, another company, Dairyland Seed, says it found Roundup Ready contamination in conventional seed that farmers were growing for it in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. As a result, several seed companies in Idaho now use a kit similar to a home pregnancy test to test every lot of seed that they buy.

"This business of (Forage Genetics) going right into every major alfalfa seed-producing area and getting some farmer to grow (Roundup Ready alfalfa seed) … They knew it, they knew what they were doing: They were just trying to quickly contaminate the whole countryside with it," says Phil Geertson. "There are a lot of seed growers that are worried that it's going to destroy their business, and that Forage Genetics will be the only game in town."


Roundup Ready seeds in the West. Source: Forage Genetics International
In February of last year, Geertson and the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Food Safety fought back with a lawsuit against the USDA. They claimed that Roundup Ready alfalfa could contaminate conventional and organic alfalfa farmers' fields and prevent them from selling their crops; that it could create Roundup-resistant "superweeds"; and that the Department of Agriculture had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not conducting a full environmental impact statement before it deregulated the crop in 2005.
This Feb. 13, U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer reversed the USDA's decision to approve Roundup Ready alfalfa for commercial planting. Because of "the possibility that the deregulation of Roundup Ready alfalfa will degrade the human environment by eliminating a farmer's choice to grow non-genetically engineered alfalfa and a consumer's choice to consume such food," Breyer ruled that the Department of Agriculture must complete a full environmental impact statement before it can revisit the question of whether to deregulate the crop. Never before has such a thorough evaluation been required of a genetically modified crop.

Breyer also put a temporary injunction on the sale of Roundup Ready alfalfa seed, leaving pallets of the purple-dyed seed sitting on dealers' loading docks with stop-sale notices stuck to them. It could take two years for the USDA to complete the environmental impact statement. What will happen in the meantime?

Late in April, the parties to the case again convened before Judge Breyer in an immaculate wood-paneled courtroom 19 floors above downtown San Francisco. Monsanto had made it clear that much was at stake if Breyer kept the injunction on planting Roundup Ready alfalfa in place while the government completed its environmental impact statement. The company had anticipated the amount of acreage planted in Roundup Ready alfalfa to grow from 220,000 acres to 570,000 this year, then to 1.1 million acres next year.

Following Breyer's initial ruling, Monsanto and Forage Genetics had seized on the idea of "coexistence" between genetically modified, conventional and organic crops. The two companies sent a letter to alfalfa growers asking them to write testimonials about "the benefits of having Roundup Ready alfalfa as a choice for farmers," and enclosed a response form with space for farmers to describe "HOW I COEXIST." In the hearing before Breyer, the companies' attorneys argued that if he allowed the USDA to impose a set of six conditions on growers — including mandatory isolation distances to minimize pollen flow, requirements that alfalfa be harvested before more than a small percentage of it blooms, and orders that any harvesting equipment that comes into contact with Roundup Ready alfalfa be cleaned to keep the seed from conventional fields — farmers could continue planting Roundup Ready alfalfa without contaminating their conventional and organic neighbors.

But from his vantage behind the bench, Breyer, wearing a gold bow tie vaguely suggestive of Orville Reden-bacher, was plainly dubious about the plea to allow farmers to plant more Roundup Ready alfalfa while the case continued. Was there a single precedent, he asked the two companies' attorneys, in which a court had allowed "an increase in the exposure or use of an item under investigation?" The question, it quickly became clear, was rhetorical. On May 3, Breyer ruled that the injunction on the sale and planting of Roundup Ready alfalfa will remain in place until the USDA completes its environmental impact statement.


Bags of Roundup Ready seed that Jerry Tlucek bought but can't plant because of a court injunction. Mike Shipman/blueplanetphoto.com
Monsanto is considering whether to appeal the ruling. Still, it is clear that the real world of farming is considerably messier than one that the company's attorneys described in Breyer's courtroom. The 3,000-odd farmers who, like Paul Rasgorshek, have already planted Roundup Ready alfalfa can continue growing the crop. But if the forthcoming environmental impact statement does not justify the release of Roundup Ready alfalfa, putting the genie back in the bottle will be considerably harder than, say, recalling a defective automobile.
"The world's not as clean and pristine as they say it is," says Vince Holtz, who grows conventional alfalfa seed near Nampa and runs a small seed-cleaning plant where he processes other growers' seed. An alfalfa plant can produce as many as 10,000 seeds, seeds so small that, in bulk, they tend to behave more like a liquid than a solid. They leak everywhere and are easily tracked from field to field. "You could have a field full of basketballs," Holtz says, "and it's pretty easy to find them, and it's contained, and you can remove it from the system, you know? But this stuff — it's making pollen, and the seeds are long-lived; they can survive in the ground."

There is, as well, the issue of "escapes" — alfalfa plants that grow next to phone poles, or alongside irrigation pipes, and lie just out of the reach of a farmer in a harvester. When such feral alfalfa blooms, its pollen is spread by bees, and the plant eventually drops its seeds and further multiplies its genes. And in alfalfa-growing country, feral alfalfa is everywhere: Phil Geertson, who lives in a duplex in the little town of Greenleaf, has to go no further than the field next door to find it. There, on a patch of ground he says hasn't been irrigated for two years, the plants grow robust and green. And there is no shortage of pathways along which the seed can spread. Cattle can eat the seed and deposit it miles away, undigested and biologically viable, in a fertilizer-rich patty. Birds can spread the seed. Seed can fall out of trucks. "It's amazing," says Geertson. "There's just so many different ways it can be spread around."

Monsanto has wrapped its fight to keep Roundup Ready alfalfa from being outlawed in the rhetoric of "choice." Following Breyer's initial ruling in February, Andrew Burchett, a spokes-man for Monsanto, told Farm Industry News: "We're going to do everything we think is appropriate to defend growers' right to choose this technology. Our goal is to restore that choice for farmers."

It was a curious position to take, given that Monsanto has spent the last decade all but forcing farmers to buy bundled packages of its seeds and herbicides, while, opponents claim, systematically eliminating its competitors. In fact, the company now faces at least 20 antitrust lawsuits over its actions.

Monsanto has assiduously kept the details of its empire-building out of the public eye. When its internal affairs are scrutinized in court, the company routinely invokes trade-secrets protections to keep its documents under seal. Taken together, however, the publicly available portions of the lawsuits currently pending against the company paint the outline of a top-to-bottom strategy to control the seed and herbicide business. The most recent lawsuit, filed by the American Corn Growers Association against Monsanto in February, lays out the basic details.


Vince Holtz grows conventional alfalfa seed near Nampa. Mike Shipman/blueplanetphoto.com
Beginning in 1996 — the same year it first released a Roundup Ready crop — Monsanto went on a more than $9 billion buying spree of some of the nation's biggest seed companies. Two years ago, Monsanto paid $1.4 billion for the fruit-and-vegetable-seed giant Seminis and became the biggest seed company in the world. (The acquisition plan is ongoing: This May, Monsanto received approval from the U.S. Depart-ment of Justice for its $1.5 billion acquisition of Delta and Pine Land Co., the largest cottonseed company in the nation.)
According to the Corn Growers lawsuit, "Monsanto's plan also included the suppression of herbicide-tolerant trait technologies … that could compete with Monsanto's Roundup Ready technology." Between 1996 and 1998, for example, Monsanto acquired a controlling interest in DeKalb Genetics Corporation. Then it quashed that company's partnership with Bayer CropScience to develop a line of crops resistant to a glyphosate competitor known as glufosinate. In 1997, the lawsuit alleges, Monsanto bought a company called Asgrow and killed a similar effort.

"In addition to eliminating actual competition through acquisitions," the lawsuit goes on to allege, "Monsanto also pursued a strategy of neutralizing potential competitors by entering into restrictive licensing agreements with (the) independent seed companies" that incorporated Monsanto's Roundup Ready genes into their own seed lines. Under that scheme, Monsanto waives royalty fees and pays rebates to seed companies if crop lines containing Monsanto's genes make up at least 70 percent of each company's total sales.

Monsanto is also accused of attempting to "cartelize" the seed market and fix prices by entering into agreements with independent seed companies. The company allegedly laid that strategy out in 1996, in what it called the Maize Protection Business Plan. The plan has remained under seal through several different lawsuits, but the Corn Growers allege that it "became the blueprint for Monsanto's overall licensing strategy to restrict competition in biotechnology seed traits and related markets." A class-action effort filed by several soybean farmers in the Midwest alleged that during the late 1990s, as part of the plan, top Monsanto executives met with leaders from Pioneer to fix prices for Roundup Ready seeds. Monsanto settled that case out of court last year, but the allegations have been revived in the recent Corn Growers' lawsuit and several others.

According to the lawsuits, cartelization not only gave Monsanto and its partners a way to fix prices, but — by entering into agreements with independent seed companies through which Monsanto aimed to gain control over 90 percent of the seed market — allowed the company to block competitors from entering that market. The most dramatic example involves a company called Syngenta Seeds. Three years ago, Syngenta, which manufactures a glyphosate herbicide called Touchdown, bought the rights to a glyphosate-resistant gene from Bayer CropScience. Syngenta then announced plans to introduce its own Touchdown-tolerant crop line that would have competed with Roundup Ready crops. But Monsanto, according to allegations in several lawsuits, prohibited its partner seed companies from developing any crop lines with Syngenta's gene — locking Syngenta out of the game.

Having controlled the supply side of the glyphosate market, Monsanto also, according to the Corn Growers' and other lawsuits, imposed a series of restrictive agreements on herbicide dealers and distributors. The company stipulated that dealers could only receive rebates — which often constitute a substantial portion of a dealer's profits — if their sales of Roundup were at least 80 percent of their total sales of all brands of glypho-sate. Finally, farmers themselves have not escaped Monsanto's near-total embrace: When they buy Roundup Ready seeds, the Corn Growers lawsuit states, Monsanto "requires (them) to sign a technology license … that effectively mandates that they use only Roundup herbicides" — and not competing brands or generics — on Roundup Ready crops.


"Escaped" alfalfa, in a vacant lot in Nampa, Idaho. Mike Shipman/blueplanetphoto.com
Attorneys on both sides of the various antitrust cases have been unwilling to comment publicly. In an e-mail, Andrew Burchett, the Monsanto spokes-man, wrote, "The claims presented by the (American Corn Growers Association) and others appear to recycle old allegations regarding Monsanto's marketing and pricing of glyphosate — complaints that DuPont has made previously in lawsuits and which were the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that was closed in 2004. We believe the complaints are without merit."
It seems likely they will also take years to resolve.

Biotechnology opponents have a certain fondness for referring to genetically modified crops as "Frankenfoods." But it's hard to see alfalfa in the role of monster — even genetically engineered alfalfa.

As Jerry Tlucek showed off his field of Roundup Ready alfalfa hay, he pulled one plant, now two years old and 17 inches tall, out of the ground. For the rest of the morning, it lay demurely between the two of us on the bench seat in Tlucek's truck, next to a knotted plastic bag of sweet corn seed that another farmer had given him. At no point did the alfalfa plant leap for my jugular, or for Tlucek's. In fact, as the morning wore on, the plant began to wilt.

Still, the dying plant suggested an unsettling contradiction. Monsanto has zealously guarded the sanctity of its intellectual property. Yet the company's prized gene, from the bacterium fished out of the Roundup waste piles in Louisiana, now seems well on its way to pervading our entire food system.

And it may be doing even more than that. In his February ruling, Judge Breyer wrote that, "If the government's action could eliminate all alfalfa, there would be no dispute that such action has a significant environmental impact, even though the primary impact is the economic effect on alfalfa and livestock farmers. For those farmers who choose to grow non-genetically engineered alfalfa, the possibility that their crops will be infected with the engineered gene is tantamount to the elimination of all alfalfa; they cannot grow their chosen crop."

In fact, transgenic "creep" is already eliminating traditional crop varieties — and with them, choice. In 2001, for instance, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley discovered genetic contamination from another of Monsanto's genetically engineered corn lines in native varieties of corn in Oaxaca, Mexico — the plant's birthplace and the worldwide center of corn genetic diversity. Phil Geertson believes a similar genetic creep is already under way in alfalfa. "The seeds of it are out there. The seeds are planted," he says. "I think what they're going to have to do is set some standard of how much contamination there can be in alfalfa seed. Because it'll be impossible to get it out of the system."

It is not hard to imagine the distinctions between conventional and organic, between conventional and genetically engineered — and ultimately between genetically engineered and organic — dissolving, regardless of whether anyone wants such an outcome.


The brochure Phil Geertson had inserted in ranch newspapers around the country
George Siemon is the head of the Wisconsin-based CROPP Cooperative, which includes about 670 dairy farms around the country whose milk is sold under the Organic Valley label. Siemon says that the cooperative's members, who produce, he estimates, about 35 percent of the nation's organic milk supply, have already been forced to deal with the omnipresence of genetically modified crops.
"We have feed that's being raised that gets polluted by (genetically modified) corn in the Midwest," he says. "The least we could ask for is seed that's not polluted, but it's getting harder and harder to find any seed that doesn't have a trace amount of pollution."

In fact, Siemon says, the "USDA Organic" seal that graces Organic Valley's milk cartons represents the spirit rather than the absolute purity of organic farming. The national organic standards went into effect in 2001, and the very way they were written implicitly acknowledged that the line between organic and genetically modified food had already been blurred: The test of "organicness" is a farmer's adherence to an organic production process, rather than a crop's absolute freedom from genetic contamination. "The organic seal represents that we're doing the very most we can do to avoid (contamination)," says Siemon. " 'Coexistence' is a nice term, but it turns out that coexistence (means) we put up with their contamination."

In Idaho, Monsanto's efforts to re-engineer the world to conform to its business plan are changing longstanding relationships between farmers. Early in the afternoon on the same stormy day that Paul Rasgorshek would make the rounds of his Roundup Ready alfalfa fields, Vince Holtz had patiently walked me through his seed-cleaning plant. The day had taken on a vaguely vaudevillian quality — partly because Holtz's wife, Sue, kept calling him to find out where she should meet him with his lunch, so his cell phone repeatedly erupted with the melody of the 1972 hit song "Ventura Highway."

But at one point, we stood behind the cleaning plant and looked out over one of Holtz's fields, planted with conventional alfalfa. Rasgorshek's farm, and one run by Leland Tiegs, another farmer who grows Roundup Ready alfalfa seed under contract for Forage Genetics, lay just a couple miles to the south over a low ridge.

Both Rasgorshek and Tiegs had made a point of saying how much they respected Holtz's chops as a farmer, and Holtz made it clear that the feeling was mutual. But looking toward their fields felt like peering across the border between two warring states — albeit one that was proving a lot more porous than anyone had imagined.

Holtz had been explaining the finer points of how to test for transgenic contamination in alfalfa seed when he seemed to come face-to-face with his own powerlessness. "I might have a little field of my own seed, and I've got some small markets developed. But I'm not gonna go out there and take over the world. It keeps me living." Then, with what seemed like sadness more than anger, he said, "But the next thing you know, Paul and Leland have got all these acres (planted in Roundup Ready alfalfa), and you can't shift gears."

Not all that far away, the next Roundup Ready crop has emerged from Monsanto's product-development pipeline. This year, farmers near Worland, Wyo., are growing some 2,000 acres of Roundup Ready sugar beets. And in Oregon's Willamette Valley, fields of Roundup Ready sugar beet seed will be ready for harvest this summer. The crop's full release is scheduled for next year.

Matt Jenkins is a contributing editor of High Country News.
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Monsanto Buys 'Terminator' Seeds Company

By F. William Engdahl

August 27, 2006

The United States Government has been financing research on a genetic engineering technology which, when commercialized, will give its owners the power to control the food seed of entire nations or regions. The Government has been working quietly on this technology since 1983. Now, the little-known company that has been working in this genetic research with the Government's US Department of Agriculture-- Delta & Pine Land-- is about to become part of the world's largest supplier of patented genetically-modified seeds (GMO), Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri.

Relations between Monsanto, Delta & Pine Land and the USDA, on closer scrutiny, show the deep and dark side of the much-heralded genetic revolution in agriculture. It proves deep-held suspicions that the Gene Revolution is not about 'solving the world hunger problem' as its advocates claim. It's about handing over control of the seeds for mankind's basic food supply—rice, corn, soybeans, wheat, even fruit, vegetables and cotton—to privately owned corporations. Once the seeds and their use are patented and controlled by one or several private agribusiness multinationals, it will be they who can decide whether or not a particular customer—let's say for argument, China or Brazil or India or Japan—whether they will or won't get the patented seeds from Monsanto, or from one of its licensee GMO partners like Bayer Crop Sciences, Syngenta or DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred International.

While most of us don't bother to reflect on where the corn in the box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes or the rice in a box of Uncle Ben's Converted Rice come from, when we grab it from the supermarket shelf, they all must originate with seeds. Seeds can either be taken by a farmer from the previous season' seeds, and planted to produce the next harvest. Or, seeds can be bought new each harvest season, from the companies which sell their seeds.

The advent of commercial GMO seeds in the early 1990's allowed companies like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow Chemicals to go from supplying agriculture chemical herbicides like Roundup, to patenting genetically altered seeds for basic farm crops like corn, rice, soybeans or wheat. For almost a quarter century, since 1983, the US Government has quietly been working to perfect a genetically engineered technique whereby farmers would be forced to turn to their seed supplier each harvest to get new seeds. The seeds would only produce one harvest. After that the seeds from that harvest would commit 'suicide' and be unusable.

There has been much hue and cry, correctly so, that this process, patented 'suicide' seeds, officially termed GURTs (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies), is a threat to poor farmers in developing countries like India or Brazil, who traditionally save their own seeds for the next planting. In fact, GURTs, more popularly referred to as Terminator seeds for the brutal manner in which they kill off plant reproduction possibilities, is a threat to the food security as well of North America, Western Europe, Japan and anywhere Monsanto and its elite cartel of GMO agribusiness partners enters a market.

The Curious History of Delta & Pine Land

Delta & Pine Land is a company that, despite the pine in its name, has deep roots. Founded in 1888, it has its headquarters at One Cotton Row in Scott, Mississippi, nestled between Goat Island and Choktaw Bar Island on the Mississippi River, near the Arkansas border. However, the people running things at Delta Pine are anything but your typical Mississippi black-dirt cotton farmers.

In 1983, Delta & Pine Land (D&PL) joined with the US Department of Agriculture in a project to develop Terminator seeds. It was one of the earliest experiments with GMO. It was a long-term project. The US Government has been serious about Terminator beginning more than two decades ago.

In March 1998 the US Patent Office granted Patent No. 5,723,765 to Delta & Pine Land for a patent titled, Control of Plant Gene _Expression. The patent is owned jointly, according to Delta & Pine's Security & Exchange Commission 10K filing, 'by D&PL and the United States of America, as represented by the Secretary of Agriculture.'

The patent has global coverage. To quote further from the official D&PL SEC filing, 'The patent broadly covers all species of plant and seed, both transgenic (GMO-ed) and conventional, for a system designed to allow control of progeny seed viability without harming the crop'(sic).

Then, in a manner reminiscent of Big Brother in George Orwell's novel, 1984, D&PL claims, 'One application of the technology could be to control unauthorized planting of seed of proprietary varieties…by making such a practice non-economic since non-authorized saved seed will not germinate, and, therefore, would be useless for planting.' D&PL calls the thousand-year-old tradition of farmer-saved seed by the pejorative term, 'brown bagging' as though it is something dirty and corrupt.

Translated into lay language, D&PL officially declares the purpose of its Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene _Expression, is to prevent farmers who once get trapped into buying transgenic or GMO seeds from a company such as Monsanto or Syngenta, from 'brown bagging' or being able to break free of control of their future crops by Monsanto and friends. As D&PL puts it, their patent gives them 'the prospect of opening significant worldwide seed markets to the sale of transgenic technology in varietal crops in which crop seed currently is saved and used in subsequent seasons as planting seed.'

Instead, the farmer or the country whose farmers depend on Monsanto patented GMO seeds must pay a license fee to Monsanto each year to get new seeds. 'No tickee, no laundy,' as the old Brooklyn poet would say.

Terminator is the answer to the agribusiness dream of controlling world food production. No longer would they need to hire expensive detectives to spy on whether farmers were re-using Monsanto or other GMO patented seed. Terminator corn or soybeans or cotton seeds could be genetically modified to 'commit suicide' after one harvest season. That would automatically prevent farmers from saving and re-using the seed for the next harvest. The technology would be a means of enforcing Monsanto or other GMO patent rights, and forcing payment of farmer use fees not only in developing economies, where patent rights were, understandably, little respected, but also in industrial OECD countries.

With Terminator patent rights, once a country such as Argentina or Brazil or Iraq or the USA or Canada opened its doors to the spread of GMO patented seeds among its farmers, their food security would be potentially hostage to a private multinational company, a company which, for whatever reasons, especially given its intimate ties to the US Government, might decide to use 'food as a weapon' to compel a US-friendly policy from that country or group of countries.

Sound far-fetched? Go back to what then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did in countries like Allende's Chile to force a regime change to a 'US-friendly' Pinochet dictatorship by withholding USAID and private food exports to Chile. Kissinger dubbed it 'food as a weapon.' Terminator is merely the logical next step in food weapon technology.

The role of the US Government in backing and financing Delta & Pine Land's decades of Terminator research is even more revealing. As Kissinger said back in the 1970's, 'Control the oil and you can control entire Continents. Control food and you control people…'

In a June 1998 interview, USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps, defined the US Government policy on Terminator seeds. He explained that USDA wanted the technology to be 'widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many seed companies.' He meant agribusiness GMO giants like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow. The USDA was open about their reasons: They wanted to get Terminator seeds into the developing world where the Rockefeller Foundation had made eventual proliferation of genetically engineered crops the heart of its GMO strategy from the beginnings of its rice genome project in 1984.

USDA's Phelps stated that the US Government's goal in fostering the widest possible development of Terminator technology was 'to increase the value of proprietary seed owned by US seed companies and to open up new markets in Second and Third World countries.'

Under WTO rules on free trade in agriculture, countries are forbidden to impose their own national health restrictions on GMO imports if it is deemed to be an 'unfair trade barrier.' It begins to become clear why it was the US Government and US agribusiness which during the late 1980's pushed at the GATT Uruguay Round for creation of a World Trade Organization, with its supranational arbitrary powers over world agriculture trade. It all fits into a neat picture of patented seeds, forced on reluctant WTO member nations, under threat of WTO sanctions, and now of Terminator or suicide seeds.

A closer look at who runs and owns Delta & Pine Land is instructive.

Arkansas Politics and D&PL

The largest shareholder in D&PL is the Stephens Group of Little Rock, Arkansas. Here is where things become interesting indeed. 

The man who is Chairman of the Board of DP&L is Jon E.M. Jacoby, who came to DP&L as representative of the Stephens Group. Jacoby is a Director and Vice Chairman of The Stephens Group LLC, the Arkansas-based private equity firm owned by the Stephens family.

The Stephens Group prides itself on being the nation's largest investment bank outside Wall Street, based, of all places, in little ol' Little Rock, in hillbilly land, Arkansas, one of the poorest states in the United States. Stephens Inc. is also one of the biggest institutional shareholders in 30 large multinationals including the Arkansas based firms Tyson Food, the world's largest chicken industrial factory operation and the infamous Arkansas giant, Wal-Mart.

Jackson Stephens, who founded the group with his brother, Witt, were more than just lucky Arkansas bankers and billionaires. Stephens evidently built his career and fortune by being connected to the 'right' people. He was a US Naval Academy classmate of Jimmy Carter and during the Georgia bank scandals of President Carter's Office of Management & Budget chief, Bert Lance, it was Jack Stephens who stepped in to bail Lance out of an extremely embarrassing financial debacle with Lance's old bank, National Bank of Georgia.

How Stephens helped Jimmy Carter's fellow Georgia buddy, Lance, is the interesting part. Stephens introduced Lance to a Pakistani businessman, Agha Hasan Abedi. Abedi was the founder of a curious Luxembourg-registered, London-based bank called BCCI.

In 1990, BCCI was convicted of money laundering for the Columbian Cocaine Cartels in Miami.

In October, 1992, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released an 800-page report on the BCCI collapse. They called the BCCI scandal, 'the largest case of organized crime in history, spanning over some 72 nations,' adding that it represented an 'international financial crime on a massive and global scale,' and that the bank 'systematically bribed world leaders and political figures throughout the world.'

The Senate report concluded that among the provable charges against BCCI were 'BCCI's criminality, including fraud…involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the America; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; its support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; its management of prostitution; its commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; its illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers.'

Jackson Stephens was no casual business acquaintance of BCCI's Agha Hasan Abedi. In response to the concerns over Jackson Stephens' involvement in BCCI, the Ohio Attorney General noted in a 1993 report, 'Stephens' name has been linked to securities violations that allegedly occurred when the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a foreign bank dominated by Pakistani financier Agha Hasan Abedi, acquired stock and control over the Washington-based First American Bank.' In 1991, Stephens joined BCCI investor Mochtar Riady in buying BCCI's former Hong Kong subsidiary from its liquidators.

The Stephens Group was well-connected to another interesting Asian banking group, the billionaire Indonesian Riady family of Moktar and his son James Riady, who own the Lippo Bank in Indonesia. The Riadys are Chinese-Indonesian businessmen who, of all places, moved to Arkansas in the 1970's, despite holding billions of assets in Asia. Stephens and Riady hit it off and soon Stephens and Riady bought a bank in Hong Kong. Stephens then invited Riady to invest in a Little Rock, Arkansas bank called Worthen.

BCCI and Jackson Stephens, chairman of the Stephens Group of Arkansas were well known to one another. Stephens Group board member, Jon E.M. Jacoby, today Chairman of Delta & Pine Land, and still a Vice Director of The Stephens Group, was a very senior, trusted member of the Stephens' inside circle for more than 35 years.

Jackson Stephens' Stephens Group financially staked Sam Walton when he started Wal-Mart in 1970. Stephens also financed Tyson Foods to become the agribusiness global giant it is today. Jon Jacoby, as senior executive of the Stephens Group, had arranged the 1970 Wal-Mart deal. Jon E.M. Jacoby and Jackson Stephens went way back.

Jacoby was Vice President of Stephens Inc. in the early 1990's, shortly after the BCCI scandals and early into the Presidency of another Jackson Stephens protégé, former Arkansas Governor and recipient of Stephens' political largess, William Jefferson Clinton.

When an Arkansas reporter questioned Jacoby on allegations of Clinton's alleged corruption as Governor of Arkansas, Jacoby quipped, "You see a girl walking down the street. You can say, 'There goes a beautiful girl' or "There goes a whore.' What the hell's the difference? They've both got legs."

Arkansas politics is known for its colorful metaphors and its colorful politicians like William Jefferson Clinton. It's good to get a little of the flavor of this Arkansas colorfulness to get a better picture of Delta & Pine Land.

Stephens Group, Tyson Farms and Other Arkansas Fairy Tales

A tangled web of relations links the Stephens Group and Delta & Pine Land of Scott, Mississippi with another satellite in the agribusiness orbit of the influential Stephens Group. The Stephens Group is also linked intimately with Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the US' largest agribusiness processor of industrialized chicken meat, and arguably one of its most unsanitary ones.

Tyson Foods curiously emerged from the recent Avian Flu (H5N1) virus scare as a winner, using the lie that their factory farm mass-bred assembly-line chickens were more 'sanitary' than free-roaming small farm chickens of Asia.

Washington Administrations, at least since the Presidency of Bill Clinton, seem to have a love affair of some sort with Tyson Foods.

It began when Clinton sought to name an Arkansas crony, Mike Espy, to be his Secretary of Agriculture. Before Clinton could submit Espy's name to the Senate for confirmation, however, Espy was sent to Arkansas for a meeting that would decide if Espy had the right stuff. The meeting was with Don Tyson, head of Tyson Foods.

Tyson apparently concluded that Espy indeed had the right stuff, at least as far as Tyson was concerned. Soon after being named head of USDA, Espy enacted measures significantly weakening Federal chicken waste and contamination standards. That opened the floodgates for expansion of Tyson Foods chicken factory farms into the huge concentrations of chicken waste and rivers overflowing with toxic pollution in Arkansas and beyond.

The on May 28, 2003 reviewed the allegations surrounding then-President Clinton and his wife, Hillary. They detailed some relevant points from the Clintons' Arkansas days:

1977

Hillary Rodham Clinton joins the Rose Law Firm. Jackson Stephens joins with former Carter administration budget director Bert Lance and a group of Mideast investors--later identified as key figures in the corrupt Bank of Credit & Commerce International--in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Financial General Bankshares in Washington, D.C

1978

October: Mrs. Clinton, now a partner at the Rose Firm, begins a series of commodities trades under the guidance of Tyson Foods executive Jim Blair, earning nearly $100,000. (author's emphasis). The trades are not revealed until March 1994.

November: Bill Clinton is elected Governor of Arkansas.

The Rose law firm was the house law firm of Jackson Stephens' Stephens Group investment bank in Little Rock. To be the corporate law firm of the Stephens Group was no casual affair. It implied a deep trust relationship and perhaps more. As one crony of Jackson Stephens put it at that time, 'Jackson Stephens? He's the man who owns Arkansas.'

The head of the prestigious Rose law firm in Little Rock in those days was C. Joseph Giroir jr. In 1977 Giroir hired a young lawyer named Hillary Clinton to work for Rose. It was all one cozy Arkansas-Indonesia family back then.

The Wall Street Journal commentary on the Clinton years had the following entry for 1987, as Clinton was still Arkansas Governor: 

1987:

Officials at investment giant Stephens Inc., including longtime Clinton friend, David Edwards, take steps to rescue Harken Energy, a struggling Texas oil company with George W. Bush on its board. Over the next three years, Mr. Edwards brings BCCI-linked investors and advisers into Harken deals. One of them, Abdullah Bakhsh, purchases $10 million in shares of Stephens-dominated Worthen Bank. (author's emphasis).

Jackson Stephens' political largesse was non-partisan: Democrats Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and then Republican George W. Bush, the man now in the White House as Monsanto seeks approval to take over the Stephens Group's Delta & pine land.

In December 1992, just after Clinton had been elected President in a campaign financed at critical points by Jackson Stephens and friends, including the Indonesian-American Riady family, Vince Foster, an Arkansas friend of the Clinton's, and a law partner at Hillary's Rose law firm, met James McDougal. Foster arranged for McDougal to buy the Clintons' remaining shares in Whitewater Development Co. That land deal was focus of Congressional investigation of the Clintons. McDougal was loaned the money for the purchase by Tyson Foods counsel Jim Blair, the long-time Clinton friend and commodities adviser who in 1978 had 'tutored' Hillary in her fabulously successful commodities speculation. The loan by Tyson's Jim Blair to McDougal was never repaid.

No sooner did Bill and Hillary Clinton move into the White House, and the Tyson Foods-approved Mike Espy took over as US Secretary of Agriculture, than Hillary's former law partner, Joseph Giroir, set up a corporation. It was called Arkansas International Development Corporation (AIDC). In fact, it appears that the AIDC was set up to do joint ventures with the Indonesian Lippo Group of the business partners of Jackson Stephens, Mokhtar and James Riady.

The Arkansas International Development Corporation brokered a deal between Indonesia's Lippo Group and Arkansas' Tyson Foods that opened Indonesia to import Tyson Foods industrially-produced Arkansas factory farm chickens. One food Indonesia does not need to import is certainly chickens. The cheap Arkansas imports destroyed the fragile economy of domestic Indonesian small family chicken farmers.

Another project of AIDC was to issue bonds to build an airport in the Arkansas backwoods for the sole purpose of shipping Tyson Farms chickens to Indonesia. Recall that Clinton's wife had been profiting from the trading advice of Tyson Foods since October 1978, a month before her husband became Governor.

Under the Clinton Presidency, agribusiness, especially agribusiness tied to the Stephens' interests, made huge advances.

Agriculture Secretary Espy was forced to resign in October 1994, and was indicted on charges of accepting bribes and other gratuities. Among the charges against him were making false statements, concealing money from prohibited sources, illegal gratuities, illegal contributions, falsifying records, interstate transportation of stolen property, money laundering, and illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies. The largest corporate offender was Tyson Foods. Tyson had illegally offered Espy $12,000 in airplane rides, football tickets and other payoffs. Espy got off because the law makes it easier to convict a briber than a bribee. Tyson paid the government $6 million to close its case.

Tyson had been enthusiastic supporters of the Clinton family for years. In 1994, Time reported that a senior pilot for Tyson, Joe Henrickson, had been grilled for three days by the Espy Independent Prosecutor, Dan Smaltz, and FBI agents. They grilled the Tyson pilot about earlier transfers of cash to the (Arkansas) Governor's (Bill Clinton) mansion. According to Time, Henrickson claimed to have carried white envelopes containing a quarter-inch stack of $100 bills on six occasions.

Time magazine reported that, 'In one case, [Henrickson claimed] a Tyson executive handed him an envelope of cash in the company's aircraft hanger in Fayetteville and said, 'This is for Governor Clinton.' Arkansas has its political traditions and the Stephens and Tyson families are evidently skilled practitioners of that art.

The real interest in Jacoby's Delta & Pine Land

By now the question comes, what is so attractive about the Stephens Group's Delta & Pine Land that Monsanto makes its second bid to add it to its global genetically-engineered seeds empire?

It's the patent Delta & Pine Land, together with the US Government, holds--Patent No. 5,723,765, titled, Control of Plant Gene _Expression. The USDA through its Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) in Lubbock, Texas, as already noted, has worked with Delta & Pine Land since 1983 to perfect Terminator GMO technology. Patent No. 5,723,765 is the patent for Terminator technology.

One year later, in early 1999 Monsanto, the largest producer of GMO seeds and related agri-chemicals, announced it was acquiring Delta & Pine Land along with Delta's Terminator patents.

In October 1999, however, following a worldwide storm of protest against Terminator seeds that threatened the very future of the Rockefeller Foundation's 'Gene Revolution' Dr. Gordon Conway, President of the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation, met privately with the Board of Directors of Monsanto. Conway convinced Monsantom that for the long-term future of their GMO Project, they must go public to indicate to a worried world that it would not 'commercialize' Terminator. Development of the genetic revolution and genetic engineering as a research area had been the project of the Rockefeller Foundation over decades, along with researchers in the family's Rockefeller University.

The Anglo-Swiss Syngenta joined with Monsanto in declaring solemnly that they would also not commercialize their work on GURTS or Terminator suicide seed technology.

That 1999 announcement took enormous pressure off of Monsanto and the agribusiness GMO giants, allowing them to advance the proliferation of their patented GMO seeds globally. Terminator could come later, once farmers and entire national agriculture areas like North America or Argentina or India had been taken over by GMO crops. Then, of course, it would be too late. The Rockefeller-Monsanto 1999 press conference was clearly application of classic Lenin Bolshevik tactics—Two Steps Forward, One Step Back…

Despite the Monsanto declaration of a moratorium on Terminator development, the US Government and the again independent Delta & Pine Land refused to drop their Terminator development.

In 2000, a year after the Monsanto Terminator moratorium announcement, the Clinton Administration's USDA Secretary, Dan Glickman, refused repeated efforts by various agriculture and NGO organizations to drop the Government's support for Terminator or GURTs. His Department's feeble excuse for not dropping support for the work with Delta & Pine Land was that it allowed the US Government to put 'leverage' on D&PL to 'protect the public interest.' Six years later it became clear: the only leverage the US Government had put on D&PL's commercialization efforts on GURTs had been to lever it into commercial reality.

Delta Vice President, Harry Collins, declared at the time in a press interview in the Agra/Industrial Biotechnology Legal Letter, 'We've continued right on with work on the Technology Protection System (TPS or Terminator). We never really slowed down. We're on target, moving ahead to commercialize it. We never really backed off.'

Nor did their partner, the United States Department of Agriculture, back down on Terminator after 1999. In 2001 the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) website announced: 'USDA has no plans to introduce TPS into any germplasm…Our involvement has been to help develop the technology, not to assist companies to use it.' As if to say, 'see, our hands are clean.' Then they went on to say the USDA was, 'committed to making the [Terminator] technology as widely available as possible, so that its benefits will accrue to all segments of society (sic)…ARS intends to do research on other applications of this unique gene control discovery…When new applications are at the appropriate stage of development, this technology will also be transferred to the private sector for commercial application.' Terminator was alive and well inside the Washington bureaucracy.

In 2001, the USDA and Delta & Pine executed a Commercialization Agreement for Terminator, its infamous Patent No. 5,723,765. The Government and Delta & Pine Land were not at all concerned about worldwide outcry against Terminator.

That announcement came two years after Monsanto had dropped its planned takeover of D&PL, with its Terminator patents.

The world was left with the (misleading) impression that Terminator was dead. Reality was it was anything but dead. Seven years later, long after public outcry against Terminator technology had died down, Monsanto re-entered and bought Delta & Pine Land and its Terminator patents.

Delta & Pine Land's global net

The key scientific member of the Delta & Pine Land board since 1993 has been Dr. Nam-Hai Chua. Chua, 62, is also head of the Rockefeller University Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory in New York, and has been for over 25 years, the labs which are at the heart of the Rockefeller Foundation's decades-long development, and spending of more than $100 millions of its own research grants to create their Gene Revolution. Until 1995, Chua was also a scientific consultant to Monsanto Corporation, as well as to DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred International. Chua is at the heart of Rockefeller's Gene Revolution. And, clearly, Delta & Pine Land and their research on Terminator have been in the center of that work.

Delta & Pine Land is well-placed globally to proliferate its suicide seeds now, with the corporate and financial clout of the giant Monsanto company. Delta & Pine already has subsidiaries including D&PL Argentina, D&PL China, D&PL China PTE in Singapore, Deltapine Paraguay, Delta Pine de Mexico, Deltapine Australia, Hebei Ji Dai Cottonseed Technology Company in China, CDM Mandiyu in Argentina, Delta and Pine Land Hellas in Greece, D&M Brazil Algodao of Brazil, D&PL India, D&PL Mauritius Ltd.

This vast global network combined with Monsanto's dominant position in the GMO seeds and agri-chemicals market along with the unique DP&L Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene _Expression, now give Monsanto and its close friends in Washington an enormous advance in their plans to dominate world food and plant seed use.  

F. William Engdahl is Contributing Editor of Global Research and author of the soon-to-be-released book, Seeds of Destruction: theDark Side of Genetically-engineeredFood. He also authored ' A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics,' Pluto Press,   He may be contacted at his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

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Tuesday, May 22, 2007 

Current mood:  pissed off
Category: Life

Aerial spraying of herbicide 'damages DNA'

Lisbeth Fog
17 May 2007
Source: SciDev.Net ..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

[..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />BOGOTA] Aerial spraying of a herbicide by the Colombian government on the border of Colombia and Ecuador has caused a high degree of DNA damage in local Ecuadorian people, according to a study. 

The research will be published in the next issue of Genetics and Molecular Biology.

The scientists, from the Pontificia Catholic University in Ecuador, analysed blood samples from 24 Ecuadorians living within three kilometres of the border of the two countries. Aerial spraying of a herbicide formulation containing glyphosate ? sold under the name Roundup by Monsanto ? took place on the Colombian side of the border between late 2000 and early 2001.

The Colombian government sprays illegal coca plantations ? used to make cocaine ? as part of its 'war on drugs'.

According to the paper, the application rate of the herbicide (litres per hectare) was 20 times the maximum recommended rate for the formulated product.

Half the individuals in the group received spraying directly over their houses, and the blood samples were taken within two months of the spraying taking place.

For comparison, blood samples were taken from 21 Ecuadorian individuals living 80 kilometres away from the border, where aerial spraying of the herbicide formulation did not take place.

In addition to expected symptoms ? including vomiting and diarrhoea, blurred vision, and difficulty in breathing ? the researchers found a significantly higher degree of DNA damage ? 600 to 800 per cent higher ? in the people living near the border compared with those 80 kilometres away.

The researchers ruled out tobacco, alcohol, non-prescription drugs and asbestos as causing the DNA damage. None of the individuals used or had been exposed to other herbicides or pesticides when the samples were taken.

DNA damage may activate genes associated to the development of cancer, lead researcher Cesar Paz y Miño told SciDev.Net, and may also lead to miscarriage or malformations in embryos.

Both Colombia and Ecuador have formed national scientific and technical commissions to study the effects of aerially spraying this herbicide formulation, with the Ecuadorian commission concluding it does affect humans and the Colombian commission refuting this claim (see Pesticides used in Colombian war on drugs 'not harmful').

President of the Colombian commission, Alberto Gómez Mejía, told SciDev.Net that it is difficult to establish the real cause of the effects of agrochemicals in humans.

Reference: Genetics and Molecular Biology 30, 456 (2007)

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Saturday, May 19, 2007 

Current mood:  worried
How Monsanto Destroyed Civilization

A Fiction story (Sort of)
The names, quotes and places are real - the time is fiction, but just barely so.

By Captain Paul Watson

Report from 2030

We refused to listen to the environmentalists. They were all just doom and gloom Cassandras, always talking down against the corporations, against the government, against science and technology as our means of solving global problems like world hunger and global warming.

We forgot that for all her hysterics, her pessimism and her dire predictions that the Princess prophetess Cassandra of Troy was right in all her predictions. Her father King Priam refused to listen to her and he, his city state, his people and his entire family were destroyed.

The first signs occurred in 2002.

We did not pay attention. We were busy having a good time, preoccupied with music, films, video games, television and sports.

Meanwhile at the University of Jena in Germany, Professor Hans-Heinrich Kaatz had begun his research into finding an answer to what was causing bee populations to dramatically decline.

By 2007 he had his answer. Professor Kaatz had discovered that the gene used to modify oil-rape seed had transferred to bacteria living inside honey bees.

Despite all of the claims by Monsanto, the biotech industry and supporters of genetically modified food, the sober fact was emerging that humans had tampered with something that they could no longer control.

In the spring of 2007, British Agriculture Minister Nick Brown urged British farmers to destroy all crops contaminated with genetically modified seeds. Some 600 farms had mistakenly planted more than 30,000 acres of GM rapeseed supplied by the Anglo-Dutch company Advanta. These seeds were also planted that spring in France, Germany and Sweden. The French and Swedish governments ordered the uprooting of the crops. Brown said at the time that if Kaatz's research was correct that it represented an extremely serious situation.

Meanwhile Monsanto's genetically modified rape seed was going into the ground in Canadian fields and the company had achieved a corporate coup d'etat in Brazil with their soybean monopoly. The company's profits were astronomical. The shareholders were ecstatic.

Monsanto and Advanta and other genetically modified seed companies threw a small army of lawyers into the fray to counter the scientific research with legalistic obstacles. Pseudo scientists like former Greenpeace President Dr. Patrick Moore were paid to praise the benefits of GM foods. Opponents of GM foods were branded as racists for opposing a product that could save millions of starving children in Africa. The public relations firms followed in the footsteps of the lawyers in a campaign to discredit anyone and everyone who spoke out against the Frankenseed.

Professor Kaatz worked at the respected Institute for Bee Research at the University of Jena in Germany. He built nets in a field planted with genetically modified rapeseed produced by AgrEvo. He let the bees fly freely within the net. At the beehives, he installed pollen traps in order to sample the pollen from the bees' hind
legs when entering the hive. This pollen was fed to young honey bees in the laboratory. Pollen is the natural diet of young bees, which need a high protein diet. Kaatz then extracted the intestine of the young bees and discovered that the gene from the GM rape-seed had been transferred in the bee gut to the microbes.

It was noteworthy that honeybees raised on organic plants did not demonstrate any sign of diminishment that the commercial honey bee breeders were experiencing.

In a May 2007 interview with the British newspaper The Observer, Kaatz said, "It is true, I have found the herbicide-resistant genes in the rapeseed transferred across to the bacteria and yeast inside the intestines of young bees. This happened rarely, but it did happen."

Although Kaatz realised the potential 'significance' of his findings, he said he "was not surprised" at the results. Asked if this had implications for the bacteria inside the human gut, he said: "Maybe, but I am not an expert on this."

Dr Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist who worked at Open University and a critic of GM technology, stated that she had no doubts about the dangers. She said: "These findings are very worrying and provide the first real evidence of what many have feared. Everybody is keen to exploit GM technology, but nobody is looking at the risk of horizontal gene transfer. We are playing about with genetic structures that existed for millions of years and the experiment is running out of control."

Ho warned that one of the gravest concerns was that anti-biotic resistant genes used in some GM crops crossed over to bacteria. "If this happened it would leave us unable to treat major illnesses like meningitis and E coli ."

By August 2007, some scientists became very worried that the same affect that GM seeds were having on bees, as serious as that was, could also affect the bacteria living inside the human digestive system. They warned that if this happened, the potential was there for the human immune system to be seriously damaged, that it could affect digestion and even the ability of blood to clot.

Monsanto descended on Professor Kaatz with a vengeance in a campaign to discredit his scientific credentials and his research methods.

Professor Kaatz was no match for the lawyers, the lobbyists and the politicians. He was discredited and retreated to the halls of academia, another scholar punished for daring to reveal scientific truth in the face of corporate power.

That was twenty three years ago.

Today, I sit here one of the few survivors. A strict organic vegan diet allowed me and a few hundred thousand others to bear witness to the death of human civilization. I wish I could get some satisfaction from saying, "I told them so."

But I can't. It is a sad thing indeed, an experience unthinkable that I would have lived to witness the death of human civilization. The death of billions was horrific. They starved to death when their bodies could no longer digest food, what food was left after the demise of the bees and the extinction of thousands of flowering plants.

Already the cities have begun to rust and crumble. We have to research and analyze every morsel of food we eat just to survive.

Sad to think that we face a world without music and art, without the sweet laughter of children, without hope.

And in the head offices of Monsanto, the stagnant computers rot and files blow across the streets by the heated wind – all their dreams of profit dashed upon the ignorant arrogance of their blind quest for profits.
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Friday, May 18, 2007 

Current mood:  disappointed
Category: Life
New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup

Sources:

Third World Resurgence, No. 176, April 2005
Title: "New Evidence of Dangers of Roundup Weedkiller"
Author: Chee Yoke Heong

Faculty Evaluator: Jennifer While
Student Researchers: Peter McArthur and Lani Ready

New studies from both sides of the Atlantic reveal that Roundup, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, poses serious human health threats. More than 75 percent of genetically modified (GM) crops are engineered to tolerate the absorption of Roundup—it eliminates all plants that are not GM. Monsanto Inc., the major engineer of GM crops, is also the producer of Roundup. Thus, while Roundup was formulated as a weapon against weeds, it has become a prevalent ingredient in most of our food crops.

Three recent studies show that Roundup, which is used by farmers and home gardeners, is not the safe product we have been led to trust.

A group of scientists led by biochemist Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini from the University of Caen in France found that human placental cells are very sensitive to Roundup at concentrations lower than those currently used in agricultural application.

An epidemiological study of Ontario farming populations showed that exposure to glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, nearly doubled the risk of late miscarriages. Seralini and his team decided to research the effects of the herbicide on human placenta cells. Their study confirmed the toxicity of glyphosate, as after eighteen hours of exposure at low concentrations, large proportions of human placenta began to die. Seralini suggests that this may explain the high levels of premature births and miscarriages observed among female farmers using glyphosate.

Seralini's team further compared the toxic effects of the Roundup formula (the most common commercial formulation of glyphosate and chemical additives) to the isolated active ingredient, glyphosate. They found that the toxic effect increases in the presence of Roundup 'adjuvants' or additives. These additives thus have a facilitating role, rendering Roundup twice as toxic as its isolated active ingredient, glyphosate.

Another study, released in April 2005 by the University of Pittsburgh, suggests that Roundup is a danger to other life-forms and non-target organisms. Biologist Rick Relyea found that Roundup is extremely lethal to amphibians. In what is considered one of the most extensive studies on the effects of pesticides on nontarget organisms in a natural setting, Relyea found that Roundup caused a 70 percent decline in amphibian biodiversity and an 86 percent decline in the total mass of tadpoles. Leopard frog tadpoles and gray tree frog tadpoles were nearly eliminated.

In 2002, a scientific team led by Robert Belle of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) biological station in Roscoff, France showed that Roundup activates one of the key stages of cellular division that can potentially lead to cancer. Belle and his team have been studying the impact of glyphosate formulations on sea urchin cells for several years. The team has recently demonstrated in Toxicological Science (December 2004) that a "control point" for DNA damage was affected by Roundup, while glyphosate alone had no effect. "We have shown that it's a definite risk factor, but we have not evaluated the number of cancers potentially induced, nor the time frame within which they would declare themselves," Belle acknowledges.

There is, indeed, direct evidence that glyphosate inhibits an important process called RNA transcription in animals, at a concentration well below the level that is recommended for commercial spray application.

There is also new research that shows that brief exposure to commercial glyphosate causes liver damage in rats, as indicated by the leakage of intracellular liver enzymes. The research indicates that glyphosate and its surfactant in Roundup were found to act in synergy to increase damage to the liver.

UPDATE BY CHEE YOKE HEONG
Roundup Ready weedkiller is one of the most widely used weedkillers in the world for crops and backyard gardens. Roundup, with its active ingredient glyphosate, has long been promoted as safe for humans and the environment while effective in killing weeds. It is therefore significant when recent studies show that Roundup is not as safe as its promoters claim.

This has major consequences as the bulk of commercially planted genetically modified crops are designed to tolerate glyphosate (and especially Roundup), and independent field data already shows a trend of increasing use of the herbicide. This goes against industry claims that herbicide use will drop and that these plants will thus be more "environment-friendly." Now it has been found that there are serious health effects, too. My story therefore aimed to highlight these new findings and their implications to health and the environment.

Not surprisingly, Monsanto came out refuting some of the findings of the studies mentioned in the article. What ensued was an open exchange between Dr. Rick Relyea and Monsanto, whereby the former stood his grounds. Otherwise, to my knowledge, no studies have since emerged on Roundup.

For more information look to the following sources:
Professor Gilles-Eric, criigen@ibfa.unicaen.fr
Biosafety Information Center, http://www.biosafety-info.net
Institute of Science in Society, http://www.i-sis.org.uk
12:58 PM 
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Tuesday, May 08, 2007 

Current mood:  aggravated

The world's biggest genetically engineered seed owner destroys time-honoured traditions of seed saving and drives American farmers to destitution and bankruptcy. Sam Burcher
Odds stacked against farmers

Feudalism has returned to farming in the US and Canada, according to the US Center for Food Safety's report detailing the domination over American staple crops by the corporations and their ruthless prosecution of farmers.

Once the ink is dried on the "technology agreements" signed by the farmers buying genetically modified (GM) seed, they enter into contracts that effectively relinquish to Monsanto their right to plant, harvest and sell the GM seed. From that moment on, they are also vulnerable to harassment such as having their property investigated, litigations and out of court settlements that are part and parcel of licensing a Monsanto patented product.

No grower is safe from this onslaught as third generation Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser discovered when he lost to Monsanto in court for failing to pay royalties on GM canola seed that had contaminated his non-GM canola crop. "The corporations are becoming the barons and lords, which are what my grandparents thought they had escaped." Schmeiser said.

To-date, Monsanto has filed 90 lawsuits against American farmers; and 147 farmers and 39 small businesses or farm companies have had to fight for their lives to avoid paying additional court costs, attorneys' fees, and in some cases, costs incurred by Monsanto while investigating them

The Center for Food Safety estimates that Monsanto has been awarded over $15 million for judgments granted in their favour. The largest recorded single payment received from one farmer was US$3 052 800 (Farmer Anderson, Case no. 4:01: CV-01 749).
Monsanto controls ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />US staple crops by licence

For the first time in history, one company has unprecedented control of the sale and use of crop seed. They have accomplished this in three main ways: control of germplasm through ownership of seed companies; domination of genetic technology and seeds through patent acquisitions; and breaking age-old farming tradition by forcing farmers to buy new seed each year rather than saving and re-planting seed.

Buying or merging with most of the major seed companies, including their recent acquisition of the giant fruit and vegetable seed company Seminis, has made Monsanto's the largest GM seed vendor in the world, providing 90% of the GM seed sown globally. It has also cornered most of the soybean market and 50% of the corn germplasm market in the US. And if Monsanto doesn't actually own the seed purchasing companies, it has been known to impose the condition that a minimum of 70% (reduced from 90% by government regulators) of its patented seeds are sold by subsidiary companies. This ensures that its seeds are the most readily available to farmers.

American farmers are hard pushed to find high quality, conventional varieties of corn, soy and cottonseed. Anecdotal evidence supports this. Troy Roush, an Indiana soybean farmer says, "You can't even purchase them in this market. They are not available." Similar reports come from the corn and cotton farmers who say, "There are not too many seeds available that are not genetically altered in some way."

Over the last 10 000 years, diverse genetic pools have been created and preserved by plant breeders. Monsanto has put these diverse gene pools at risk by contaminating certified and traditional seed stocks, and by not permitting farmers to save seeds. A feudal system of seed ownership destroys perhaps the key privilege of a farmer as the guardian of societies' crop heritage. And it has turned agriculture into an industry where the corporations consolidate their hold over costly seeds and chemicals that increase farmers spending on inputs. Meanwhile monopolies are created in corporate manipulated markets that include fewer buyers who demand the lowest possible prices for the outputs produced by farmers, forcing them into a debt spiral. In 2003 Monsanto made $3.1 billion in pesticide sales and $1.6 billion in seed sales.

Farmers are under pressure to confirm their identity as modern agriculturalists, particularly in developing countries. But replacing the traditional strategy of saving and replanting seeds from diverse varieties by a patented seed with all its restrictions threatens food security at household and global levels.
Patents place the burden on farmers

Over the past twenty years, Monsanto has voraciously accumulated collected patents on engineered plants, seeds and genetic engineering techniques, perhaps most importantly, the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) 35S promoter, the commonest component in the genetic engineer's toolbox. Along with CaMV35S, which other biotech companies pay exorbitant fees to license, Monsanto owns 647 plant biotech patents and a 29% share of all biotech research and development.

Patents have changed the face of farming because the farmer has lost control of seeds. Once farmers paid royalties on seed to the US Plant Variety Protection Act or Canada Plant Breeders Rights Act licensees who allowed seed saving. Since the 1980s, the US Patent and Trademark Office began issuing patents for GM organisms and seeds and have granted more than 2 000 since 1985. Professor Lawrence Busch of Michigan State University estimates the saving of soybean seed dropped from 31% in 1991 to just 10% in 2001 after the introduction of the GM soybean; this translates into an additional $374 million in seed industry profits in 2001.

Robert Schubert, the author of Farming's New Feudalism believes than an important strategy in saving independent farmers is to remove agriculture, food and water from the control of the WTO. His message is no "free" trade where farming is concerned and no patents.

When Monsanto suspects that saved seed containing a "Monsanto genetic trait," have been grown, documentation is requested from the farmers to confirm that the crop was planted from newly purchased seed. If proof is not forthcoming, then all of the growers' fields may be tested and inspected to determine if saved seed was used. Even after the farmer has extricated himself from Monsanto technology agreements, if volunteer plants sprout up in his fields from transgenic seeds purchased and sown from previous years, he is still vulnerable to allegations of patent infringement.
Farmers intimidated by Monsanto

Here's what typically happens to US farmers who fall under suspicion of planting saved seed. Private investigators from the Pinkerton agency hired by Monsanto arrive on the farm without warning, sometimes accompanied by local police. They then proceed to take samples and photographs over the course of a few hours to a few weeks, without the farmer being present.

One Mississippi farmer who runs a farm shop from his farmhouse was subjected to constant surveillance by Monsanto investigators who watched the family coming and going, warned off customers, and even rented an empty lot across the street from where to position their cameras.

Monsanto used entrapment to file a lawsuit against another farmer, when one of their investigators begged seeds from him to help solve an erosion problem too late in the season to plant crops. If personal intimidation fails, Monsanto resorts to another violation of privacy by sending a registered letter threatening to "tie the farmer up in court for years" if he refuses to settle out of court for patent infringement. One farmer who challenged this intimidation had his name blacklisted on thousands of seed dealers' lists. He concedes, "It is easier to give into them than it is to fight them."

A further example is seed dealers who sell seeds in plain brown bags so farmers sow them unknowingly. This happened to Farmer Thomason who was harassed into court by Monsanto and sued for over a million dollars. He had no choice but to file for bankruptcy despite never intending to plant Bt cotton.

In 1999, The Washington Post reported that the number of farmers under investigation in US and Canada was 525. A later report confirmed that Monsanto was investigating 500 farmers in 2004 "as they do every year." Once a farmer agrees to settle out of court he may be forced to present all documents relating to farm activity within 24 hours of request, purchase a specific quantity of company product and disclose the names of other people that have saved company seed.
Contamination of conventional seed stock

Researchers at the University of Manitoba, Canada tested 33 samples of certified canola (oilseed rape) seed stock and 32 were contaminated with GM. The Union of Concerned Scientists tested traditional US seed stocks of corn, soy and canola and found 50% corn, 50% soy and 83% canola contaminated by GM.

One hundred percent purity is no longer achievable, and even if non-contaminated seed could be purchased, some contamination can take place in the field either by transfer of seed by wind, animals or via farm equipment.

Monsanto dominates the sale of seed stocks yet puts the onus of finding markets for crops on the farmer. Within their contract is the "Technology Use Guide" which gives directions on how to find grain handlers willing to accept crops not approved for use in the EU. While Monsanto acknowledges that pollen flow and seed movement are sufficient to contaminate neighbouring non-GM fields their implicit rule is that "the growers of the non-GM crops must assume responsibility and receive the benefit for ensuring that their crops meet specifications for purity."
Monsanto profits from lawsuits against farmers

Outcomes of lawsuits brought by Monsanto against farmers are mostly kept under wraps. If farmers are tempted to breach confidentiality they can face fines greater than the settlements. But where judgments have been publicly recorded, sizeable payments benefit not only Monsanto, but also partner companies.

Combined financial penalties have forced many farmers into bankruptcy and off their land. Agriculture is suffering losses all around because of the disappearance of foreign markets. The US Farm Bureau estimates that farmers lose over $300 million a year because European markets refuse GM corn. The US State Department says that as much as $4 billion could be lost in agricultural exports due to EU labelling and traceability requirements. Organic and conventional farmers alike have lost their premium markets through having no choice but to sell their contaminated crops into GM crop streams.

Monsanto denies making profits from the misery of farmers and claims that proceeds go to agricultural school programmes, which some does, but by no means all. An annual budget of $10 million is set aside each year to run a department of 75 staff dedicated to prosecuting farmers.
What Monsanto did next

Monsanto has another way of controlling patented genes. So called "terminator technology" are seeds that become infertile after one life cycle. The international moratorium on terminator ended when New Zealand and Australia announced it would support the technology's introduction on a case-by-case basis at a 2005 meeting in Canada. The US Administration in Iraq has already enforced the non-replanting of seeds by farmers, under Order 81. Both GURTS (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies) and "technology agreements," used as weapons against farmers when they purchase GM seed, have not been legally challenged. It's high time that patent laws on living organisms that are encouraged by legislators, regulators and the courts alike, come under public scrutiny.

Amending the Patent Act so that sexually reproducing plants are not patentable and amending the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) to exclude such plants from protection under the PVPA are two policy options suggested by the Center for Food Safety to defend farmers from Monsanto. This would minimise the damage done to farmers and agriculture in the long term. Drastic policy changes are needed at state and federal levels to address the hounding of farmers, their families and small agricultural companies by the aggressive tactics of a big corporation determined to destroy traditional farming practices and rights that go back thousands of years.

Farmers facing lawsuits or threats from Monsanto can call this toll-free hotline for guidance and referrals: 1-888-FARMHLP

8:13 AM 
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Tuesday, May 08, 2007 

Current mood:  determined
Taro genetic work blasted

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer

Some Native Hawaiians are expressing concern that genetic engineering of taro could pose a cultural and economic threat to the Hawaiian people.

"Taro is a sacred plant to us. It's absolutely sacred," said Big Island educator Ku Kahakalau. She said taro — kalo, in the native language — is a body form of the Hawaiian god Kane.

Moloka'i activist Walter Ritte Jr. said tradition has taro as an ancestor of the Hawaiian people.

Until recently, most genetic work with taro has involved traditional breeding: crossing one variety with another to develop new varieties with qualities of the parent plants. Such work, for example, might try to combine the disease resistance of one variety with the flavor and large-sized corms of another.

Kahakalau and Ritte said that using genetic-engineering techniques to insert foreign genes into the taro plant is wrong. "You can't change our ancestors without our permission," Ritte said.

They also expressed concern that genetically engineered taro would be patented and that farmers might have to pay a license fee to grow it. "They're trying to own what shouldn't be owned," Ritte said.

University of Hawai'i plant pathologist John Cho, who conducts taro research, said he generally agrees that genetic engineering is neither necessary nor appropriate for taro grown for food. But he said there are instances in which new varieties have been patented, even when grown using traditional techniques.

Cho said he is participating in a trial with the Hawai'i Agricultural Research Center to insert disease-resistance genes from rice into a Chinese taro variety called bun long to develop a hardy ornamental taro.

"I've told people I don't think it's appropriate for food taro. You can improve disease resistance and do the other things we need to do with taro using traditional breeding methods," Cho said.

Stephanie Whalen, director of the Hawai'i Agricultural Research Center, said the research at this point is simply aimed at determining how to do the genetic modification on taro if in the future someone wants it.

"We've been working with the University of Hawai'i on trying to develop a system for working with taro, but we're not working on any traditional Hawaiian varieties. And if people don't want it, it won't go anywhere," Whalen said.

Kahakalau said she has no objection to traditional breeding. "We know that our Hawaiian ancestors hybridized kalo. There is no need to genetically engineer it," she said.

Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 245-3074.

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Farmers and consumers say no to GMO

By Melanie Bondera



Papaya farmer Albert Kung checks the leaves on a genetically engineered papaya tree at Kamiya Farm in La'ie. Hawai'i has, for better or worse, long served as the world's largest outdoor biotechnology lab.


AP LIBRARY PHOTO | Jan. 10, 2006




As a consumer, it can be frustrating. We just reached the point where the only whole foods in the produce section that we have to watch out for are the papayas. That's because they can be unlabeled GMO (genetically modified organisms) or GMO-contaminated papayas. The one farmer on O'ahu who grew GMO sweet corn stopped, and GMO potatoes and tomatoes were market failures.

Now, they are talking about a new round of GMO fruits and vegetables. This time, they will have had their genomes violated with supposedly healthy things, as opposed to pesticides.

I find it difficult enough to shop for and feed my family without being subjected to confusing and misleading information about the value and safety of GMO foods. The biotech industry has been "on the verge" of saving starving people in the world for 20 years now with Golden Rice, which is vitamin A-enriched. But this bio-fantasy has never truly been figured out in the lab, nor has it made it to field trials. But they sure have sold a lot of herbicide based on this story.

The technology behind the genetic engineering that was used to make Hawai'i's GMO papaya in 1989 in the lab is now archaic. Marker Assisted Selection is the latest technology, and has been dubbed "Super Organics" because conventional breeding can be sped up by reading genomes — not violating them — and this method uses traditional plant crosses to create new varieties that even organic farmers can use. And this method comes without all the protests, and potentially expensive liability.

Clearly, Hawai'i should support this option rather than genetically engineering our vitamins and medicine into our salad ingredients.

As a coffee farmer, I'm upset that the state Legislature and the Department of Agriculture chose not to protect me or my industry. Our GMO-free coffee bill made it through the House and died before the final hearing stages in the Senate. Our coffee industry (farmers, processors and retailers) has had a consensus on GMO-free coffee in Kona since 2002, and on GMO-free coffee in Hawai'i since 2004. Considering how divided our industry is on many issues, I'm shocked that the Legislature wouldn't easily pass this bill that has such broad industry support.

We cannot sell our high-end, specialty coffee around the world if there is market perception of GMO contamination. Now, International Coffee Technologies has testified that it will have GMO decaffeinated coffee plants ready for field trials on O'ahu in 12 to 18 months. This is a serious threat to the coffee industry in Hawai'i.

Taro farmers and Native Hawaiians also sought protection for their crops through a GMO-free taro bill, and they were shut out in the final hearing stages, even after their passionate protest on the steps of the state Capitol.

Consider the papaya industry. The GMO papaya was introduced in 1998 and despite the contention of backers, GMO did not save the industry. The papaya industry continues to have economic troubles, including the loss of the Japanese market segment. Many of Hawai'i's papayas have become GMO contaminated. Clearly, our farmers don't want this GMO technology. Why is our Legislature and the University of Hawai'i still supporting it?

Let's look at corn. The majority of the seed corn for the U.S. corn crop is developed in Hawai'i. At least half of it is GMO, with producers conducting their experimental field trials here. They claim to be a $144 million industry. But beyond land lease fees and migrant labor jobs, there are few benefits to Hawai'i —no products, no sales taxes. Mainland-based seed companies see the bulk of the profits, lucrative patent rights and executive jobs. We get stuck with the risk and liability.

Recent land purchases by Monsanto on Moloka'i and the North Shore of O'ahu have citizens concerned that they might be breathing genetically altered corn pollen, finding lost GMO corn genes in their gardens and seeing increases in chemical and pesticide run-offs.

And there's more to consider. After 10 years of lobbying and millions of our tax dollars spent, Japan still does not want our GMO papaya. I doubt that our Japanese tourists would like to see our new image as "GMO Field Test Capital of the World," either. We are all worried about peak oil prices and our barge-based food system. However, taking Hawai'i's prime agriculture lands to grow seed corn that is not for people to consume or for animal feed, but rather for ethanol biofuel, is not a "sustainable" option, either.

Luckily, all around us are the signs of what Hawai'i's consumers and farmers really want: more farmers' markets filled with local, fresh whole foods; increasing interest in organic eating and farming; and resurgence of taro growing and varietal protection.

It's time to say no to GMO — and yes to a GMO-free and food-secure Hawai'i.


Melanie Bondera is a mother and coffee farmer on the Big Island. She wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.
5:06 AM 
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