http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/s-510-is-hissing-in-the-grass/
America wants to end home grown food production. It will be only a matter of time before it spreads to Australia (a country currently run by morons). Is there no end to corporate fascism?
Move along. Nothing to see here. Nobody cares if Monsanto will now control the entire food supply chain, or if only a select few companies can make vitamins for you.
America or some American senators?
I haven’t read the bill, so I don’t can’t respond about its contents.
nwo
more on the topic of us loooooooooooooosing all rights!
although i don’t believe the jeeebus is coming back stuff…the other stuff is right on!
I strongly object.
How do you know your nation’s leaders are any more moronic than mine?
BT corn and “round up ready” soy beans are great products
As a greeny liberal, I like how these 2 products, that together produce the majority of protein (animal chows are mostly a mix of soy and corn) produced in the world.
BT corn produces a natural pesticide that reproduces a stomach problem in corn caterpillars that formerly cost an expensive pesticide. Now bacillus thuragis
is incorporated into the genome of the corn. This corn is commonly "pirated " and grown all around the world, allowing millions of farmers to grow corn without buying and using DDT. Cool huh ? Food for poor people is always cool.
Before 'Round up ready" soybeans, expensive tractors burning lots of fuel would churn soil with disks, between rows of soybeans, as an essential step to suppress weeds. This damaged the roots of the beans, destroyed most of the nests of wildlife in the field, killed many worms in the soil, and greatly increased soil erosion. All the weeds sprouting in the bean rows survive.
With Monsanto’s system, a herbicide called gluco phosphate, which is a sort of jello that gums up a plants capillaries and makes it wilt and die, is sprayed over a field of soybeans. Round up ready soy beans are genetically engineered to be immune. The spray is cheap and the process is easy and harms no birds nesting in the fields. This herbicide breaks down into harmless sugar and phosphate in the soil. The reason that almost all the soybeans grown in the USA are now “round up ready”, is because it is a better way to produce soy beans at a lower cost to the farmer and the environment than older methods.
I agree that Monsanto has gone to far in enforcing it’s patent seed rights, and is generally a prick about that. However, it is illogical to denigrate the quality of it’s products. BT corn and RR soybeans have done more to reduce the cost of food production, while reducing the need for bad chemical pesticides than any recent advance I can think of.
Monsanto can only claim patent rights to it’s own products. I have seen nothing to suggest they will ever get any rights or control over heirloom seeds
or any others that they did not create and patent themselves. They only have so many years to have a corner on the BT corn and RR seed market. It is very true that Monsanto has been a super dick about suing any farmer they find growing “their” seeds without a licence from them. But patents run out. I just wanted to make the point that it seems a lot of people take their Monsanto hate to the point of thinking BT corn and soy beans are part of some conspiracy. Most of the corn and soy beans today comes from huge Agra farm corporations, not mom and pop farms like the '30’s. They cheerfully buy millions of $ of Monsanto GM seed because it works for the bottom line, and Monsanto will sue them if they use last years seed instead of buying from Monsanto. Patent rights= $ for Monsanto.
While there may be no problem with Monsanto’s actual product, the problem lies with their overzealous control of seed use in general. Farmers are no longer allowed to buy seeds, grow crops, harvest the seeds from those crops,and then use them. Instead, they have to buy more seeds from Monsanto every year. They’ve sued independent farmers who operate machines that clean seeds for themselves and other small farmers, claiming that this encourages violating patent laws. Furthermore, Monsanto’s seeds tend to migrate via wind and erosion onto non-Monsanto-seed farms, and Monsanto sues those farmers too. It’s an attempt to control the entire market, not protect its patent rights.
Of course, there is also the debate about whether life should be patented.
Even if Monsanto’s seeds have had great benefits, the question remains, do those benefits outweigh the costs, both current and forthcoming? The homogenization of seed variety leaves the entire US food production system vulnerable to disease.
I had the great pleasure of meeting Eric Holt-Gimenez, director of Food First, yesterday. His book: Food Rebellion: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice is an absolute cracker and offers some interesting alternatives to breaking down the control of global food production by the collection of oligopolies that have taken over. The book also dispels many myths around food systems that pervade popular conscsiousness.
He puts forth many reasons for optimism that we can change the structures that create hunger in a world where we have the means to sustainably produce enough food for the growing world population.
I’m hoping to get an internship at Food First this summer and would advise anyone in the Oakland/San Francisco area to get in touch and see if you can help them at all, as to my mind they’re fighting the good fight!
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