Monsanto Meltdown

[Guest guest]

I thought this was interesting...

Misty

http://www..com

 

Monsanto Meltdown

Excerpted from the BioDemocracy News #42

of the Organic Consumers Association

 

Despite heavy advertising and PR greenwash, despite a cozy

relationship with the White House, Monsanto's image, profits, and

credibility have plunged. Its aggressive bullying on Frankenfoods,

its patents on the Terminator gene, its attempt to buy out seed

companies and monopolize seed stocks, and its persecution of

hundreds of North American farmers for the " crime " of seed-saving,

has made Monsanto one of the most hated corporations on Earth.

 

 

Monsanto will likely soon be broken up, with its parts sold off to

the highest bidder. The New York Times reported 1/14/03, that " With

its stock price low, Monsanto is considered a takeover target. by

investment banks. and could be bought and sold off in pieces. " On

December 19, Monsanto shocked the biotech industry by forcing the

resignation of its CEO, Hendrik Verfaillie, a 26-year veteran with

the company. The sudden move came as Monsanto reported losses of

$1.75 billion for the first three quarters of 2002, despite

cutbacks, including layoffs for 700 employees. Monsanto's stock has

fallen nearly 50% since January 2001.

 

 

But Monsanto is not the only Gene Giant downsizing. Last year,

biotech giant Syngenta closed down its plant genome lab in San

Diego, terminated its controversial research partnership with the

University of California in Berkeley, pulled out of its planned

collaboration with the Indira Gandhi rice research institute in

India, and canceled its contract with the John Innes Center in the

UK.

 

Major transnational corporations in the food and life sciences

sector are unlikely to shed any tears over Monsanto's demise. It's

no secret on Wall Street that Monsanto, in its present form, has

become a major liability for transnational food corporations and the

biotech/pharmaceutical giants, who are much more concerned with the

potential for hundreds of billions of dollars in sales from biotech

drugs, nutraceutical foods, and nanotechnology, than the declining

fortunes of agbiotech crops, whose total sales in 2002 were $4.25

billion.

 

 

One of the major reasons for Monsanto's decline, besides the growing

worldwide opposition to its GE crops, is the growing resistance of

weeds to Monsanto's flagship product, Roundup herbicide. Roundup, up

until now the top-selling weed killer in the world, making up 50% of

Monsanto's sales and 70% of their profits, has recently begun to

lose its effectiveness against major crop weeds such as mare's-tail,

waterhemp, and ryegrass. GE Roundup-resistant soybeans presently

account for more than 75% of all the soybeans planted in the United

States and Argentina, as well as the majority of rapeseed or canola

in Canada. According to a recent report by Syngenta, herbicide-

resistant superweeds will soon reduce the economic value of farmland

on which Roundup Ready soybeans are grown by 17%. Forty-six percent

of farmers surveyed in Syngenta's study said that weed resistance to

glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's herbicide Roundup,

is now their top concern.

www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/roundup011403.cfm

 

 

 

According to industry experts, Monsanto has no alternative in the

pipeline once glyphosate starts to fail. Syngenta, which also sells

herbicides containing glyphosate, has criticized Monsanto for

encouraging its customers to overuse the relatively cheap herbicide,

as well as for not warning farmers to avoid mono-cropping, growing

the same Roundup Ready crops, year after year, on the same plots of

land.

 

 

Leading scientific critics such as Dr. Michael Hansen and Dr.

Charles Benbrook have warned for years that weeds would inevitably

develop resistance to GMOs. The reason for this is that GE herbicide-

resistant plant varieties are designed to be able to survive heavy

doses of the companies' broad-spectrum weed killers, which in turn

cause resistant strains of these weeds to survive and eventually

predominate. Similar warnings have been leveled at the use of Bt-

spliced crops, which are engineered to express high doses of a soil

bacteria called Bt. Now that Bt crops such as cotton and corn have

been commercialized on millions of acres, major insect pests such as

bollworms, bud worms, beetles, and corn borers are also expected to

become resistant to Bt over the next 5-10 years.

 

 

The shaky bottom line for agbiotech is that almost 100% of all

Frankencrops today, the so-called " first generation " GE crops, are

either herbicide-resistant or Bt-spliced. Once these genetically

engineered traits lose their effectiveness, which is now happening,

the first generation of biotech crops will be dead, period. Here's a

toast to the speedy breakup and demise of Monsanto and the other

Gene Giants. RIP. In future issues of BioDemocracy News we'll look

at the so-called second, third, and fourth generation of

Frankenfoods and crops, including the absolutely frightening advent

of nanotechnology, or " atomtechnology. "

 

See www.etcgroup.org

[Guest guest]

The Monsanto article I forwarded yesterday came from another group I'm on and

this reply to that group was in my email today. This is unbelievable!

Rena

 

This isn't really related to your article, but it is related to

Monsanto.

 

A few years ago I worked for a company that specialized in making

processing equipment for Companies like Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, Union

Carbide(when they were called that). We only made equipment in

exotic metals that could handle extreme conditions, mostly worked

with titanium, hastelloy, tantalum and zirconium. Interesting,

zirconium is a controlled metal because it's primary use is nuclear.

Anyway, we made some equipment for Monsanto to process their new

product Nutri-Sweet. The equipment was made from zirconium and was

supposed to last for at least 30 yrs. It only lasted 3 months. The

stuff ate holes right through the metal.

 

I can't imagine what it would do to a human when ingested. Guess we

will find out in the near future. Can't say I'm sorry to see them

falling apart.