Monsanto Meltdown

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Monsanto Meltdown

 

Excerpted from the BioDemocracy News #42

of the Organic Consumers Association

2-11-3

 

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