Good news: India Defies Monsanto and says NO to GMO Crops

[Guest guest]

Thursday, February 11, 2010

 

India Defies Monsanto, Says No to GMO Crops

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve followed the story of the slow but increasing and badly

needed pushback against Monsanto’s predatory business practices, which

force farmers to buy Monsanto seed annually, rather than re-use it.

Worse, Monsanto seed has been genetically engineered so as to require

the use of Monsanto herbicides and fertilizers.

And with (until recently) the seeds patent protected, farmers

could be sued for having Monsanto genes in their crops. And with

Monsanto having established a near monopoly in seeds, it has set prices

so as to extract a higher percent of agricultural revenues than it

could otherwise command. Needless to say, what is good for Monsanto is

not at all good for farmers, as these excerpts from a Daily Kos post illustrates:

 

I am a small farmer, and I am deeply concerned about the broad

power Monsanto and other seed companies wield. Their patents on life,

unfair business practices, and aggressive genetic engineering of seed

for commercial farming are making farmers dependent on their very

expensive seed and killing the millennia-old practice of saving seed.

Since I was a child, the cotton business has been radically

changed by developments like Round-Up Ready cotton. Farmers are forced

by market pressures to adopt new practices, like using Monsanto seed,

that are locking them into annual tithes to a monopolistic seed

company. Monsanto, in particular, has forced hundreds of small seed

companies out of the business with litigation and threats of

litigation, and it’s no accident. Farmers are afraid to collect seeds

at all, for fear that Monsanto will accuse them of patent infringement….

In visiting my husband’s family in Bangladesh, my brother-in-law

complained about the lack of rice varieties available for consumption.

In the past, hundreds of tasty varieties were available. Now only a

very few with much less taste are on the market. These varieties, grown

in the very unhealthy chemically dependent and unsustainable manner

espoused by Monsanto to encourage the use of their many pesticides and

herbicides, depletes the land and contaminate the waterways. Fish

populations, on which the Bangladeshi population depends heavily for

protein, are disappearing. Only the farm-raised varieties are in vast

supply, those also being of less nutritional value and raised in

polluted waters.

Monsanto’s hold on the seed market is especially problematic in

that they also manufacture the chemicals with which the seeds are

grown. This is forcing many farmers to use GMO seeds and unsustainable

methods whether they want to or not. Neighboring farms (specifically,

organic or those choosing to use non-GMO seeds) are having their seeds

contaminated by the GMO varieties. Native varieties and hybrids, grown

for 10,000 years and adapted to optimize local growing conditions, are

bought up by Monsanto and removed from the market, denying options to

farmers and consumers. Those not bought up are in danger of

contamination by Terminator genes, which would lead to their

extinction. The same way we protect animal species from extinction, we

should protect plant species, especially the tens of thousands of food

varieties, from companies like Monsanto that are consciously

eliminating them. Would we allow genocide to occur in any other

circumstance?

GMO crops have not been tested properly for safety. In India,

farmers allowed their cattle to graze on GMO cotton plant stubble as

they had grazed their cattle for millennia; all those cattle died

within a few days. Many GMO varieties are neither better yielding nor

requiring less fertilizer or water. They are designed to increase the

use of Monsanto chemicals. These varieties are more expensive to grow,

and the farmers are not allowed to save seed for the next year or the

seeds have “Terminator” or “Traitor” genes to make new seeds sterile,

causing them added expense. Monsanto’s methods are depleting the soil

in areas already stressed.

 

I hope you will rein in these companies and start to restore a

sense of fair play to agribusiness. Family farmers have enough to deal

with without big chemical and seed companies holding them hostage.

The US courts have begun to

whittle away at some of Monsanto’s efforts to monopolize seed

production:

 

The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) announced today that the

United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected four key

Monsanto patents related to genetically modified crops that PUBPAT

challenged last year because the agricultural giant is using them to

harass, intimidate, sue – and in some cases literally bankrupt –

American farmers. In its Office Actions rejecting each of the patents,

the USPTO held that evidence submitted by PUBPAT, in addition to other

prior art located by the Patent Office’s Examiners, showed that

Monsanto was not entitled to any of the patents.

Monsanto has filed dozens of patent infringement lawsuits asserting the

four challenged patents against American farmers, many of whom are

unable to hire adequate representation to defend themselves in court.

The crime these farmers are accused of is nothing more than saving seed

from one year’s crop to replant the following year, something farmers

have done since the beginning of time.

One study of the matter found that, “Monsanto has used

heavy-handed investigations and ruthless prosecutions that have

fundamentally changed the way many American farmers farm. The result

has been nothing less than an assault on the foundations of farming

practices and traditions that have endured for centuries in this

country and millennia around the world, including one of the oldest,

the right to save and replant crop seed.”

 

Raw Story describes the

latest anti-Monsanto salvo, this by India :

 

India refused to grant permission Wednesday for the commercial

cultivation of its first genetically modified (GM) food crop, citing

problems of public trust and “inadequate” science.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said he was imposing a

moratorium on the introduction of an aubergine modified with a gene

toxic to pests that regularly devastate crops across India.

“It is my duty to adopt a cautious, precautionary,

principle-based approach and impose a moratorium on the release,” until

scientific tests can guarantee the safety of the product, said Ramesh…

“I cannot go against science but in this case science is

inadequate,” he added. “I have to be sensitive to public concerns.”

Indian regulators had approved the new aubergine back in October

and its introduction would have made it the first GM foodstuff to be

grown in India.

But the decision roused huge opposition and a broad spectrum of

voices, including farmers, environmentalists and politicians of all

stripes had urged the government to prevent its cultivation…

Ramesh said there was “no overriding food security argument” for

the introduction of GM aubergines.

He said he had considered the views of different interest groups

in making his decision but denied he had been pressured by members of

his cabinet or by companies producing genetically modified crops.

“My conscience is clear. This is my decision and my decision

alone,” he said.

India is one of the largest aubergine producers globally.

 

Reader John D, who pointed us to the piece, adds:

 

They are fighting Monsanto trying to patent the genes from their

indigenous plants.

The history of GMO crops in India is like elsewhere. The first

few years are great then they need more herbicide and more fertilizer

to get yields and that drives the farmer into bankruptcy. India has had

a rash of farmer suicides due to crop failures. They didn’t have this

with indigenous seeds. The costs were much less and they could muddle

through.

 

The concerns about safety are also legitimate. As Scientific American pointed out:

 

Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically

modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech

companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent

researchers.

…Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed

to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails.

They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another

company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the

genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side

effects.

Research on genetically modified seeds is still published, of

course. But only studies that the seed companies have approved ever see

the light of a peer-reviewed journal. In a number of cases, experiments

that had the implicit go-ahead from the seed company were later blocked

from publication because the results were not flattering. “It is

important to understand that it is not always simply a matter of

blanket denial of all research requests, which is bad enough,” wrote

Elson J. Shields, an entomologist at Cornell University, in a letter to

an official at the Environmental Protection Agency (the body tasked

with regulating the environmental consequences of genetically modified

crops), “but selective denials and permissions based on industry

perceptions of how ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’ a particular scientist may

be toward [seed-enhancement] technology.”

 

Some research recently raised questions on the adequacy of Monsanto’s research on the

health of GMOs (a mere 90 days) and some small scale animals

studies have found consumption of Monsanto GM products are associated

with organ damage. One reader noted:

 

I am fairly well-qualified to comment on this, as both a PhD in

genetics who has made hundreds of transgenic plant lines (albeit in

Arabidopsis) and a former Nature editor.

I don’t doubt for a second that Monsanto has failed to

adequately investigate the potential negative effects of BT toxin (MON

810 and MON 863) and bar (NK 603) overexpression and possible toxicity.

This is even more warranted by the fact that these genes are being

regulated by a strong viral promoter (CaMV35S) that is producing levels

of these proteins that far exceed what would normally occur in a

plant–even though these gene products don’t normally in plants. (Both

genes are bacterial in origin.)

 

That’s a long winded way of saying concerns about Monsanto, from

both a health and economic perspective, are far from alarmist.

 

More on this topic (What's this?)

 

Monsanto Co.

(NYSE: MON): Q2 Earnings Preview 2010 (Stock Wizard, 3/15/10)

 

Monsanto Company

Inc. (NYSE: MON): First Quarter Earnings Preview 2010 (Stock Wizard, 1/2/10)

 

Monsanto Infects

Our Food Supply with Mutated Seeds (Trends I'm Watching, 1/22/10)

 

Read more on Monsanto

Company, Investing

in India at Wikinvest

 

 

 

 

Topics: Science and the scientific method, Species loss, Technology and innovation, The destruction of the middle class