monsanto meltdown

[Guest guest]

Monsanto Meltdown

 

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

 

Poisoning Pigs and Humans

 

In July 2002 a number of hog farms in Iowa reported that pigs were

suffering extraordinary rates of reproductive failure-outward signs of

pregnancy but no births.

www.organicconsumers.org/ge/pigfertility012703.cfm

What the farms had in common

[Guest guest]

Brilliant!

Jo

 

> Despite heavy advertising and PR greenwash, despite a cozy

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

> credibility have plunged.

 

 

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