The subject of Monsanto is covered in the first 5 minutes of the video. Several other subjects can be viewed in the video which gives an out of the box view e.g debt, peak oil, Gross Domestic Happiness (GDA) etc.
Monsanto And The Scourge Of Genetically Modified Seeds
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Go to this link http://www.ireggae.com/playlist.htm#1219
and click LISTEN HERE to hear an interesting critique of the present economic system (you must have real player installed to hear it)
Senator Bernie Sanders “The Economy’s Winners and Losers” – Nov. 30, 2010 Floor Speech -
Ras Jahaziel I am so glad to see you had watched this very interesting topic, and offered to share it with others. Who I hope will listen to what’s said. Also bear in mind that Barbados is surely heading in the same direction. I will continue to say that the little man who’s doing all the work isn’t the one making the big bucks; I also think that Barbadians should pay very close attention to all the money being borrowed from China, or whatever agreements that China is making to help Barbados is going to cost in the long run; China isn’t a country to take lightly when money is invested. Barbados is the name of the Island. The people are the ones who makes the difference. So I feel that the time has arrived for change in policies being made all in the name of the people. Others are making it work for them, but not enough for the little man; PLEASE don’t keep getting deeper and deeper in debt and situations that will sooner or later make us loose the country we were born in and love; *ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE**; Laugh if you want to. Someone else will have the last laugh if you keep going after the money;
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Monsanto versus Farmers
The world’s biggest genetically engineered seed owner destroys time-honoured traditions of seed saving and drives American farmers to destitution and bankruptcy. Sam Burcher
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For the first time in history, one company has unprecedented control of the sale and use of crop seed. They have accomplished this in three main ways: control of germplasm through ownership of seed companies; domination of genetic technology and seeds through patent acquisitions; and breaking age-old farming tradition by forcing farmers to buy new seed each year rather than saving and re-planting seed.
Buying or merging with most of the major seed companies, including their recent acquisition of the giant fruit and vegetable seed company Seminis, has made Monsanto’s the largest GM seed vendor in the world, providing 90% of the GM seed sown globally. It has also cornered most of the soybean market and 50% of the corn germplasm market in the US. And if Monsanto doesn’t actually own the seed purchasing companies, it has been known to impose the condition that a minimum of 70% (reduced from 90% by government regulators) of its patented seeds are sold by subsidiary companies. This ensures that its seeds are the most readily available to farmers.
American farmers are hard pushed to find high quality, conventional varieties of corn, soy and cottonseed. Anecdotal evidence supports this. Troy Roush, an Indiana soybean farmer says, “You can’t even purchase them in this market. They are not available.” Similar reports come from the corn and cotton farmers who say, “There are not too many seeds available that are not genetically altered in some way.”
Over the last 10 000 years, diverse genetic pools have been created and preserved by plant breeders. Monsanto has put these diverse gene pools at risk by contaminating certified and traditional seed stocks, and by not permitting farmers to save seeds. A feudal system of seed ownership destroys perhaps the key privilege of a farmer as the guardian of societies’ crop heritage. And it has turned agriculture into an industry where the corporations consolidate their hold over costly seeds and chemicals that increase farmers spending on inputs. Meanwhile monopolies are created in corporate manipulated markets that include fewer buyers who demand the lowest possible prices for the outputs produced by farmers, forcing them into a debt spiral. In 2003 Monsanto made $3.1 billion in pesticide sales and $1.6 billion in seed sales.
Farmers are under pressure to confirm their identity as modern agriculturalists, particularly in developing countries. But replacing the traditional strategy of saving and replanting seeds from diverse varieties by a patented seed with all its restrictions threatens food security at household and global levels.
Full article at:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/MonsantovsFarmers.php -
A short history of that avaricious, conscienceless corporate behemoth striving relentlessly for monopoly control of the world’s seed supply known to us as Monsanto.
Monsanto: a history
snip
Following the Second World War, Monsanto championed the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture. Its major agrochemical products have included the herbicides 2,4,5-T, DDT, Lasso and Agent Orange, which was widely used as a defoliant by the U.S. Government during the Vietnam War and which was later shown to be highly carcinogenic. The Agent Orange produced by Monsanto had dioxin levels many times higher than that produced by Dow Chemicals, the other major supplier of Agent Orange to Vietnam. This made Monsanto the key defendant in the lawsuit brought by Vietnam War veterans in the United States, who faced an array of debilitating symptoms attributable to Agent Orange exposure. Internal Monsanto memos show that Monsanto knew of the problems of dioxin contamination of Agent Orange when it sold it to the U.S. government for use in Vietnam.
Agent Orange contaminated more than 3 million civilians and servicemen, and an estimated 500,000 Vietnamese children have been born with deformities attributed to Agent Orange, leading to calls for Monsanto to be prosecuted for war crimes. No compensation has been paid to Vietnamese civilians and though some compensation was paid to U.S. veterans, according to William Sanjour, who led the Toxic Waste Division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “thousands of veterans were disallowed benefits” because “Monsanto studies showed that dioxin [as found in Agent Orange] was not a human carcinogen.” An EPA colleague discovered that Monsanto had apparently falsified the data in their studies. Sanjour says, “If [the studies] were done correctly, they would have reached just the opposite result.”
The success of the herbicide Lasso had turned around Monsanto’s struggling Agriculture Division, and by the time Agent Orange was banned in the U.S. and Lasso was facing increasing criticism, Monsanto had developed the weedkiller “Roundup” (active ingredient: glyphosate) as a replacement. Launched in 1976, Roundup helped make Monsanto the world’s largest producer of herbicides.
The success of Roundup coincided with the recognition by Monsanto executives that they needed to radically transform a company increasingly under threat. According to a recent paper by Dominic Glover, “Monsanto had acquired a particularly unenviable reputation in this regard, as a major producer of both dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) – both persistent environmental pollutants posing serious risks to the environment and human health. Law suits and environmental clean-up costs began to cut into Monsanto’s bottom line, but more seriously there was a real fear that a serious lapse could potentially bankrupt the company.”
Such a fear was not misplaced. By the 1980s Monsanto was being hit by a series of lawsuits. It was one of the companies named in 1987 in an $180 million settlement for Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange. In 1991 Monsanto was fined $1.2 million for trying to conceal the discharge of contaminated waste water. In 1995 Monsanto was ordered to pay $41.1 million to a waste management company in Texas due to concerns over hazardous waste dumping. That same year Monsanto was ranked fifth among U.S. corporations in EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, having discharged 37 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air, land, water and underground. In 1997 The Seattle Times reported that Monsanto sold 6,000 tons of contaminated waste to Idaho fertilizer companies, which contained the carcinogenic heavy metal cadmium.
Then in 2002 the Washington Post ran an article entitled, “Monsanto Hid Decades Of Pollution, PCBs Drenched Ala. Town, But No One Was Ever Told”. Monsanto began production of polychlorinated biphenyls in the United States in 1929. PCBs were considered an industrial wonder chemical – an oil that would not burn, was impervious to degradation and had almost limitless applications. Today PCBs are considered one of the gravest chemical threats on the planet.
Monsanto produced PCBs for over 50 years and they are now virtually omnipresent in the blood and tissues of humans and wildlife around the globe. These days PCBs are banned from production and some experts say there should be no acceptable level of PCBs allowed in the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says, “PCB has been demonstrated to cause cancer, as well as a variety of other adverse health effects on the immune system, reproductive system, nervous system and endocrine system.” But the evidence of widespread contamination from PCBs and related chemicals has been accumulating from 1965 onwards and internal company papers show that Monsanto knew about the PCB dangers from early on. For instance, toxicity tests on the effects of two PCBs in 1953 showed that more than 50% of the rats subjected to them died, and all of them showed damage.
http://www.gmwatch.eu/gm-firms-mobile/10595-monsanto-a-history
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In a related matter, the USA media has started to have a serious conversation about the affect of ‘junk food’ on the health of Americans.
When will we have a similar serious conversation?
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@Green Monkey
What can we do? How much of a fight can the small business person put up against big corporations.WE either eat the food and die or starve ourselves to death. Also as of now the government has allowed genetically produce foods in the markets.No suggested labeling have been put in place to make consumers aware of the difference
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@Green Monkey
What can we do? How much of a fight can the small business person put up against big corporations. We either eat the food and die or starve ourselves to death. Also as of now the governments have allowed genetically produce foods in the market. No suggested labelling have been put in place to make consumers aware of the difference -
Most of Europe has ban GM seeds and crops, they will not accept them.
In barbados most people plant one variety of a crop I assume it is because there are no alternatives on the market. Most are forced to plant what the hardware store selling these crops are no good because they are sterile you can’t replant them you have to buy new seed. Yes we are all eating sterile food, I hope it does not make us sterile.
Farmers use to save seed from the best plants for the next seasons crop. After successive generations of choosing the best the crops were well adapted to the surroundings. Now our plants are weak to environmental conditions.
I only plant Heirloom varieties that I got from bakercreak.com you can get yours from me if you don’t want the hassle of online shopping.
Let me warn you, there is a problem for individuals with acquiring good seed, any seed be it 1 or 1million needs to be accompanied by a photo-sanitary certificate at a cost of $100 so if you want $2 in seed you realy pay $102 that shuts out the little man.
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@ready done
Can you confirm if Barbados is importing GM seeds?
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Readydone is on the right track…Heirloom seeds are the way to go. I keep some in my pantry and give some to my neighbor and he sings their praises.
@ac. No, we do not acquiesce to the beast. There is still hope.
And for those who can afford it, try to acquire some Juice Plus. I don’t think Monstersanto has gotten its hands on those seeds as yet.
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@HOPI
Is that so! Time and history says different. Look around at all he fast food restaurants and in part there sucess is due to fast product availabilty . The same reasoning behind Monsanto purchasing the genetically seeds . People want Quick and fast . -
@ac……… Fast food success is due to ‘our’ laziness, & our need to identify with the dominant culture of death. We take 1 step forward and 5 steps backwards. Its not enough to throw up our hands we need personal responsibility & accountability. Stop surrendering to local gov’t and by xtension world gov’t which have absolutely no interest in the welfare of the people.
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(NaturalNews) Corn plants genetically modified (GM) to produce pesticides in their tissues are contaminating water supplies across the US Midwest, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
The study was conducted on corn engineered to carry a gene from the Bacillus thuriengensis (Bt) bacteria that produces an insecticidal protein, Cry1Ab. The researchers tested 217 Indiana streams for traces of Cry1Ab, and pesticide the chemical in 13 percent of them. Every contaminated stream was within 500 meters (1,600 feet) of a corn field.
In the Midwestern “Corn Belt” states of Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, 90 percent of streams and rivers are within 500 meters of a corn field. This amounts to 159,000 miles worth of waterways at risk from Bt corn contamination.
Eighty-six percent of the streams tested in the study contained corn cobs, husks, leaves or stalks.
“Our research adds to the growing body of evidence that corn crop byproducts can be dispersed throughout a stream network, and that the compounds associated with genetically modified crops, such as insecticidal proteins, can enter nearby water bodies,” said researcher Emma Rosi-Marshall.
Although this study is among the first to show that the tissues of GM crops can harm the environment after the plant has died, other dangers of GM agriculture have already been well established.
“Genes from genetically modified plants have already been shown to be capable of escaping into the environment and contaminating natural crops,” write Michael Murray and Joseph Pizzorno in their book The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods.
“Manipulating genetic material changes the expression of proteins and antigens in foods, a situation that could lead to allergic reactions. … Another concern is that some GM foods, such as GM corn, are being manipulated to resist synthetic pesticides. As a result, more of the pesticide is being used and humans’ exposure to toxic pesticides is actually increasing while insects develop resistance to the pesticides’ toxic effects.”
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Prediction #7 in my top 11 for 2011 is global fear of food scarcity…
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NIA Projects Future U.S. Food Price Increases…
NIA projects that at the average U.S. grocery store it will soon cost $11.43 for one ear of corn, $23.05 for a 24 oz loaf of wheat bread, $62.21 for a 32 oz package of Domino Granulated Sugar, $24.31 for a 32 fl oz container of soy milk, $77.71 for a 11.30 oz container of Folgers Classic Roast Coffee, $45.71 for a 64 fl oz container of Minute Maid Orange Juice, and $15.50 for a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate 1.55 oz candy bar. NIA also projects that by the end of this decade, a plain white men’s cotton t-shirt at Wal-Mart will cost $55.57…
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Monsanto Hired Mercenary Blackwater To Infiltrate ANTI*-GMO Groups….
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/297701#ixzz1AenUFyi5
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@Hopi
Call it whatever. So far it is working for the big Corporation. Needless to say that we as a people have already surrender to them .That is why they are so far ahead of the people and we are like the dog trying to catch its tail going around in circles. Not to mention the Pharmeceutical industry who would also get a cut of pie from all the illness brought about by these genetically modified food.Checkmate!
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