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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Monsanto’s bad seeds
Monday 27 March @ 12:44:56 |
 by Craig Minowa
Monsanto and its affiliates are probably the last place a consumer would want to source their seeds from right now. The corporate behemoth has made it clear that its intent is to control as much of the world’s seeds as possible. The corporation, already one of the leading patent owners of the world’s diverse seeds, recently acquired Seminis, the largest seed vendor on the planet. Monsanto is also the leading producer of genetically modified seeds. Its most popular genetically modified seeds on the market create a plant that is resistant to the company’s own Roundup (glyphosate) pesticide. This allows farmers/gardeners to spray their plants with a nearly endless stream of the pesticide, killing off everything living near the plants while building up high levels of pesticide residues on the food portion of the plant.
 Monsanto
is also the lead purveyor of the “Terminator” technology. A non-reproductive
trait is genetically engineered into a seed so that a plant is created with
sterile seeds, thereby forcing farmers to buy seed year after year, rather than
save seeds from each year’s crops. The major environmental concern with
this technology is that the trait could spread through the plant’s pollen
to nearby wild plants, thus passing a sort of suicide trait into the world’s
natural botanical ecosystems. Monsanto claims it has a right to implement such
technologies in order to ensure the company gets paid annually for its seed
fees, known as technology fees. Monsanto currently employs a system wherein
farmers are given rewards if they report a neighboring farmer who has collected
Monsanto seeds from the previous year’s crops for reuse. When purchasing
Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds, a farmer must sign a contract
that states that s/he will not save any seed. Monsanto successfully sues U.S.
farmers for millions of dollars each year for reusing the company’s seeds.
 An
ongoing case in Canada, between Percy Schmeiser and Monsanto, depicts the contentious
aspects of these legal disputes. Schmeiser is a canola farmer that never bought
Monsanto seeds. Schmeiser’s neighbor’s crop pollen drifted into
Schmeiser’s field, thereby creating plants with Monsanto’s genetically-modified
traits. Monsanto successfully sued Schmeiser for using Monsanto’s technology,
even though he never intentionally introduced it to his own fields.
Monsanto’s intent to control the world’s seed supply has resulted
in dozens of annual international legal disputes wherein the corporation has
successfully secured legal patents for seeds of plants grown indigenously everywhere
from South American to Africa to India. For example, in 2004, Monsanto was contentiously
awarded patents on a traditional native Indian wheat used for making chapati—the
flat bread staple of northern India, meaning the company now has legal right
to demand payment every time a farmer/gardener grows this traditional variety
of Nap Hal wheat.
When gardening, try to buy only organic seeds. To find out more about the campaign
against Monsanto, see OrganicConsumers.org.
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Craig Minowa is an environmental scientist with the Organic Consumers Association.
 
 
 
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