Monsanto, You Are Striping Away Our Roots

Monsanto is in the process of cleansing rural America of non-corporate farming. But they are not alone. Corporate livestock production is doing their share to purge rural families of their livelihoods and funnel any remaining pennies into their multi-national coffers. Through the leverage of big money, rural people are losing control of their local public institutions as corporations gain influence over local economies and local governments.

I would really like to believe that these over-zealous and blindly self-serving corporate interests do not realize the effect their corporate creep is having on rural America, but I suspect I would be wrong.

The imposition of corporate control over these precious irreplaceable rural resources, including rural people and rural culture, has but one purpose, and that is to feed the wealth of corporate investors. Investors, by reducing rural America to an accounting balance sheet, has created several irrefutable side-effects: we are losing our diversity and our independence.

This phenomena is not unique to America. It is taking place around the world. Outside investment, badly needed in many parts of the world, is the enticement that allows corporations to buy their way into a community promising to stimulate the local economy and expand the tax base. Then slowly, like a cancer, guts it out, sucking the local economy dry by sending all the profits back to a corporate headquarters.

Corporations like to boil things down to its lowest common denominator making their product more easily manageable. For Monsanto’s part in ‘bringing the rural farmer into the fold’ is to use genetic engineering of food crops to create seeds that will guarantee better results while making the seed immune to their own herbicidal formula. In order to buy this seed, farmers are required to sign a contract that states no seed from this years crop can be collected and used for next years crop. This ‘intellectual property rights’ contract ensures Monsanto will sell the farmer more seed next year.

They are serious enough to take farmers to court. One farmer in Covington, Tennessee is believed to be the first farmer to have gone to jail for saving and replanting Monsanto's Roundup Ready soy seed in 1998. Ralph spent four months behind bars and must also pay the company 1.8 million dollars in penalties.

In total, U.S. courts have awarded Monsanto more than 15 million dollars, according to a new report by the Washington-based Centre for Food Safety (CFS) called "Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers".

According to the report, court awards are just a fraction of the money the company has extracted from farmers. Hundreds of farmers are believed to have been coerced into secret settlements over the past eight years to avoid going to court.

In 2004, nearly 85 percent of all soy and canola were GE varieties. Three-quarters of U.S. cotton and nearly half of corn is also GE. Monsanto controls roughly 90 percent of GE soy, cotton and canola seed markets and has a large piece of the corn seed market.

So why don't farmers just buy non-GE seed? North Dakota farmer Rodney Nelson says there is actually very little conventional seed left to buy anymore because seed dealers don't make nearly as much money from them.

Monsanto sued Nelson and his family in 1999 for patent infringement, charging they had saved Roundup Ready soybean seeds on their 8,000-acre farm. Two years of legal hell ensued, Nelson said. The matter ended with an out of court settlement that he is forbidden to talk about. "We won, but we feel forever tainted."

The report contains a number of similar individual stories that often end in bankruptcy for the farmer. Even if a farmer decides to stop using Monsanto seeds, the GE plants self-seed and some will spring up of their own accord the following year. These unwanted "volunteers" can keep popping up for five or more years after a farmer stops using the patented seeds. Under U.S. patent law, a farmer commits an offense even if they unknowingly plant Monsanto's seeds without purchasing them from the company. Other countries have similar laws.

In the well-known case of Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, pollen from a neighbor's GE canola fields and seeds that blew off trucks on their way to a processing plant ended up contaminating his fields with Monsanto's genetics. The trial court ruled that no matter how the GE plants got there, Schmeiser had infringed on Monsanto's legal rights when he harvested and sold his crop. After a six-year legal battle, Canada's Supreme Court ruled that while Schmeiser had technically infringed on Monsanto's patent, he did not have to pay any penalties. Schmeiser, who spoke at last year's World Social Forum in India, says it cost 400,000 dollars to defend himself.

Another North Dakota farmer, Tom Wiley, explains the situation this way: "Farmers are being sued for having GMOs on their property that they did not buy, do not want, will not use and cannot sell."

"It's a corporation out of control," says Andrew Kimbrell, the executive director of CFS. Unfortunately, he adds, there will be no help for farmers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration as key positions are occupied by former Monsanto employees and the company has a powerful lobby in Washington.

In a 2007 report, the Center for Food Safety, in Washington, D.C., documented 112 such lawsuits, in 27 states. Even more significant, in the Center's opinion, are the numbers of farmers who settle because they don't have the money or the time to fight Monsanto.

In the latest phase in Monsanto’s grand plan to control the use of seed, police officers in Illinois, on January 9, 2009, served notices to several farmers on behalf of Monsanto citing that they were illegally saving seeds that belonged to Monsanto. One of those cited is Steve Hixon. Mr. Hixon provides a seed cleaning service to surrounding farmers. His equipment takes plant material and separates the seed to save for the next years crop.

Monsanto got its start making saccharin. In 1948, the company started making a powerful herbicide; a by-product of the process was the creation of a chemical that would later be known as dioxin. On March 8, 1949, a massive explosion rocked a Monsanto herbicide plant. Court records indicate that 226 plant workers fell ill. In the 1960s, the factory manufactured Agent Orange, which later became the focus of lawsuits by Vietnam veterans contending that they had been harmed by exposure.

During the 1990s, Monsanto alone spent nearly $8 billion acquiring leading commercial seed suppliers in the United States and internationally; DuPont and others quickly followed suit, leading to today's widespread proliferation of genetically engineered food crops."


Monsanto's pledge is "We want to make the world a better place for future generations. As an agricultural company, Monsanto can do this best by providing value through the products and systems we offer to farmers. With the growth of modern agricultural practices and crops that generate ever-increasing yields, we are helping farmers around the world to create a better future for human beings, the environment, and local economies."

I doubt that many farmers would agree.

Do they know the effect they are having on our farming heritage? I think they know and I also think they don’t have any regrets.


Further reading:
Monsanto’s Seed Police Keep Harassing U.S. Farmers

Building a World Free of Monsanto

Genetically Modified crops reach 9% of global crop production