In the Beginning There Was Monsanto
Art by Anthony Freda
Barbara H. Peterson, Farm Wars
Waking Times
Yes, life as we know it is ending. It is being replaced by designer genes constructed in a lab and set loose on the environment with reckless abandon. We eat them, breathe them, drink them, absorb them through our skin, and pass the genetic changes on to our children. We are the experiment.
Some think that coexistence with Monsanto’s genetically engineered pseudo life forms is the answer, but in the end, one must realize that there is no coexistence with genetically engineered organisms. They contaminate, pollute, and change our environment in ways that we cannot even imagine. If only the ones who choose to coexist would at least admit to the fact that organic does not contaminate biotech, biotech contaminates organic, and get a clue instead of casting their lot with the purveyors of death who so blithely spread the carnage. Any supposed “coexistence” turns out to be a wholesale invasion by biotech, and that isn’t coexistence at all. It is a hostile takeover.
Look at the alfalfa issue. Forage genetics sold seeds in 2010 to a farmer whose field was contaminated by GMO alfalfa before GMO alfalfa was approved in 2011, and those seeds were most likely contaminated with GMOs from 2005.
Roundup Ready alfalfa was initially approved by USDA in 2005. But environmental groups and some seed companies sued USDA in 2006 and successfully forced the agency to rescind its approval after a federal court found USDA had not conducted a thorough environmental review as required before approving the product.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/17/usa-alfalfa-gmo-idUSL2N0HD1SQ20130917
The USDA and Forage Genetics said, basically, so what. Expect contamination.
USDA said the detection of Monsanto Co’s patented Roundup Ready herbicide-tolerant trait in the Washington farmer’s non-GMO alfalfa crop should be addressed by the marketplace and not the government.
The amount of GMO contamination that might be present in conventional alfalfa is not known. But a December 2011 report by Stephanie Greene, a geneticist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, ARS, said that after Roundup Ready alfalfa was first deregulated in 2005 industry testing of conventional seed lots found levels of contamination as high as 2 percent.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/17/usa-alfalfa-gmo-idUSL2N0HD1SQ20130917
The biotech industry and the USDA are fully aware of this issue, but somehow, coexistence promoters don’t seem to have a grip on this very real threat to any type of organic existence, or if they do, they have sold out completely to biotech interests. They just don’t want their money base to figure that out.
And so coexistence supporters assist the promoters of self directed eugenics in spreading the pollution and getting us to poison ourselves and our own children with genetically engineered (GMO) vaccines, GMO food, and Glyphosate-saturated water. And as long as we just keep our eyes on the shiny object (pretty packaging, advertising, PR rhetoric), we will keep on coexisting and stuffing our pie holes with GMO garbage until we croak. They set out the bait and we go for it like hungry rodents, scurrying back to our dens and feeding the bounty to our families and friends. It really couldn’t get any easier for them.
It is absolutely pathetic that those who see the big picture and actually care about this have to beg and ask pretty please for biotech polluting companies to let us know where they are planting their filth and to please, pretty please, put up a buffer to try and keep their pesticides from polluting our bodies. And to please label the stuff, but noooooo. We aren’t entitled to that. Just eat, breathe, drink your poison and shut up. A ban? Out of the question.
But do you think it stops at merely producing the poison and distributing it? No, that is not nearly enough for the likes of Monsanto and the biotech industry. Total control is the goal, and that is on its way to being accomplished through a few strategic acquisitions on the part of Monsanto.
- Monsanto buys Climate Corporation
Controversial agri-giant Monsanto is dipping its massive hands in a different type of technology. The company, known for its focus on herbicides and genetically modified seeds, recently spent nearly $1 billion to buy Climate Corporation, a climate data research company. The move allows Monsanto to have control over tools that allow farmers to predict local weather so that they can make better farm management decisions.
The last sentence should actually read like this:
The move allows Monsanto to have control over tools that allow the company to predict local weather so that it can enforce control of seeds and make it so that the only choices farmers have who are facing tough weather are their biotech stress resistant seeds.
- Monsanto infiltrates Food and Chemical Toxicology journal
Fast forward to September 2012, when the scientific journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) published a study that caused an international storm (Séralini, et al. 2012). The study, led by Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini of the University of Caen, France, suggested a Monsanto genetically modified (GM) maize, and the Roundup herbicide it is grown with, pose serious health risks. The two-year feeding study found that rats fed both suffered severe organ damage and increased rates of tumors and premature death. Both the herbicide (Roundup) and the GM maize are Monsanto products. Corinne Lepage, France’s former environment minister, called the study “a bomb”.
Subsequently, an orchestrated campaign was launched to discredit the study in the media and persuade the journal to retract it. Many of those who wrote letters toFCT (which is published by Elsevier) had conflicts of interest with the GM industry and its lobby groups, though these were not publicly disclosed.
The journal did not retract the study. But just a few months later, in early 2013 theFCT editorial board acquired a new “Associate Editor for biotechnology”, Richard E. Goodman. This was a new position, seemingly established especially for Goodman in the wake of the “Séralini affair”.
Richard E. Goodman is professor at the Food Allergy Research and Resource Program, University of Nebraska. But he is also a former Monsanto employee, who worked for the company between 1997 and 2004. While at Monsanto he assessed the allergenicity of the company’s GM crops and published papers on its behalf on allergenicity and safety issues relating to GM food (Goodman and Leach 2004).
Goodman had no documented connection to the journal until February 2013. His fast-tracked appointment, directly onto the upper editorial board raises urgent questions. Does Monsanto now effectively decide which papers on biotechnology are published in FCT? And is this part of an attempt by Monsanto and the life science industry to seize control of science?
- Monsanto buys Beeologics
Beeologics LLC is an international firm dedicated to restoring bee health and protecting the future of honey bee pollination. Beeologics’ mission is to become the guardian of bee health worldwide. Through continuous research, scientific innovation, and a focus on applicable solutions, Beeologics is developing a line of RNAi-based products to specifically address the long-term well being of honey bees, including the control of parasites and how they’re involved in Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).
http://www.beeologics.com/about-us/
RNA manipulation blocks gene expression. Monsanto is currently working on a new genetic engineering technique that uses RNA. Also, coincidentally? Terrence Ingram was working on the effects of Roundup on bees. His bees were confiscated and lost… conveniently.
The Illinois Ag Dept. illegally seized privately owned bees from renowned naturalist, Terrence Ingram, without providing him with a search warrant and before the court hearing on the matter, reports Prairie Advocate News.
Behind the obvious violations of his Constitutional rights is Monsanto. Ingram was researching Roundup’s effects on bees, which he’s raised for 58 years. “They ruined 15 years of my research,” he told Prairie Advocate, by stealing most of his stock.
Ingram can prove his bees did not have foulbrood, and planned to do so at a hearing set in April, but the state seized his bees at the end of March. They have not returned them and no one at the Ag Dept. seems to know where his bees are.
The bees could have been destroyed, or they could have been turned over to Monsanto to ascertain why some of his bees are resistant to Roundup. Without the bees as evidence, Ingram simply cannot defend against the phony charges of foulbrood.
Beeologics was doing important research on bees. Now that research belongs to Monsanto, the new “guardian of bee health worldwide,” and quite possibly, so do Mr. Ingram’s bees. In any event, there will be no more information coming from Beeologics to inform the public about what is really going on with a possible link between Glyphosate and bee die-offs.
Monsanto acquires conventional seed companies
Corporate behemoth and GMO titan Monsanto has been gobbling up the seed market faster than a caterpillar can munch a tomato plant! With one fell swoop in 2005, Monsanto grabbed approximately 40% of the US vegetable seed market with its acquisition of Seminis.
http://investmentwatchblog.com/monsanto-is-buying-up-non-gmo-seed-companies/
If you own the seed sources then you can control what seeds are available and what seeds are not. Guess which seeds are more readily available to farmers? Yup, biotech.
- Monsanto buys off universities
“When I approached professors to discuss research projects addressing organic agriculture in farmer’s markets, the first one told me that ‘no one cares about people selling food in parking lots on the other side of the train tracks,’” said a PhD student at a large land-grant university who did not wish to be identified. “My academic adviser told me my best bet was to write a grant for Monsanto or the Department of Homeland Security to fund my research on why farmer’s markets were stocked with ‘black market vegetables’ that ‘are a bioterrorism threat waiting to happen.’ It was communicated to me on more than one occasion throughout my education that I should just study something Monsanto would fund rather than ideas to which I was deeply committed. I ended up studying what I wanted, but received no financial support, and paid for my education out of pocket.”
http://www.alternet.org/story/155375/how_corporations_like_monsanto_have_hijacked_higher_education
- Monsanto in government
A report by Food & Water Watch documents the efforts of US ambassadors acting as sales reps for the biotech industry. They “twist the arms of countries” pushing sales of GMO seeds, it says, at US taxpayer expense.
Besides Monsanto, the biggest biotech companies are DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow Chemical.
The group obtained more than 900 State Department diplomatic cables spanning 100 countries through WikiLeaks, which reveal pro-biotechnology public relations campaigns and outright attempts to influence government policies and laws that ignore “commonsense biotechnology safeguards and rules – including opposing genetically engineered food labeling laws.”
The report says, “The U.S. State Department has launched a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology, often over the opposition of the public and governments, to the near exclusion of other more sustainable, more appropriate agricultural policy alternatives.”
“It really gets down to twisting the arms of countries and working to undermine local democratic movements that may be opposed to biotech crops, and pressuring foreign governments to also reduce the oversight of biotech crops,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, told Reuters.
The State Department also works with the US Trade Representative promoting these crops and forcing nations to accept unwanted imports of US companies’ GMO food and seed.
http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/25165
- TPP and TAFTA
Known jointly as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), these two stealth trade agreements, which are currently in the process of being sold by the sitting administration to foreign governments, would make it difficult, if not impossible, for genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) to be labeled anywhere in the world. This is due to the fact that these agreements are intended to harmonize the current U.S. model, which allows GMOs to be secretly added to food without labeling or public oversight, with the rest of the world.
http://www.naturalnews.com/042158_trade_agreements_Monsanto_GMO_labeling.html
Statewide Monsanto Protection Acts
Relating to preemption of the local regulation of agriculture; declaring an emergency.
Makes legislative finding and declaration that regulation of agricultural seed, flower seed, nursery seed and vegetable seed and products of agricultural seed, flower seed, nursery seed and vegetable seed be reserved to state.
Several counties in Oregon were about to get bills on the ballot that would ban the planting of GMOs in their respective counties. Can’t have that, so this bill effectively banned local communities from being able to do that. Jackson county already has something on the ballot, so that is allowed to go through and get voted on…. at least for the time being.
And for all of it’s efforts in manipulating and controlling the world’s food supply for profit, Monsanto was recently awarded The World Food prize, along with two other biotech interests:
By awarding this year’s prize to three biotechnology pioneers, the nonprofit foundation infuriated environmental groups and others opposed to large-scale farming. Two of the recipients hold prominent positions at biotech companies — Mary-Dell Chilton, founder and researcher at Syngenta Biotechnology, and Robert Fraley, chief technology officer at Monsanto. The third is Marc Van Montagu, founder and chairman of the Institute of Plant Biotechnology Outreach at Ghent University in Belgium.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/world-food-prize-takes-biotech-global-warming-20578179
This comes as no surprise considering who funds this organization. The following are some of the sponsors:
The Rockefeller Foundation, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DuPont Pioneer, Howard G. Buffett Foundation, Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland Company, Bankers Trust, Bayer CropScience, Soyfoods Council, Syngenta Corporation, Syngenta Foundation, The Mosaic Company, United Soybean Board, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Wallace Genetic Foundation, and Walmart, to name a few. Here is a link to the rest: http://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/about_the_prize/sponsors/
I guess that eugenics is quite popular in the “I’m too rich to care about the little people” set, but there is one thing that these people, and I use the word loosely, haven’t counted on. And that is – a core group of die-hard individuals that simply will not roll over for them. A determined, and very vocal minority who cry out to the true Creator each and every day for relief from this scourge on the planet, and then put feet to their cries and dig in. These are those who won’t stop shouting at the top of their lungs about the corruption in high places and the adulteration of our planet with corrupt genetic material that will never succeed in replacing what was put in place by the Creator of heaven and earth. These biotech “geniuses” simply aren’t that smart. Their efforts to remake the world and its inhabitants into a design of their own choosing will only reap destruction that they will not be able to escape.
When the Bible says “come out of her my people” I believe it means to rid ourselves of this decaying system of corporate filth. And that is the message I would like to convey. We need to rid ourselves personally of every bit of this filth in our lives and shun the system that puts it there. That is the only way out. It is personal. Very personal. And no one can do it for us. And when the time comes for restoration, we will be right there, working hand in hand to restore that which was stolen from us. But first, we must take a stand against the beast. Against the corrupt system of corporate filth that has invaded our planet, and work every day to get rid of it. It really is up to us. Unless, of course, you would rather keep your eyes on the shiny object and continue down the path of coexistence and destruction. Your choice.
©2013 Barbara H. Peterson
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