The giant chemical company Monsanto is at it again. Did you know that 80% of the soy beans grown in the United States belong them? Their seeds are genetically modified to resist Monsanto's Roundup weed killer. (Roundup kills more than weeds: sprayed onto a plant/bush/tree, it makes its way through the plant down into its roots and kills it. Nasty stuff, but very ubiquitous, it enters into the water eventually.) Farmers are able to liberally apply Roundup to their fields, and kill everything but the soy plants. These Roundup resistant plants/seeds have been Genetically MOdified, and are known as GMO seed.
Monsanto doesn't allow farmers to keep the GMO seed they grow, but forces them to purchase new crop seed each year. Never mind that farmers have kept seed from their previous crop for thousands of years.
Because soy is wind pollinated (the wind blows one plant's pollen to other plants), farmers with genetically pure soy plants cannot keep Monsanto's pollen from theirs. The pure seed may then produce a new hybrid seed with some of Monsanto's genetics imprinted in it. When the hapless farmer reuses the seed that he has grown, Monsanto accuses him in court of stealing their seeds. Invariably Monsanto wins, with their in-house lawyers; the poor farmer hasn't a chance, even if his seed is still pure. It all comes down to money.
Now Monsanto is engineering other Roundup resistant crops. Watch the following video and tell me what you think.
1 comment:
Can't say that I understand too much of what is going on here. But it seems to me that if the seeds can't be kept where they belong, that this ought to be a fairly straightforward case. It appears that the first leg of it was.
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