Ok, what's so evil about Monsanto?

[Kraven251]

I always have been a fairly strong supporter of GMO crops, but have also been pretty negative on Monsanto. They do ramrod farmers pretty hard on the cross pollination issue. They also pose a serious risk to the seed banks and the reason behind having them due to their seeds being largely infertile from year 1 crops.

I have recently started looking at GMO crops like many modern medicines. The individual components are mostly harmless, until you put them all together in high concentrations, or you introduce an allergen into a food as part of a gene splice that was never there before. For instance you have an allergy to shellfish and company X has spliced in a sequence that makes the plant more hearty and in the sample set for consumption no ill effects. The Susy Shellfish-Allergy eats some corn has a reaction and drops dead.

I see nothing inherently wrong with the concept of the GMO, just the implementation.

[RblDiver]

IMHO, if someone wants to buy a cucumber seed, grow the plant, harvest the produce, and process the seeds in order to continue to grow more produce in years to come, they should be able to do that.... Monsanto says no. They MUST buy THEIR seeds, every single year until the end of time.

I don't actually see a problem with this.

My company is in the marketing business. We analyze people's purchase habits and sell names to companies of people most likely to buy their products. We have stipulations that such names are one-time-use only. Our product aren't the names, but rather the process which we use to find the names. If we said "Sure, go ahead and use these people forever," we'd be run out of business pretty darn quickly.

To a certain extent, yes while Monsanto is selling seeds (a more physical product than names I'll admit), another large part of what they are selling IS the process which they used to create the seeds in the first place. If they only sold once and then no more, pretty soon all farmers'd have their seeds and wouldn't need them anymore. It's not like selling a car, which once it's dead it's dead. It'd be like selling a car that could produce even more cars in perpetuity. A company which would sell the first and only the first would either have to have rights to all the future cars, or sell the first car at an amazingly high price to compensate for the future ones.

So (to throw out numbers pulled from the air), say that now a bushel of seeds costs $10. Let's assume that their product cycle is 20 years (time until they think they can make a new type of seed you'll use). They would probably have to change the price to more than $200 (20*10, plus whatever interest that they would think would account for inflation and the like. I don't feel like calculating this too). So sure, then you can own the seeds, but they receive a fair price for what their product is worth.

[Ronin13]

I am somewhat suspicious of the increase in various allergies in the general population but the evidence on that is sketchy and could just as easily be a reaction to our modern hyper-sterilized society. I'm not weighing in for or against anything or anyone because of videos on the Internet. There are also videos saying fracking is evil, we blew up the Twin Towers ourselves and other tin-foil hat fantasies.

At the end of the day, as much as I dislike some of their legal theories, the only thing I need to know is that the same people pushing anthropogenic global warming, Bush is Evil but Obama is Good, fracking causes cancer/makes water catch fire, and gun control is a rationale reasonable way to protect the children are the same idiots protesting Monsanto and GMOs. Some capitalists have certainly done bad things but I have to worry that the people who favor state control of the economy/health services/education/etc. are the same ones who've chosen to direct their fire against a particular conglomerate.

This is the exact reason I'm skeptical.
SA- I understand your background in science and all that, but from the little looking around I've done on this, I just can't find much. It seems a lot of the shouting and hollering is baseless and emotional demagoguery. Like Aloha says, these are the same people telling us that CO2 emissions are killing the planet (even though they ignore the fact that CO2 isn't a very good greenhouse gas and only contributes to 7% at best of the so-called "global warming"), and that Fracking is evil (when it clearly is not). Forgive my skepticism, but Jhood makes a very valid point that when the same people who have been wrong about almost every position they take (global warming, oil/gas development, gun control, drug use) you really have a hard time believing anything they put up in an argument. Afterall, capitalism is terrible, right? I'll continue to eat the food that I eat, as I feel healthy as ever, and if I croak prematurely due to GMO foods, well I assume I'll probably be the last to know, and by then I'll be ashes spread on the Continental Divide, so I won't really care.

[Aloha_Shooter]

a documentary or short film like "Food inc"

Just a quick aside -- "Food, Inc" is a documentary in the same way "Bowling for Columbine" or "Farenheit 9/11" are considered documentaries by the Left. "Food, Inc" is a case study in Stalinist-style agit prop and I continually find it amazing that the Left gets away with this obvious crap. The emotional plays, made-up "facts", skewed presentation ... I've seen fast food, soda, and cereal commercials that were more subtle.

[PSS]

A quick Lexis-Nexis search proves you very very wrong.

What they do is file a TRO on you, then get an injunction forcing you not to sell your crops until they can be tested (and only THEY are allowed to test - lest thier secrets get out) - so your crops rot. The injunction also says you can't replant until the testing is done - so your screwed for the next year as well. Effectivly bankrupting anyone who wants to challenge them.

They do lots heavy handed tactics and they have a whole metric fuck ton of case law that let's 'em do it.

I would like to see a link where a farmer had cross contaminated seed and replanted it without any knowledge of it being that way and Monsanto sued them. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I see a lot of they and them and so on but there aren't names being put out there. It could change my mind. All I know I grew up in a convention farming community and there was zero animosity and zero problems with Monsanto. Except for the price of seed going up everyone loved Monsanto products. And not many balked at paying the price. There were farmers who replanted patented seeds but not many that got caught. Everyone wanted the technology but there were a few who didn't want to pay for it.

I'm just saying that from a farmers standpoint in Kansas (southeast and western Kansas), you simply don't see the supposed heavy handed tactics of Monsanto. The ones that got caught was stupid enough to even tell people that they were replanting patented seed. Happened more when the seeds first came on the market. When they found out that Monsanto wasn't fooling around it became a lot more rare. Or maybe they just smartened up. I have zero sympathy for the ones who bought Monsanto seed and after signing a document agreeing not to plant seed harvested from those crops doing exactly that. Even those that managed to get the seed without signing such an agreement almost certainly knew. You don't go buy seed without a lot of research. Especially not seed that is much more expensive. Of course I would be against suing farmers where his crops were contaminated by cross pollination. I tend to agree with the courts that they knowingly replanted seed that had those genes. Why didn't they contact Monsanto to complain when they where suspicious that it had happened. In Schmiessers case he replanted the seed from the surviving plants. Again to me it looked like he hoped to gain something by that.

If Monsanto is running around suing farmers for simple cross pollination why is there news stories like this one.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/201...ue-so-you-cant
Farmers suing Monsanto in case they start suing for simple cross pollination.

According to most people writing news articles for or against Monsanto, the company has filed around 150 lawsuits and reached settlement with all but 9 of those. They also reached about 700 settlements without filing lawsuits. That's since 1997. Considering that 275,000 farmers plant Monsanto that doesn't seem to be a lot when you hear the left claiming there are thousands. I just don't see the facts supporting such an evil empire.

[spittoon]

when there stock's crashed they took well i lost a cash pot

[PSS]

I find myself conflicted a bit with this all. So much of the organic farmers appear a bit loony to me with all their conspiracies. It's hard for me to take them serious. Maybe I'm wrong. I grow my own vegetables and am hoping to grow some of my own meat soon. Rabbits, chickens, and hogs. I grew up on a conventional farm with a confinement swine operation. Peta and other animal rights kept screaming how we were sadistic factory farms, beating and mutilating animals for fun. The lady that ran the farrowing operation would physically assault you if she thought you was abusing one of her sows. We hired kids from high school to help and I saw more than one get a verbal thrashing for being a little too rough on the animals. The hogs were healthy, seemed content, and we resented the fact that some person with their nose up in the air would accuse us of being the bad guy.

It's fine if the majority wants to eat local and organically. I support the local part. Don't give a shit either way about the organic. I can take it or leave it. But since the prices seem mostly insane I usually leave it. I very much like the idea of the local growers. It seems more right to me to support a small farmer that is in my community that a ag giant. But the truth is the vast majority want cheap food. As long as there isn't good evidence that large farms are destroying our health I'm fine with it too. To the idea that big ag is evilly suppressing proof that the food they are producing is actually killing us, I say the people with the proof isn't trying hard enough. There are a lot of people with huge amounts of money, governments that would love to prove gmo's unsafe so they could compete with US farmers, and the entire extreme left and some on the right that would support them. I just can't believe the proof exists. Maybe they are keeping the proof in the fema camps. (That was a little facetious, sorry)

[bryjcom]

Monsanto is the wonderful company that brought you Agent Orange.

Now they just sell you mutant corn with pesticides engineered in them for you to ingest into your body.

Yummmmmm.

[Waywardson174]

I grew up on a corn farm in SW Kansas. When Monsanto released roundup ready corn it revolutionized the industry. When my father started raising corn 43 years ago, he struggled to grow 100 bushels an acre. Now he is having a bad year when he can't crank out 200. His water input has fallen by 75% over the same time period. Corn was sold for less than 3 dollars for decades because the production capacity increased so much while Monsanto pushed the production envelop. Yes it's expensive as hell. The input costs are astronomical. The seed (for corn) is single generational. It requires no less than six previous generations to produce the retail kernel. Disclaimer, my father grows test plots for Pioneer. What he sees in test varieties is the potential to double production without an increase in water input over the next decade. Without GMO, production capacity would be unthinkably low. I'm not saying its not causing cancer, but I'll continue to gorge on corn fed beef because its tasty and cheap. GMO corn killing people would be an extinction level even in the USA b/c corn syrup is used in EVERYTHING processed.

Monsanto as a corporation has one goal, make money. I don't believe they are evil, but when they invest the GDP of a small nation into development of a new super crop, I expect them to get mad when a licensing agreement is violated b/c a farmer wants to increase his margin by .5%. The profits of today pay for the miracles of tomorrow (scientific I mean). I left Kansas to avoid being a fourth generation farmer. But my dad is still there and my brother is in the corporate side of the industry now (implements, not genetics). I've never met or even heard of a single farmer complain about Monsanto other than seed prices going up again (especially in a time of record crop prices). No one got sued that I'm aware of. Anecdotal I know, but I grew up in a place where cattle outnumber people 5 to 1 and the majority of their feed is grown less than 20 miles from the pen.

btw, celiac and other auto immune disease are instantly cured by infecting yourself with hook worm. Brazil has almost no auto immune disease and they run Monsanto corn full board. My vote is for hyper hygiene, not GMO as the cause.

-not a scientist, just a farm boy.

[PSS]

The same pesticides organic farmers have been using for 50 years.

http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1135

The pesticide resistant plants have been engineered to produce a protein isolated from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (known generally Bt). Each strain of Bt produces a different version of the protein, known as Cry, each highly specific to a limited number of related species. Bt has evolved these proteins as a key part of a reproductive strategy in which they kill insects that ingest them and then eat nutrients released by the dying host. The Cry protein found in Bt spores must be activated by a protein-cleaving enzyme found in the host gut and then bind to a specific protein on the surface of cells in the digestive system, which Cry then destroys. Insects, who are not huge fans of this strategy, eventually evolve resistance by modifying one or both of these proteins. Bt stains that rely on this insect adapt in turn, creating highly-specific strain-insect relationships.The irony of Cry becoming a major bugaboo of the anti-GMO movement is that, until the gene that produces it was inserted into corn, it was the poster-child of a “natural” insecticide, preferred over chemical pesticides because of the potential for extreme host specificity and complete biodegradability. Bt spores were sprayed on crops for decades, and are still widely used to control pests by organic farmers. But the effectiveness of Bt as an insecticide is limited because it degrades in the matter of days – more rapidly when it rains. This led agricultural biotechnology companies to try and insert Cry genes directly into the plants, and there are now many varieties on the market, each targeting pests that are a particular problem for a given crop (some varieties of Bt corn, for example, targets the European corn borer).
- See more at: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=....J4PjElZK.dpuf