More than
270,000 organic farmers are taking on corporate agriculture giant Monsanto in a
lawsuit filed March 30. Led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association,
the family farmers are fighting for the right to keep a portion of the world
food supply organic—and preemptively protecting themselves from accusations of
stealing genetically modified seeds that drift on to their pristine crop
fields.
Consumers
are powerful. For more than a decade, a cultural shift has seen shoppers
renounce the faster-fatter-bigger-cheaper mindset of factory farms, exposéd in
the 2008 documentary Food, Inc. From heirloom tomatoes to heritage chickens, we
want our food slow, sustainable, and local—healthy for the earth, healthy for
animals, and healthy for our bodies.
But with
patented seeds infiltrating the environment so fully, organic itself is at
risk. Monsanto’s widely used Genuity® Roundup Ready® canola seed has already
turned heirloom canola oil into an extinct species. The suing farmers are
seeking to prevent similar contamination of organic corn, soybeans, and a host
of other crops. What’s more, they’re seeking to prevent Monsanto from accusing
them of unlawfully using the very seeds they’re trying to avoid.
“It seems
quite perverse that an organic farmer contaminated by transgenic seed could be
accused of patent infringement,” says Public Patent Foundation director Dan
Ravicher in a Cornucopia Institute article about the farmers’ lawsuit (May 30,
2011), “but Monsanto has made such accusations before and is notorious for
having sued hundreds of farmers for patent infringement.”
Even as the
megacorporation enjoys soaring stock, the U.S. justice department continues to
look into allegations of its fraudulent antitrust practices (The Street, June
29, 2011):
- Monsanto, which has acquired more than 20 of the nation’s biggest seed producers and sellers over the last decade, has long pursued a strict policy with its customers, obligating them to buy its bioengineered seeds every year rather than use them in multiple planting seasons. Farmers who disobey are blacklisted forever.
It’s a wide
net Monsanto has cast over the agricultural landscape. As Ravicher points out,
“it’s actually in Monsanto’s financial interest to eliminate organic seed so
that they can have a total monopoly over our food supply.” Imagine a world
devoid of naturally vigorous traditional crops and controlled by a single
business with a appetite for intellectual property. Did anyone else feel a cold
wind pass through them? Now imagine a world where thousands of family farmers fight the good fight to continue giving consumers a choice in their food—and
win.
Source:
Cornucopia Institute, The Street
1 comment:
This entry is well-done. Organic farming can provide for the world, without the needs for all the chemicals Monsanto pushes on us.
Jeffrey McCrary
www.lagunadeapoyo.blogspot.com
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