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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsShilling for Monsanto
(Mother Jones) Nearly two decades after their mid-'90s debut in US farm fields, GMO seeds are looking less and less promising. Do the industry's products ramp up crop yields? The Union of Concerned Scientists looked at that question in detail for a 2009 study. Short answer: marginally, if at all. Do they lead to reduced pesticide use? No; in fact, the opposite.
And why would they, when the handful of companies that dominate GMO seedsMonsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Doware also among the globe's largest pesticide makers? Monsanto's Roundup Ready seeds have given rise to an upsurge of herbicide-resistant superweeds and a torrent of herbicides, while insects are showing resistance to its pesticide-containing Bt crops and causing farmers to boost insecticide use. What about wonder crops that would be genetically engineered to withstand drought or require less nitrogen fertilizer? So far, they haven't panned outand there's little evidence they ever will.
Yet despite all of these problems, the US State Department has been essentially acting as a de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry, complete with figures as high-ranking as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mouthing industry talking points as if they were gospel, a new Food & Water Watch analysis of internal documents finds.
The FWW report is based on an analysis of diplomatic cables, written between 2005 and 2009 and released in the big Wikileaks document dump of 2010. FWW sums it up: "a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology overseas, compel countries to import biotech crops and foods that they do not want, and lobby foreign governmentsespecially in the developing worldto adopt policies to pave the way to cultivate biotech crops." .................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/05/us-state-department-global-marketing-arm-gmo-seed-industry
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Shilling for Monsanto (Original Post)
marmar
May 2013
OP
Buzz Clik
(38,437 posts)1. I've asked this question before, and never received an answer:
Do anyone really believe that Monsanto created Roundup Ready soybean varieties and Bt corn over the objections of farmers? Or, is it the case that Monsanto developed these GMOs because of their high demand?
ananda
(28,876 posts)2. Shilling for Monsanto: deep in so many psyches.
Just gotta find an excuse for evil.