The studies that showed sickness and tumor growth in rats was done with a full year to determine effects of normal doses. Even at the three month … Read more ». Glyphosate residues have been found in almost every commercial food, even milk, since cows are being fed GMO grains. Glyphosate is NOT safe for human consumption, and that is my main concern. Monsanto has spent millions on lawyers defending against the lawsuits of those who have been harmed by glyphosate, and THAT is what brands them as an evil corporation.
Bayer bought out evil Monsatan and the new company name is Bayer-Monsanto. Now they have a pill for every ill — after they poison you. How dare they or anyone else gamble with the health and safety of innocent people. Rot in hell Monsanto! How do you explain this to your children and grandchildren Monsanto! How do you sleep at night? Most high-level FDA employees have a background in either medicine or law, but one of the largest private-sector sources is the Monsanto Company.
Over the past decades, at least seven high-ranking employees in the FDA have an employment history with the Monsanto Company. At the forefront of this controversy is Michael R. Taylor, currently the deputy commissioner of the Office of Foods. However, between that position and his current FDA position, Mr. During his … Read more ». Because of the sympathy, in the article by Anderson, concerning Monsanto, I am no longer interested in, what should be called, Naive Modern Farmer.
Too bad, for a while there I thought I found a gem of information! They poisoned our world, killed directly or indirectly millions of people and species of insects, fish, mammals. Tried to limit our use of seeds. Got to be kidding about how they tried to save themselves They are still there and still killing millions. I have no problem with GMOs, golden rice is awesome and saved millions of people from blindness and other health problems caused by vitamin A deficiency.
But that case of the one farmer being sued that was mentioned in the article was NOT an isolated case. The Million Gardens Movement doesn't just help you grow a garden, we're also bringing gardens to kids across the country — and you can help.
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Everyone seems to think that Monsanto is the face of evil. But why? In , Greenpeace activists held a letter to Monsanto's China CEO and a bowl of rice to protest in the lobby of a building where Monsanto has its office in Beijing. It's not just the U. Scenes from a protest, outside the Monsanto annual shareholder meeting in Creve Coeur, Missouri.
Sign up for your Modern Farmer Weekly Newsletter. Notify of. Most Voted Newest Oldest. Inline Feedbacks. View Replies 3. The popular definition of a GMO is according to Wikipedia "an organism whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques.
But that's not why everyone's afraid of Monsanto. Monsanto is scary because -- in the eyes of detractors -- it's compressing 10, years of genetic adaptations into 10 years of mad science. The history of commercialized GMO foods as we now know them began just two decades ago, with an "enhanced" tomato that was so unprofitable to produce that its developer wound up selling itself to Monsanto.
Since then, other developments have embedded GMOs into a rather substantial part of the world's food supply. Total global cropland, by comparison, amounts to roughly 1. All of this adds up to big business. Fear of a mod planet A quick search of "GMO" will turn up all sorts of scaremonger websites, with all sorts of frightening claims that when you eat a Monsanto-developed crop, you're consigning yourself to a short, sickly life of gastrointestinal or just general agony.
Cancer, allergic reactions, liver problems, sterility, and even the unnatural modification of your genes -- these are just the claims I found on the website of the Institute for Responsible Technology, which purports to be a leading anti-GMO advocacy group. I won't go into some of the anti-Monsanto conspiracy theories you'll find bandied about on less reputable corners of the Internet. It may not be easy to debunk all of these claims, but thanks to extensive national medical records, we can at least see how close to the mark they may strike.
Since America was the earliest adopter of GMO foodstuffs, and is now the world's predominant grower and consumer of GMO crops, it should be experiencing the worst of the purported GMO health problems. The results are even more pronounced when focusing on cancers of the stomach, colon, and rectum, which all show a persistent and significant downtrend throughout the entire tracked period across race and gender divisions.
If we're eating ourselves to death, shouldn't our digestive systems be the most damaged by these Frankenfoods?
Cancer statistics don't back up anti-GMO claims at all, and with more than 16 years in the food supply, you'd expect there to be a statistically significant change. The one statistically significant spike on these graphs, occurring around , is often blamed on the Chernobyl disaster. There has been an increase in death rates from chronic liver disease and cirrhosis in recent years, by about one person per , from to -- but keep in mind that these liver problems are typically alcohol-related.
Simply noting a slight statistical uptick isn't enough to blame on modified crops. People might just be binge-drinking more. That's rather notable. The average number of food-allergy-related hospital visits per year also spiked toward the end of the tracking period, from only 2, per year in to more than 9, in On its own, this may not be enough to blame on GMOs -- except for soy, none of the foodstuffs on the CDC's list of common food allergens is a known GMO crop although wheat appears headed in that direction.
The body may react to one type of food by increasing its reaction severity to other types, but the interplay between these factors is complex and not easily reduced to a simple cause-and-effect relationship.
Other noted health problems -- here I refer to a long essay by Earth Open Source, no more an impartial observer than the ISAAA impartiality is all but impossible to come by in the GMO debate -- include toxin contamination from the overuse of herbicides on GMOs modified for herbicide resistance, stomach lesions, and adverse immune reactions in mice, liver and kidney abnormalities in rats You can read about the effects in detail at this link , beginning on page 37 PDF opens in new window.
If you can name an ailment, there's probably a study somewhere that has traced its cause to GMOs. Yet the world continues to live longer. If we're less healthy, we sure are coping with it more effectively.
Economic benefits? There has to be a reason farmers keep using GMOs. The most obvious would be that the end product -- that is, the stuff you eventually eat -- would yield more per planting that is, per acre , which should result in lower costs at the consumer level.
To the extent that this is true, it can't be credited to the adoption of GMO seed, as yield improvements and price declines began long before Monsanto got into the seed business:. Source: Prof. Mark J. Soybean yields haven't grown quite as impressively but have still doubled on a per-acre basis over the same time frame. Others do, but ignore the stipulation rather than throw away a perfectly usable product. The seeds look identical; only a laboratory analysis can show the difference.
Most Americans know Monsanto because of what it sells to put on our lawns— the ubiquitous weed killer Roundup. What they may not know is that the company now profoundly influences—and one day may virtually control—what we put on our tables. For most of its history Monsanto was a chemical giant, producing some of the most toxic substances ever created, residues from which have left us with some of the most polluted sites on earth. Monsanto brought false accusations against Gary Rinehart—shown here at his rural Missouri store.
There has been no apology. So far, the company has produced G. Many more products have been developed or are in the pipeline, including seeds for sugar beets and alfalfa. Even as the company is pushing its G.
Louis—based corporation into the largest seed company in the world. In Iraq, the groundwork has been laid to protect the patents of Monsanto and other G. One of L. As recently as , no genetically modified crops were grown in the U. In , the total was million acres planted. Worldwide, the figure was million acres. Many farmers believe that G. Another reason for their attraction is convenience.
By using Roundup Ready soybean seeds, a farmer can spend less time tending to his fields. With Monsanto seeds, a farmer plants his crop, then treats it later with Roundup to kill weeds. That takes the place of labor-intensive weed control and plowing.
Monsanto portrays its move into G. Like it or not, farmers say, they have fewer and fewer choices in buying seeds. And controlling the seeds is not some abstraction. During the growing season, Investigator Jeffery Moore, through surveillance of Mr.
Moore observed the Defendant take the brown bag soybeans to a field, which was subsequently loaded into a grain drill and planted. Moore located two empty bags in the ditch in the public road right-of-way beside one of the fields planted by Rinehart, which contained some soybeans.
Moore collected a small amount of soybeans left in the bags which Defendant had tossed into the public right-of way. Faced with a federal lawsuit, Rinehart had to hire a lawyer. Rinehart later learned that the company had been secretly investigating farmers in his area. I felt like I was in another country. Ever since commercial introduction of its G. Lawyers who have represented farmers sued by Monsanto say that intimidating actions like these are commonplace.
Pilot Grove, Missouri, population , sits in rolling farmland miles west of St. The town has a grocery store, a bank, a bar, a nursing home, a funeral parlor, and a few other small businesses. The little traffic it has comes from trucks on their way to and from the grain elevator on the edge of town.
The elevator is owned by a local co-op, the Pilot Grove Cooperative Elevator, which buys soybeans and corn from farmers in the fall, then ships out the grain over the winter. The co-op has seven full-time employees and four computers.
In the fall of , Monsanto trained its legal guns on Pilot Grove; ever since, its farmers have been drawn into a costly, disruptive legal battle against an opponent with limitless resources. Neither Pilot Grove nor Monsanto will discuss the case, but it is possible to piece together much of the story from documents filed as part of the litigation. Monsanto began investigating soybean farmers in and around Pilot Grove several years ago.
There is no indication as to what sparked the probe, but Monsanto periodically investigates farmers in soybean-growing regions such as this one in central Missouri. The company has a staff devoted to enforcing patents and litigating against farmers. Once Pilot Grove had been targeted, Monsanto sent private investigators into the area. At least 17 such surveillance videos were made, according to court records.
The investigative work was outsourced to a St. It was a McDowell investigator who erroneously fingered Gary Rinehart. McDowell, like Monsanto, will not comment on the case. The co-op provided more than pages of documents pertaining to dozens of farmers. Monsanto sued two farmers and negotiated settlements with more than 25 others it accused of seed piracy. Although the co-op had provided voluminous records, Monsanto then sued it in federal court for patent infringement.
In effect, Monsanto wanted the co-op to police its own customers. In the majority of cases where Monsanto sues, or threatens to sue, farmers settle before going to trial.
The cost and stress of litigating against a global corporation are just too great. The more the co-op has resisted, the more legal firepower Monsanto has aimed at it. Monsanto next petitioned to make potential damages punitive—tripling the amount that Pilot Grove might have to pay if found guilty. After a judge denied that request, Monsanto expanded the scope of the pre-trial investigation by seeking to quadruple the number of depositions.
Monsanto gave them two weeks to comply. Whether Pilot Grove can continue to wage its legal battle remains to be seen. Whatever the outcome, the case shows why Monsanto is so detested in farm country, even by those who buy its products. The future of the company may lie in seeds, but the seeds of the company lie in chemicals.
Monsanto was founded in by John Francis Queeny, a tough, cigar-smoking Irishman with a sixth-grade education. A buyer for a wholesale drug company, Queeny had an idea. So he went into business for himself on the side. Queeny was convinced there was money to be made manufacturing a substance called saccharin, an artificial sweetener then imported from Germany.
Louis waterfront. With borrowed equipment and secondhand machines, he began producing saccharin for the U. The young company faced other challenges. Questions arose about the safety of saccharin, and the U. Department of Agriculture even tried to ban it. His persistence and the loyalty of one steady customer kept the company afloat. That steady customer was a new company in Georgia named Coca-Cola.
Monsanto added more and more products—vanillin, caffeine, and drugs used as sedatives and laxatives.
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