Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.’s business practices reveal how the world’s biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.
With Monsanto’s patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.
Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price hikes that ripple out to every family’s dinner table. That’s because the corn flakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you ate for dinner likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto’s patented genes.
Anniston Alabama: Pollution, Contamination, and Betrayal. I have worked in Anniston and have seen for myself the valley of the living dead. We promise this to the food gods of monsanto. (We Will Defeat You.)
[quote="Uncle Dave"]This has long been a No Agenda topic for John and Adam which the Main Stream Media is just now getting around to.[/quote]
Just the standard courtesy press delay so Monsanto can get it’s ducks in a row.
Monsanto is evil.
@ #17,
It was called Starlink Corn. It happened sometime during the latter half of the Clinton administration.
So, farmers raise their crops the old fashioned ways get seeds blown in from neighboring farms using Monsanto genes. Then Monsanto sues the legacy farmers for using the modified seeds.
Why oh why hasn’t some smart lawfirm sued Monsanto for trespassing or invasion or some such defense?
Not that I would support that case. I am – in general – in favor of genetically modified foods. I am NOT in favor of patenting life. I believe Monsanto should be allowed to patent their techniques for modifying the genetic makeup but not the resulting genome. That strikes me as patenting “4″ as the answer to “2 + 2 =” simply because I designed the circuit board in the calculator.
Actually, these dinosaurs are not going to be around for very much longer, and they know it. Outsourcing has distributed their technology and globalisation has diluted their lobbying power. They have failed in and have exited many foreign countries and are struggling to maintain market dominance in their own homeland, against foreign producers.
Monsanto, the Darth Vader of biotech.
I only eat Roundup ready foods, when they start spraying the world with roundup I know I’ll be only one who alive!!!!!!!!!!
#24 because of money and they got the hook up in white house.. People had tried.
We need to return to LIMITED PATENTS, in terms of how long any commercial entity has to exploit is exclusive use. Monsanto is hardly a struggling business, that needs decades of agro patent protection to stay profitable. And we’re talking the food supply here. Not some damn song or movie. I think the genetic patents ought to expire into public domain (or whatever) just as soon as patent drugs do. If not much sooner.
But of course when big money talks, law makers listen. So I suspect Monsanto will be allowed to skirt all anti-monopoly, and anti-trust protection laws. Making them the De Beers of seeds. If they’re not already!
You’re all worrying about a monopoly of prices, but when I read “With Monsanto’s patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S.” I’m worried about an agricultural monoculture which invites disaster from a biological perspective.