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What is a problem for IT is an even greater problem for agriculture. Rice and corn diversity have greatly decreased, which leads to serious risks, putting especially developing coutries in danger. One parasite/desease could destroy the entire harvest.

Of course, large companies like Monsanto deny this and keep pushing their products and binding customers with highly dubious tactics, like their terminator technology (sounds familiar?).

- Andreas

I have to address the last "point" first:


Given the history of governments, why anyone wants them to have more power is beyond me. I guess it's because it's easy to have dreams of grandeur that one's philosophy on how everyone else should behave, implemented at the point of a gun, will result in a better world. You are behind the gun, after all.

You put the gun in my rhetorical hands, not me. Don't think I'll let that slide for a second. Nothing I said in the parent post said anything about using force to achieve anything. If you want to spout Mao, you'd better attribute it as such. BTW, that's a perfect description of the current US attitude towards the world economy. Think about it.


And the unstated solution is to have an even larger and more intrusive government into the lives of people. Non-coericive monopoly (business) bad, coercive monopoly (government) good.

What's coercive? I can only use USPS if I want to mail a letter from my mailbox, but if I want to go to Mailboxes Plus, I have a choice of shippers. Is USPS "coercing" you into buying stamps for your bills, or can you pay them online instead? What's coercive? I want to buy a PC from a brand-name house, but I intend to put a *NIX on it, so I don't want to pay for the MS license. No license, no PC. Resell the license on e-bay? You must be a criminal! De-listed. Sound coercive to me. Hell, they make the mouse and keyboard too! How's that for vertical integration?
As for intrusive, it's not the government who's charging more for my groceries in exchange for not selling my eating and drinking habits, it's your pal the private sector.


Please note that WalMart, GM, Exxon, whoever, aren't even close to having wild dreams of being a non-coercive monopoly.

N.B. Microsoft as an aspiring non-coercive (you don't NEED computers to live) monopoly. Then there's these guys. Turns out you do have to eat, after all. How much more coercive can you get?

Look, this country has an egalitarian patina over an economic model that guarantees winners and losers while we talk about equality. The contradiction is getting close to the breaking point, and I think we're going to have to make some sort of a choice. One model bases enfranchisement in society on citizenship and the right to vote. The other model bases enfranchisement on the possesion of shares and the right to proxy votes (no citizenship required.) Only under one of these models is it guaranteed that you are enfranchised simply by being born. Under the other, its's purely random, not equal (nor is it guaranteed--you can still squander the inheritance if you wish.) The "equality of opportunity" crowd can have their day when they demonstrate equality of healthcare and education. After all, it's hard to concentrate on those ABC's when your belly's grumbling and you're running a fever.

We have more to fear from Monsanto than just about any other corporation out there.

For more info:

Contact Monsanto

Wrong. Monsanto produces "Roundup ready" plants.

These do _not_ produce any toxins themselves. Instead, they were modified to be resistant to Roundup, a glycophosphate based herbicide.

These are to control weeds, not insects. I fully agree that these are a very worrying idea, but spreading untruths is not helpful. In any field. The truth is scary enough.

Plants can't spread DNA to others. The worry about spreading genes is primarlily in corss polination, where pollen from modifed corn gets blown around, and lands on normal corn.

There is a theoretical risk of a virus picking up the modified genes and spreading them to other species, true - but cross pollination is a much bigger issue.
--

A lot of responses to this article are of the nature "GE foods are just fine, and anybody who disagrees is a luddite."

I have a lot of faith in science, but very little faith in human nature. We are prone to make mistakes. And when are dealing with something as powerful and potentially damaging as GE foods, I get a little concerned.

Not only do we have scientists running around altering genes when they can't possibly know all of the effects, we have greedy corporations pushing GE Foods through the FDA. We've got Monsanto trying to convince the Feds that in-house testing of their products was complete, and that their products are safe, the Feds listen because Monsanto has the cash to fund the lobbying (and campaign contributions).

The point is, how far are you going to trust someone who's main interest is pro fit ? Potrykus' motives may be humanitarian, but, then again, who knows what biotech companies he holds stock in?

And before anybody screams that genetic information is a bad analogy as well, consider that ironically enough, some corporations want to lock up that kind of information too.

(Farmer Fred's Famous Fine Fruit ©2000 Monsanto Corp.)
---

Seriously though, Genetic engineering is pretty scary. Look at all the GM crops. People in Britain will not buy GM food, so the farmers were told by the British gov't to slash and burn their crops and they are now suing Advanto.

Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle, and there has been conclusive evidence of horizontal gene flow from plants to animals. How would you like some Scorpion DNA in an Apple? They are already doing it. A lot of Biotech companies like Monsanto are extremely short-sighted when it comes to proper research and testing. There's no way of telling how much damage has already been done and how much more damage will occur.

Fialar

Perhaps he was hinting at 'terminator technologies' - genetically engineered crops that produce infertile seed, forcing farmers to buy new seed every year.
Monsanto hold a patent to this.

However, after much controversy Monsanto backed down late last year.

Lots of people can't get weed to plant the next crop, there's a big famine in most of the world(3rd world, should I say, they always get all the hits), and that means LOTS of people die, revolutions(not that they are bad, but...), etc, more people die. Sure it is a fast solution to the demographic problems on earth.

I imagine worse than that. Much worse. Never mind that Monsanto is the same company that brought the gift of PCBs to the world, ignoring the evidence of how hazardous they are, and also brought us saccharin and even brag about that on their webpage, that they censor opposing views, and generally act like the genetic Mafia, suing farmers left and right.

Giving this vicious, dishonest, fascist corporation a monopoly on natural phenomena and then encouraging them to spread crops with zero genetic diversity across the world invites terrorism. Imagine this: Monsanto succeeds in their vision of global domination of the food market. Then Iraq releases a phage specifically targeting Monsanto products, resulting in global crop failures. Due to all the crops being the same, or having been cross-pollinated by the offensive plants, world starvation, global riots, a world war, you get the picture.

Even worse, I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to release such a phage themselves. Is there a single damn thing this company has ever made that isn't toxic, carcinogenic, or otherwise vile?

Even if none of the worst-case scenarios happen, they abandon the "Terminator" seeds, and they *merely* get a monopoly on the food market, and create a slave-class of Third World farmers who work as serfs to pay for seeds each year, because they aren't allowed to save seeds--after all, by the insane logic of "intellectual" property law the natural growth of plants is now "patent infringement"--isn't that bad enough?

This company is pure fucking evil and they need to be stopped.

Monsanto (www.monsanto.com) make a bunch of different things, you can browse their products on that site. Now, one product is Roundup herbicide, and they market verious genetically modified crops that they label 'Roundup Ready', modified to be resistant. So farmers using Monsanto seed can spray huge amounts of weedkiller and still get a healthy crop.

The other reason for the possible success of these seeds is that Monsanto have enough capital to actually undercut any other vendors of normal seeds with seeds containing the terminator gene. They could say, "It's better! Try it!", and naive farmers would use this seed for a year, and then quite possibly when the price of buying it each year is suddenly massively increased, they find that they didn't keep any of their old seed, or that it has died and won't germinate. Then, certain farmers could be locked into subscribing to Monsanto seed each year.

It's flexible enough, to be sure. But how durable is this stuff? Could it be used for all the purposes which any given type of plastic is used for today?

Most likely, it is durable under "normal" conditions. (Room temperature and humidity) It'll probably melt at typical plastic processing temperatures, (>230 F) and degrade in compost or some other unusual condition. If it can't survive room temperature, it wouldn't be commercially viable. Other biodegradable polymers can be made into fibers for clothing, and films or containers for packaging. Monsanto's Biopol could be made into credit cards.

If the plastic can somehow be "extracted" from the plants, then I'm assuming it's in liquid form.

The plastic probably isn't a liquid in the canola seed. It is likely they'll use a solvent to dissolve the polymer from the seed meal, and then purify the plastic and recover the solvent.

http://www.monsanto.com/
Food, Health, Hope

haha.. such tripe!! :-)