Monsanto - Public Enemy Number 1
September 21, 2009 - 10:49am
Monsanto: Public Enemy Number 1
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/23837
"The War of the Empire has many faces. Monsanto is just about the most callous, the most harmful, the most insidious of the whole gang of predators who are out to get on top of the world - and who are ruining it savagely in the process..Monsanto plays the part as the leader of the gang of predators in the destruction of age-old agriculture.."
Don't kow how I missed this:
Monsanto 7-State Probe Threatens Profit From 93% Soybean Share
excerpt:
March 10 (Bloomberg) -- At least seven U.S. state attorneys general are investigating whether Monsanto Co., the world's largest seed producer, has abused its market power to lock out competitors and raise prices.
Monsanto's "Superweeds" Gallop Through Midwest
The pitch was simple and powerful: No longer would large-scale farmers need to worry about weeds. All they would have to do was douse their fields with Roundup, which would wipe out all plant life except the desired crop. Farmers leapt at the technology. It represented a fantastic labor-saving opportunity, allowing them to manage ever-larger swaths of land without having to pay more workers....
Well, in what is surely the least surprising, most-anticipated major development in the history of US agriculture, farmers are discovering that when you spend years dousing land a single herbicide, ecosystems adapt. Roundup Ready crops, meet Roundup-defying weeds.
If this is anything like antibiotics they will be super weeds. Far more resilient than anything mother nature originally designed.
We have now had a century of chemical companies being allowed to poison our planet.
In a way it is nice to see that weeds learn to bypass these unsustainable farm practices. Farmers have know for a long time that weeds tend to develope resistance to these chemicals. This probably means that farmers will have to go back to, or develope more sustainable cultural practices.
They are not realy super weeds, just weeds that have learned to resist Roundup, they can still be controled by the more traditional farm practices.