Ahh, Monsanto... What Would We Do If We Didn't Have You to Hate?

by: Jill Richardson

Mon Feb 09, 2009 at 13:00:05 PM PST

Monsanto (whose first quarter profits are way up) made some headlines this week and not in a good way. Well, it's never in a good way with Monsanto, is it? First off, there's the fact that Monsanto and its biotech buddies are trying to profit from global warming:

The world's largest seed and agrochemical corporations are stockpiling hundreds of monopoly patents on genes in plants that the companies will market as crops genetically engineered to withstand environmental stresses such as drought, heat, cold, floods, saline soils, and more. BASF, Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Dupont and biotech partners have filed 532 patent documents (a total of 55 patent families) on so-called "climate ready" genes at patent offices around the world. In the face of climate chaos and a deepening world food crisis, the Gene Giants are gearing up for a PR offensive to re-brand themselves as climate saviours. The focus on so-called climate-ready genes is a golden opportunity to push genetically engineered crops as a silver bullet solution to climate change. But patented techno-fix seeds will not provide the adaptation strategies that small farmers need to cope with climate change. These proprietary technologies will ultimately concentrate corporate power, drive up costs, inhibit independent research, and further undermine the rights of farmers to save and exchange seeds.

Given that, what is Oxfam doing in bed with Monsanto? Especially when it's been found that organics beat GMOs for drought tolerance, and that organics can feed Africa! Looks like they are falling for Monsanto's bullshit PR strategy that claims GMOs can feed the world.

Even at the time of the Monsanto ads [that claimed GM would feed the poor], though, the company knew perfectly well that the only GM crops it had developed were designed to meet the needs of large-scale commercial farmers, primarily in the industrialized world.
So how did this extravagant pro-poor rhetoric around GM crops actually arise?...
[Researcher Dominic Glover] notes that during the 1960s and '70s, Monsanto senior executives recognised that they needed to radically transform a company increasingly threatened by the emergence of the environmental movement and by tougher environmental regulation.

Yuck - even the World Wildlife Fund is falling for Monsanto's BS that it holds the key to the future.

This info was copied from La Vida Locavore