A History Of Monsanto

David Trammel's picture

We all love to hate the "Evil Empire", so its informative to review their legacy.

The Complete History of Monsanto

I'll leave it to the people who read it to select a favorite quote, lol.

If the word Monsanto becomes a slang for Satan, what would the suitable swear words be in the far future?

Sweet Tatorman's picture

Your link appears to be broken.

David Trammel's picture

in the html code.

Should be fixed now.

SLClaire's picture

Please understand that I am *not* claiming that Monsanto didn't do things with serious risks to the general public and the larger world that we are part of. Or that they didn't conveniently bury their own scientists' advice in the service of making more money.

The problem with this article is that it paints Monsanto with the evilly-evil-with-evil-sauce-on-top label, instead of soberly focusing on the real harms that the company has committed and reporting those accurately. Besides causing people who don't want to waste time on yet another report of this sort to move on to something else, the article is just plain wrong on a few things that I caught, among them the discussion on pollination. Soybeans are self-pollinated, but corn is not; it's self-sterile and wind-pollinated. It's because corn is wind-pollinated that its GMO genes can readily spread from the pollen of GMO corn to nearby corn plants that a farmer wishes to keep free of GMOs. Then Monsanto, which has patented the GMO traits, finds people to take samples of the other farmer's corn that was intended to be GMO free, analyzes the samples, discovers their GMO genes in it, knows that the farmer didn't buy their seeds because they keep sales records, and then threatens to sue the farmer for patent infringement. A few of the suits went to court, which IIRC have almost always been resolved in Monsanto's favor; generally, in order to avoid court, the farmer pays up and then buys the GMO seeds from then on, to avoid any such issues in the future. Monsanto was supposed to ensure that those who bought its seeds established sufficient distance between their and neighboring fields for pollen contamination to not occur, but for various reasons that hasn't happened. Instead of saying something like this, however, the article makes stuff up to fit its evilly-evil label.

Also, so far as I know, bee colony collapse disorder hasn't been conclusively linked to GMOs; rather, it appears to be linked to a certain class of insecticides, the neonicontinoids.

I could go through the article and point out a number of other inaccuracies, but life is too short and I have too much to do.