ST. LOUIS—Agricultural biotech giant Monsanto unveiled its latest strain of genetically modified corn Wednesday, claiming that the new, hardier seed yields 400 percent more litigation against small independent farms than the company’s previous GMO products.
~The Onion
In the ongoing corporatization of our nations’ laws, courts ruled that corporations could hold patents on life. Each bag of GMO seeds comes wrapped in a contract, warning the farmer that he is
not buying but renting the seed. If these seeds go astray in his own fields and he happens to grow last year’s seeds, the full wrath of the patent-holding corporation will fall upon him and may drive him into bankruptcy.
The 10,000-year-old agricultural practice of saving seeds is now forbidden by law.
And woe betide the conventional or organic farmers with fields adjoining those GMO-planting farmers whose crops are cross-contaminated by these patented products. Not only will their harvests be rejected by national and international markets and their organic farms threatened with decertification, they will be sued by these giant agrochemical companies for “stealing” their patented products. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto has successfully sued 144 family farmers while settling over 700 patent infringement/GMO contamination cases out of court.
“We are excited to introduce our newest variety of corn, which is capable of producing up to 1,000 patent infringement cases per growing season,” said Monsanto spokesman Richard Gringell, explaining that this proprietary strain of the large cereal grain had been carefully engineered to withstand even the harshest countersuits.
“Moreover, our new variety can cross-pollinate with nearby farmers’ crops three times faster, generating new targets for legal action much more efficiently than before. In fact, just one acre of our new corn is able to bankrupt as many family farmers as 10 acres of our previous formula. It’s a huge leap forward for our company."
~The Onion
The last word in this diary belongs to the
farmers who are under siege by these agrochemical giants:
"Our farmers want nothing to do with Monsanto," declared Maine certified organic seed farmer, Jim Gerritsen, President of lead Plaintiff Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association. "We are not customers of Monsanto. We don't want their seed. We don't want their gene-spliced technology. We don't want their trespass onto our farms. We don't want their contamination of our crops. We don't want to have to defend ourselves from aggressive assertions of patent infringement because Monsanto refuses to keep their pollution on their side of the fence. We want justice."
~Mother Earth News
IRONY UPDATE: A friend of mine, whom I hope will soon be joining me here on DKOS, found The Onion's article and my headline ironic:
Ironically, one of the goofy and pointless boutique vegetablesSeminis has been pushing is a less lachrymotic (i.e. no-tears) onion. "Evermild", they call it.