Proving that nothing is out of bounds in the pursuit of food hegemony, Monsanto alters the free market itself by paying customers to use their products. Farmers are paid up to $20 per acre to plant Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready GM corn, as long as they spray it with a blend of RoundUp and herbicides from other companies.
The story behind this bizarre twisting of the free market starts with Monsanto’s genetically-engineered corn that was made to survive Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide, RoundUp. Actually, the story began billions of years ago with basic evolutionary functions. As a population of life forms is attacked repeatedly, individuals will begin to evolve defense mechanisms against that mode of attack. These individuals survive (the fittest) and pass the defense mechanisms along to their progeny.
In this case the predator was Monsanto’s chemicals and the prey was agricultural weeds. Some of the target weeds, such as pigweed, developed resistance to RoundUp in a matter of years. These “superweeds” are now a major problem for an agricultural system that has become dependent on chemical poisons.
Facing this reality, Monsanto keeps its product in use by actually paying farmers to use other herbicides from other manufacturers in conjunction with its own. While this is going on, it is developing other genetically-engineered crops that can withstand even more toxic herbicides than glyphosate.
Interestingly, when Monsanto was pushing to have its GM corn seed approved for commercial sale in 1993, it stated that RoundUp is “considered to be a herbicide with low risk for weed resistance” and it was “highly unlikely” that resistant weeds would emerge. Apparently this was good enough for the USDA. Besides calling into question the validity of the USDA approval process, this calamity casts a great deal of doubt on Monsanto’s ability or truthfulness of their own research.
However, this likelihood of weed resistance was in fact known among scientists involved in agricultural issues. In 1990 the Union of Concerned Scientists published a report called “Biotechnology’s Bitter Harvest” where they explicitly warned of the development of herbicide-resistance.
This free market manipulation—Monsanto paying farmers to use its product—can only be carried out by a corporation with huge economic might and a near monopoly, in tandem with government protection in the form of patents on life.
by Justin Gardener
Source: RealFarmacy.com
