G'day.
I recently watched this documentary, well, actually it was yesterday evening, so that qualifies as recently. 
Here's the trailer and some information that I checked out that is presented in the documentary (there's some good stuff on the website 
) ...
Website: www.japanesepopsongs.com/idiotcycle/index.html
Monsanto Investor Bill Gates Says GMO Crops Needed to Fight Starvation
Bill Gates, the heavy Monsanto investor who purchased 500,000 shares of the biotech giant in 2010, has been touting Monsanto’s genetically modified creations as a tool that is necessary to prevent starvation in poor nations. The same poor nations where thousands of farmers routinely commit suicide after being completely bankrupt by Monsanto’s overpriced and ineffective GM seeds. The same company that we recently exposed to be running ‘slave-like’ working conditions, forcing poor workers to operate the corn fields for 14 hours per day while withholding pay.
According to Gates, this is the company whose GMO crops are going to save the world from starvation. Of course along with ‘saving the world from starvation’, GMO crops also bring along a large number of unwanted health and environmental effects. A prominent review of 19 studies examining the safety of these crops found that consumption of GMO corn or soybeans can lead to significant organ disruptions in rats and mice – particularly in the liver and kidneys.
Are Monsanto’s Devastating Creations Really the Answer to World Hunger?
What’s more is that Monsanto’s best selling herbicide Roundup has been completely devastating farmlands for years through the creation of resistant superweeds. Experts estimate Roundup usage to result in the destruction of over at least 120 million hectares of farmland thanks to these superweeds.
Is it any wonder that in 2008 a startling report uncovered Monsanto’s blatant abuse of poor farmers in the very poor countries that will supposedly benefit from GMO crops? Thanks to an article in the Daily Mail, it was revealed that thousands of farmers were committing suicide after using Monsanto’s GM seeds. Due to failing harvests and drastically inflated prices, the bankrupt poor farmers began taking their lives — oftentimes drinking the very same chemical concoctions provided by Monsanto as a method of suicide.
‘We are ruined now,’ said the dead man’s 38-year-old wife. ‘We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.’
Monsanto actually conned the farmers into buying their GM seeds, majorly overpriced and performing far worse than even traditional seeds. Monsanto went as far as to charge these poor farmers £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, while they could have purchased 1,000 times more traditional seeds for the same amount. The result? A career-ending harvest that led to mass farmer suicide.
It is quite clear that Monsanto really has no intention of helping these farmers fight starvation in their communities, as Monsanto investor Bill Gates would have you think. You can view Bill Gate’s speech about how GMO crops are the answer to starvation and see for yourself how he puts such strong emphasis on that selling point.
540x80 papaya leaf extract Monsanto Investor Bill Gates Says GMO Crops Needed to Fight Starvation
Explore More:
1. Bill Gates Foundation Buys 500,000 Shares of Monsanto
2. Sorry Gates: GMO Crops Shown to be Ineffective at Fighting World Hunger
3. World Bank Nominee Tied to Monsanto Shareholder Bill Gates, Soros
4. Genetically Engineered Rice Pushed Through by Bill Gates & Monsanto
5. How the Bill Gates Foundation is Genetically Manipulating Nature and Devastating Our Health
6. Monsanto Threatens Lawsuit Over GMO Labeling Bill
Linked referrences available at: naturalsociety.com/monsanto-investor-bil...ation/#ixzz1zQdA5rxR
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The Real Victor in Iraq: Monsanto
Five years of occupation, more than $558 billion spent, 4,182 U.S. soldiers and 655,000 Iraqi civilians dead, and it now looks like Monsanto (NYSE.MON - $71.95) is going to be the real victor in Iraq thanks to a postwar document known as Order 81.
Part of the infamous 100 Orders, Order 81 mandates that Iraq’s commercial-scale farmers must now purchase "registered” seeds. These are available through agribusiness giants like Monsanto, Cargill Corporation (a private company) and the World Wide Wheat Company (also private), but Monsanto is far and away the most significant player in the registered seed market.
Monsanto’s seeds are “terminator” seeds. This means they are inherently sterile, and any seed they produce does not give birth to more plants.
The technology behind registered seed is called genetic modification, and genetically modified (GM) seeds supposedly can’t reproduce, though “drift,” via wind currents and bird consumption, has resulted in a great many instances where GM crops ended up in fields where they were not planted.
A classic example is Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, whose canola fields inexplicably sprouted GM varieties from Monsanto. Monsanto promptly sued Schmeiser for patent infringement.
Originally developed to avert world hunger (at least according to Monsanto), these GM crops not only do not produce more than their non-modified cousins, but the herbicide Roundup, developed in tandem by Monsanto to treat GM fields, is becoming increasingly ineffective. This has led to more herbicide purchases among farmers, greater profits for Monsanto, increasingly smaller yields, and greater environmental pollution overall.
Roundup, a glyphosate, is the direct descendant of Agent Orange (also produced by Monsanto), and is especially toxic to marine animals. Glyphosates, known as endocrine disruptors, are being increasingly implicated in neurological disorders, DNA damage and even death. However, as often (and mistakenly) reported, Roundup does not contain pesticide. Pest control is part of the genetic modification of seeds.
In the U.S., these GM varieties of corn, soy and rapeseed may have cost the U.S. economy $12 billion since 1999 in rising farm subsidies, lower crop prices, loss of major export orders and product recalls, according to Britain’s premiere organic food association, the Soil Association.
Contrary to popular belief, farm subsides do not protect small American farmers. They do drive down the profit on crops. In the US, 10 percent of farms receive 75 percent of subsidies, and all these farms are run by agribusiness giants like Monsanto. Exporting GM crops is hampered by the fact that many countries refuse to buy genetically modified crops, including Australia, the EU (except Spain), and Japan. Product recalls, involving the use of GM crops in food products sold to countries where GM food is forbidden, is not only costly but represents an ongoing bone of contention on the world market which hampers international trade relations.
In India, where regional governmental studies show Monsanto’s GM cotton producing seven times less than an indigenous variety of cotton, farmers are drinking the toxic chemicals they formerly used to treat their fields in an effort to escape rising debt and poverty. This so-called “suicide by pesticide” is the final solution for farmers locked into Monsanto contracts that benefit no one but Monsanto.
In Columbia, where Monsanto’s RoundUp Ultra has been deployed in the war against drugs (under the name Plan Columbia), local communities and human right’s organizations are charging that Ultra is destroying indigenous food crops, water sources and indeed entire protected ecologies in the Andes. Ironically, cocaine production has jumped almost 10 percent since the plan's inception, moving higher into the mountains and decimating even more remote ecologies.
Monsanto’s share of this American taxpayer-funded drug eradication enterprise ($1.3 billion) is more than $25 million. Ultra, a concentrated version of Roundup with added surfactants to increase its toxicity, has been implicated in the deaths of a number of children. DynCorp International (NYSE.DCP - $10.83), the company doing the spraying, is under contract to the U.S. government.
Order 81, by first forcing Iraq’s farmers to use GM seeds, and then by declaring natural seeds an infringement on Monsanto technology, will result in the sorts of tragedies seen elsewhere in the developing world, reducing Iraq’s farmers to drinking field-grade herbicides to escape financial catastrophe.
Nor will the Iraqi people benefit in terms of more food. Order 81, mandated under the dystopian title "Plant Variety Protection,” turns the agricultural world on its head by defining indigenous crops as invasive and GM crops as uniform and stable. Moreover, the six varieties of wheat developed for Iraq are primarily used in pasta. Since the Iraqis don’t eat pasta, one can only assume these food crops are destined for Western nations, leaving the average Iraqi that much closer to starvation.
Order 81, carefully crafted to look like humanitarian legislation aimed at rescuing a country decimated by half a decade of war, is in fact a Monsanto power play under U.S. government sponsorship. Farmers who do not comply will have seeds, farm implements and even land seized.
The infamous 100 Orders, of which 81 is only an instance, are clearly a ploy to allow multinationals like Monsanto to take over an entire nation. As Iraqi resentment over this privatization grows, expect continued resistance, more deaths, and ultimately a failure of democracy.
And that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.
Linked referrences available at: www.thepanelist.net/opinions-culture-100...tor-in-iraq-monsanto
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Monsanto in Iraq and Afghanistan
* By Alexis Baden-Mayer, Esq.
Organic Consumers Association, September 2, 2009
From the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, OCA has been tracking the opportunities for Monsanto, a well-known war profiteer (Agent Orange, Vietnam), to take advantage of the current occupations. These include pushing glyphosate (Monsanto's Roundup herbicide) for poppy eradication in Afghanistan and opening the Iraqi market to the patenting of plants and seeds while preventing farmers from saving registered seed varieties.
As Vanity Fair reported last year, "In Iraq, the groundwork has been laid to protect the patents of Monsanto and other G.M.-seed companies. One of L. Paul Bremer’s last acts as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority was an order stipulating that 'farmers shall be prohibited from re-using seeds of protected varieties.' Monsanto has said that it has no interest in doing business in Iraq, but should the company change its mind, the American-style law is in place."
In fact, Monsanto has already been doing business in Iraq. According to a 2004 USAID Transition Plan for the Agriculture Sector in Iraq, "All the major international players in the pesticide field are now present in Iraq: Dow (USA), Syngenta (Swiss), Dupont (USA), Bayer (Germany), Monsanto (USA), Novartis, FMC (USA), Dupont and Uniroyal, BSF and Cynamide."
Monsanto's latest opportunity to do business in the US's occupied territories has been created by the National Guard's "Agri-Business Development Teams." The Missouri National Guard, which has maintained Agri-Business Development Teams in Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan since fall 2007, hosted Safi Mohammed Hussein, agriculture director of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, on a recent visit to Missouri. While in St. Louis, Safi toured the headquarters of biotech giant Monsanto.
Linked referrences available at: www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_18999.cfm
