Monsanto manipulates patent law and the 3rd world suffers. Processes that have been used for hundreds of years in Iraq have been retroactively claimed by Monsanto. People starve because the US uses their influence to strong arm them to follow our patent laws. I've read that farmers in India have committed suicide because Monsanto patents destroyed their business.
GMOs are fine but Monsanto can go **** themselves.
The third world, in places like Africa and India, suffers because their corn yields (their largest source of food) are less than 1/5 of those in the U.S. and 1/3 - 1/4 of those in Brazil, Argentina and China, respectively. This difference is owed to the continued depletion of soil fertility caused by decades of extracting nutrients during crop harvests without replenishing these important elements via fertilizers, organic or mineral, a practice that the rest of the world has adopted.
Over the past 12 years or so the Agriculture and Food Security Center at the Earth Institute, Columbia University has worked to improve rural livelihoods, human nutrition, and environmental sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa. They've done this by leading the United Nations Millennium Project Hunger Task Force, which recommended policies to overcome hunger to African governments and development partners.
These policies include:
- increasing the use of fertilizers and hybrid corn with subsidies and government support
- and conducting research on any potentially negative environmental impacts of increased fertilizer use in Africa.
The India suicides are a result of debt accumulation unable to be paid back due to cotton crop failures. Failures that were predominantly attributed to a two year drought in the region. A phenomenon even noted by those trying to place the blame on Monsanto. Damn Monsanto, why'd you go and turn the rain off on those Indians? The cost of inputs was greater than what it traditionally was due to added seed costs from switching from conventional seed to GE seed. However, the debt would've been non-existent had the weather cooperated and yields panned out. Trying to blame Monsanto for a suicide in that instance is a reach of epic proportions. That's like blaming a company for the death of a former employee who turned into an alcoholic after losing his job.
GE cotton containing the Bt trait (insect resistance) in India out-yields non-Bt cotton by 80% and local hybrids by 87%. This is based on research conducted by UC Berkley and the University of Bonn (Germany).
Dow, DuPont, Bayer etc. have all contributed to the GE movement, especially the seed side, and all have no-replant contract clauses, with stipulated repercussions. This isn't confined solely to one company. But whereas the others are diversified in their business ventures, with agriculture only being a portion of their business, Monsanto is strictly an agricultural technology company so they undeservingly take the bulk of the heat.
