Puerto Rico gives away over $519 million to multinational seed corporations, including Monsanto
Millionaire enterprises, including Monsanto, Pioneer Hi Bred and nine other multinational producers of transgenic and hybrid seeds, benefited from over $519.7 million in Puerto Rican public funds throughout the last 10 fiscal years. They took advantage of corporate welfare while the country headed toward a $69 billion debt that cannot be paid to its bondholders, which prompted the enforcement of the Fiscal Oversight Board by the U.S. Congress.
Governors Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, Luis Fortuño and Alejandro García Padilla’s administrations awarded these companies preferential tax rates, tax exemptions, industrial incentives and wage subsidies. Those wage subsidies come from the General Fund, which is the money collected directly from Puerto Rican taxpayers. They also allowed Monsanto and Pioneer, for example, to receive 238 million gallons of free water from an underground water reserve in the south of the Island, between Salinas, Guayama, Juana Díaz and Santa Isabel.
And so it was that 11 agricultural biotechnology enterprises found an oasis of easy money in Puerto Rico throughout 10 years of fiscal crisis, according to findings by the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, Centro de Periodismo Investigativo) after requesting and analyzing reports by the local Department of Treasury, the Administration for the Development of Agricultural Enterprises, the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company and Puerto Rico’s Department of Natural and Environmental Resources. The only information available on the issue originates from the same agencies that grant benefits to the companies.
During that decade of fiscal crisis, incentives were also granted to multinational companies AgReliant Genetics, Mycogen Seeds, 3rd Millennium Genetics, Syngenta Seeds, RiceTec, Bayer Puerto Rico, Illinois Crop Improvement Association, Dow AgroSciences and Dupont Agricultural Caribe Industries.
Read more: http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/articles/puerto-rico-millions-multinationals/
