MONSANTO SUCKS

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Monsanto U: Agribusiness's Takeover of Public Schools
By Nancy Scola, AlterNet. Posted February 15, 2008.

Thanks to Bush's new cuts on public funding for land-grant schools, agribusiness is gaining a huge foothold in the future of our food.

...

That was until America's land-grant system met George W. Bush. Tucked into the appendix of his latest national budget is a nearly one-third cut in the public funding for agriculture research at the land grants. The size of the cut is surprising, but not its existence -- it's part of a multiyear drive by the Bush administration to completely eliminate regular public research funding. In a press briefing last week, a USDA deputy secretary illuminated the Bush administration's rationale for the transition to competitive grant making: "That's how you get the most bang for the buck."

Wallace Huffman, an Iowa State agro-economist, is deeply unimpressed with Bush's "bang" approach to land-grant research. "There's a sense in the president's office that you invest in research like you invest in building cars," Huffman told me last week. Land-grant school officials are similarly skeptical. In a survey, Kansas State argued that the loss of regular funding would upend education. Minnesota complained that cuts would undermine ongoing research projects. North Dakota simply asked, "What is the future of ag research?"

...

But, it doesn't take a presidential invitation to get Monsanto to sink its roots in the land-grant system. Those roots are already planted. Iowa State's campus boasts a Monsanto Auditorium and the school offers students Monsanto-funded graduate fellowships on seed policy with a special focus on "the protection of intellectual property rights." Kansas State has spun off Wildcat Genetics, a side company whose purpose is the selling of soybean seeds genetically engineered to survive the application of Roundup® -- the result of a decades long relationship with Monsanto, the pesticide's maker.

But don't get the wrong idea about Monsanto's land-grant activities. By that, I mean, don't think the company is the only multinational biotech conglomerate firmly rooted in American land-grant soil. Head on down to Texas A&M. There you'll find the a chair for the "Dow Chemical Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering." Similar chairs exist at West Virginia State and Louisiana State. The agricultural college of the University of California at Davis is funded in part by DuPont and Calgene.

...

http://www.alternet.org/environment/76804/

[HCE SuiGeneris]

1. Evil incarnate.

The ultimate subject matter for horror movies and nightmares.

[Redstone]

19. Yes. Satan's own corporation. God, how I hate them.

Redstone

[Agony]

2. We will be paying for the Conservative Privatization DrillDown for a LONG time.

The gutting of the commonwealth is still in full swing.

Thanks for posting this. I am deeply interested in food policy and we don't get a lot of discussion about it around here.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

3. Don't miss this article

The killing fields: Science and politics at Berkeley

Bruce H. Jennings1

(1) The Evergreen State College, Environmental Change and Health Program, Olympia, Washington, USA
Abstract Over the past several decades, a group of scholars at the Berkeley campus of the University of California have frequently challenged many of the dominant themes of contemporary agricultural research. In their work, they have organized curricula questioning the assumptions of conventional agriculture and its sciences while encouraging the development of alternative agricultural practices based on principles of ecology. Their collective critique has stimulated an intellectual climate calling forth a scrutiny of the university''s role in the production of knowledge and the social consequences of its works. The result of this intellectual project has been a group that has also largely challenged the dominant themes of the modern university. In place of a setting where ideas are a passive currency, the modern university is a place where knowledge and power are manifest in a dialectic that is revealed not simply by the production of knowledge, but its destruction as well. It is in this context that the recent history of a group of scholars at the University of California provides a striking testimony concerning the disturbing character of science in the modern university. The ecological and social dimensions of killing fields that captures the contemporary hazards of food and fiber production in California is also reflected in the gradual demise of a group of researchers at Berkeley who have endeavored to provide an alternative vision of agriculture.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/qt18751290201861/

Go to link and look to the right side of page to open pdf file for 19 page article that is well worth the time.

[flashl]

4. K&R n/t

[Lorien]

5. Watch "The Future of Food"

available through Netflix. Then your head will really explode.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

6. Everyone needs to see that

We've had a few showings of that locally and folks who are unaware of these issues come away pretty startled.

Do you have a link to the netflix thing?

[Lorien]

7. Don't know if this will work:

http://www.netflix.com/Movie/The_Future_of_Food/70038794?trkid=222336&lnkctr=srchrd-sr&strkid=101778961_0_0

it's available for instant play if you have a Netflix membership and a PC.

[countryjake]

12. Is this it?....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNezTsrCY0Q&feature=related

[nebula]

8. It's on Youtube too.

[Lorien]

9. The whole documentary? n/t

[nebula]

14. Yup, the whole doc is up on Youtube

It comes in 9 parts. Here's a link.

www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x94276


I suggest people who have seen it tell their friends, family, coworkers about it.

[Elidor]

10. Error: You've already recommended that thread.

Heh. Well, I'll kick it, too.

[and-justice-for-all]

11. Another evil corperation with no regulation thanks to shrubCo!

[blues90]

13. I've seen a few documentaries on GMO

and it's pretty scary and depressing stuff . One has to wonder how these things are allowed to get such a foot hold before anyone in the public is aware of it .

No small wonder when these freaks work in the bowels of the earth performing experiments to turn a buck at everyones expense .

I read the Monsanto site and their list of products once and it was horrifying stuff . This is something that once it takes over can't be stopped and no one seems to know or care . No one knows what the effects these products will have over time just with everything else they brew in a test tube .

[nebula]

15. People don't care because they don't know

Monsanto has done a good job of keeping the public in the dark.

We need to expose the evils of GM content in our food supply. That means working toward legislation that will require all retail food products, to carry labels that specifically identify the GM ingredients contained in them. That includes not only grocery stores but also restaurants. Consumers have the right to know what kind of crap is being put into their food so they can make informed choices. If we had warning labels on GM food you can bet that most people would avoid the GM-infested products like the plague, and Monsanto wouldn't be nearly as rich and powerful as it is today.

[countryjake]

16. They have to go after our young people, with the promise of "change"...

since most self-respecting older farmers, the world over, know by now what sort of threat Monsanto and their modern chemical marvel methods of growing will mean to their livelihoods, if such changes are allowed into their fields.

They are going "underground" overseas, with their bastard seeds:

GM Crop Trial Locations May Be Hidden From Public
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/15/7099/


It's time for this country to pick up the pitchforks, root them out, and eliminate these poisonous policies, before there is no future in farming for our children.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

17. From article

"Some GM companies fear future crop trials are in greater danger because of what they claim is a “broadening out” of anti-GM activists to include anti-globalisation and possibly animal rights campaigners. British anti-GM activists have also developed links with European groups that hold training camps to share tactics, such as crossing police lines and gaining access to fields. In France and Germany, crop trashings have increased substantially as farmers have taken to growing GM crops.

Defra officials said making it harder to identify trial sites was not a straightforward process."

[countryjake]

18. Did you also notice the last line in that piece?

"A second crop, a potato, is in the final stages of approval in Brussels, but it would only be used to produce starch for the paper industry and would probably be grown in Germany and the Czech Republic."

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, many of the Monsanto mutant plants that they're now trying to bombard us with have nothing whatsoever to do with human consumption...they're for renewable "energy" like canola or to substitute a new crop for another that the chemical companies has always reaped tremendous profits from, such as the logging industry. In our county, they planted a whole mess of "refined" toilet paper trees, supposedly more dense and faster maturing alders that would yield finished "product" (butt wipe) sooner; those projects were abandoned for reasons I can't offhand remember, something about the run-off affecting nearby wetlands during our numerous floods and disappointingly high maintenance costs; they were deemed a failure and harvested after only three years and never replanted, but the blueberry canes, veggie fields, and other food crops that they'd replaced have never been re-cultivated either, so those farms lost out, big-time, in that experiment.

I worry about this alert from the British Isles, in pointing out the "danger" of people who don't want anything to do with GM methods, Monsanto and the other huge chemical mega-corps, or Agri-businesses moving into our areas. Our local governments are eager to be complicit with this bullshit and are enabling such policies that make it harder, daily, for the average farmer to protest or to even stop being nudged out by such conglomerates. It's become fruitless to simply knock on the door of a grower who has been sucked into the "progress" and "greed" these methods lure with, so what is the average farmer to do?