Why is monsanto bad

Bayer bought out evil Monsatan and the new company name is Bayer-Monsanto. Now they have a pill for every ill — after they poison you. How dare they or anyone else gamble with the health and safety of innocent people. Rot in hell Monsanto! How do you explain this to your children and grandchildren Monsanto!

How do you sleep at night? Most high-level FDA employees have a background in either medicine or law, but one of the largest private-sector sources is the Monsanto Company. Over the past decades, at least seven high-ranking employees in the FDA have an employment history with the Monsanto Company. At the forefront of this controversy is Michael R. Taylor, currently the deputy commissioner of the Office of Foods.

However, between that position and his current FDA position, Mr. During his … Read more ». Because of the sympathy, in the article by Anderson, concerning Monsanto, I am no longer interested in, what should be called, Naive Modern Farmer. Too bad, for a while there I thought I found a gem of information! They poisoned our world, killed directly or indirectly millions of people and species of insects, fish, mammals.

Tried to limit our use of seeds. Got to be kidding about how they tried to save themselves They are still there and still killing millions. I have no problem with GMOs, golden rice is awesome and saved millions of people from blindness and other health problems caused by vitamin A deficiency. But that case of the one farmer being sued that was mentioned in the article was NOT an isolated case. Check out the new Million Gardens Movement website and get gardening!

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By Lessley Anderson on March 4, Lessley Anderson. Everyone seems to think that Monsanto is the face of evil. But why? In , Greenpeace activists held a letter to Monsanto's China CEO and a bowl of rice to protest in the lobby of a building where Monsanto has its office in Beijing. It's not just the U. Scenes from a protest, outside the Monsanto annual shareholder meeting in Creve Coeur, Missouri.

Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. When asked about these practices, Monsanto declined to comment specifically, other than to say that the company is simply protecting its patents. At least with Microsoft the buyer of a program can use it over and over again.

For centuries—millennia—farmers have saved seeds from season to season: they planted in the spring, harvested in the fall, then reclaimed and cleaned the seeds over the winter for re-planting the next spring.

Monsanto has turned this ancient practice on its head. Monsanto developed G. Monsanto then patented the seeds. For nearly all of its history the United States Patent and Trademark Office had refused to grant patents on seeds, viewing them as life-forms with too many variables to be patented.

Indeed not. But in the U. Rather, it was a Pseudomonas bacterium developed by a General Electric scientist to clean up oil spills. But the precedent was set, and Monsanto took advantage of it.

Since the s, Monsanto has become the world leader in genetic modification of seeds and has won biotechnology patents, more than any other company, according to U. Department of Agriculture data. This means that farmers must buy new seed every year. Those increased sales, coupled with ballooning sales of its Roundup weed killer, have been a bonanza for Monsanto. This radical departure from age-old practice has created turmoil in farm country. Others do, but ignore the stipulation rather than throw away a perfectly usable product.

The seeds look identical; only a laboratory analysis can show the difference. Most Americans know Monsanto because of what it sells to put on our lawns— the ubiquitous weed killer Roundup. What they may not know is that the company now profoundly influences—and one day may virtually control—what we put on our tables.

For most of its history Monsanto was a chemical giant, producing some of the most toxic substances ever created, residues from which have left us with some of the most polluted sites on earth. Monsanto brought false accusations against Gary Rinehart—shown here at his rural Missouri store. There has been no apology. So far, the company has produced G.

Many more products have been developed or are in the pipeline, including seeds for sugar beets and alfalfa. Even as the company is pushing its G. Louis—based corporation into the largest seed company in the world.

In Iraq, the groundwork has been laid to protect the patents of Monsanto and other G. One of L. As recently as , no genetically modified crops were grown in the U. In , the total was million acres planted. Worldwide, the figure was million acres. Many farmers believe that G. Another reason for their attraction is convenience. By using Roundup Ready soybean seeds, a farmer can spend less time tending to his fields.

With Monsanto seeds, a farmer plants his crop, then treats it later with Roundup to kill weeds. That takes the place of labor-intensive weed control and plowing.

Monsanto portrays its move into G. Like it or not, farmers say, they have fewer and fewer choices in buying seeds. And controlling the seeds is not some abstraction. During the growing season, Investigator Jeffery Moore, through surveillance of Mr. Moore observed the Defendant take the brown bag soybeans to a field, which was subsequently loaded into a grain drill and planted. Moore located two empty bags in the ditch in the public road right-of-way beside one of the fields planted by Rinehart, which contained some soybeans.

Moore collected a small amount of soybeans left in the bags which Defendant had tossed into the public right-of way. Faced with a federal lawsuit, Rinehart had to hire a lawyer. Rinehart later learned that the company had been secretly investigating farmers in his area.

I felt like I was in another country. Ever since commercial introduction of its G. Lawyers who have represented farmers sued by Monsanto say that intimidating actions like these are commonplace. Pilot Grove, Missouri, population , sits in rolling farmland miles west of St. The town has a grocery store, a bank, a bar, a nursing home, a funeral parlor, and a few other small businesses.

The little traffic it has comes from trucks on their way to and from the grain elevator on the edge of town. The elevator is owned by a local co-op, the Pilot Grove Cooperative Elevator, which buys soybeans and corn from farmers in the fall, then ships out the grain over the winter. The co-op has seven full-time employees and four computers. In its own testing over the years, Monsanto had accidentally harmed its own crops dozens of times.

In order to commercialize dicamba, both Monsanto and BASF worked to develop new formulations with low volatility. Off-target movement from dicamba can happen in two main ways: drift and volatilization. Volatilization is when dicamba particles turn from a liquid to a gas in the hours or days after the herbicide is applied.

Volatilization is particularly concerning because dicamba can move for miles and harm non-target crops, especially soybeans, and even lawns and gardens.

Tomatoes, grapes and other specialty crops are also at-risk of being damaged. During its testing of an older version of XtendiMax, Monsanto had at least 73 off-target incidents , according to court documents. In , Monsanto had significant dicamba damage at a training facility in Portageville , Missouri. The EPA took note of an incident where, through volatilization, dicamba turned into a gas and apparently floated more than 2 miles away , much farther than it was supposed to.

During that incident, no one had measured how badly the crops had been damaged and the EPA was unable to definitively determine the symptoms were caused by dicamba. When a weed science professor at the University of Arkansas asked Monsanto for a little bit of Xtendimax to test its volatility, the company told him it would have difficulty producing enough dicamba for both him and its independent tests.

With low profit margins, farmers will use any tool they can to control weeds. Monsanto recognized this in and when they released dicamba-tolerant crops without their new versions of dicamba.

But the company decided the benefits of establishing a market share outweighed the risks and launched the cotton crops in The EPA allowed farmers to spray other weed killers on the crops, and Monsanto decided to launch the seeds with "a robust communication plan that dicamba cannot be used.

When the seeds were sold, Monsanto put a pink sticker on each bag to indicate it was illegal to spray dicamba on the crops in The company also sent letters to all growers and retailers , among other tactics, to limit illegal applications of dicamba.

In Oct. Monsanto doubled down on this risky strategy in , releasing dicamba-tolerant soybean crops without a weed killer, too. Meanwhile, Monsanto also declined to investigate drift incidents in and BASF documents indicated the sales increased because of dicamba-tolerant seeds.

In the summer of , BASF sales representatives in the field were reporting older versions of dicamba causing damage, hinting the problem was predictable.

Dicamba drift led to widespread news coverage. Monsanto and BASF expected to turn it all into more money. The sales pitch? In April , a market research document prepared by Bank of America found many farmers were doing just that.

Gotta admit I would not have expected this in a market research document," a Monsanto executive wrote. BASF also had a market research document that found defensive planting was driving sales. The companies announced in that they were collaborating in the development of the dicamba-tolerant cropping systems, granting each other reciprocal licenses, with BASF agreeing to supply formulated dicamba herbicide products to Monsanto.

The companies said they would make new dicamba formulations that would stay where they were sprayed and would not volatilize as older versions of dicamba were believed to do. But in private meetings dating back to , records show agricultural experts warned that the plan to develop a dicamba-tolerant system could have catastrophic consequences.

The experts told Monsanto that farmers were likely to spray old volatile versions of dicamba on the new dicamba-tolerant crops and even new versions were still likely to be volatile enough to move away from the special cotton and soybean fields on to crops growing on other farms. Other cotton and soybean farmers and farmers growing everything from wheat to watermelons would be at risk from the drifting dicamba.

Both Monsanto and BASF defended their products and their different roles in bringing the new dicamba crop system to market. Several million acres of crops have now been reported damaged by dicamba, according to industry estimates.

The documents reviewed by the Guardian were obtained through court-ordered discovery by the law firm that won that case. Their products are safe and effective when used correctly, both say.