For those of you who had read my last choice post (on big pharma), you should know that I like to rant. I got pretty good feedback on the last one, so I thought "Hey, let's do more ranting!" That's exactly what I'm about to do. Prepare yourselves, it gets ugly this week. While last week I talked about essentially large scale legal drug dealers, this week, I'll focus on arguably a more unethical company, Monsanto.
Monsanto is an agricultural and biotechnical giant in our modern world. They are a lead manufacturer of pesticides and genetically engineered seeds. First, I'll talk about their pesticides.
Monsanto's main product, herbicide glyphosphate, commonly known as round-up, has been a huge destruction to the environment. It's been found in the air, on land, in rivers, and hundreds of other places around the world. The chemical goes in, and contaminates the environment, this destroys the ecosystem, and sets the balance of nature way out of wack. Just how much of the glyphosphate was found? Experts suggest the number is in the ballpark of 180 million pounds. That's 180 million pounds of toxic chemicals spread around countless ecosystems. Bottom line, it's a big deal.
However, the damage of their product doesn't stop with the environment. Glyphosphate also causes birth defects, DNA damage, Neurotoxicity, cancer, and many other diseases. This stuff is toxic and has caused animals and humans alike to suffer major consequences.
This, in itself, makes a company evil. What's worse is that Monsanto executives allegedly had known about this for a long time, yet chose to hide it from the public. Why you may ask? Why does anyone do anything? Money.
If Monsanto would have gone public with this environmental hazard, they would have lost billions. So, instead, they kept their mouth shut and let this monstrosity happen.
While it can't be definitively proven that in court that Monsanto knew about this, there have been "confidential" company documents labeled "read and destroy" that implicate the giant, and confirm they had known about this for decades. Around various lakes, Monsanto workers have found bleeding fish with serious neural damage as a direct result of their pesticidal dumping. But instead, they turned a blind eye, as their product was extremely profitable.
Now you're reading this thinking that this company is full of scumbags. I wholeheartedly agree with you.
But wait, there's more!
Monsanto, as I previously said, is not only a pesticide provider, but also a seed giant. And genetically modified seeds at that. For over 30 years, Monsanto has been the lead manufacturer of genetically modified seeds. In this course of this time, they've accumulated over 650 biotechnical patents, much more than any other company. In this, they have even succeeded in patenting life forms. Yes, Monsanto owns certain species of plants. Also, farmers who purchase Monsanto's seeds (which they almost have to, Monsanto is getting closer and closer to a monopoly over the seed business.) must sign an agreement saying they won't sell their seeds, and also that they can't reproduce the seeds. In agriculture, seeds have been being reproduced for thousands of years, yet Monsanto has banned this, as it hurts their profit. The result of this is that farmers must buy new seeds every single year, and they have to buy them from Monsanto.
Now, your first question is "How in the world can this company stop farmers from reusing seeds?"
This is where it gets bad.
In order to make sure farmers aren't reusing seeds, Monsanto has hired countless private investigators to go to farms, secretly videotape farmers (without consent). Their actions have been compared to the mafia as well as the gestapo. This has coined the term "Monsanto's seed mafia." Seeds are expensive, and with the agricultural market being shaky at best, most farmer's can't afford to buy new seeds every year, so they end up having no choice but to cheat Monsanto's system. If caught, the farmers are often sued and they lose everything. All to Monsanto. If this goes on, we may face a world where every farmer is fully dependent on this company, which, as you can see, is not the type of company you want to be dependent on.
Citations:
http://www.naturalnews.com/033699_Roundup_pollution.html
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/07/08/tthe-most-evil-company-on-the-planet-monsanto.aspx
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A46648-2001Dec31
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto
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