Food Freedom - The battle against GMO's grows

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GMO Crop Sabotage on the Rise: French citizens destroy trial vineyard

Aug 2010

Early Sunday morning, French police stood helpless as sixty people, locked inside an open-air field of genetically modified grapevines, uprooted all the plants.  In Spain last month, dozens of people destroyed two GMO fields. On the millennial cusp, Indian farmers burned Bt cotton in their Cremate Monsanto campaign. Ignored by multinational corporations and corrupt public policy makers, citizens act to protect the food supply and the planet.

 

Cont: http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/gmo-crop-sabotage-on-th...

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Manifest Haiti: Monsanto's Destiny

Thursday 20 January 2011

 

Let It Burn

"A fabulous Easter gift," commented Monsanto Director of Development Initiatives Elizabeth Vancil. Nearly 60,000 seed sacks of hybrid corn seeds and other vegetable seeds were donated to post-earthquake Haiti by Monsanto. In observance of World Environment Day, June 4, 2010, roughly 10,000 rural Haitian farmers gathered in Papaye to march seven kilometers to Hinche in celebration of this gift. Upon arrival, these rewarded farmers took their collective Easter baskets of more than 400 tons of vegetable seeds and burned them all.[i] "Long live the native maize seed!" they chanted in unison. "Monsanto's GMO [genetically modified organism] & hybrid seed violate peasant agriculture!"

 

More- http://www.truth-out.org/the-new-earthquake-manifest-haiti-monsanto...

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See also this video abour GMO's

Genetically Engineered Foods

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5559950370092458530&hl...

 This explosive exposé reveals what the biotech industry doesn't want you to know - how industry manipulation and political collusion, not sound science, allow dangerous genetically engineered food into your daily diet. Company research is rigged, alarming evidence of health dangers is covered up, and intense political pressure applied. Chapters read like adventure stories and are hard to put down: * Scientists were offered bribes or threatened. Evidence was stolen. Data was omitted or distorted. * Government employees who complained were harassed, stripped of responsibilities, or fired. * Laboratory rats fed a GM crop developed stomach lesions and seven of the forty died within two weeks. The crop was approved without further tests.

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Feast Your Eyes: The Atlas of Genetically Modified Crops

Clive James, ISAAA's director and founder, told the BBC that more than 15 million farmers grow GM crops, and that, "during 2010, the accumulated commercial biotech plantation exceeded one billion hectares [2.47 billion acres]— that's an area larger than the U.S. or China," and equivalent to 10 percent of the world's arable land.

http://www.good.is/post/feast-your-eyes-the-atlas-of-genetically-mo...

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New Lawsuit Filed Against the USDA for GM Alfalfa Deregulation

March 18th, 2011  By Heather Whitehead

 

Today, attorneys for the Center for Food Safety (CFS) and Earthjustice filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), arguing that the agency’s recent unrestricted approval of genetically engineered (GE), “Roundup Ready” Alfalfa was unlawful.  The GE crop is engineered to be immune to the herbicide glyphosate, which Monsanto markets as Roundup.  USDA data show that 93 percent of all the alfalfa planted by farmers in the U.S. is grown without the use of any herbicides.  With the full deregulation of GE alfalfa, USDA estimates that up to 23 million more pounds of toxic herbicides will be released into the environment each year.

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Echoing Big Agribusiness, Farmers Sue Monsanto

By Barry Estabrook

Mar 30 2011, 2:32 PM ET

Tearing a page out of Monsanto's own playbook, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), an advocacy group whose mandate is to represent the public's interest in the patent system, filed suit (PDF) on behalf of 60 organic farmers, small farm organizations, and seed businesses this week against the litigious agrichemical and genetically modified (GM) seed giant.

In a press release, PUBPAT said, "The organic plaintiffs were forced to sue preemptively to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement should their crops ever become contaminated by Monsanto's genetically modified seed." PUBPAT is asking the federal court in Manhattan to declare that if organic farmers' crops are ever contaminated by Monsanto's GM seed, they need not fear also being accused of patent infringement.

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Clear-Cutting the Last Wilderness:
Compromising the genomes of our major crops

by Wes Jackson
Published in The Land Report, Number 65, Fall 1999, a publication of The Land Institute.

In April of 1997, The Economist carried a story entitled "The Green Gene Giant," featuring Monsanto and its CEO, Robert Shapiro. This well-known St. Louis chemical firm announced that it was about to spin off its central source of income, the chemical division which was then yielding almost a third of its $9 billion in annual sales. Mr. Shapiro wanted to make Monsanto the "main provider of the agricultural biotechnology the world will need if it is to feed itself in the future without despoiling the environment." The company was already selling genetically altered soybeans, potatoes and cotton. Dozens more genetically altered products were in the works including corn, sugar beets, and strawberries. This was no minor economic venture for, as The Economist reported, "one estimate is that there will be a world market for genetically altered seeds of $7 billion in 2005." Monsanto had already been called the "Microsoft of genetic engineering." The price per share at the time of the announcement had risen from $14 in early 1995 to nearly $40. Shapiro and other top managers had "promised to buy a large number of Monsanto shares with an interest-bearing loan from the company." This means they could owe the firm money if things didn't pan out.

More...