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Tag Archives | Monsanto

Food 2.0

By on October 7, 2014 in News 0

Krispy Kreme DoughnutsThe next big thing for many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors is food. Paul B. Farrell explains ‘Food 2.0′ at MarketWatch:

  • Silicon Valley: “The Next Start-up Craze” is “Food 2.0” predict MIT Technology Review’s editors. “They are taking on corporate giants such as ConAgra, General Mills, and Kraft that spend billions on research and technology development.” Still, you can bet a successful new food-tech start-up is likely to have one of the Big Ag firms along as a venture partner or later as buy-out sugar-daddy.

  • Big Ag’s Monsanto: The global food industry, especially Big Ag capitalists like Monsanto, which controls 27% of the global seed market, is already having trouble feeding a global population of seven billion today. You can bet your corn futures that Monsanto will need many new ag technology breakthroughs if it expects its stock to double again like it had the past four years. And Big Ag is already facing heavy backlash over genetically modified food as it is.

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Here We Go Again: Monsanto Spends Millions to Defeat State’s GMO Labeling Effort

By on October 5, 2014 in News 0
A 2011 rally in support of GMO labeling. (Photo: Daneil Lobo/flickr/cc)

A 2011 rally in support of GMO labeling. (Photo: Daneil Lobo/flickr/cc)

via Andrea Germanos at Common Dreams:

Monsanto has poured $4.7 million into the campaign to defeat an initiative to label genetically modified food in Colorado.

The funds went to the No on 105 Coalition, which hopes it can beat Proposition 105, one of four statewide ballot measures Colorado voters will see on their November ballots.  If passed, the measure would require most food made with genetically modified material (GMOs) to be labeled “Produced With Genetic Engineering” starting July 1, 2016.

The GMO-labeling effort is backed by Right to Know Colorado, which says its “movement is built on the foundation that we have the basic right to know what is in our food and what we are feeding our families.”

The campaign contribution continues a pattern of big spending to defeat state GMO labeling efforts, such as those in California and Washington, not only by by the St.

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Mayans Defeat Monsanto In Guatemala

By on September 16, 2014 in News 7

Anga Bottione-Rossi00Who’s got the cojones to stand up to Monsanto and send them packing? The Mayans of Guetamala, that’s who!

IC Magazine reports on the recent victory of the Mayan People’s Movement against Monsanto’s attempt to bring their patented, genetically engineered seeds into Guatemala, displacing traditional seed diversity:

On September 4th, after ten days of widespread street protests against the biotech giant Monsanto’s expansion into Guatemalan territory, groups of indigenous people joined by social movements, trade unions and farmer and women’s organizations won a victory when congress finally repealed the legislation that had been approved in June.

The demonstrations were concentrated outside the Congress and Constitutional Court in Guatemala City during more than a week, and coincided with several Mayan communities and organizations defending food sovereignty through court injunctions in order to stop the Congress and the President, Otto Perez Molina, from letting the new law on protection of plant varieties, known as the “Monsanto Law”, take effect.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Anti-GMO Movement

By on August 3, 2014 in News 83

I often agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson; However it appears to me that he’s either deliberately withholding information here, and/or he doesn’t fully know what he’s talking about. What’s your input disinfonauts?

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Stephen Jay Gould

Pardon the vertical video.  They must not have seen this PSA. Just say no to vertical video.

via IFL Science

There has been a considerable amount of discussion and debate regarding the safety of genetically modified food. Though the topic has been researched over and over again, there isn’t evidence that eating conventional produce will cause disease, despite whatever the scientifically-illiterate Food Babe has to say. In fact, over 2000 studies have found GM food to be perfectly safe.

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Conclusive Link Between GMOs and Cancer | Brainwash Update

By on July 18, 2014 in News 19

Abby Martin goes over the publication of a study on how genetically modified foods (GMOs) affect living organisms, as well as the pushback the study received by the GMO companies like Monsanto who fought unsuccessfully to silence the findings of the research.

LIKE Breaking the Set @ http://fb.me/JournalistAbbyMartin
FOLLOW Abby Martin @ http://twitter.com/AbbyMartin

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Inside Monsanto, America’s Third-Most-Hated Company

By on July 5, 2014 in News 26

BBW_cover_070714Well no surprise that the spinmeisters at America’s third-most-hated company, Monsanto, chose Bloomberg Businessweek to depict them as unjustly and unreasonably reviled, but nonetheless it’s interesting to review their take on just why we shouldn’t hate the corporate bad guys du jour:

…In a Harris Poll this year measuring the “reputation quotient” of major companies, Monsanto ranked third-lowest, above BP  and Bank of America and just behind Halliburton. For much of its history it was a chemical company, producing compounds used in electrical equipment, adhesives, plastics, and paint. Some of those chemicals—DDT, Agent Orange, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—have had long and controversial afterlifes. The company is best known, however, as the face of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

On May 24, cities worldwide saw the second annual “March Against Monsanto.” In New York City, a couple thousand protesters gathered in Union Square, next to a farmers’ market, to hear speakers charge that the company was fighting efforts in states all over the country to mandate the labeling of GM foods; that organic crops were being polluted by GM pollen blown in on the wind, only for Monsanto to sue the organic farmers for intellectual-property theft; that Monsanto had developed a “Terminator” gene that made crops sterile.

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Oregon Voters Overwhelmingly Approve Ban of GE Crops

By on May 22, 2014 in News 13
PIC: USDA (PD)

PIC: USDA (PD)

Lauren McCauley writes at Common Dreams:

In a victory for sustainable food advocates everywhere, two counties in Oregon on Tuesday voted to ban the cultivation of genetically engineered (GE) crops.

Despite an onslaught of spending by agribusiness giants such as DuPont and Monsanto, voters in Jackson County and Josephine County overwhelming took a stand for measures protecting “seed sovereignty and local control” of food systems. The Jackson Measure 15-119 passed 66-34 percent, while the Josephine County Measure 17-58 passed 58-42 percent.

“It’s a great day for the people of Oregon who care about sustainability and healthy ecosystems!” GMO Free Oregon wrote on their Facebook page after receiving the final tally.

“Tonight family farmers stood up for our basic right to farm,” cheered Elise Higley, Jackson County farmer and campaign director for the Our Family Farms Coalition, in a statement following the vote.

Calling the bans a “tremendous victory” for the citizens and farmers of the counties, as well as for the national anti-GMO movement, Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), said the votes are further proof that, when given a voice, citizens will choose a sustainable food system over corporate-dominated agribusiness.

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Your Food Is Poisoning You

By on May 13, 2014 in News 18

Crop Spraying - geograph.org.uk - 445532Is there anything left that’s safe to eat? Devon Jackson writes for Outside that “[f]or years, an underground movement has claimed that the very food we eat—by virtue of the pesticides and herbicides we so commonly use—is poisoning us. Until now, they’ve been (at best) ignored and (more often than not) mocked. Suddenly though, it looks like the joke has been on us all along”:

There’s a scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the Air Force subjects Richard Dreyfus and his fellow Third Encounterers to the media. The press conference is actually going pretty well, the media seem to be on the verge of believing these people—until one of them, a bearded old hermit type (Roberts Blossom) launches into a speech about how he once saw Bigfoot. Credibility: shot.

Such is the case, too, with people who’ve been trying to link celiac disease (and other ills) with the use of the herbicide glyphosate.

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Why Does Everyone Hate Monsanto?

By on March 5, 2014 in News 52

Hazardous-pesticideIn recent years, no company has been more associated with evil than Monsanto, says Lessley Anderson, asking “why?” for Modern Farmer:

The house was raised above the ground, like a mushroom or a white ray gun, its rooms radiating out like spokes of a wheel. It was 1957 and this was the “House of the Future,” a prototype modular house created by Monsanto, in collaboration with M.I.T. to help solve the housing crisis baby boom America was in the middle of. Not coincidentally, the house was made of plastic, one of Monsanto’s products at the time.

“They imagined fast subdivisions of this house, like Levittown,” says Gary Van Zante, curator of architecture and design at the M.I.T. Museum.

While that never happened, Walt Disney did select it as an exhibition at his new Disneyland. For 10 years, until it was torn down, the chemical giant’s creation stood peacefully in The Happiest Place On Earth, where millions of people marveled at it.

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Monsanto Goes Organic

By on January 23, 2014 in News 13

Yes, you read that right, Monsanto is concocting a line of trademarked organic vegetables. Let’s hope it takes off and they decide to give up on their favorite genetically modified varietals. Report from Wired:

…Changing the agricultural game is what Monsanto does. The company whose name is synonymous with Big Ag has revolutionized the way we grow food—for better or worse. Activists revile it for such mustache-twirling practices as suing farmers who regrow licensed seeds or filling the world with Roundup-resistant super­weeds. Then there’s Monsanto’s reputation—scorned by some, celebrated by others—as the foremost purveyor of genetically modified commodity crops like corn and soybeans with DNA edited in from elsewhere, designed to have qualities nature didn’t quite think of.

seminisSo it’s not particularly surprising that the company is introducing novel strains of familiar food crops, invented at Monsanto and endowed by their creators with powers and abilities far beyond what you usually see in the produce section.

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