Bovine Growth Hormone In August Monsanto sold its controversial and widely rejected recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone BGH , a genetically engineered veterinary drug designed to boost milk production in dairy cows, to pharmaceutical company Eli Lily.
Click here to read the book chapter about what happened in Canada to BGH. Patents Monsanto owns patents on its genetic sequences and enforces its patent rights over these traits by suing farmers it believes have saved and used its seeds without authorization. Monsanto now owns Terminator technology which would be the perfect tool for the corporation to protect its patents, without the bad public relations of suing farmers see below. Click here to see Vandana Shiva describe what patents mean to Monsanto.
Monsanto responded with a pledge never to commercialize Terminator. However Monsanto never pledged to stop research. Vegetables Though fruits and vegetables remain, for the most part, free of genetic engineering some GE squash and papaya varieties have been commercialized , Monsanto now owns a large part of the fruit and vegetable seed market.
In Monsanto formed the International Seed Group, a holding company to invest in vegetable and fruit seed businesses. Cliquez ici pour vous inscrire. Share this:. Search Search for:. Monsanto Monsanto is now owned by Bayer. These studies associate exposure to glyphosate with a number of negative effects on human and animal health, including long term or chronic effects: Birth defects in the Argentinean state of Chaco, where GM soya and rice crops are heavily sprayed with glyphosate, increased nearly fourfold over the years to Similar defects were also found in woman from Paraguay exposed to glyphosate-based herbicides during pregnancy.
These defects were compatible with those induced in laboratory experiments at much lower concentrations than normal commercial glyphosate concentrations. Glyphosate is a suspected endocrine disruptor. This means it could disrupt production of vital reproductive hormones, such as progesterone and oestrogen. Published studies demonstrate various endocrine effects in animals and human cells associated with glyphosate.
In the fall of , Monsanto trained its legal guns on Pilot Grove; ever since, its farmers have been drawn into a costly, disruptive legal battle against an opponent with limitless resources. Neither Pilot Grove nor Monsanto will discuss the case, but it is possible to piece together much of the story from documents filed as part of the litigation.
Monsanto began investigating soybean farmers in and around Pilot Grove several years ago. There is no indication as to what sparked the probe, but Monsanto periodically investigates farmers in soybean-growing regions such as this one in central Missouri. The company has a staff devoted to enforcing patents and litigating against farmers.
Once Pilot Grove had been targeted, Monsanto sent private investigators into the area. At least 17 such surveillance videos were made, according to court records. The investigative work was outsourced to a St.
It was a McDowell investigator who erroneously fingered Gary Rinehart. McDowell, like Monsanto, will not comment on the case. The co-op provided more than pages of documents pertaining to dozens of farmers. Monsanto sued two farmers and negotiated settlements with more than 25 others it accused of seed piracy.
Although the co-op had provided voluminous records, Monsanto then sued it in federal court for patent infringement. In effect, Monsanto wanted the co-op to police its own customers.
In the majority of cases where Monsanto sues, or threatens to sue, farmers settle before going to trial. The cost and stress of litigating against a global corporation are just too great.
The more the co-op has resisted, the more legal firepower Monsanto has aimed at it. Monsanto next petitioned to make potential damages punitive—tripling the amount that Pilot Grove might have to pay if found guilty. After a judge denied that request, Monsanto expanded the scope of the pre-trial investigation by seeking to quadruple the number of depositions. Monsanto gave them two weeks to comply. Whether Pilot Grove can continue to wage its legal battle remains to be seen.
Whatever the outcome, the case shows why Monsanto is so detested in farm country, even by those who buy its products. The future of the company may lie in seeds, but the seeds of the company lie in chemicals. Monsanto was founded in by John Francis Queeny, a tough, cigar-smoking Irishman with a sixth-grade education. A buyer for a wholesale drug company, Queeny had an idea. So he went into business for himself on the side. Queeny was convinced there was money to be made manufacturing a substance called saccharin, an artificial sweetener then imported from Germany.
Louis waterfront. With borrowed equipment and secondhand machines, he began producing saccharin for the U. The young company faced other challenges.
Questions arose about the safety of saccharin, and the U. Department of Agriculture even tried to ban it. His persistence and the loyalty of one steady customer kept the company afloat. That steady customer was a new company in Georgia named Coca-Cola. Monsanto added more and more products—vanillin, caffeine, and drugs used as sedatives and laxatives. In , Monsanto began making aspirin, and soon became the largest maker worldwide. During World War I, cut off from imported European chemicals, Monsanto was forced to manufacture its own, and its position as a leading force in the chemical industry was assured.
After Queeny was diagnosed with cancer, in the late s, his only son, Edgar, became president. Where the father had been a classic entrepreneur, Edgar Monsanto Queeny was an empire builder with a grand vision. Under Edgar Queeny and his successors, Monsanto extended its reach into a phenomenal number of products: plastics, resins, rubber goods, fuel additives, artificial caffeine, industrial fluids, vinyl siding, dishwasher detergent, anti-freeze, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides.
Its safety glass protects the U. Constitution and the Mona Lisa. Its synthetic fibers are the basis of Astroturf. During the s, the company shifted more and more resources into biotechnology. In it created a molecular-biology group for research in plant genetics. The next year, Monsanto scientists hit gold: they became the first to genetically modify a plant cell. Louis, developed one genetically modified product after another—cotton, soybeans, corn, canola. From the start, G. Monsanto has sought to portray G.
In its list of corporate milestones, all but a handful are from the recent era. One of the benefits of doing this, as the company does not point out, was to channel the bulk of the growing backlog of chemical lawsuits and liabilities onto Solutia, keeping the Monsanto brand pure.
For many years Monsanto produced two of the most toxic substances ever known— polychlorinated biphenyls, better known as PCBs, and dioxin. Monsanto no longer produces either, but the places where it did are still struggling with the aftermath, and probably always will be. Twelve miles downriver from Charleston, West Virginia, is the town of Nitro, where Monsanto operated a chemical plant from to A by-product of the process was the creation of a chemical that would later be known as dioxin.
John Francis Queeny founds Monsanto, giving the company his wife's maiden name. Queeny, a purchaser for a wholesale drug house, forms his St. Louis-based company in order to begin production of saccharin, an artificial sweetener developed in the latter part of the 19th century. The company expands to industrial chemicals and drugs and introduces now-banned polychlorinated biphenyls PCBs.
Monsanto creates its first hybrid seed corn and expands production of cleaners and synthetic rubbers and plastics. Navy tests determine that the hydraulic fluid the company is trying to sell to the military is associated with liver damage in humans. Congress bans production of PCBs after they were found to cause cancer, including damage to the liver, immune system, reproductive system, skin, eyes and brain.
The company purchases chemical manufacturer G. It was in no way lavish, but by the end of the month I was eating a healthy balanced diet of mostly rice, meat and veggies. Every person on the planet, says Jeavons, can feed themselves with just square feet of well-managed land.
A little known study by botanist Sue Edwards found that organic gardening test sites in Ethiopia produced significantly higher yields from every single crop tested. At the same time that more and more data is pointing toward organics and away from the giant mono-crop farming that embraces genetically modified foods, unflattering data on American-style agriculture continues to mount. In , the US used five times more fertilizer than it did in , with crop yields lagging far behind, at an estimated fifty percent increase.
Polluting pesticide use is at an all time high while more crops are lost to pests now than six decades ago. More and more scientists are getting behind the argument that industrial agriculture is simply unsustainable. As a global community it is time to look honestly at the facts about how our food is grown.
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