Above Photo:Â Mercola.com
This Time, By Court Decision
Monsanto’s plans to spread GMO seeds continue to be obstructed, at least in other nations, most notably, in Mexico, in which their ban on GMO corn.
This legal battle continues, and in the last week of January, a Mexican court upheld a 2013 ruling that followed a legal challenge on the effects GMO crops have on the environment, which temporarily put a stop on GMO corn-growing, including pilot plots.
Laura Tamayo, Monsanto’s regional corporate director, commented:
“It’s going to take a long while for all the evidence to be presented. I think we’re talking years.”
Monsanto’s yellow corn imports will increase by 20+ percent the next season, because of increasing production costs and the weakening peso. Mexico is self-sufficient when it comes to the country’s white corn, they rely on GMO corn that comes from the United States to feed livestock.
As reported by Reuters’ David Alire Garcia in Mexico City:
Mexico is the birthplace of modern corn, domesticated about 8,000 years ago and today the planet’s most-produced grain.
If new U.S. President Donald Trump upends the North American Free Trade Agreement as he has threatened and U.S. supplies are not longer available, Tamayo said Mexico might have to look to other major corn producers, like Argentina and Brazil.
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Prominent Mexican politicians, including former President Felipe Calderon, say the nation should consider ending purchases from U.S. corn producers in favor of Brazil and Argentina if Trump applies new taxes on Mexican exports to its northern neighbor.
“But there’s no magic wand to do that,” she said. It would be “disastrous” in the short term to source from new South American suppliers since that would mean higher transport and other costs, Tamayo added.
[How predictable an analysis coming from Monsanto’s regional corporate director…]
Monsanto tries to expand its markets into Mexico
Monsanto several years ago submitted two applications to grow GMO corn commercially in Mexico’s northwestern state Sinaloa. The region is known for being the country’s largest corn-producing area, and Monsanto wanted a huge hunk of it: both applications requested 1.7 million acres of land.
Both of these applications are still pending approval, but that day may never come. While Monsanto hails itself as an agricultural business, the truth is that the company does anything but help farmers. They’ve been destroying real farming for the last few decades.
Ostensibly, Monsanto’s primary business in Mexico is “developing and selling conventional corn seeds and vegetable seeds,” but Tamayo says the company is committed to defending the so-called “benefits” of GM crops on what she calls “scientific grounds.”
However, according Tamayo, the corporation didn’t recognize any obligation to convince consumers that their products were good for years; instead, they focused on the farmers. This allowed environmental organizations to take over the debate.
What convoluted bullshit, at the highest level of incomprehensibly poor logic! Monsanto has second rate minds in their legal team, judging from the recent decision in Fresno California, which I recently wrote about here at OEN:
Mandatory Carcinogen warning label on Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer: Coming Soon in California!Â
also:Â Mexican Avocados vs. US GMO Potatoes: USDA’s Vindictive Response Part of the Wall against Mexico?
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The United States Department of Agriculture, like a small child with a new toy called Genetic Modification, has been aiding and abetting the development of Monsanto for many decades.
The REAL mistake lies in the creation of Monsanto as a whole, rather than their failure to try to brainwash the public more openly. Obviously these modified corn seeds could contaminate heirloom varieties, and that the pesticides used to protect GMO crops are harmful to beneficial insects like bees — which have been dying off in record numbers.
Corn was invented in Mexico from strains of grasses 8-10,000 years ago, so of course Mexican corn growers are fiercely resistant and suspicious of these monstrous corporate lies!
Community advocates state that Mexico’s 59 varieties of native corn will be at risk if Monsanto is allowed to take hold of the corn market.
Monsanto has ruined agriculture in many nations
Look at India to see the effects of Monsanto on agriculture. Farmer suicide rates in India have skyrocketed, and the primary causes is the biotech giant’s seed monopoly. Things changed when Monsanto entered India. In 2013, they reportedly controlled some 95 percent of the cotton seed market in the country.
What about seeds? Seeds had always been a resource for farmers, but Monsanto claimed them as “intellectual property,” and began collecting royalties on their products.
Monsanto also sought out to change farming practices on the whole, eliminating open-pollinated cotton seeds, demanding monoculture farming techniques, and even subverting India’s own regulatory processes.
Monsanto even used public resources to promote its non-renewable hybrids and GMOs, with the help of “public private partnerships.”
Monsanto’s creation of seed monopolies and profit-seeking royalty collection, combined with the outright destruction of any alternatives, has left farmers in India devastated. Debt, distress, and suicide run rampant under Monsanto’s rule. Data from the Indian government suggests this: some 75 percent of rural debt is attributed to “purchased inputs,” which suggests that as farmer’s oppressive debt grows, so do Monsanto’s profits.
India’s Agricultural Ministry’s January 2012 internal advisory noted:
“Cotton farmers are in a deep crisis since shifting to Bt cotton. The spate of farmer suicides in 2011-12 has been particularly severe among Bt cotton farmers.”
Monsanto puts forth its calculated lying propaganda when it claims that they are in the business to HELP farmers.
This is in fact all a very transparent monstrous lie, which only the most naive and stupid people in the world could possibly believe.
The folks at Monsanto far worse than mere “corporate bad boys,” and their practices in usurping, subverting, and abnegating 8,000 to 10,000 years of agricultural history with their GMO madness: these are not mere “shenanigans”! These are tactics as bad or worse than the Mafia’s (hence, Monsanto Mafia, but that might be too much of an undeserved insulting comparison to the Mafia).
Please see also this 2015 EcoWatch story on Monsanto getting the double whammy legally in Campeche and in Yucatan regarding GMO soybean cultivation:
Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Indignación and Litiga OLE reportedly said that farming GMO soybeans in the region would put honey production and approximately 15,000 Maya farm families at risk due to the use of the glyphosate (the herbicide linked to cancer). It was also claimed that soy production would lead to deforestation in Campeche.
According to Al Jazeera, “Fewer than 30 percent of Mexican farmers even use conventional hybrid maize–high-yielding, single-use seeds, which need to be purchased every year,” and prefer “to stick with seeds they can save year to year, often varieties of the native ‘landraces’ of maize the injunction is intended to protect.” Still, Monsanto “has the Mexican market for yellow maize seeds; 90 percent of U.S. maize is in GM seeds, and that is the source for Mexico’s imports of yellow maize.”
Mexico’s initial ban of GMO corn in September 2013 was overturned in August 2015, which opened the door for more business opportunities for Monsanto pending favorable later court decisions, as Telesurtv noted. The multinational company announced that it was seeking to double its sales in the country over the next five years. However, this latest ruling from the appellate court could drive Monsanto’s ambitions to the ground.
A staunch anti-GMO movement has swelled in the country in order to preserve the country’s unique biodiversity of its staple crop. Lawyer Bernardo Ba’tiz, advisor to the lead plaintiffs’ organization, Demanda Colectiva, spoke about the significance of the two separate cases.
He said that Mexico is “a country of great biological, cultural, agricultural diversity and [therefore the courts should consider the impact of] planting GMO corn, soybeans or other crops. In a country like ours, among other negative effects that would result, is that Mexican honey would be difficult to keep organic.”