Shares of Monsanto (MON) dropped again Friday after South Korea joined Japan in suspending importation of genetically modified wheat sourced to the crop seed company.
The moves came after the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday that it found genetically engineered wheat, never approved for sale and thought to have been shelved, growing on a farm in Oregon.
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Japan earlier canceled plans to buy more wheat from the U.S. Other Asian countries said they're mulling similar moves.
Meanwhile, Monsanto plans to quit lobbying for acceptance of its genetically modified seed in Europe, where it's met with strong resistance. Everyone from French wine producers to German crop growers has objected to its modified seed.
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Last year, GM crops accounted for 88% of all corn in the U.S., 94% of cotton and 93% of soybeans, according to USDA figures. In Europe, they're estimated to account for less than 1% of crops.
The leaders of Big Agriculture–Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta–are determined that world's populations remain ignorant about the serious health and environmental risks of genetically modified crops and industrial agriculture. Deep layers of deception and corruption underlie both the science favoring GMOs and the corporations and governments supporting them.
This award-winning documentary, Seeds of Death, exposes the lies about GMOs and pulls back the curtains to witness our planet's future if Big Agriculture's new green revolution becomes our dominant food supply.
A Question and Answer fact sheet deconstructing Monsanto's GM claims and Big Agriculture's propaganda to accompany the film is available online:
I have decided to focus today's SR on GMOs and the transgenic sector because it represents such a clear example of the geopolitical shift we are living through: the Ascendence of the Non-geographical corporate states.
NGCSs are not just corporations, in a business sense, that we mean when we say, corporatocracy. These transnational entities are so big and so powerful that they are essentially states, literally countries without geography. They have their own foreign policies; their own goals that may have little to do with the policies of the country where they happen to be based. They control the political structure and write the laws that govern them, and judge them. They are the emerging world powers.
This transfer, is not a continuation of the chain of family, to tribe, to village, to duchies and the like, to nations. The NGCS springs from the business world. Its priority is profit. In its most extreme manifestation nothing else really is a factor.
Nowhere is the transfer of national power over to the NGCSs clearer than in what is happening in food and water. Parts of this trend are known, but the overarching strategy the NGCSs are following, and the tactics they are using are rarely seen as the coherent whole they are.
Monsanto, BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont and Syngenta. They are usually described as chemical pesticide companies but, I think, a better way to see them is as a corporate cohort making an aggressive attempt to gain domination over the world's food and water supplies.
What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.
In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.
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The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this:
Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat—or worse, your family can’t eat—you fight.
How sophisticated traders exploit an obscure USDA rule change to get rich, fleece farmers, and drive up food prices
EXTRACT:
Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and former director of the division of Trading and Markets at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, says the change further empowers traders to treat grain markets like “casinos,” and in the long-run the public pays. “It creates biases in markets that drive prices up,” he said. “The average consumer is completely undermined in this entire process.”
Yet another aspect of our failing food system and, once again, it comes down to putting profit ahead of wellness. Jo Robinson is the author of the forthcoming book ‘Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health.”
Here is another report on how Theocratic Rightist organizations are attempting to take over American healthcare, and then use their “religious preferences” to deny women full healthcare options. This is also another part of The Great Schism Trend.
Protesters rallied in Nevada as part of a global protest against seed giant Monsanto and the genetically modified food it produces.
“March Against Monsanto” protests Saturday drew some 2,000 protesters in Las Vegas and about 150 in Reno.
Las Vegas protesters marched about one mile down Las Vegas Boulevard to the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, while Reno protesters chanted and waved placards as they marched through downtown Reno.
Genetically modified plants are grown from seeds that are engineered to resist insecticides and herbicides, and to improve crop yields.
Most corn, soybean and cotton crops grown in the U.S. today have been genetically modified. But critics say genetically modified organisms can lead to serious health conditions and harm the environment.
Monsanto Co. says it respects people’s rights to express their opinion on the topic, but maintains that its seeds improve agriculture.
We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say
