tagged w/ seed monopolies
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“The crops that we grow are the basis of our civilization,” Todd Leake said. “If anything belongs in the public domain it is the crops we grow for food.”
President Barack Obama's administration has been investigating monopoly concentration in the seed business for over two years. But when the President spoke on the steps of the Seed Savers Exchange, an independent seed company, he didn't mention tht inquiry once. Nor did he talk about business concentration in other areas of agriculture, despite hearings held by his Department of Justice all over rural America.
Last week President Obama held a town hall meeting on the grounds of Iowa’s Seed Savers Exchange, an organization dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds.
The stop was part of a larger strategy to appeal to rural voters as the campaign season begins. The president spoke about job creation and the gridlock on Capitol Hill, both issues of concern, to be sure.
But what would have really resonated with rural America is a re-commitment to working toward fairness in our farm fields.
The President should know that growing economic opportunities in rural America will take confronting the concentrated market power (and thus political and legislative power) in several agricultural industries. It will take fulfilling a campaign promise to fight for family farmers and ranchers by ensuring fair and transparent markets.
The President couldn’t have picked a better spot to make this point. His venue, Seed Savers, is home to a trove of genetically diverse seed. It is the perfect counterpoint to the alarming extent to which ownership of this vital resource is privatized and concentrated. The top three firms, for example, account for more than 75 percent of U.S. corn seed sales.
Monsanto is the largest seed company in the world, receiving royalties from nearly every acre of corn, soybeans, and cotton planted in the U.S.; it also has a hand in much of the vegetable and sugar beet seed supply. Indeed, this level of control over our plant genetic resources and the narrowing of diversity makes the mission of groups like Seed Savers Exchange so much more important.
Out of Hand
Monsanto has a lock on the soy and corn seed market.
Confronting the business concentration in the seed business is paramount for the success of farmers, especially new farmers and businesses seeking to cultivate a niche in agriculture. But just as seeds as an organism are complex, so is untangling the roots of seed concentration.
And this gets us back to President Obama’s missed opportunity at Seed Savers Exchange.
President Obama’s administration initially signaled a willingness to tackle the problem of monopoly in the seed business. His Justice and Agriculture departments held workshops last year on all aspects of agricultural competition.
These hearings were unprecedented. Farmers, ranchers, farm advocacy organizations, small businesses, and consumers were encouraged that the agencies were investigating consolidation in the seed, livestock, dairy, poultry, and food retail industries.
“We’ve waited a long time for justice in the heartland,” said Missouri state senator and farmer Wes Shoemyer at the first Justice/Agriculture workshop in Ankeney, Iowa, which focused in part on problems in the seed industry.
But the hope was short-lived. There is no indication that either agency is furthering these investigations or taking meaningful action on outcomes of the investigations. The agencies don’t even seem inclined to publish a report in response to the thousands of public comments personally delivered at the 2010 workshops.
And then the President appears at Seed Savers Exchange to talk about the rural economy and doesn’t mention seeds or any of the other issues brought up in his own administration’s workshops.
It would behoove the President to look at the comments received at these workshops before he talks about the rural economy. Tucked within the thousands of comments the agencies received are both evidence of the problems with too much concentration in the seed business and reasonable solutions.
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“So how do we fix the industry?” Nelson asked. “I say we disallow any monopolies and the anticompetitive activities that come with them...I think we have to re-examine the safety and wisdom of granting long-term patents on living things.”
Indeed, even the assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Christine Varney, who has since left Justice, highlighted the problem of patents in her opening remarks: “You know, patents have in the past been used to maintain or extend monopolies, and that's illegal, and you can be sure, Secretary, that we are going to be looking very closely at any attempt to maintain or extend a monopoly through an abuse of patent laws.”
Such abuse of patent law has come in a variety of forms. Nelson said he’s witnessed the misuse of confidential GMO seed contracts, aggressively enforced through patent rights.
Indiana farmer David Runyon took to the microphone to recount his experience of being wrongfully pursued by Monsanto for alleged patent infringement. It turned out his conventional varieties of soybeans were contaminated by GMO material. He laid out the need to transfer liability to the patent holder in such events so that farmers aren’t pitted against each other.
“In my case whom do I sue but my neighboring farmers?” Runyon asked. “Because they are taking the liability when they sign that contract. And that's wrong. That's why it should go back to [the] patent holder.”
Woven within many comments was a plea for USDA to protect genetic diversity in seeds and breeds, and to keep germplasm public and accessible to our public land grant universities.
“The crops that we grow are the basis of our civilization,” Todd Leake said. “If anything belongs in the public domain it is the crops we grow for food.”
Fred Kirschenmann operates an organic farm in North Dakota and also serves as a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. He told the Obama administration officials, “We have lost about three-fourths of our crop seed stock -- that is the varieties of seeds that farmers have had available -- and about 30 percent of our livestock breeds, and as we move into a more uncertain future with more uncertain climates…we're going to need more diversity, not less, that are going to be locally adapted to these local conditions.”
Kirschenmann and others also pointed out that the future of our food supply relies on bringing young people into agriculture, which means ensuring they have a fair fighting chance at a profit.
“I believe our government has an obligation written in law not to pick winners and losers but to act as a referee and ensure the laws and regulations dealing with anticompetitive practices are enforced,” Nelson said.
These farmers’ messages were loud and clear, but they appear to have fallen on deaf ears. There has been no action (or even a peep) out of the Department of Justice. And President Obama didn’t mention his administration’s two-year investigation into the seed business when he spoke at the front door of an independent seed company.
More at the link“The crops that we grow are the basis of our civilization,” Todd Leake... more
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In 1992, Monsanto toppled regulatory hurtles facing its new transgenic crops by convincing the George H.W. Bush Administration to go along with the ruse that genetically engineered foods are "substantially equivalent" to normal foods and therefore don't need to be safety tested or labeled.
This was a terrible trick to play on the public, especially considering that 85% of consumers polled at the time thought it was "very important" to label genetically engineered foods. Since then, poll after poll has showed overwhelming support for the mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. But, because genetically engineered foods haven't been labeled, currently only 26% of the public know what they're eating.
FDA scientists knew that genetically engineered foods were different in 1992. They described genetically engineered foods as "an entirely new adventure," acknowledging that genetic engineering endows plants with novel material never before found in them, including "new proteins in the human diet."
Eighteen years later, investigations of genetically engineered foods are confirming scientists' suspicions that biotech's scattershot technique of spraying plant cells with a buckshot of foreign genes that hit chromozomes in random spots would trigger the expression of new allergens, change the character of plant proteins, and ultimately prove to be toxic to mammals' vital organs.
President Obama's Food & Drug Administration needs to admit that, in the Bush-Quayle era of deregulation, they took the wrong approach to genetically engineered foods. On the campaign trail, Obama professed support for mandatory labeling. Now is the time for him to fulfill his promise to support consumers' right to know.In 1992, Monsanto toppled regulatory hurtles facing its new transgenic crops by... more
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Throughout much of agriculture, a remarkable span of 10,000 years, farmers were largely the stewards of the land and the crops that they grew. Seeds collected from one year’s harvest were selected, stored, and used again for successive growing seasons.
As Frank Morton, an organic seed breeder explains in this segment of the Seeds Of
Life series, the role of the farmer at the center of agriculture began to change with the advent of hybrid seed development beginning with hybrid varieties of corn in the 1930’s.
Hybrid seeds are created out of two separate parent lines, each (parent) line, incapable of producing the desirable plant characteristics themselves. Only the seeds of their offspring, provide the desired mix of traits, measured by characteristics, such as : crop yield; protein content; oil quality; disease resistance, and other characteristics. Most importantly, especially to the commercial seed companies, the plants grown from these seeds do not produce useful seeds for further use. Once grown, the plants themselves are dead ends; no further selection under the farmers control can be made to create better crops for the future. Giving new meaning to the term “free enterprise”, hybrid seeds can only be purchased from the commercial seed companies (those in control of the proprietary parent lines); nature’s inherent generosity, circumvented.
cont.Throughout much of agriculture, a remarkable span of 10,000 years, farmers were... more
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First public hearing to prepare the presentation of the GM Maize case before international courts
Guadalajara, March 2, 2010. Faced with the international "technical" conference of the FAO in Guadalajara, "Agricultural Biotechnologies in Developing Countries," which is little more than just the promotion of GM crops - today we inaugurated the "First public hearing to prepare the presentation of the GM Maize case before international courts," organized by La Via Campesina North America Region, Red en Defensa del Maíz (Network in Defense of Maize, Mexico), and Asamblea Nacional de Afectados Ambientales (Assembly of People Displaced by Environmental Impacts, Mexico), with the participation of 276 people, mostly members and leaders of peasant, family farm , and indigenous peoples' organizations from 19 Mexican states, the USA, and Canada.
The hearing was inaugurated by Alberto Gómez Flores of La Via Campesina, Eutimio Díaz of the Wixarika People (in the name of the Network for the Defense of Maize), and Octavio Rosas of the Asamblea Nacional de Afectados Ambientales. Alberto Gómez said that the peasant and indigenous people of Mexico feel it is an act of aggression for the FAO to come here to promote GMOs, called the GM contamination of maize "a crime against humanity." He was followed by Pat Mooney of the ETC Group (Canada), who denounced that "GMO contaminated and transnational corporations (TNCs) have now contaminated the FAO and the UN, which is another crime against humanity." He noted that "what is a crisis for people - hunger - is cynically seen by TNCs as an opportunity, to push new products, like GM crops."
Camila Montecinos of GRAIN in Chile sent her regrets that the terrible recent earthquake in her country made it impossible for her to travel. But in her document, which was read to the audience, she stated that "GMO contamination is an intentional strategy by TNCs to open new markets for their seeds," using the argument that once local crops are already contaminated, there is no longer any reason to maintain bans on legal GMO plantings. George Naylor, ex-president of the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) in the USA, told an anecdote from his neighbors, who found that their cows refuse to eat GM maize, and he argued that this exposes the lie by industry when they claim there are no negative health effects of GMOs.
Ernesto Ladrón de Guevara of UNORCA, reviewed the history of neoliberal laws in Mexico, on seeds, biosafety, etc., and noted that they have given "poor or negative results." Similarly, attorney Evangelina Robles of the Coas Collective, explain how, with the signing of NAFTA, a process of modifying nationals was initiated in Mexico, with the objective of "disarticulating and privatizing of the elements of the territories of indigenous and peasant peoples; the land, air, forests, water, biodiversity, etc.," paving the way for GMOs, among other evil things.
The afternoon saw testimonies and indigenous, peasant and family farmers. A Mixtec man and women from Oaxaca told how their native maize varieties had been contaminated with as many a three different transgenes, but also that they have been developing local techniques for decontamination, such as pulling up deformed plants, or cutting off their tassels. Eutimio Díaz, of the Wixarika people in Jalisco, described how, "for indigenous people, maize is first, maize is ours, and we are part of her." He noted that his communities have made a firm decision to defend their maize, and therefore, "we will not accept any seeds from the government, because we don't know what they are, or for what real purpose they are giving them to us." Sergio Bautista, of the Nahua people in the Huasteca region of Hidalgo, agreed, stating that, "we will not plant any seed from SAGARPA (the Ministry of Agriculture)." He also said that "maize is very sacred to us, it is our life."
cont.First public hearing to prepare the presentation of the GM Maize case before... more
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