Why Does Monsanto Always Win?

Monsanto’s political influence clearly reaches far beyond our U.S. borders. Most recently, in an effort to “end hunger in Africa,” the Obama administration drafted some of the world’s largest food and finance companies to invest in projects all over the continent5. Much of the $3 billion effort will go toward developing seeds and fertilizers and building silos for storage. To do this, the President has rounded up the usual suspects, which includes Monsanto.

However, unlike the U.S., some donor countries are insisting that their money be spent on traditional food handouts instead of genetically engineered monoculture, such as that offered by Tanseed, a Tanzanian seed company that will spend $11 million buying certified seed to be sold in little packets to small farmers.

Still, the evidence tells us genetically engineered crops cannot coexist with organic or conventional crops. They usually end up contaminating nearby fields, turning those farmers into patent-infringing criminals in the process—a scenario no farmer on any continent could ever have imagined a couple of decades ago.

Another project seeking to establish genetically engineered crops in Africa is the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Through this alliance, heavy-weights like Monsanto and other biotech companies, along with the Gates Foundation, are foolishly promoting GE crops as the answer to Africa’s hunger problem.

But donating patented seeds, which takes away the farmers’ sovereignty, is not the way to save the third-world poor.

The Gates Foundation has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to AGRA, and in 2006 Robert Horsch was hired for the project. Horsch was a Monsanto executive for 25 years. In a nutshell, the project may be sold under the banner of altruism and ‘sustainability’, but in reality it’s anything but. It’s just a multi-billion dollar enterprise to transform Africa into a GE-crop-friendly continent.

In the end, such “humanitarian” efforts are doomed to fail while allowing Big Biotech to make obscene profits at the poor’s expense. African farmer’s will likely encounter the same problems as those in India, where farmers growing genetically engineered crops have been committing suicide due to financial hardships at a rate of one farmer taking his own life every 30 minutes…

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