Kansas Farmer Sues Monsanto Over Rogue GMO Wheat

Originally posted by Phage
Rice futures plunged,

As pointed out, that doesn't seem to have happened with wheat futures.

So I have a little time to do a bit of background research on this old rice case, and what I find is...

The announcement by the USDA that Rice was "contaminated" with a version of GMO that had not been approved was on August 18, 2006 and the price was said to drop almost immediately. By 14 percent according to one report.

So, back to check the historical rice futures records. I find...



Yes, a big drop, immediately.
Completely unlike the wheat case.

The difference is that the rice was already in the export supply. Having already been exported to 30 different countries. It was EVERYWHERE and was going to be a massive task to stop it, destroy it, and sort it all out.

The wheat, in the other hand, appears to be in one part of one field of one farmer who had not yet even planted a crop at that field yet.

reply to post by burntheships

It's not even an attenuated virus. It's a singe gene. Seems that CMV needs quite a few to make it complete.
ictvdb.bio-mirror.cn...

reply to post by alfa1


Give it time, when all of the nations reject the GMO wheat,
prices will plummet.

Who wants to eat that carp anyways. Noooooooooooooooooooo.

And, they dont want it in the gates, who wants to pay Monsatan the rest
of their life.

Originally posted by burntheships
reply to post by alfa1

 

Give it time, when all of the nations reject the GMO wheat,
prices will plummet.

Who wants to eat that carp anyways. Noooooooooooooooooooo.

And, they dont want it in the gates, who wants to pay Monsatan the rest
of their life.

Just from a legal perspective, the fact that you cannot grow from the resulting seeds of your crop, and you have to buy new seed from Monsanto each year is a deal breaker for many countries. Imagine if Monsanto ever failed and went belly up? Who would get the patent rights to ALL THE WHEAT ON THE PLANET?

Absolutely INSANE if you ask me....the ultimate in greed.

Originally posted by Krakatoa
Just from a legal perspective, the fact that you cannot grow from the resulting seeds of your crop, and you have to buy new seed from Monsanto each year is a deal breaker for many countries. Imagine if Monsanto ever failed and went belly up? Who would get the patent rights to ALL THE WHEAT ON THE PLANET?

Absolutely INSANE if you ask me....the ultimate in greed.

Indeed.

Yes, and then look at India, and how all of the GMO cotton seed failed its
Indian farmers....it absolutely did not deliver. Monsatan sold them
GMO cotton, they paid the bucks and it failed. To those farmers,
that is their livelihood, their life.

reply to post by Krakatoa

Just from a legal perspective, the fact that you cannot grow from the resulting seeds of your crop, and you have to buy new seed from Monsanto each year is a deal breaker for many countries.

The question of saving seeds really is not exclusive to GMO or Monsanto. Virtually all hybrid seed used in large scale agriculture is patented and cannot be legally reseeded.
www.ers.usda.gov...

reply to post by burntheships

Monsatan. Cute. Original.

Bt cotton in India. Really bad, right. Apparently not when proper techniques are used.

NAGPUR: Every morning, Vijay Atmaram Ingle thanks his stars for having agreed to conduct the first Bt cotton trials in India in 1997-98. The success landed him and his village, Chitalwadi in Akola district, on the Bt cotton map of world.

articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com...

reply to post by Phage


How old is that article?

You missed the thousands of farmers that bought GMO
Cotton seed since then, and it failed. Maybe not enough Monsatan fertilizer?
Not enough Monsatan Round Up? You missed it when the Indian farmers were
so defrauded they assaulted a Monsatan office headquarters.

news.bbc.co.uk...
Indian farmers target Monsanto

Angry farmers in southern India have stormed a building that formerly housed the global biotech giant, Monsanto.

More than 40 farmers ransacked the corporation's former Bangalore facility on Thursday, after staging noisy demonstrations.

They were protesting after more than 70 farmers committed suicide in the region in the last three months.

Their deaths are being blamed on debt and drought - and on the introduction of Monsanto's genetically modified crops.

According to eyewitnesses, the farmers went on the rampage in a former Monsanto research centre, located in India's top science facility, the Indian Institute of Science.

They damaged furniture and windows, and shouted slogans demanding Monsanto close down its operations in India.

reply to post by burntheships

It's dated May 16, 2013.

Maybe there was a lot of hyperbole about the actual situation in India. Maybe some farmers screwed up. The seeds aren't magic beans. This guy seems to have gotten it right.

reply to post by Phage


Hyperbole...Monsatan and its great crops.
Cherry pick one (likely poster boy farmer).

Not impressive.

reply to post by burntheships

Yup. Hyperbole.

“The issue of farmer suicides is not just entirely a farmer issue, or rural issue, or a village issue — it is a much more broader political-economic problem,” said Raju Das, a developmental studies professor at York University.

While the spotlight is on farmers, forgotten is a suicide crisis among Indians where the suicide rate is twice as high for the general population and even higher for young females.

The issue of farmer suicides first gained media attention in 1995 as the southern state of Maharashtra began reporting a significant rise in farmers killing themselves.

But in 2008, the International Food Policy Research Institute, an alliance of 64 governments, private foundations, and international and regional organizations that aims to end hunger in the developing world, reached an entirely different conclusion.

“It is not only inaccurate, but simply wrong to blame the use of Bt cotton as the primary cause of farmer suicides in India,” said the report, stating that the introduction of Bt cotton in India had actually been effective in producing higher yields and decreasing pesticide usage by nearly 40%.

news.nationalpost.com...

They "stormed" Monsanto because of a drought? That's what your link says.

reply to post by Phage


Yep, that article is hyperbole. Seen it reprinted several times that way...
its pure BS.

outdated farming methods

meaning
....

Not enough Round Up, not enough Monsatan fertilizer.

On the other hand, Indian farmers that went the NON GMO
route: total success!

What if the agricultural revolution has already happened and we didn’t realize it? Essentially, that’s the idea in this report from the Guardian about a group of poverty-stricken Indian rice and potato farmers who harvested confirmed world-record yields of rice and potatoes. Best of all: They did it completely sans-GMOs or even chemicals of any kind.


[Sumant] Kumar, a shy young farmer in Nalanda district of India’s poorest state Bihar, had — using only farmyard manure and without any herbicides — grown an astonishing 22.4 tonnes of rice on one hectare [~2.5 acres] of land. This was a world record and with rice the staple food of more than half the world’s population of seven billion, big news.

It beat not just the 19.4 tonnes achieved by the “father of rice”, the Chinese agricultural scientist Yuan Longping, but the World Bank-funded scientists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, and anything achieved by the biggest European and American seed and GM companies. And it was not just Sumant Kumar. Krishna, Nitish, Sanjay and Bijay, his friends and rivals in Darveshpura, all recorded over 17 tonnes, and many others in the villages around claimed to have more than doubled their usual yields.

grist.org...

The real story behind Indian cotton, and GMO...

www.globalresearch.ca...

So despite all the GM seeds, India’s cotton yields keep on dropping. (In some states, they are now lower than they were before Bt seeds became popular.) So what’s the way forward?

To me this is a very hard question, but not to the Business Standard, which simply reports the news that

continuous R&D and innovation to develop new value-added technologies is imperative to stay ahead of insect resistance. To support such innovation, Monsanto demanded government policies’ support to encourage investment in R&D which will result in Indian farmers having a wider choice of better and advanced technologies translating thereby, higher yield.

No kidding — innovation from Monsanto is going to keep us ahead of the insects and guarantee higher yields. But lets take a look at the facts, at least as reported by the industry-friendly ISAAA. Yields started dropping after 2007/8. But that was just after new genetic constructs started appearing: a new 2-gene technology in 2006/7, and by 2009, six different constructs were approved. And these rapidly proliferating technologies were appearing in dizzying numbers of seed products. After 2006/7, the number of Bt hybrid seeds being offered to farmers jumped from 62 to 131 to 274; by 2009/10 there were 522.

There you have it: Indian cotton farmers today are being pelted with a hailstorm of new gene technologies and seed products, their yields steadily dropping, and the way forward is clear to the Business Standard: invest in Monsanto innovation.

edit on 6-6-2013 by burntheships because: (no reason given)

reply to post by burntheships

On the other hand, Indian farmers that went the NON GMO
route: total success!

Um. That's about rice and potatoes. Not cotton. I thought you were bitching about cotton. It's also about small scale farms. That sort of farming becomes problematic the greater the acreage.

The real story behind Indian cotton, and GMO...

No. Not really.

Check it out: the biggest rises were from 2002/3 to 2004/5, when yields rose 56% from 302 to 470 kg. But by 2004/5, only 5.6% of India’s cotton farmers had adopted Bt. Do the math: if those 5.6% of planters were really responsible for a 56% rise in yields, then they must have been harvesting 3,288 kg/ha

www.globalresearch.ca...

Shall we go back to Ingle? He doesn't seem to be complaining. And I'm pretty sure he isn't the only success story.

"After trials over three seasons, when Dr MS Swaminathan asked us in 2001 whether the technology was worth it, we had unanimously said yes. Today, Bt cotton has increased my family's (including three brothers) land holding from 14 acres to 88 acres. We constructed two pucca houses and use drip irrigation for all the land. My Chitalwadi farm is a model for farmers," says Ingle proudly.

After initial support by seed company, dealers and irrigation companies, universities and government departments too are now providing information. "When I first cultivated Bt cotton, people made fun due to ignorance and misinformation. Now, as much as 2,000 acre is under Bt cotton in my village and surrounding areas," he said.

articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com...

India's cotton yield was 225 kg per hectare in 1990-91. It fell to 190 kg per hectare in 2000-01, a bad monsoon year. Bt cotton cultivation began in 2002, and its acreage shot up from 0.29 million hectares in 2002 to 9.4 million hectares in 2011-12. By this time, the Bt variety accounted for 90% of cotton acreage. The result? Cotton yield rose to 362 kg per hectare in 2005-06, and then increased further with fluctuations to 510 kg per hectare in 2010-11.

articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com...

Increased yields=Increase profits=Increased investment=increased acreage in Bt=increased production. Your "real story" doesn't seem to take that into account. So yes. The introduction of Bt cotton apparently had a great deal to do with the sudden increase in cotton production. What's your explanation?

reply to post by burntheships

The real story behind Indian cotton, and GMO...

No. Not really.

Check it out: the biggest rises were from 2002/3 to 2004/5, when yields rose 56% from 302 to 470 kg. But by 2004/5, only 5.6% of India’s cotton farmers had adopted Bt. Do the math: if those 5.6% of planters were really responsible for a 56% rise in yields, then they must have been harvesting 3,288 kg/ha

www.globalresearch.ca...


His figures are deceptive. He cites the percentage of farmers rather than coverage. A pointless comparison. Let's look at actual planted area.

From 2002 to 2005 coverage of Bt cotton increased from 0.0294 million hectares to 1.0148 million hectares. In that period of time the overall coverage of cotton went from 7.769 million hectares to 8.677 million. A total increase of 1.08 million hectares. The increase in coverage was almost exclusively due to the increase in Bt coverage. (see below, pages 19 and 24)

Cotton yield peaked (prior to Bt cotton) in the 1990s, at 257 kg/ha. In 2005 (with those added 10 million hectares of Bt) yield reached 362 kg/ha. By 2008 it had reached 432. During that period of time there was no increase in irrigation (page 13).

On a state by state basis the increase in yields follows the increase in Bt coverage.

The increased planting of Bt cotton fully accounts for the increase in cotton yields in India. Ask Mr. Ingle.

www.ncipm.org.in...

reply to post by alfa1


Of course . The most hated company on the planet couldn't have people planted on all the website posting the truth about them .
I mean they only buy companies that conduct testing proving what we are all saying is true. Monsanto is so kind and gentle and ethical ,no way would they plant disinformation .
No no ....

*titters*

reply to post by burntheships

Monsanto’s vice president and general counsel David Snively..

Snively? Snivelling Snively sound an apt name to me.

Hope all the small farmers get together and give that creepy outfit a good kick in the backside.

ETA:

I don't have a problem with GMO cotton, as it isn't going to be ingested in any way by people or animals, so if GMO can increase yeild and quality for crops like cotton, hemp, flax and so on, i don't see the problem.

But having said that...thinking about it, insects still visit these types of crop and will still be affected by the GMO pollen etc..so probably better to lose 10% yeild and still have the ability to naturally fertilise our food crops.

Originally posted by burntheships

Originally posted by Peter Brake
reply to post by burntheships

 

The FDA needs disbanding also, put a new agency in place that actually enforces protection of the environment and peoples health.

Indeed, I noticed that the USDA claims this wheat is safe, how do they know?
If it was so safe, why was it not given approval? I think they are full of it.
Its not safe, and they know it.

Exactly. The answer to the question of why it was never approved is haunting. Does anyone know? What was the reason????

reply to post by burntheships


Hurray!

The farmer should also sue for punitive damages too

reply to post by burntheships


Since corporations are considered "people" in the US can you sue them for punitive damages making their loss even greater?

Corporate Personhood

And since those "people" are being managed by actual persons, can you hold those persons responsible for corporate personhood.? And how does the Monsanto protection act plays into all this?

There are so many question with difficult answers concerning this evil company, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the legal issues.

reply to post by PtolemyII


Interesting that you mention that, I was just looking at an article on
Monsanto using Blackwater to infiltrate groups....
well its not that surpising but it is still a bit of a shocker.

www.theglobaldispatch.com...

Seems that Monsanto is feeling the heat from the the lastest "March Against Monsanto".