How the US Government is helping Monsanto get into Europe

[Lars77]

Monsanto’s magic beans

Give a person food and you feed them for a day, show them how to grow their own food and you feed them for life or so the adage goes in one form or another. But I would add ‘force them to buy your food every year just to survive and you enslave them‘.

One of the stories to come out of Wikileaks does not seem to have been given the exposure it deserves. This is that the former US Ambassador Craig Stapleton said in 2007 in response to the French ban on Monsanto’s GM corn that “Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. …… In our view, Europe is moving backwards not forwards on this issue with France playing a leading role, along with Austria, Italy and even the Commission … Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices“.

I’m not sure that any retaliation plan was ever put in place or implemented, but that an ambassador felt themselves in a position to push retaliation as a trading strategy to support Monsanto’s ‘Mon810′ is interesting. Sounds like a modern version of the Chinese opium wars to me. But the push was also not limited to France.



Read more: http://www.economicvoice.com/monsanto-and-its-magic-beans/50015305#ixzz1AGfPjO5c



Here is Democracy Now on the matter. This story seems to have been buried by Christmas..
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/23/wikileaks_cables_reveal_us_sought_to

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[BlueMTexpat]

2. Believe me, Europeans didn't need Wikileaks to know that this

has been happening.

They've been paying attention all along.

[trungpa ricochet]

6. C'est vrai

Ca n'est pas inconnu ici. Monsanto est une equipe de pirates.

:mad:

[emilyg]

3. k/r

[jtuck004]

4. 'Course, you can sell them seeds and kill them by the thousands...

Traditional agriculture has for centuries allowed farmers to supplement each other's planting, sharing seeds
where needed, etc. This system breaks when Monsanto's "magic seeds" appear, because then the farmer must buy them from
Monsanto each season. RoundUp Ready seeds allow them to plant, then just spray the whole crop with the herbicide RoundUp,
and it only kills the weeds.

Problem is, when one crop fails, the farmer may lose everything, because they cannot pay back the loan used to buy seed
for the last planting. At that point, they cannot get a loan for the new planting - game over.

India has had a rash of suicides attributed to just this problem as the story by Nancy Scola, below, details.

Order 81, signed by Paul Bremer in Iraq, set up the conditions necessary for Monsanto to sell their seeds to that country,
again breaking the community of agriculture that has existed for thousands of years.

Gotta watch those "diplomats"...

Heard about the thousands of farmer suicides in India? Well, Iraqi farmers may be next thanks to the work of U.S. diplomat Paul Bremer and his Monsanto friends.
...
What Order 81 did was to establish the strong intellectual property protections on seed and plant products that a company like the St. Louis-based Monsanto -- purveyors of genetically modified (GM) seeds and other patented agricultural goods -- requires before they'll set up shop in a new market like the new Iraq. With these new protections, Iraq was open for business. In short, Order 81 was Bremer's way of telling Monsanto that the same conditions had been created in Iraq that had led to the company's stunning successes in India.
...
It's a world not unfamiliar to former CPA honcho Bremer, if the company he keeps is any indication. Robert Cohen, author of the book Milk A-Z, talks about the Bush administration as the "Monsanto Cabinet."
...
Monsanto's interpretation of the impact of seed contamination is, of course, a good one if its goal is to eventually own the rights to the world's seed supply. And that goal may well be in sight. In fact, a 2004 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that much of the U.S. seed pool is already contaminated by GM seeds. If that contamination continues unabated, eventually much of the world's seeds could labor under patents controlled by one agribusiness or another

http://www.alternet.org/story/62273/?page=entire">More here...

[awoke_in_2003]

5. give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day...

teach a man how to fish, and he will waste his days drinking beer on a boat :) Seriously- Monsanto is evil. The rich won't be happy until we are all subjugated.