By James Donahue

Since the first commercial cultivation of genetically modified farm crops in 1996, the use of plants modified for tolerant to herbicides and insecticides has grown until it dominates the agricultural seed market. This is especially true for soybean, corn, canola and cotton among other crops. Modified grains including wheat and rice as well as alfalfa seeds entered the market more recently.

While not alone in the production, sale and control of this seed, Monsanto was among the first and remains the most aggressive and largest producer. Farmers in the United States, Canada and India have been sold on the new seed as the manufacturers promise higher yields, the ability to grow the crop using fewer chemicals to control weeds and insects, and that the overall benefits of GMO seeds will help feed a starving world.

It sounded good at first blush, but then farmers discovered that to get involved with Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide-resistant seed, they were literally giving up traditional farm practices of saving seed for replanting, a system that has worked on this planet since farming began.

Farmers had to sign a contract agreeing to annually purchase Monsanto’s seed. The modified seed was designed as a terminator, which means it no longer produced live seed for replanting the following year. Also, Monsanto patented its seed, thus setting up neighboring farms for litigation over payment to Monsanto when non-modified crops cross pollinated and thus became contaminated. Such crops legally belonged to Monsanto and farmers found to have them were forced to pay the company accordingly.

Problems multiplied. There were crop failures. Patented Monsanto cotton seed produced a failed harvest in India for two consecutive years. Over 100,000 Indian farmers, deep in debt after paying the high cost of the Monsanto seed committed suicide because they were unable to pay off heavy bank loans. It seems the modified cotton seed was not resistant to certain insect infestations unique to India and the plants required more water than conventional cotton. India experienced unusually dry growing seasons both years.

There has been a growing question of the effects of the chemicals included in the seeds to the health of the humans and animals that consume this food.

Hungarian bio-chemist Dr. Arpad Pusztai, who studied this problem in about 2004, wrote that it has been found that once in the body, altered DNA can be picked up by gut bacteria, can itself be modified, leading to a spread of human resistance to antibiotics. Pusztai also expressed concern for the development of unknown toxic/allergens.

Dr. David Schubert, a cell biologist and medical researcher at Salk Institute in California, and William Freese, research analyst with Friends of the Earth, published a 25-page paper, “Safety Testing and Regulation of Genetically Engineered Foods” in which they reveal serious flaws in how GM crops are tested. Consequently the paper raises serious questions about the safety of these altered foods.

Schubert noted that U.S. regulators “rely almost exclusively on information provided by the biotech crop developer.” What he is saying is that Monsanto does its own testing and reporting, and government agents are not questioning it. This is like having the fox watch the hen house.

In another paper, Schubert wrote that “it would be very naïve to think that humans can ‘adapt’ to all new plant metabolites. Since GE can lead to the introduction of novel compounds, 10,000 years of experience with food safety is essentially disregarded by the promoters of GE.”

He also noted that “a transgene from GE soya can survive passage through the small intestine and can transfer its DNA to the microflora of the small intestine.” This is scary stuff.

Even more alarming is that a whistleblower, a scientist who once worked for Monsanto, revealed that the company has been planting “test plots” of various grain crops dosed with pharmaceutical medicines and then failing to properly destroy them . . . even the tests that fail . . . thus allowing the plants to cross-pollinate with other plants. Consequently foods that we think may be safe, may be lased with dangerous chemicals designed to make us very sick or even kill us.

The recent die-off of the Monarch butterfly and honeybees has been linked by some biologists to contamination by flowering GMO plants.

F. William Engdahl, in his book Seeds of Destruction, brings forth evidence that major corporations like Monsanto, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill Gates Foundation has been deeply involved in eugenics, a fancy name for the mass culling of the so-call “inferior” races, the elderly, sick and otherwise disposable people, thus creating a super race of humans. Shades of the Adolph Hitler dream of an Aryan Race that overpowers the world.

The idea is that this can be achieved quite easily by genetically modifying food that will make people in certain areas sterile, thus unable to have children.

A recent writer for The Daily Kos, identified only as Scaredhuman, addressed the way Monsanto and other biotech companies are monopolizing seeds, “actually privatizing the DNA of life. They sell the GE seeds at many times the price of normal seeds.

“They are removing actively and aggressively and thoroughly removing access to normal "open pollinated" seeds, the ones we have known since the beginning of time, that farmers have collected and saved and shared among each other.

Having bought up the normal seed companies, having locked farmers worldwide into patent contracts that remove their right to collect seeds anymore, having set loose a biotechnology that contaminates normal seeds of farmers who do not buy into the patented seeds, having made plain it will sue if even a volunteer plant comes up, Monsanto is now working to eliminate the last man standing between humans and corporate privatized seeds - the seed cleaner.

The farmers has had three choices - to buy normal seed (now almost gone), to buy GE-seeds at huge cost or to collect their own seeds and use them the next season.  If a farmer has even 10 acres, collecting and cleaning those seeds is a huge task.  If he has 1000 (acres), it  would be an impossible task without the seed cleaner whose equipment can separate out seed in just a few hours and whose costs are a third that of buying normal seed.”

Seeds a harvest become mixed with those of wild weeks during the harvesting process. Sometimes the shape and size of the weed seed is so close to that of the harvested grain it takes hours to pick through the seeds and get them separated. This is why the machines help. But there is a move on in the United States, promoted by Monsanto, to make seed cleaners illegal, or very difficult to acquire.

The report by Scaredhuman said “Monsanto is getting laws put into place in state after state that themselves are overwhelming and destructive of seed cleaners and all those who save normal seeds.

“A bill has been introduced in the Ohio state legislature that would require registration and state-level regulation of anyone who cleans or conditions self-pollinated seed. According to the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), the proposed legislation is part of Monsanto's aggressive corporate strategy to police rural communities and intimidate seed-saving farmers.”

The thing that makes us so angry is that our state legislators, who are obviously getting well paid for supporting such legislation, are happily marching in lock step to meet Monsanto’s demands.

And for those of you who think that big “doomsday” seed bank recently completed in a mountain on Spitsbergen Island, Norway, will save the day, think again. This has been a project heavily financed by Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation and . . . you guessed it . . . Monsanto. Also involved are seed giants DuPont and Syngenta of Switzerland, also producers of GMO seeds.

All the seed stored in the doomsday vault is most likely genetically engineered. So we must ask, what is it’s purpose?