Tuesday March 11, 2008, 11:26 am
Oh, ain't it cute: Monsanto who kills Colombians with their roundup ultra, who make their money with destruction, start crying over women who don't follow "legal means". Boooo! Hoooo!

Tuesday March 11, 2008, 11:26 am
I do not like Monsanto one bit. They are evil.

Tuesday March 11, 2008, 11:32 am
Monsanto has set the precedent for illegal manuevering - so let it be done to them. These women were acting in self-defense - literally!

Tuesday March 11, 2008, 11:36 am
Great story, Julia, thank you. I'm going to post it in the Global Alliance to stop GMO's group.

Tuesday March 11, 2008, 1:14 pm
Good on those women who stood up to Monsanto..should be more of it..

Tuesday March 11, 2008, 3:10 pm
Yes, indeed.

Tuesday March 11, 2008, 3:12 pm
"In a press statement, the world's leading producer of herbicides condemned "vehemently illegal acts like that," stressing that the protest did not even respect "judicial decisions."

"The company believes that disagreements either ideological or not "must be expressed by means of legal ways, and not by means of attacks on individuals and on private property," Monsanto stressed.

Boo-Hoo is right Julia. Can you imagine a monster-corporation who destroys lives being upset by a protest that doesn't play by the rules. Too Bad So Sad!!!

Thanks for the great story Julia. R-O-C-K ~~ O-N!

Wednesday March 12, 2008, 3:36 am
tHANK YOU JULIA FOR LET KNOW ABOUT MONSATO COMPANY!!!

Wednesday March 12, 2008, 7:35 am
WOW!!!
Great news, Julia! Thank you

Wednesday March 12, 2008, 10:30 am

I saw a G R E A T documentary on Monsanto behind-the-scenes power and the ills of GE seeds, crops and food on our Franco-German TV station, Arte, last evening.

Entitled 'Le Monde Selon Monsanto' (the World According to Monsanto), we have a great investigative journalist to thank for it : Marie-Monique Robin

If you understand French you can see the trailer of the film here:

http://www.arte.tv/fr/Video/183604,CmC=1957270.html

and see an interview with Marie-Monique Robin here :


http://www.arte.tv/fr/content/tv/02__Communities/C4-knowledge_20and_20discovery/03-Dossier/2008.01.29__Monsanto/04__interview/ART_20interview/1912698.html

One part of the film took us to Paraguay where despite the government's initial ban on OGMs, they 'somehow' have got in and contaminated much farmland. The government, presented with this fait accompli, decided then to legalize what already existed on the national territory.

We saw and heard the small farmers speak out about the tragedy now taking place for biodiversity and their farms. With airplanes spraying Round-up all the time, the only crop that now survives is the Monsanto soy, the only one to resist the poisonous herbicide. There were once trees, there were once a variety of crops, fruit and vegetables, produced by these small farmers, all have died. And the rural population is forced to leave their small farms to go and live in the favela-style slums around the big towns. Their rural home has been devastated !

In a different part of the documentary, we heard scientists talk about their research into Round-up, the famous weed killer. It is at the very root of cancer production, since the effect it has on cells is to intervene in the natural way that cells divide. It is this cellular instability that is the beginning of a cancerous situation.

Total horror !

Wednesday March 12, 2008, 7:53 pm
Thanks Julia and Jill for the information. Also read about the Right Livelihood Award laureates Percy and Louise Schmeiser, and the movement they have founded for farmers against Monsanto. There are world wide protests, hopefully connecting and gathering strength all the time - GMO kills, that's for sure.
http://www.rightlivelihood.org/schmeiser.html

Wednesday March 12, 2008, 9:31 pm
thanks Jill for the comment, I would like to post it on my website if you dont mind?

Wednesday March 12, 2008, 11:17 pm
They should give those women a medal!!!!!!Thx Julia. I love calling up Monsanto headquarters in St louis and giving them an informed earful!

Thursday March 13, 2008, 12:10 am
Monsanto is one of the World's Worst companies around. Glad to hear that Monsanto got a little taste of destruction. It may have been small but, perhaps, other people will start thinking about getting Monsanto out of their countries.

TY, Julia.

Thursday March 13, 2008, 2:03 am

The documentary also featured interviews with two American farmers who tell the sad story of Monsanto's 'gene police' - detectives that go around intimidating farmers and accusing them of either replanting GE seeds (farmers are bound to buy seed anew for each planting) or using Monsanto seed without having purchased it - legally known as 'theft of intellectual property.' One of the farmers, Troy Roush, told of how the gene police & Monsanto lawsuits ended up destroying the family farm...AND the family. He and his farmer friend, David Runyon, both said that Monsanto has caused an atmosphere of suspicion & denunciation among farmers, whereas friendly neighborlyness had been the dominant community atmosphere prior to Monsanto invasive policies.
I have found an article on Troy Roush called -

Prosecuting American Farmers:
Monsanto's Investigations, Coerced Settlements & Lawsuits
(Chapter 3 from Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers
Center for Food Safety 12jan05)

It is too long to reprint in this comment section, but please do a copy-and-paste for the URL, as I don't know how to turn this into a link :

http://www.mindfully.org/GE/2005/Monsanto-Prosecuting-Farmers12jan05.htm

the following are active links on the above page-
Mindfully.org note:
Also see "Heartbreak In The Heartland," about Percy Schmeiser and more on 'Monsanto'

The documentary of the other evening brought other names to my awareness -

scientists whose research on Monsanto GE seeds or crops or Round-Up or Round-Up Ready 'upset' the company -
they all lost their jobs and their research was condemned or criticized by so-called "experts" - they were to all intents and purposes internationally black-listed !

Two of them - Dr Stanley Ewen and Dr Arpad Pusztai - were working in Scotland, and are interviewed together in 'the World According to Monsanto'.

Dr Stanley Ewen, whose research was considered excellent one day and useless the next. What happened overnight, so to speak ? A phone call from Tony Blair in London, all the way up to Scotland, to get rid of him.
Imagine Monsanto's reach & ruthlessness, if they can get Downing Street to intervene/interfere with research and destroy a man's career!

Arpad Pusztai, the other researcher who worked with Ewen, also lost his job: "World renowned scientist lost his job when he warned about GE foods" -http://www.psrast.org/pusztai.htm

Arpad Pusztai: the verdict GM food: safe or unsafe?-http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Arpad-Pusztai-Potato.htm

Ewen and Pusztai discovered that laboratory rats fed gm potatoes had their immune system going wild, reacting as though the potatoes were not food, but dangerous foreign bodies.

A young Professor at Berkeley, Ignacio Chapela, failed to get tenure. He discovered that despite a ban on GE corn in Mexico, there has been contamination and so the 161-odd precious natural varieties of corn in Mexico are now at risk. This profile from the WEB apparently predates his exclusion :

Dr Ignacio Chapela is (I think, 'was' is the correct tense now, unfortunately) Assistant Professor of Microbial Ecology, Division of Ecosystem Sciences, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California Berkeley. He is also the founder of The Mycological Facility, in Oaxaca, Mexico. Dr. Chapela has worked for the pharmaceutical/agrochemical industry as well as the USAD Agricultural Research Service. He was also a member of a National Academy of Sciences committee reviewing the environmental effects of transgenic crops.

In 2001, in Nature, Dr. Chapela reported transgenic DNA in traditional maize landraces in Oaxaca. This study is one of many ways he is engaged in the current debate over biotechnology. Here is an article where he discusses his having been pushed out:

http://www.mindfully.org/GE/2005/Chapela-State-Enemy19jan05.htm

Ignacio Chapela is also interviewed in the documentary, as is a Mexican government researcher, a woman whose name I cannot remember.

I learned that there are 161 different natural varieties of native corn in Mexico and that the Mexican government had banned GMOs to protect this national heritage. Somehow, again that mysterious 'somehow,' GM corn has got in there and it is producing mutant plants. The woman researcher shows pictures in the documentary of corn plant flowers. The fact that a very same gene is located at different places in the DNA explains the difference between having the natural, normal flower and very weird, mutant flowers, some of which the researcher calls 'monsters' !

Another important person in the war against GMOs is Dr Samuel Epstein, who teamed up with an investigative journalist, when the latter received several hundred pages of 'top secret' Monsanto files on the Bovine Growth Hormone that has contaminated milk in the US. I believe the relevant site is called 'Milkweed' or Milk Weed; in fact, it is a newsletter, but there must be a site, as well.

I hope all of this information can be exploited somehow to build support for a world without Monsanto and OGMs. Now that the Pope is on our side, maybe more people will start thinking about what is going on.

Christelle, you can put that on your website, too, to publicize these topics.

Thursday March 13, 2008, 2:04 am
Ah, one last thing :
there is the case of a whole community in Anniston, Alabama, who have been poisoned with c/o Monsanto :

THE INECE NEWSLETTER

March 2002

International Network for Environmental Compliance and Enforcement

Jury Holds Monsanto Liable for 40 Years of PCB Pollution

A recurring theme of INECE is that a variety of effective mechanisms must be utilized if environmental law compliance and sustainable development are to be achieved. One of the strongest weapons in the compliance arsenal – the ability of individual citizens to press civil damage claims in a court of law – demonstrated its value on February 24th when a jury found multinational Monsanto Co. liable for polluting the small town of Anniston, Alabama, over a 40-year period. While the jury has not yet awarded damages, the verdict opens the door for Anniston residents to recover millions of dollars based on their showing that they were harmed by the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, in the soil around the city. In finding Monsanto liable for negligence, the jury agreed with the claims of 16 residents who said the chemicals had damaged their property and caused them emotional distress. After 40 years of making PCBs as an electrical insulator, Monsanto shut down its production of the chemicals in 1971, eight years before the US government banned PCBs as a possible carcinogen.

According to company documents produced during the trial, the company flushed tens of thousands of pounds of PCB’s into nearby creeks and buried millions of pounds of wastes containing the toxic substance in a hillside landfill. Monsanto later spun off its chemical division into a separate company called Solutia Inc., which was also found liable by the jury. Evidence presented by the plaintiffs in the case showed that, even though Monsanto knew by at least the mid-1960s that PCBs were dangerous, it did not install pollution controls until 1970. releases caused fish kills and the evidence showed that many of the plaintiffs were found to have PCB levels in their blood 27 times the national average. Although a clear relationship between the chemicals and cancer has not yet been proved, residents of the city of about 24,000 people have claimed for years that their cancer rate is abnormally high.

Claims of other residents are proceeding in separate trials in state court, and as many as 15,000 residents may pursue a class-action lawsuit in federal court. Although the company has paid more than $80 million in previous court settlements, the jury’s verdict is the first time Monsanto has been adjudged legally responsible for PCB contamination that caused injury.

For more information visit http:/ewg.org/reports/anniston/

Thursday March 13, 2008, 5:12 am
All power to the people!!!

Thursday March 13, 2008, 6:46 am

Genetic engineering, recombinant DNA technology, genetic modification/manipulation (GM) and gene splicing are terms applied to the direct manipulation of an organism's genes. Genetic engineering is not to be confused with traditional breeding where the organism's genes are manipulated indirectly. Genetic engineering uses the techniques of molecular cloning and transformation. Genetic engineering endeavors have found some success in improving crop technology, the manufacture of synthetic human insulin through the use of modified bacteria, the manufacture of erythropoietin in Chinese hamster ovary cells, and the production of new types of experimental mice such as the oncomouse (cancer mouse) for research.

Since a protein sequence is specified by a segment of DNA called a gene, novel versions of that protein can be produced by changing the DNA sequence of the gene.
Some groups have argued that genetic engineering is Wrong and is "doing

...the work of God",

Thursday March 13, 2008, 7:10 am
Monsanto has the dubious distinction of being the second group I despise most (Bush and Co. being the first) - I'm glad to see strong women doing their thing to poor little Monsanto. They should get a medal -

Thursday March 13, 2008, 7:56 am
If I could gather 300 women I would do the exact same thing here. WHO cares about what is legal through a very corrupt legal system? Not me. How dare those criminal assholes at Monsanto shoot anyone! Since when is it legal for ANY business to shoot a woman peacefully protesting? If you are a child molester and you go to another country to do it, you are still lible in american court systems, so why are there NO charges on Monsanto corp for this? This Toxic waste company needs to go down permanently the talked farmers in to PCB's and now Roundup Toxic Genetically Modified foods!!! Nasty! Bad Company!!!

Thursday March 13, 2008, 12:05 pm
Just hung-up with Monsanto in St. Louis, couldn't get anyone that knew any "details " yet, but they confirmed the "attack". They said (once again) that someone would call me back.LOL. the 3 is , if anyone would like to call and at least ask why if they say their product is so good you would think they would want to label it at least????314-694-1000. This Corp. is attacking ALL of us everyday!

Thursday March 13, 2008, 12:10 pm
Right on Lisa!!!!!!What kind of a sadistic psycho would shoot a women for protesting. These people are mentally ill and need to pay for their actions.

Thursday March 13, 2008, 7:47 pm
I tried to warn people about GMO's ever since i was still little & smarted for it dearly. What many of you are describing, is exactly what i was hoping would not happen. It is such a shame! Another thing we need to be concerned about is the putting of 'micro-chips' into humans! We need to be making laws against it everywhere we can, before it is too late.

Friday March 14, 2008, 2:05 pm
noted!