Hey Monsanto, it's time to pay the piper... again.
In the largest fine ever levied under a U.S. pesticides law, Monsanto agreed to pay the Environmental Protection Agency $2.5 million.
The agricultural giant was found to have been selling genetically modified cotton seeds without labeling them as such. Between 2002 and 2007, Monsanto's seeds were illegally sold in several Texas counties where the seeds are explicitly banned.
The seeds — known as Bollgard and Bollgard II — were genetically engineered to produce the insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), and Texas officials were concerned that using the seeds would lead to pest resistance.
But that didn't stop Monsanto from bamboozling buyers into purchasing the illegal seeds.
“As a result of this matter, we have implemented new internal review processes to prevent such errors in the future,” said Rob Nixon, Monsanto’s Stewardship Lead.
I find Mr. Nixon's statements to ring hollow. While this is the biggest fine Monsanto has received under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, it is far from their first major legal infraction.
Here's a quick look at a few of Monsanto's other “errors”:
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Monsanto's biggest individual fine to date was a $100 million settlement to the family of Wilbur Jack Skeen in 1986. The company was found to be negligent in exposing Mr. Skeen, a worker in the companies Texas plant, to benzene. The exposure eventually led to his death from leukemia.
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Monsanto was one of the companies named in a $180 million suit for Vietnam War vets exposed to “Agent Orange”. Monsanto manufactured the herbicide from 1965 to 1969.
The settlement did not include the 400,000 disabilities and deaths that the population of Vietnam suffered from the toxic herbicide.
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In 1995, Monsanto was forced to pay a Texas Waste Management company $41.1 million for hazardous waste concerns.
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In 1996, New York's Attorney General hit them with a $50,000 fine for false advertising of their flagship pesticide Roundup. Claims in question included “Remember that environmentally friendly Roundup herbicide is biodegradable. It won't build up in the soil so you can use Roundup with confidence along customers' driveways, sidewalks and fences... ”
That's a tough claim to swallow when you consider the EPA warning required on Roundup's packaging:
Do not allow the herbicide solution to mist, drip, drift, or splash onto desirable vegetation since minute quantities of this herbicide can cause severe damage or destruction to the crop, plants, or other areas on which treatment was not intended.
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As recently as 2005, the Justice Department ordered Monsanto to pay a $1.5 million fine for bribing Indonesian officials in order to get their Bollgard cotton seeds approved without having to prove their environmental safety.
So, while its nice lip service when the EPA holds the company accountable for their recent indiscretions, the company's sordid past goes to show that a fine of $2.5 million is toothless.
If it were up to you, what kind of fine would you give Monsanto?
Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments section.
Be Well,
Jimmy Mengel
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Monsanto's products are designed to give their corporate parent exclusive rights to profit from what nature grants for free. They are more than an environmental risk, more than a threat to food diversity.
What fine would I give them? I wouldn't fine them. I'd banish them.
You two are probably an organic eating baboon who doesn't know the first thing about agriculture yet you claim to know.
Brian, that's right you enjoy that banana in your hand because that certainly inst a GMO right even though it says Organic? You do realize most of the food you eat is thanks to this great leap in science? Please a risk to genetic diversity? you do realize they add more genes to the already existing gene pool? If anything it increases the gene pool.
Jim, What your proposing is that we take all incentive away from the private industries to produce hybrids that can produce enough food to feed the world? So Jim you would prefer to let all those starving kids in Africa... just starve? Gee Jim i bet that didn't fit into your perfect ideal world. what about letting Russia take over the market that keeps the US alive by allowing them to feed china like we do? That seems just swell.
You two have no idea what in the world you are talking about, its people like you that don't think through their actions and then proceed to vote on things that effect us all.
Do some homework, go take an economics class, please refrain from this kind of stupidity in your future without doing your homework. Honestly you do more harm to your cause then you do good.
The root of any political argument lies in perceived Truths. The perception of a profit incentive always leading to Good is no exception. The argument is not as solid as the anger expressed and is mauled by a belief in an innocence to what power and control is yielded in the markets.
Brawndo the thirst mutilator.
I think perhaps it is you that could have done a little more homework.
First I don't think anyone can claim that GMO's produce most of the food we eat. But if by "great leap in science" you meant the green revolution then yes it has allowed us to increase yields dramatically although there are trade-offs.
Second what Brian meant by GMO's threatening genetic diversity, is not that the genetic modification reduces the gene pool directly, but that farmers begin to plant GMO's to the exclusion of other varieties, that if not grown, are lost thus limiting the genetic diversity of the crop.
No Jim is not talking about eliminating the incentive for companies to produce hybrids. It is unnecessary to patent hybrids to earn profit, as hybrid seeds do not grow true to the parent. Essentially requiring the purchase of new seeds from the supplier each year. Jim's proposal of returning the patent laws on living things to those previous of the 1980 supreme court decision, may discourage GMO production, although the long-term wisdom of developing GMO's is contentious to say the least.
And as far as the starving African children are concerned improving their lives through education about and cultivation improvements of native, climate adapted food crops. Sounds quite a bit more compassionate then keeping them alive on an interruptable drip feed of foreign commodity grain.
While there may be no easy answers about the prudence of genetically modifying these crops. I like to think if a county outlaws this seed out of concern, the company should respect a county's choice.
Lastly Lew please try not to go around being condescending and calling people baboons. I think it might be worth reflecting that most likely all of our views of this issue, including your own, are flawed. And that everyone is being lead by a different moral compass.
The problem is the LIMITED perspective most people have regarding such ideas. Most people believe they have the right to sustain and maintain their own life, as a human, and this is to some degree true. However, one must consider the consequences of our current rationale on the subject of "quality of life." Yes Lew, having a banana in your hand is great to have when you are hungry. Being able to buy as many bananas as you would like when you or others like you are hungry. What is not considered is how the mass production of bananas was conducted and why it was conducted on a mass scale. The answer might be obvious, but it only becomes obvious to someone who thinks they know the answer, that doesn't mean it's obviously the RIGHT answer.
We, as a species, need to continue to grow food to survive. The understanding held currently as well as for the past few thousand years is that we need other sources of food, and more of it if we are going to continue to populate this world. Instead of living of the provided "sunlight" (sunlight refers to, ultimately, what we eat. We essentially are beings of sunlight which keeps us alive by the energy of the sun, ingested through plants which have converted the sunlight into energy where they can break down CO2 into carbon for their benefit and oxygen for ours.) When we break away from the balance of available "sunlight" (food) and amount of food needed to supplement the population, you are forced to consider other means of energy. This is when we decided as a species, to cut down trees in space for crops, which would change the diet of naturally grown subsidence to mass produced food. This method is "okay" until you begin to interfere with the amount of land used for agriculture. There arise many different problems out of this one problem which were all rooted in the fundamental problem that occurred when humans began making more and more babies which forced us to find more and more land to grow food on. You can see that the more people on Earth, the more land we need. Because the Earth is limited in space, and our ability to produce offspring is unlimited, there is a contradiction in our style of living that will ultimately lead to destruction of our planet.
So Lew, when you find yourself enjoying the abundance of life, with a banana in your hand, be grateful yes, but also remember that we have completely strayed from the balance in our environment and maybe you will not be caught in the midst of destruction due to the style of living, but only a few generations below you will live through a time of famine and death. You can choose to support the life style that points to the end, or a life style that supports life and supports the future.
GMO's are dangerous, and even you're aware of it. Not to mention the death of Monarch butterflies' larva after a snack on some GMO corn pollen. We know they are dying, people may not be dropping dead yet, but we are concerned that we don't know enough about the process that we can call it healthy. Some see that the secrecy in Monsanto and the potential threat they hold is concerning, others are simply concerned with only their well being. Other people are concerned that there won't BE enough, so they say continue to make GMO's and privatize nature so we can have a banana any time we'd like.
"Please a risk to genetic diversity? you do realize they add more genes to the already existing gene pool? If anything it increases the gene pool."
This has to be one of the most ignorant comments I've ever read...Its actually people like YOU that do more harm than good. If you agree that genetically-engineered food is doing the world a "favor", then you obviously don't know how evolution works, and how this will lead to more and more pest resistance and diminishing returns.
But that's OK with you, right? Because you're here and now, stuffing your face with genetically-engineered foodstuffs and really don't give a flying fuck about future generations, do you?
GMO's and other advances in agricultural/food science are good...but maybe not in the hands of a private cooperation driven by profits and greed more than helping feed the world.
Anyone in their right mind can tell you that, with any research done at all, Monsanto is doing much more harm than good in this world.
Just because we genetically engineer our crops to grow more per plant, doesn't mean we have to place pesticides WITHIN the food that stays inside while we digest it.
As to the question of what to do to Monsanto, I believe that only fining them would not be sufficient. Seeing as they are one of the worlds largest food corporations, any size fine would be just like getting flicked in the nose. It's bothersome, but not much else. The EPA needs to have a very short leash on them watching virtually each step they take. However, if they were as bold to bribe Indonesian officials, why wouldn't they try to bribe the EPA's officials? Everyone seems to have a hush-hush price these days.
The best thing to do may be what Brian suggested, banishing them. Banish them from poisoning us, our environment, and our world.
The truth is, our bodies don't recognize GMOs as food. Our digestive system can't effectively break them down which causes inflammation in the gut lining and leads to a multitude of disorders. This also causes malabsorption, leaky gut, villous atrophy which allows parasites to thrive and yeast to grow. This will eventually cause autoimmune diseases and degenerative diseases. It's also been shown that such things as BT toxin and antibiotics from GMOs, can survive digestion in the stomach and infest the small intestine.
These are just some of the reasons GMOs are banned in many countries.
By all means, if you think GMOs are good then keep eating them. You'll live a shorter life and it's less likely that you'll be able to reproduce which will ultimately make the world a better place.
You're Welcome. :^)
@Lew specifically: there is a difference between cultivating new varieties of plants that will keep desirable traits and engineering them in willy-nilly, which is what Monsanto and other GMO corps do: they don't carefully place a gene into a plant's DNA strand; instead, they blast the new genes at the DNA strand and wherever they land, they land. There's no testing to see if something beneficial was lost, or if there is a bad reaction between competing genes. Further, Monsanto's Roundup-Ready crops are made to be used with heavy Roundup use, and as a result, "superweeds" are developing in much the same way as "superbugs" in humans and animals due to overuse of antibiotics, meaning stronger and stronger hebicides must be used to control weeds - meaning we're right back where we started only it's MORE toxic and MORE work to kill the weeds.
When GMO's have been tested on hamsters (shorter breeding cycle), the hamsters have become STERILE within THREE GENERATIONS. Does that not scare the heck out of you? It has not been tested on humans, but it is all over our food supply.
And BTW, if the food says "organic," it had better NOT be a GMO food. Me, I'll pay for the organic. My family is healthier than most of our city: a mild case of what was diagnosed as "swine flu" that lasted less than 48 hours in a family of 4 with no flu shots is a pretty good average, thanks.
Lew, please do YOUR homework, and for your own sake, don't be afraid to explore points of view you might not agree with. You may end up as disgusted with the food system in our country as many of us are.
There are numerous links to various not-particularly-favorable studies about Monsanto. It seems they have a strong history of overstating the safety of Roundup.
but i agree, for an evil such as this, the punishment must be biblical in scale.
obviously money, especially such piddling amounts, doesn't work
@Jessica: 2.5 million is small change for a company like Monsanto...a fine that small will not prevent them from doing the same thing in the future.
Here is another one of his public responses: http://ecomattersdaily.com/2010/04/better-than-round-up-and-free/comment-page-1/#comment-1003
Here is the deal, if you don't understand Lew's point then you really don't have a good clue whats going on in reality. His point is basic in nature, we need companies like this to make it so we can progress into the future. Money drives the world, welcome to reality I guess.
While granted I am not a huge fan of Monsanto, I do fully understand why they exist and the good the do even though public perception is not there.
Oh, and I did take an economics class, and that's where I learned this.
Ever heard of spell check? When ruthlessly ripping a fellow human about their choice in food, of all things, it helps if the said reader can in fact discern what your point is.