Monsanto has left the building - but nobody told the farmers, say police
Posted on 09/12/2003 4:32:31 AM PDT by yankeedame
Last Updated: Thursday, 11 September, 2003, 12:04 GMT 13:04 UK
Indian farmers target Monsanto
A group of farmers in southern India has stormed a building formerly used by the global biotech giant, Monsanto.
More than 40 farmers of the Karnataka State Farmers Association ransacked the building in the city of Bangalore on Thursday after staging noisy protests.
The attack came a day after the group demonstrated in the city against more than 70 suicides by farmers in the state in the past three months which the farmers blame on debt, drought and the introduction of Monsanto's genetically modified crops.
Monsanto says its critics have been misinformed, and its experiments in genetically modified farming have been successful in the US, China and other countries.
"We have served them [Monsanto] a notice to leave India...We are not afraid of the police," Professor Nanjundaswamy.
Eyewitnesses said the farmers stormed into 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.
Monsanto is active in several southern Indian states, where it has angered environmentalists and farmers by spearheading the cultivation of genetically modified cotton.
Not aware
Police arrested 15 farmers after Thursday's incident.
They said Monsanto had shifted its research facility recently, but the protesters were probably not aware of this.
The attack on the building followed protests over farmers' suicides
The head of the Karnataka State Farmers Association, Professor MD Nanjundaswamy, has been leading a campaign against multinational food corporations in the state.
He told the BBC the attack was a warning to Monsanto to leave India.
Monsanto denounced the attack as "criminal activity" in which two people were injured by an "out of control mob", saying the farmers' group had targeted other multinationals as well.
The association has in the past torched several farms in the state where Monsanto's new cotton crop was being trialled.
The environmental group, Greenpeace, has joined protests against Monsanto by calling on the company to withdraw its seeds from the market.
The professor is a farmer?
It's genetically modified crop seeds that will contribute to the starvation in developing countries.
India is one of the countries that has had the foresight to ban the use or sale of seeds modified to produce crops with a "terminator gene". This gene does not allow a plant to produce any seeds as part of its natural cycle. Thereby forcing the farmers to buy fresh seed from the company that produced the seeds with the "terminator gene" in the first place. It's like a marketing tool from hell.
The problem arises when these plants are cross-pollenated with "normal" plants and the gene is passed on to other crops that are not under the control of the farmer. This is going to be a huge problem in the future.
How are you going to tell a bee, "No, don't pollenate those plants."
Then that's obviously not what they're protesting against.
In other countries, if the production of the terminator-gene crops aren't sufficiently higher than the "garden variety" crops to justify the added cost of buying seed each year, they will fail in the marketplace.
Furthermore, it was the Greens who pushed for terminator genes in the first place. They were the ones who insisted that GM organisms not have the ability to propagate continually through the environment. To hear them cry foul against the terminator gene for environmental reasons rings awfully hollow.
As for cross-pollination, that may or may not be a serious problem. It remains to be seen. If it renders some fraction of ostensibly non-GM seed corn unusable, I would hope that the manufacturer would be made to compensate the affected farmers. If it really gets disruptive, the crops can be banned then (on the basis of solid data, rather than simply fear). The seed corn problem will then correct itself in one planting season.
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