Monsanto & corporate control

The corporations that market GMOs and the associated chemicals seek to control agriculture and food production by:

• buying up seed companies
• patenting seeds and locking farmers into exclusive agreements.

If this strategy succeeds, it will dramatically reduce agricultural biodiversity and lead to more industrialized and unsustainable farming.

did you know?

Biotech giant Monsanto is the leading producer of GM crops, followed by DuPont/Pioneer, Syngenta, and Dow/Mycogen.

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biopiracy

At a meeting in Kuala Lumpur in February 2004 the 188 parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed on an international regime on access to genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge and benefit sharing. However, the agreement had no safeguards for the rights of indigenous peoples and small farmers.

Through their traditional technologies and practices, farmers and indigenous peoples have been the main caretakers and breeders of seeds, medicinal plants and other forms of biodiversity. Companies and commercial research institutions are trying to buy these varieties and the associated traditional knowledge, in order to monopolize and profit from this valuable information through patents and other intellectual property rights. This is called biopiracy.