LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Monsanto: Crops
built 192 days ago
Major transnational corporations in the food and life sciences sector are unlikely to shed any tears over Monsanto's demise. It's no secret on Wall Street that Monsanto, in its present form, has become a major liability for transnational food corporations and the biotech/pharmaceutical giants, who are much more concerned with the potential for hundreds of billions of dollars in sales from biotech drugs, nutraceutical foods, and nanotechnology, than the declining fortunes of agbiotech crops, whose total sales in 2002 were $4.25 billion.
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On Wednesday, Monsanto was fined $25,000 by a British court for "genetic pollution": inadequate barriers between an experimental field of GM oilseed rape and adjacent fields of natural crops. The free ride in public opinion is over -- but what are the real risks?
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The world recoils at Monsanto's brave new crops / The St. Louis company's political clout has turned the president and Cabinet secretaries into pitchmen -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 28, 1998. "A $ 7.5 billion company with 25,000 employees needs to be well-connected, and Monsanto works to keep it that way. The company plies political parties equally and recruits people with deep ties in Washington. By virtue of a friendly relationship between Monsanto chief operating officer Robert B. Shapiro and Clinton, Monsanto is identified in Washington as 'a Democratic company.'"
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Fraley cited an "intensity index" of U.S. biotech traits that shows significant penetration of multiple Monsanto traits for key crops on each acre planted with biotech crops. For instance, in cotton, for the 2004 planting season, Monsanto estimates an intensity index of approximately 1.5 -- meaning Monsanto believes there are approximately 1.5 Monsanto traits being planted on every acre growing biotech cotton. Similarly, for 2004, the projected intensity index for corn is 1.2, with continued growth expected in 2005 and 2006 as a result of the introduction of second-generation traits and increased penetration of stacked traits.
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As the May 27, 1998 The Wall Street Journal declared: "Monsanto Co. and DuPont Co. are betting the farm in bids to transform themselves into the Coke and Pepsi of genetically engineered crops. In the three years since the first transgenic seeds were introduced, crop biotechnology has grown from a young science to a hot business: About half of U.S. cotton fields, forty percent of soybean fields, and twenty percent of corn fields this year are genetically altered. Now, in a stunningly swift concentration of power, much of the design, harvest, and processing of genetically engineered crops is coming under these two companies."5
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In a little known action, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency shocked the environmental world by approving the use of genetically engineered crops by the Monsanto Company and Novartis, among others, in 1995. Today, after a few years of the use of these plants in commercial agriculture, an environmental calamity may be in progress. The genie is out of the bottle, and there may be no way to stop it. Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 1999 For Full Text and Graphics Visit: http://ens.lycos.com/ens/feb99/1999L-02-21g.html - ---
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