Viewing profile — monsanto

  It appears that people have wisened up to this style of business...

More to the point, I think there was a profound amount of attention scrutinizing Monsanto, more than any other company I can think of.

The concept of Monsanto's business model has been probably the most chilling example of vendor lock-in ever imagined, and certainly throughout the 1980's and onward, raised more than a few eyebrows anywhere it was explained.

It really resonates to the core of human values as a concept of highly calculated evil, executed as a long game. Apologists will shrug their shoulders, and with open hands, suggest that it's enough to say that a company motivated to earn money is justified in any behavior, and that the truth is that natural modes of food supply would strangle and starve civilization, were it not for innovators creating expanded production volumes by exploiting powerful technologies under tightly controlled circumstances.

But, it's clear that Monsanto's products and services represent a direct threat to those who dare to depend on them. Genetic modfication of herbicide/pesticide resistant food supplies, combined with litigation designed to destroy unlicensed supplies, all to further sales of proprietary organisms and their matching chemicals, is such an intuitively horrific system of practices that it begs disbelief.

And with that, you have the far reaching attention that glyphosphate weed killer and genetically engineered crops have brought upon those who would seek to threaten the world with them.

To properly internalize the ideas in play, one can handily imagine what it means, should anything ever go wrong. Every mouth fed by food grown as corporate product will starve, if ever there's an incident that precludes the use of the product.

Thus, if Monsanto's genetic engineering enables crops that feed two billion, and suddenly, next year, for any reason, farmers are made to cease production, well... what happens to two billion people?

Except, it's worse than that. Because it's not like you can draw a line around those two billion people. They aren't living in some enclave, sealed off in a parallel universe. It's not a hypothetical person that eats RoundUp Ready food. We've all probably eaten some, and now, we'll all have to cram into the same life boat if something goes wrong, and the mistake can't be reversed.