Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Monsanto, bigger Monsanto, fake Monsanto

This week I found two distrubing stories about Monsanto.

The first story was Monsanto buying up another vegetable seed company. Monsanto bought De Ruiter Seeds Group of the Netherlands. Monsanto already controls the majority of all GMO seeds sold. But Monsanto is also one of the large producers of agricultural chemicals. They therefore, seem to want to have total control over all GMO crops in order to be able to dictate what seeds people use and what chemicals they produce. (see my article "What is wrong with GMO's")

The other story was about an organization claimed to be a dairy farmers organization which supports using artifical growth hormone, rBGH, but is supported and founded by Monsanto. And guess what?, Monsanto is the producer of rBGH.

What Monsanto is doing is protecting its market. There have been many questions about rBGH and some countries have banned its use. Monsanto is therefore, trying to convince people (and regulators) by deceiving them into believing rBGH is a good thing.

To begin with I do not care for companies which buy up companies in order simply to get a control on the marketplace in order to increase their profits. But to then go and deceive people by setting up fake organizations in order to be able to sell their products is not only unacceptable, but is bordering on fraud.

These are the problems when you have a company which controls too many of the facets of one market.