This isnt completely new. Monsanto owns about 90% of the organic seed companies. Although doing their own crossbreeding - thats the new part. They are trying to monopolize on another corner of the market, just on case the people have their way and run the GEd products out of business. And most people dont have the time or awareness to look up the parent company of the seeds they want to buy - so Monsanto is still profiting from the organics. There are so many contradictions in this article... holy cow. And that’s a serious business advantage. Despite a gaping lack of evidence that genetically modified food crops harm human health, consumers have shown a marked resistance to purchasing GM produce (even as they happily consume products derived from genetically modified commodity crops)... But a few paragraphs later... Aside from consumer backlash, the EPA deemed StarLink corn, a new biotech strain from another company, unfit for human consumption because of its potential to cause allergic reactions. Another genetically modded corn variety seemed to kill monarch butterflies. Big food conglomerates including Heinz and McDonald’s—which you might recognize from their famous tomato and potato products—abandoned GM ingredients; some European countries have since refused to grow or import them... And then theres this: Is that unhealthy? No one really knows, but it’s certainly true that the law doesn’t require Monsanto to account for potential long-term effects. (The FDA considers all additive-free, conventionally bred produce to be safe.) Nobody has ever tinkered with sugar levels the way Monsanto is attempting; it’s essentially an experiment, says Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist and president of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition. “The only result they care about is profit.” The very next paragraphs have a company reps response: Monsanto, of course, denies that charge. Make fruit taste better and people will eat more of it. “That’s good for society and, let’s face it, good for business,” Stark says. Monsanto is still Monsanto. The company enforces stringent contracts for farmers who buy its produce seeds. Just as with Roundup Ready soybeans, Monsanto prohibits regrowing seeds from the new crops. The company maintains exclusion clauses with growers if harvests don’t meet the standards of firmness, sweetness, or scent—pending strict quality-assurance checks. “The goal is to get the products recognized by the consumer, trusted, and purchased,” Stark says. “That’s what I really want. I want to grow sales.” wired/2014/01/new-monsanto-vegetables/
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 08:17:35 +0000
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