Monsanto's Royalty Grab in Argentina

Or: How corporations get their way with a little help from their friends in government

A dramatic comedy in three acts (with more to come)

GRAIN

October 2004

Behind many big promises of "technology transfer" and "feeding the world" lies a brutal truth: biotechnology corporations like Monsanto only care about profits. They are not offering genetically modified (GM) seeds to the South out of charity. They want to take over seed markets and squeeze farmers for as much as they can get - which, even in poor countries, can be a lot. The formula seems to be this: focus on the major cash crops (cotton, soybeans, maize, etc), find an entry point, contaminate the seed supply and then step in to take control. Argentina, the first country outside of North America to start planting GM crops, is a case in point. But the same pattern is being reproduced around the world, as with GM cotton in India and West Africa. The story of what has happened in Argentina should serve as a stark warning of what occurs when GM agriculture takes root.

Act One: The Infection

1996 - The government of Argentina approves the commercial planting of Monsanto's genetically modified Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans. Farmers save, multiply and sell the seeds to other farmers, as they always have, and the area planted to RR soybeans grows exponentially - from less than a million hectares in 1996 to 14 million hectares in the 2003-2004 growing season. RR soybeans also start to cross Argentina's borders, with people smuggling them into neighbouring Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, where cultivating GM crops is banned.

Monsanto's patents on RR soybeans are not recognised in Argentina. The company's rights over the GM seeds are limited to the country's Seed Law - a plant breeders' rights regime that allows farmers to save seeds for their own use but not to sell them "over the fence" [1]. Still, Monsanto does nothing to stop the large-scale "brown-bagging" taking place. It sits back and watches its GM seeds and the use of its RoundUp herbicide expand over the Southern Cone, as the large landholders of the Pampas and surrounding areas adopt the industrial no-till farming system of RR soy on a massive scale.

For many, the absence of any complaints from the company during these early years confirms what they suspected from the start: the spread of GM crops through contamination and the violation of national laws is a conscious and intentional strategy of the transnational seed corporations.

Act Two: The Threats...

Read more at link above.
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From TouchArt.net and OneEarthBlog.blogspot where we see that what Monsanto is doing to farmers in Argentina today is the same criminal M.O. as the U.S. companies in the late 1800s who destroyed the food supplies of American Indian Nations like the Lakotah and Dine to subjugate the People, steal their land and make American consumers complicit in their genocide.