Quote of the week: Monsanto's enforcers make Roundup look tame

American farming; Beset by thuggery? (Wiki Commons)

It has recently come to light that Monsanto, the former deadly chemical giant now transitioning itself into a pseudo-friendly agricultural company, has been giving farmers a hard time. Mainly, Monsanto is combing the hills for hints that Farmer Brown or one of his shifty neighbors is saving Monsanto’s patented seeds and using them the following season.

Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety in DC, says farmers have told him Monsanto goons show up at the farmers’ houses or in their fields and accuse the farmers of violating Monsanto’s technology agreement. Quoted in an article in Vanity Fair, Freese noted that the so-called investigators will say, “Monsanto knows that you are saving Roundup Ready seeds, and if you don’t sign these information-release forms, Monsanto is going to come after you and take your farm or take you for all you’re worth.”

If someone from Brooklyn, NY, did that, people might think the Mafia (which we all know doesn’t exist) was after them. Or maybe they’d think it was the CIA: The Monsanto thugs “will sometimes show a farmer a photo of himself coming out of a store, to let him know he is being followed,” according to the Vanity Fair article.

Whether it was ethical of Monsanto to create genetically modified seeds that will stand up to its own weed-killer…and whether it was ethical for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 to render a decision making it possible for the greedsters to patent building blocks of life…

Those are not the ethical questions for today, although they will be dealt with shortly.

The ethical question is: Should any of us use Roundup on our gardens knowing what scurrilous strong-arm tactics Monsanto uses against people trying to provide the world’s food?

I’m about to go to my potting table and grab the bottle I bought last week (I loathe nettles in my rosebushes) and take it for proper disposal at the landfill, and buy some gardening gloves. I sure don’t want Roundup around here, now that I know it can cause genetic damage. And wondering what other sorts of damage Monsanto might be capable of.