Meanwhile, Monsanto is Destroying the Global Food System

Growing food is not always easy, but it's based on a simple principle: put aside part of the harvest as seeds to produce the next year's harvest. Failing to do so is called "eating your seed corn" and is the fastest way to create famine.

Which is precisely what giant chemical corporation Monsanto is doing.

Hmm. Do you think it's really a good idea that one multinational corporation controls the vast majority of the international food supply? Haha, just kidding. Of course it's a good idea! That's why one of the first things we did when we invaded Iraq was to announce a law that farmers could no longer save their own seed:

ST. LOUIS — Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.'s business practices reveal how the world's biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

With Monsanto's patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.

Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price hikes that ripple out to every family's dinner table. That's because the corn flakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you ate for dinner likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto's patented genes.

Monsanto's methods are spelled out in a series of confidential commercial licensing agreements obtained by the AP. The contracts, as long as 30 pages, include basic terms for the selling of engineered crops resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, along with shorter supplementary agreements that address new Monsanto traits or other contract amendments.

The company has used the agreements to spread its technology — giving some 200 smaller companies the right to insert Monsanto's genes in their separate strains of corn and soybean plants. But, the AP found, access to Monsanto's genes comes at a cost, and with plenty of strings attached.

Read the whole thing.