Monsanto has made headlines rather a lot over the last few months, generally doing what they do best, pissing environmentalists and third-world Governments off.
This time it is in regard to their new DroughtGard GM strain of Maize, which they claim assists farmers in low rainfall areas to grow Maize:
“The DroughtGard® trait facilitates improved water use efficiency. Drought or water stress is one of the major factors that can impact on yields in South Africa. The drought trait alone cannot guarantee success, but farmers can use it as another tool in their systems-based approach to give their maize crop the best chance to survive and thrive in climates prone to drought.”
However, a South-African GMO-lobbyist group claim their product is a trojan horse, as with all the other produce they’ve been pushing onto the World, IOL reports:
An anti-GMO lobby group has accused multinational seed company Monsanto of “colonising” South Africa’s food system with its new “bogus” drought-tolerant maize seed that it wants to make commercially available to the country’s farmers.
“We all love mealies and the many other food products we get from maize seeds but wherever Monsanto does business, communities health and the environment are at risk.”
“To make even more money, they’re trying to push their so-called drought-tolerant maize seed on to our farmers.”
“Monsanto is using the drought and our rising food prices as a means of inserting its bogus drought-tolerant technology and maize into the South African food systems.”
You cannot blame them for being sceptical, this is the same company that has brought us Glyphosate, a chemical now being widely accepted as ‘Cancer-Causing’, a chemical which now blankets the planet and everything that inhabits it. California has just ruled that all products containing Glyphosate should now be labelled as ‘Cancer-Causing’. Monsanto, of course, fought this with everything they had, which was to put it frankly, lies.
Monsanto Co. was accused in court documents of ghostwriting scientific literature that led a U.S. regulator to conclude a key chemical in its Roundup weed killer shouldn’t be classified as carcinogenic.
Lawyers suing the company on behalf of farmers and others, who claim exposure to glyphosate caused their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, alleged in a court filing which was partially blacked out until Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency “may be unaware of Monsanto’s deceptive authorship practice.”[source]
Then we have Monsanto’s Dicamba which is, guess what, ‘Cancer-Causing’ also.
Monsanto’s dicamba-resistant soybean and cotton crops are also engineered to withstand applications of glyphosate, which means that this recent approval of XtendiMax will exacerbate the current overuse of that chemical as well. Dicamba is linked to increased rates of cancer in farmers and birth defects, while glyphosate was recently classified as a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organization.
The list of the humanitarian atrocities that Monsanto are responsible for are endless and we won’t bore you with them all, but it is suffice to say that South Africa should be concerned and they should reject this new offering from Monsanto immediately.
More About Monsanto:
Monsanto Isn’t Feeding The World, They’re Killing Our Children
Dicamba | Just Another Monsanto Cancer-Causing Pesticide
Monsanto Accused of Fabricating Papers on Roundup-Cancer Risk
Monsanto And UK Collude And Use Wales As Toxic Dumping Ground