A match made in Hell: Monsanto-Bayer merger gets the green light… farmers are worried, as they should be
04/20/2018 / By Lance D Johnson
As hundreds of lawsuits against Monsanto for personal injury and wrongful death move forward, German pharmaceutical company Bayer has been given the green light to acquire Monsanto in a deal surpassing $60 billion. The mega monopoly merger was approved by the U.S. Department of Justice in April. Instead of breaking monopolies up, the U.S. encourages monopolies to merge with other monopolies, as the agriculture and pharmaceutical elite clamor for domination over the world’s food and drug supply. The merger follows in the footsteps of the Dow-DuPont and Syngenta-ChemChina mergers.
Monsanto and Bayer announced the merger in September 2016, claiming the deal will “boost agriculture research and innovation.” This only means there will be more genetic modifications made to plant life to accommodate new agrochemical inventions. Many farmers aren’t buying into it. During the 2016 and 2017 growing seasons, farmers across the United States have been plagued by dicamba drift. Millions of acres of U.S. crops were damaged in 2017 by a dicamba-based herbicide, manufactured by Monsanto and BASF SE. In order to maintain yields of the most profitable crops, farmers are trapped into growing only the genetically modified seeds that have been engineered to withstand the herbicides. This corporate takeover of agriculture has put many small family farms out of business, consolidating farmland into the hands of the few. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, America continues to do away with smaller farms in favor of larger farms. In 1987, larger farms representing at least 2000 acres, controlled 15 percent of U.S. cropland. In 2012, large farms controlled 36 percent of U.S. cropland. The choking out of small farms and biodiversity has continued since.
In central Montana, fourth generation farmer Todd Enley says that when chemicals and seeds become more consolidated, the small farmer can’t compete. He, like other small farmers who struggle year-to-year, haven’t seen many benefits from GMOs and agrochemicals. He told Business Insider, “Our farm has been out here since 1935, and I’m 40 years old and I’ve watched a lot of small family farms in our area go under. They can’t compete because they can’t pay the price of input because of what these companies are wanting to charge for input now.” He iterated, “These corporate bigwigs, are they really going to do what they say?”
Despite Monsanto’s claims of feeding the world, the cost of healthy, nutritious produce has gone up over the years. This is because Monsanto is feeding the world synthetic chemicals, making nutritious, unpolluted foods harder to come by. Monsanto is not assisting farmers with sustainable growing methods, but instead forcing more farmers to rely on agrochemicals and monoculture growing practices that put the food supply and human health at risk.
As the U.S. tries to shut down chemical weapon manufacture in Syria, the country harbors its own chemical weapons facilities, an evil named Monsanto. It was Monsanto that manufactured Agent Orange, which was used on three million U.S. soldiers in Vietnam and on countless Vietnamese, inhumanely causing nervous system and genetic damage. A staggering 500,000 children were born with birth defects and an additional million people suffered health problems or disabilities due to Monsanto’s Agent Orange. It’s only fitting that Monsanto merges with Bayer, a company that manufactured and sold the chemicals that were used to kill Jews in Nazi Germany. Bayer, along with BASF and Hoechst, originally merged as IG Farben and contributed heavily to Adolf Hitler. In return, Hitler relied on the chemical manufacturers to create Zyklon B, a chemical weapon used in Auschwitz and other concentration camps to exterminate the Jews who were too old, too small, or too weak to work.
The Bayer-Monsanto merger is a match made in hell — two chemical weapons manufacturers that are damaging biodiversity, bankrupting small farmers, and destroying human health with poisons like Roundup (glyphosate) and dicamba, all while taking over the world food supply with their genetic experimentation.
Read Monsanto.news for more coverage.
Sources include:
Tagged Under:
RECENT NEWS & ARTICLES
