There is an old
African saying "Whether elephants make love or war, the grass suffers."
The two elephants in the agricultural seed business are now making real
war, although they have been wary of each other for years. Monsanto,
a relatively recent entry into the business, has become the "dominant
male" in the battle after moving to acquire a large number of formerly
independent seed companies. Pioneer,
content for years to be the premiere corn breeder in the world, has
Sure
Catch Baits owner, Lisa Pilgrim, was in Toronto for a routine meeting
with the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) just over a year ago as a
member of a baitfish advisory committee. There had been many such
meetings, but this time she brought a prop.
"It was an MNR sign, a proper notice, that said ‘don't eat the blueberries,'" Pilgrim said.
The reason? The blueberries were in an area that had received
herbicidal spray, applied from a helicopter, and were therefore
potentially unsafe to consume.
It was April 18 -- a warm and sunny day, weather completely unlike we had seen for some time.
I
must confess, I didn't have a chance to buy those not-so-fancy farming
overalls like I had hoped. But, I did manage to plant my grains -- inch
by inch, (or thereabouts) crooked row by crooked row.
Red Fife, a
hard wheat variety, emmer and hulless oats made up my crop -- and by
crop I mean whatever I could jam into my 200-square foot plot, which,
incidentally, feels a whole lot bigger when you have to pull the weeds
out.
I have
learned over the past decade if I want to know what's really going on
in the United States, I have to cruise through the foreign media to see
what's creating a furor or causing a stink. So, while searching for the
status of Spain's on-again, off-again criminal proceedings against six
Bush Administration war criminals, this headline in Der Spiegel caught my eye -- "Frankenfood Ban is Neither Populism nor Panic-Mongering."
