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Monsanto in Gates' Clothing? The Emperor's New GMOs
If you had any doubts about where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is really placing its bets, AGRA Watch's recent announcement of the Foundation's investment of $23.1 million in 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock should put them to rest. Genetic engineering: full speed ahead.
If you are one of those people who believes the axiom that Monsanto is the farmer's friend (and the corollary, that its climate-ready, bio-fortified GMOs can save the world from hunger) you will not be surprised, disappointed, or find any conflict of interest in this investment.
But if you are part of the growing population who gets their information about GMOs from scientists who are not beholden to corporate funding, has a problem with anti-trust issues, or is getting queasy about the increasing monopoly power of philanthropy capital... it's time to say the Emperor has no clothes.
Under the guise of "sustainability" the Foundation has been spearheading a multi-billion dollar effort to transform African into a GMO-friendly continent. The public relations flagship for this effort is the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a massive Green Revolution project. Up to now AGRA spokespeople have been slippery, and frankly, contradictory about their stance on GMOs.
The first Director of AGRA was Gary Toenniessen, a career program officer for Rockefeller Foundation. He said AGRA was not ruling out GMOs and if and when they were introduced it would be with all the appropriate "safeguards." After AGRA was criticized for not having any Africans, Kofi Anan was named Chairman in 2007. He first said GMOs were out of the picture, the next day he recapitulated. Last Spring, Joe DeVries, who runs the AGRA seed program was asked by a Worldwatch blogger if they were engaging in genetic engineering. "Read our lips," said Joe DeVries. "We are not promoting or funding research for GMOs (genetically modified organisms)..." In fact, in Kenya alone AGRA has used funds from the Gates Foundation to write grants for research in genetically modified agriculture. Nearly 80% of Gates' funding in Kenya involves biotech and there have been over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto. In 2008, some 30% of the Foundation's agricultural development funds went to promoting or developing genetically modified seeds (See Ending Africa's Hunger)..
More to the point is that--as Monsanto and Gates are fully aware--to establish a healthy GMO industry one first needs a strong conventional breeding program in place: labs, experiment stations, agronomists, extensionists, molecular biologists... and farmer's seeds. All of which Gates, Rockefeller, Monsanto and AGRA are actively lining up.
They also need the power of U.S. government funding. That is where the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Casey-Lugar come in. USAID is now headed up by former Gates employee Rajiv Shah. The Casey-Lugar Global Food Security act ties foreign aid to GMOs. When the Gates Foundation places a bet, they like to hold all the cards.
Africa's seeds are a potential windfall investment for Monsanto. Regardless of the philanthropic side of its intentions, cloaked in the sheep's clothing of AGRA, the Gates Foundation is moving stealthily opening African seed market to global corporations. When the research, extension, and U.S. foreign aid is all in place Monsanto will swoop in for the feast.- Posted in
29 Comments so far
Show AllSo... the countries/continents with GMO's are going to get killed first, on the way to "sustainability". And for when the dust settles, there's the Gates/Strong/Monsanto "Doomsday Vault" of unaltered seeds up in Svalbald.
Jonathan Edwards, good point about the "Doomsday Vault". What is one to make of the Gates Foundation's financial support for the "Global Crop Diversity Trust" on the one hand and investing in Monsanto and funding other programs that actively promote the use of GM crops in other countries, in the name of improving yield and feeding the hungry?
I think it is quite possible that there are forces at play which are planning on killing a whole bunch of us. Of course the best avenue would be incurable illness of some sort, triggered by some pathogen we know no cure for, to avoid any suspicion and accusation of murder. Can new viruses be created or genetically altered in labs?
I saw a video of a Finnish Scientist who mentioned that the epidemic-scares that are leading to worldwide vaccination-drives are intended to lower our immune system in preparation for something that will be introduced in the future. I don't know if it's real or imagined.
Likewise GMO's will not only provide absolute control over food production, but will also introduce genetic combinations and proteins we have not evolved for.
Then you have the discovery of 'super bugs', natural or created, we wouldn't know - it appears that a lot of scientists are still expressing puzzlement at how the composition of H1N1 came about, being composed of genetics from various continents as well as bird, swine and human flu virus.
Of course it could be that this is all merely a result of our world really getting messed up because of how we have altered it, and without being done on purpose. Personally, with the wall we are in crash-course with in the near future, I am not sure whether we need the addition of artificial crisis' to do us in. I do not personally have high expectations for the future, though I worry about my partner, who is only 23 years old, and whom I love with all my heart, and do not want to see suffer.
I was wondering if Monsanto will 'swoop' in like an eagle or like a vulture? I couldn't help imagining super gluing eagle feathers on a vulture.
I heard a program on radio last night that GMO corn may be killing insects which bats depend upon to live. Therefore, some bat populations are going extinct.
Bees have already been decimated. Bats next. How long until humans stuff mass extinction because of the profit motive of corporations?
BTW, Shah is another corporate shill appointed by the Harvard/corporate shill Obama.
http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2679
All I know is that I wish the bats in my area would eat more mosquitoes.
"Gates' clothing"...
The 's' in the name has nothing to do with the plural -- it's his name! Therefore it should be GATES'S.
correct..............
Btw, I loathe Monsanto... and thanks for the article.
Gates should have given that money to American Indians to show us how to live in harmony with Mother Earth.
I have no reason to be surprised at this alliance of Microsoft and Monsanto. Microsoft stole from UNIX which is open source to make closed source operating systems which they could then sell for profits. Apple is no different by the way. Likewise, Monsanto wants nothing more than to rob and rape from Mother Nature to not only profit but to make agriculture a closed business. Both Microsoft and Monsanto are very deceptive about pretending to be open and fair but they'll do anything to wipe out the competition. They'll slap corporate lawsuits against anymore they think is a competing threat. Microsoft has stalked independent programmers in the past the same way Monsanto has stalked farmers who accidentally grew a hybrid crop because one of their seeds fell into their farms on purpose. I have witnessed independent programmers on their sites telling users how they had to change their programs because they couldn't use certain modules from M$. It's ironic how Microsoft cries foul and theft on people wanting to run their OSes off their CD/DVDs or removable hard drives but they have the nerve to buy and steal from other companies. Monsanto has the same plans on their seeds. Independence is dead in the water. It's use it their way only or get financially mugged.
Those two companies also like government when it is locked into their ways. I met former employees of Microsoft who explained to me all the seductive benefits they were lured into for working 10-14 hours a day on average. I wouldn't be surprised if farmers found themselves in the same rotting hell under Monsanto. These employees are taught to love soaking in profits and they don't have to be paid to lie and troll. They get trained by their bosses to call open source a "loser's paradise" and I wouldn't be surprised if GM farmers were taught the same language against Mother Nature.
Now I know some people don't like to farm and garden honestly because they think it's too much back breaking work and takes too long to get those crops. This is the same attitude I have had to put up with when running across M$ fans at work. They say that open source is too much thinking and programming to do while Microsoft offers quick, snappy, and easy solutions despite lack of security. Maybe so but my wife and I can't forget the spontaneous love we get from working and thinking freely and independently. That said, it's not too late to step away from Microsoft and Monsanto despite their already existing corporate control of their lives. I see nothing to lose.
For me, my 'to-do' list is always years long. I have too many other things to do and learn than to spend even more time with computers and fighting weeds, etc. Life is short. I would lose time doing things I would rather do. By the way, I watched a movie the other day with Tim Robbins playing a Bill Gates type sinister computer software CEO. I forget the name, but it was very interesting.
your thoughts are simliar to mine...the way Bill Gates acquired and handled the DOS system, then the Windows system, do not bode well for the world of agriculture...
maxpayne, great post on Microsoft and Monsanto. Interesting point about both stealing, and yet take aggressive action against others to protect their "property". I'll have to say that Monsanto is clearly the greater evil, but the Gates Foundation putting its money on this company only raises more questions of its real agenda.
Monsanto would look like the greater evil compared to Microsoft but the time it takes for one company to be evil not to mention the different shades of evil can make those two look different. I think of Microsoft more than just the Gates Foundation alone and still haven't forgotten the times when IBM and Microsoft were at odds after the splitting off on DOS. The day M$ made a public scene on the Blue Screen of Death during that Windows 98 introduction should have been the day users would migrate en masse to Linux but here were are still in the minority even on browsing. Yes, I use Microsoft but I use the OS the UNIX way. This means that my wife and I run the operating system in user mode and only allow admin for installation. That alone prevents most viruses and trojans from taking over the PC. If our user account is messed up, we create another one and move things around just like we would on a UNIX based system. If it weren't for the manufacturers relying on Windows for general requirements to run their apps, I would have been on Linux already. There's a Windows emulator for Linux but I would still look for UNIX equivalents. There's lots to say about this but you get the idea. I don't know what to say but maybe it's just mankind's desire for the easy stuff that gets most of us in trouble. :(
Hi maxpayne, I just want to say that installing and using Linux (I've tried a few different distro's) has become a heckuva lot easier in recent years and except for proprietary software that comes with camcorders and such, I really haven't faced the limitation with driver software for any of my peripherals and the few gadgets I use. Of course, since my recent computers came with Vista preloaded, I'm keeping it - but in dual boot mode. I know dual booting has to be set up a bit carefully if using Windows is essential, but it can be done and that gives you first hand proof that you **can** live without Windows. Of course if you rely on some specialty applications that need to be the same as at work, then it's different, I guess.
"Microsoft stole from UNIX"
Not even close, maxpayne. The way it went down was IBM first wanted to buy the rights to CP/M (NOT UNIX) from a brilliant computer scientist with a PHD. His name was Gary Kildall (http://www.cadigital.com/kildall.htm) and he had previously worked for the Navy. He created CP/M for the love of it and it was as bulletproof as any bit of software could be. Perfect, to be exact. At the time, it was the primary operating system for most microcomputers.
The day that the IBM committee came to visit Gary, there was some confusion about exactly when they were to meet and Gary missed the appointment. The IBM boys were offended and went off to buy a second-hand piece app (Word) from Gates. As the IBM guys were leaving Gates, and almost as an afterthought, they told him they were still looking for an operating system and asked if he knew of one. Gates told them he thought so and to come back the next day.
Gates promptly went to a couple of teenagers that he knew were about halfway through the process of creating a knock-off version of CP/M. Gates, when asking if they would sell it to him, received the response, " You want to buy THIS?" He did and paid them $50,000 on the spot for a half completed bunch of crappy, bug-plagued code that is STILL used as the base for MSDOS, to this day.
--
Apple, BTW, didn't rip off it's version of UNIX. It has and uses a licensed Berkley version.
Tarry_Faster, not sure about Gary Kildall missing the appointment with the IBM guys, but CP/M, great as it was, was still an 8-bit OS and Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer had already developed a 16-bit version directly based on CP/M. The real story is that Gary Kildall was magnanimous about it, as he felt that QDOS (the 16-bit clone of CP/M) was different enough from CP/M and didn't bother to go after Paterson - who was later hired by Microsoft. The first IBM PC came with a 16-bit OS. And it's a fact that many of the subsequent DOS versions "adopted" a lot of features from UNIX, whether you call it stealing or not.
I have heard about similar behavior from IBM in the past and certainly don't give IBM any pass but I will be happy to look more into it. But as Alcyon correctly put it, DOS was based on UNIX. But everything from Microsoft was based on other technologies and third party apps. The way Microsoft takes from other manufacturers is like the two political major parties stealing ideas from third parties and then mutilating them once the election is over every time. Do you understand how Microsoft and Monsanto act? They pretend and spin about doing a better job than UNIX and Mother Nature respectively and they'll come up with false and hyped theories about what they can offer. But by the time they actually deliver, it is nothing close to what they promised. It will look good at first but slowly the rot becomes obvious over time. That is how they profit. Operating system after operating system, every time a new OS would come out, all the big magazines would say big and bright things about that operating system. 6-12 months after the release, it's tones of articles telling us how tweak it but no guarantees and troubleshooting tips and solutions that aren't always easy.
I see Monsanto and the likes doing the same thing with their crops so that farmers have to keep buying from them and consumers. Someone wrote this once about the difference between the same fruit or vegetable from a natural seed vs a GMO seed. Both look the same and both feel equally healthy at first. A few months later, however, the subject eating the same naturally grown produce all along is doing better while the subject eating the GMO grown produce could be vitamin deficient or sick because an unexpected GMO bug is altering his or her health for the worse. Like Microsoft, Monsanto will play good cop bad cop and promise to "fix" the bug. Hell, why not just "upgrade" that produce to a new version or service pack and confuse the consumers and pretend "diversity"?
Alcyon, I saw your reply on Linux. I have room to put in another hard disk and use that for experimenting with UNIX side by side. A 40 or 60 GB hard disk drive will suffice I presume.
>>maxpayne wrote: Alcyon, I saw your reply on Linux. I have room to put in another hard disk and use that for experimenting with UNIX side by side. A 40 or 60 GB hard disk drive will suffice I presume.<<
Yup, that should do. If you are planning to make it dual-boot and want to keep Windows, be sure to read up on steps to creating a dual-boot set up. In particular, be sure that you understand the part about the "bootloader" and the decision to leave the boot-time control with Windows (Vista) or Linux. I'm sorry I don't have something handy to point to, as I set up my systems a while ago - but I'm sure you can find the steps listed on the internet. If you are not in a hurry, maybe I'll find some reference "one of these days" and perhaps add my own tips as well. All the best! :)
Vista was one of the poorer OSes but Microsoft actually fixed a lot of it in Windows 7. If your computer came with VISTA preloaded, make sure you get the latest BIOS updates so that the Windows 7 brand specific OEMs you can find cheap on Ebay will install without the need for activation. Like VISTA, it's ok to modify your BIOS to SLIC 2.1 if you can't get the latest BIOS update with SLIC 2.1 tables but be careful when you do it. Usually, some programmer would have put an unofficial BIOS update. That's not the same as software loaders to fake activation. We're talking about hardware modifications. Overall, I thought that the risk was well worth it. I haven't changed any hardware and yet my system runs faster and crashes much less than even VISTA SP2. I'm running the 32 bit version by the way.
That's often a scheme used by M$ to do damage control. This isn't the first time they fooled customers with "improvements" after ripping off enough consumers.
Better living through chemistry, right? Technology can save us from the reality of what we are doing to the ecosystems of the world, and hell, there's always "virtual reality".
"When the research, extension, and U.S. foreign aid is all in place Monsanto will swoop in for the feast."......
....and while Monsanto feasts, the poor will starve.
Brave New World
Soylent Green etc.
Please visit William Engdahl's website to see what else Bill Gates has been up to...............
I've heard about Gates's love affair with genetic engineering. With wealth comes hubris. Just because you understand how a relatively simple machine like a computer works doesn't mean you understand anything real complicated like lifeforms in an inter-related system.
It's a foolish investment by a man that has turned foolish.
Tell your State pension fund or your teacher's pension fund you don't want them investing in Monsanto. Make Gates lose money on his investment.
Thank you for this very interesting article .....
Why am I not surprised?
OTOH, the fact that the Gates Foundation bought half a million shares in Monsanto could be one of those "values-neutral" investments where the investor doesn't care how the company makes its money, as long as it makes money.
But then, later in the article we find that:
"In fact, in Kenya alone AGRA has used funds from the Gates Foundation to write grants for research in genetically modified agriculture. Nearly 80% of Gates' funding in Kenya involves biotech and there have been over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto. In 2008, some 30% of the Foundation's agricultural development funds went to promoting or developing genetically modified seeds (See Ending Africa's Hunger)."
This demonstrates the insidious nature of the Gates Foundation's investment in Monsanto. It is a profit loop. The Gates Foundation guarantees a market opening for Monsanto in Africa by direct NGO investment promoting GMOs, then buys Monsanto shares after guaranteeing a market, all to help those hapless Africans who just never did learn how to do agriculture on their own. It's like the heroin dealer who sucks in a new addict by saying, "hey, you gotta try this stuff. It's really great! It's on me."
It also smacks of racism and Western cultural exceptionalism.
This business of promoting the idea of "benevolent philanthropy" promoted by Gates and Warren Buffet, in lieu of government-based social improvements is utterly anti-democratic and fits the old Reagan model: government bad, free markets good. ("You don't need to tax our excess wealth; we plan to give it away." Selectively, of course.)
Just one more example of the social hazards of concentrated wealth in private hands. Capital gains need to be taxed at least at the level of taxes on labor.
-30-
rebelde: Shame on Bill Gates! Monsanto must be the devil. Don't those Monsanto ghouls also need to eat? But wait...they have forgotten that you can't eat money.