The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality (138 page)

The corporation later admitted that Schmeiser had not obtained the seeds illegally, but said that wasn't important.
 
What did matter, Monsanto argued, was that it had found some of its canola plants in the ditch along Schmeiser's field (note that the plants were not found in Schmeiser's fields); that meant that the farmer had violated the firm’s patent.
 

The judge agreed with Monsanto, ruling that 'the source of (GM) oilseed rape… is not really significant for the issue of infringement'.
 
In other words, it was irrelevant how the patented canola plants got on Schmeiser's land.
 
It could have happened as a result of cross-pollination or by seed movement caused by wind. (The latter is the biggest cause of contamination involving GM crops, and the farm next to Schmeiser's did grow Monsanto's crop.)
 
The judge told Schmeiser that all his seeds, developed over almost half a century, were now the property of Monsanto.
 
The Ecologist May 2004

This is so typical of the immoral behaviour of the Elite corporations.
 
Profit is everything and ordinary, hard-working, decent people and their families count for nothing other the fact that they are considered fair game for extortionate practices or at best regarded as ‘profit centres’ to be exploited to the maximum.

Worse still, it is a well-documented fact that thousands of farmers in India are committing suicide due to Monsanto’s hideously unethical and immoral business tactics.
 
In early 2011 it was estimated that at least 250,000 Indian farmers had committed suicide in the previous decade due to Monsanto’s business practices causing their livelihoods to virtually evaporate. Powerful GM lobbyists however are stating that GM crops have transformed India’s agriculture, providing greater yields than ever before.
 

“So who is telling the truth?
 
To find out, I travelled to the 'suicide belt' in Maharashtra state.
 
What I found was deeply disturbing - and has profound implications for countries, including Britain, debating whether to allow the planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to circumvent the laws of nature.

For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month.
 
Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths.
 
Most swallow insecticide - a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.

It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed.
 
Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and 'agrarian distress' that is the real reason for the horrific toll.
 
But, as I discovered during a four-day journey through the epicentre of the disaster, that is not the full story.

In one small village I visited, 18 farmers had committed suicide after being sucked into GM debts.
 
In some cases, women have taken over farms from their dead husbands - only to kill themselves as well.
 
Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed - two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much.
 
She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. 'He cries when he thinks of his mother,' said the dead woman's aunt, sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.

In village after village, families told how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds.
 
The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds.
 
But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were 'magic seeds' - with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.

Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks.
 
The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new biotechnology.
 
Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.

In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution.
 
But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers' lives have slid back into the dark ages.

Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years - up to 17 million acres - many farmers have found there is a terrible price to be paid.
 
Far from being 'magic seeds', GM pest-proof 'breeds' of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite.
 
Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.

With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off.
 
Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis.
 

When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.
 
But with GM seeds they cannot do this.
 
That's because GM seeds contain so-called 'terminator technology', meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own.
 
As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices.
 
For some, that means the difference between life and death.

Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated this week, leaving a wife and two children.
 
As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbours squatted outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT Cotton, a genetically modified plant created by Monsanto.

'We are ruined now,' said the dead man's 38-year-old wife.
 
'We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton.
 
Our crop failed twice.
 
My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.'
 
Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along rutted farm roads. 'He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he was sorry,' she said, as her family and neighbours crowded into her home to pay their respects.
 
'He was dead by the time they got to hospital.'

Asked if the dead man was a 'drunkard' or suffered from other 'social problems', as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified gathering erupted in anger.
 
'No! No!' one of the dead man's brothers exclaimed. 'Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes.
 
'He was strangled by these magic seeds.
 
They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do.
 
We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year.
 
It is killing us.
 
Please tell the world what is happening here.'

Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a 'factor in this tragedy'.
 
But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as 'untimely rain' or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life.
 
Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM seeds - no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics.

During the course of my inquiries in Maharastra, I encountered three 'independent' surveyors scouring villages for information about suicides.
 
They insisted that GM seeds were only 50 per cent more expensive - and then later admitted the difference was 1,000 per cent. (A Monsanto spokesman later insisted their seed is 'only double' the price of 'official' non-GM seed - but admitted that the difference can be vast if cheaper traditional seeds are sold by 'unscrupulous' merchants, who often also sell 'fake' GM seeds which are prone to disease.)

With rumours of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of assistance.
 
'We just want to escape from our problems,' one said.
 
'We just want help to stop any more of us dying.'
 
Cruelly, it's the young who are suffering most from the 'GM Genocide'  -  the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship and misery by these 'magic seeds'.
 
Here in the suicide belt of India, the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.”
 
Andrew Malone, UK Daily Mail,
 
3rd November 2008

Dr. Arpad Pusztai a Hungarian-born protein scientist spent most of his working life at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland – a total of 36 years.
 
He was considered to be the world’s foremost expert on plant lectins and has authored 270 scientific papers and 3 books on the subject.
 

However, in 1998 Pusztai publicly announced that the results of his extensive, meticulous research showed conclusively that feeding genetically modified potatoes to rats substantially harmed them, leading to his summary dismissal from the institute.
 
The resulting controversy over his dismissal and the attempts to invalidate the conclusions of his research became known as the ‘Pusztai affair’.

The rats fed on the genetically modified potatoes showed significant intestinal damage and harm to their immune systems.
 
These effects were not observed in control rats fed on unmodified potatoes, or unmodified potatoes mixed with snowdrop lectin.
 
The team concluded that the effects observed were a result of the genetic modification, not the snowdrop lectin.

Dr. Pusztai commented, "We had two kinds of potatoes - one GM and the other non-GM.
 
I had expected that the GM potato, with 20 micrograms of a component against the several grams of other components, should not cause any problems.
 
But we found problems.
 
Our studies clearly show that the effects were not due to that little gene expression, but it depended on the way the gene had been inserted into the potato genome and what it did to the potato genome."

In early 2009 I was fortunate enough to briefly meet Arpad’s wife, also a scientist, Dr. Susan Bardocz at a conference in London.
 
She told me that what actually happened, although it was obviously distorted in the media, was this;

As soon as the report on the trials was published, at the headquarters of a large corporation primarily concerned with the production and distribution of GM foods, alarm bells began to ring and so the head of the corporation involved (no prizes for guessing its name but it begins with M and ends with onsanto) contacted the then US President Bill Clinton to demand some sort of government intervention in order to limit the damage done to GM foods by this worrying turn of events.
 
According to Susan Bardocz who was told this by the director of the institute, Clinton immediately contacted the British PM, Tony Blair and Blair immediately put pressure on the director of the Rowett Institute to dismiss Dr. Pusztai.
  

In addition to this, the Rowett Institute's director Philip James, who had initially supported Pusztai, suspended him and used misconduct procedures to seize the data.
 
His annual contract was not renewed and Pusztai and his wife were banned from speaking publicly.
 
Phone calls to his office were diverted and his research team was disbanded.
 
Initially the Rowett Institute claimed that they were not performing any research on GM crops but later the Institute claimed that Pusztai had voluntarily retired and apologised for his ‘mistake’.
 
According to another version of the ‘story’, the experiments had never been performed in the first place and then yet another version emerged whereby a student had accidentally confused control data with experimental data.
 
This is a typical modus operandus.
 
Confuse the issue as much as possible so that the whole story becomes a total mess and no-one really knows the actual truth any more.