Paid By Monsanto: Universities Taking Money From The Biotech Bully

By: Barbara Peterson | Farm Wars -

I want food that Grandma ate. How hard is that to understand? I don’t want it chemically lobotomized and coated with poison. I don’t want it genetically spliced to become something between a salamander and a tomato. I don’t want it radiated and mutated. I don’t want a virus inserted in its DNA. I don’t want its RNA tampered with to change its traits. I just want good, old fashioned food. The kind you grow in your garden and use to feed your family and critters. The kind the bees like to collect pollen from and not go belly up the minute they enter the hive. The kind that you can pick with your bare hands and eat right from the plant. The kind that won’t turn your stomach into a pesticide factory and your guts into mush.

I actually have the gall to want food that is edible and good for me, not just something a chemical company threw together sporting a pretty label and packaging that says it is. Is that really too much to ask?

Well, according to Monsanto et al, it is. And the agribusiness giants have taken over the universities.

These corporate GMO and chemical farming pushers are brainwashing whole generations of young adults and senior adults that GMOs are safe, have been around for thousands of years, and are a perfectly natural alternative to Grandma’s garden, made by Monsanto. The chemical/life sciences company. You know the one. The one that appears to poison the very ground that it sits on along with the people around it.

Just how were Nitro citizens exposed to dioxin? Monsanto was producing the toxic herbicide Agent Orange in Nitro, and dioxin is a chemical byproduct of the substance. It is known to cause serious health conditions. The factory which produced Agent Orange was opened in Nitro in 1948 and remained in operation until 2004, even though usage of this herbicide in the past (in Vietnam and other Asian countries) was fatal to millions of citizens and the war veterans who were exposed to it.

Is this what we want for our children? Our planet? Our dinner plates?

Monsanto laughed all the way to the bank while covering up the toxicity of its industrial shenanigans as Anniston, Alabama’s children played in and ate dirt soaked with PCBs at yet another toxic superfund site created by Monsanto.

On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston, the people ate dirt. They called it “Alabama clay” and cooked it for extra flavor. They also grew berries in their gardens, raised hogs in their back yards, caught bass in the murky streams where their children swam and played and were baptized. They didn’t know their dirt and yards and bass and kids — along with the acrid air they breathed — were all contaminated with chemicals. They didn’t know they lived in one of the most polluted patches of America.

That is what Monsanto is about. Greed and avarice. Not feeding a starving world as the PR would have you believe.

And this is the company my friends, that is hell bent on owning the foundation of the world’s food supply, including that snack you are munching on, organic or not. And we are supposed to trust its good intentions? I’ll just bet those kids who played on that toxic soil in Anniston are feeling the love about now, as they inhale their last breaths through a respirator in the cancer wing of the local hospital.

Want to know why supposed “scientists” from universities such as UC Davis can get by with purporting to be “not receiving funds” from the biotech industry while spouting Monsanto propaganda? Because the money they receive is laundered through the universities they work for. They don’t receive it directly from Monsanto, they simply receive their paycheck from the university that does. Or the foundation that does. Or whatever biotech sinkhole that will accept money for services rendered.

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Land grant universities’ dependence on industry money has corrupted the independence of public science, as academics align their research projects with the ambitions of the private sector. Industry funding also diverts academic resources and attention away from projects that benefit the public, including research that challenges corporate control of food systems.

Donors can and do influence the outcomes of research to meet their business needs. More than 15 percent of university scientists acknowledge having “changed the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source.”

Individual examples of pro-industry research abound… [A] study found that around half of authors of peer-reviewed journal articles about the safety of genetically engineered (GE) foods had an identifiable affiliation with industry. All of these produced favorable results to industry sponsors, while very few acknowledged having received industry funding.

The future of a major research deal between UC Davis and the Monsanto corporation brings the role of the university into bold relief. How far can a university go in collaborating with private industry before its mission of contributing to basic knowledge becomes distorted? How will we know when it’s gone too far?

Here is a link to a letter confirming only one of Monsanto’s many contributions to UC Davis:

The following is a portion of a Sacramento Bee article that has been removed from the newspaper’s site:

A “who’s who” of international biotechnology companies fund work at UC Davis. They include Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont and Bayer. Some grants pay for specific research, but many arrive with no official strings attached. Whatever the form, the companies get something in return – access to the university’s talent pool and, often, first crack at its scientific breakthroughs.

“The public is having a hard time figuring out where the corporate door ends and where the university door begins,” said Bill Liebhardt, former director of the UC system’s sustainable farming program, which promotes nonindustrial farming methods.

Small farmers — the very people agricultural colleges like UC Davis were established to help — feel neglected. “The university is being led by industry,” said Judith Redmond, co-owner of Full Belly Farm, an organic vegetable farm in Yolo County. (Source: Sacramento Bee)

But don’t worry, Monsanto and its cohorts are feeding the world. What’s left of it when they get through is anyone’s guess.

This type of behavior is unacceptable by any standards. The Universities are essentially bought off by corporate biotech interests such as Monsanto’s and tasked with unleashing a technology with relatively unknown consequences on the general public under the guise of a love for humanity; a PR campaign designed to sell as much of the stuff as possible. This type of behavior is not only unethical, but criminal. Yet, that is exactly what Monsanto has a sordid history of doing and getting away with. With the government’s blessing and complicity. Money talks, reason walks. Along with common sense, compassion, and any spark of humanity left in the souls of those wretched creatures who are pulling the trigger on humanity one gene-spliced concoction at a time.

Article first appeared at Farm Wars.