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DuPont 
Sun Jul 25, 2010 at 20:24:45 PM PDT
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This diary series covers my trip to the Mexican state of Jalisco to study the effects of NAFTA and the Green Revolution on subsistence farmers in rural areas. The trip began with a few days in Guadalajara, the largest city in the state. On the fourth day of the trip, we traveled through the countryside to the small town of Cuquio, where we would spend the rest of our trip.
Day 1: Guadalajara
Day 2 Part 1: Breakfast and the EcoStore
Day 2 Part 2: Jalisco Ecological Collective
Day 3: The Flea Market
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Fri Jun 25, 2010 at 15:58:14 PM PDT
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WTF? Obama just nominated Ramona Emilia Romero as General Counsel of the USDA. Who's she? Well, she's spent the last 12 years working as a lawyer for DuPont. You know, the pesticide company. Among her areas of specialty was antitrust litigation. I am pretty confident that means that she was helping DuPont weasel its way through U.S. antitrust and competition law to keep it from having its mergers denied or getting accused of anti-competitive behavior. This is a strange pick, considering that right now the Dept of Justice is doing a series of antitrust workshops focused on agriculture.
Ramona Emilia Romero's bio is below, taken from the Whitehouse.gov site.
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Mon Jan 18, 2010 at 13:49:36 PM PST
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Two large and odious companies just went head to head in court: Monsanto and DuPont. In this round, Monsanto won... but the door is open for DuPont in the future, if Monsanto gets nailed by the Dept of Justice on antitrust grounds later.
Recall that Monsanto owns the Roundup Ready trait and other seed companies are only allowed to engineer it into their own seeds if they sign contracts with Monsanto. DuPont previously got a license from Monsanto to develop a line of Roundup Ready corn and soybeans. However, they've now developed a NEW line of seeds called Optimum GAT that adds a new DuPont gene along with the Monsanto genes... and Monsanto sued them over it.
The U.S. District cout in St. Louis ruled that DuPont did NOT have the right to do this, according to Monsanto's licensing agreement with DuPont. However, this decision only holds IF Monsanto's licensing agreement isn't ruled to be illegal. DuPont is challenging Monsanto's licensing agreement on antitrust grounds, saying that it represents anticompetitive behavior. In other words, Monsanto may have won Round 1 but buckle up for a long ride:
"This litigation is just beginning; we will now vigorously pursue our antitrust, license and patent fraud claims," DuPont Senior Vice President and General Counsel Thomas L. Sager said in a statement Saturday.
Meanwhile, Monsanto's also in court over its GM alfalfa.
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Wed Sep 23, 2009 at 10:11:55 AM PDT
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Public corporations have one obligation: to maximize profits for their shareholders. Keep that in mind, first and foremost, when you hear of things like the Global Harvest Initiative. It's an effort by the likes of Monsanto, DuPont, ADM, and John Deere to "help" the developing world. Civil Eats writes it up, accusing these companies of acting out of an interest to expand their markets abroad instead of a genuine desire to help people. It's not exactly hard to see through their motives, given how much damage many of their products have done to agriculture in the developed world:
DuPont, Monsanto, ADM and John Deere realize the days of jaw-dropping profits are numbered if they don't change tactics. So under the guise of humanitarianism, these giants have come together and invited receptive politicians like Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) with the distinct strategy of furthering their aims worldwide: to these corporations, the US has been conquered by industrial agriculture (it may be worth noting that 40 million US citizens are currently food insecure) - so now they must spread what isn't working here abroad to continue to make ever larger profits.
Civil Eats also calls on people to quit following Sen. Dick Lugar off an agricultural cliff in the effort to solve world hunger (Lugar was the keynote speaker at the Global Hunger Initiative symposium this week):
Lugar has been in the Senate for over 30 years, and serves as the ranking Republican member of the Senate Agriculture Subcommittee on Hunger, Nutrition and Family Farms, and is also a ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee. In that time, he has become the go-to person on hunger issues. Everyone in the Senate defers to Lugar on hunger, and most have been unwilling to stand up to him, even when he is making a bad decision
Rodale Institute CEO Tim LaSalle also spoke out about the event, saying "New Big Ag Push to Fight World Hunger Misses What Organic Ag Is Already Doing:"
The GHI overture appears to be geared to grab even more money, attention, research, trade and policy support for high-input dependent systems. This mission runs counter to calls from several world food study groups... who say organic and ecological production systems are the best hope for transforming the "feeding the world" challenge from simply producing more corn and soybeans on industrial farms toward growing more diverse and nutritive crops, better suited to feed the hungry poor, produced in more ecologically sound ways based on locally-available, biologically renewable resources.
Food-focused farmers already know how well biology works. Without further research, organic farms in widely varied climates and sizes are already producing highly nutritious food in sustainable ways that are reducing greenhouse gases, increasing resilience in the face of changing climatic conditions, and providing greater economic opportunity.
With a fraction of the hundreds of millions of research dollars already spent to overcome chemical agriculture's failures, agricultural researchers around the world could work on organic farming advances relevant to their bioregions. NGOs dedicated to exploring ecologically sound ways to optimize hunger-relieving livestock and crop production could adopt and teach organic techniques to help bring degraded soils into production -- a goal of the GHI's white paper -- while improving nutrition through complex crop mixes that are impossible when pesticides are used.
I've also included a U.S. Food Crisis Working Group press release about the Global Harvest Initiative, below.
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Sat Jul 26, 2008 at 16:25:36 PM PDT
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This week I posted about a new corporate front group, the Alliance for Abundant Food and Energy, which represents the pro-ethanol lobby. One of my favorite organizations, the Center for Media & Democracy, is onto them as well:
Monsanto, Dupont, Archer Daniels Midland and the PR giant Burson-Marsteller are some of the corporations behind the Alliance for Abundant Food and Energy. No doubt feel-good ads from this front group will soon fill the airwaves, especially in Washington DC. The Washington Post reports, "A group of the world's biggest agribusiness companies announced it will use lobbyists on Capitol Hill and national ads to build the case for fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, even as grain prices climb worldwide. The biofuels industry has blossomed under federal mandates requiring the United States to increase alternative fuel usage by 2009. The mandates are under attack from groups who blame the new industry for rising food prices that have sparked riots and hoarding in several countries. ... The alliance has a budget of several million dollars for the campaign, but it did not disclose the exact amount."
Ethanol's no energy solution, but it can succeed in making this group of megacorporations rich(er). With farmers planting more corn in order to satisfy the rising demand created by ethanol, Monsanto and Dupont will make money selling them the inputs they need to grow the corn (like GM seeds from Monsanto). Then Archer Daniels Midland will make money on the other end, processing the corn into ethanol.
This might be a good time to call or write your Congresscritters to let them know you aren't fooled by this. Ethanol isn't the way to go because it takes a lot of oil to make it - we need to invest in real renewables like wind and solar.
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