http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...s/6768757.html

AP INVESTIGATION: Monsanto seed biz role revealed

By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD AP Agribusiness Writer © 2009 The Associated Press
Dec. 13, 2009, 11:54PM

ST. LOUIS ‹ Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.'s business
practices reveal how the world's biggest seed developer is squeezing
competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its
dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered
crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

With Monsanto's patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of
all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company
also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms
to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of
several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed
industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.

Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price hikes
that ripple out to every family's dinner table. That's because the corn
flakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you
ate for dinner likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto's
patented genes.

Monsanto's methods are spelled out in a series of confidential
commercial licensing agreements obtained by the AP. The contracts, as
long as 30 pages, include basic terms for the selling of engineered
crops resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, along with shorter
supplementary agreements that address new Monsanto traits or other
contract amendments.

.. . .

Since GMOs don't produce larger or healthier crops, the above is a
reminder of why we should be growing heirloom crops (open pollinated).
--
³When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist.²
-Archbishop Helder Camara

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