Combatting Monsanto: Grassroots resistance to the corporate power of agribusiness in the era of the ‘green economy’ and a changing climate

Vía Campesina, et al.

03/04/2012

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Executive Summary

This report provides snapshots of frontline struggles against Monsanto and other biotech corporations pushing genetically modified (GM) crops.1 It shows that small-holder and organic farmers, local communities and social movements around the world are resisting and rejecting Monsanto, and the agro-industrial model that it represents. There is intense opposition to this powerful transnational company, which peddles its GM products seemingly without regard for the associated social and environmental costs.

These vocal objections from social movements and civil society organisations are now having an impact on policy-makers tasked with regulating the food and agricultural sectors in relation to GM crops and pesticides, as this report demonstrates.

In India, for example, a moratorium has been implemented on the cultivation of Bt brinjal, a GM version of a key Indian food staple, and Mahyco-Monsanto has been formally accused of biopiracy by India’s National Biodiversity Authority. After a decade of popular opposition in India, a movement rejecting Monsanto’s colonial-style approach is gathering under the ‘Monsanto, Quit India!’ banner, with a view to ejecting the company from the country. This would free India’s cotton industry of Monsanto’s current stranglehold, and help to stop the suicides of small farmers driven into debt by the ever-increasing costs of GM and chemical inputs.

The movement against Monsanto is also growing in Latin America and the Caribbean. The powerful farmers’ movement in Brazil continues to promote alternative food sovereignty initiatives; and mass mobilisations in Haiti roundly rejected Monsanto’s hybrid seed ‘donations’ after the Haitian earthquake, because of the threats this ‘assistance’ would pose to small farmers and food sovereignty in the country. A ten-year moratorium on GMOs has been introduced in Peru, and legal cases now restrict pesticide use near homes in regions in Argentina. Guatemalan anti-GM networks are issuing warnings against impending legislation and about US aid programs that could lead to the entry of GM seeds and food.

The majority of Europe’s public remains opposed to GM food production, and several countries in Europe now have national bans on Monsanto’s MON810 maize and BASF’s Amflora potatoes, despite the European Commission’s opposition to these bans. A range of direct actions continue as well, including France’s ‘voluntary reapers’ protecting local food production, and Spain’s activists raising public awareness of the Spanish government’s isolated support for GM crops.

Anti-GM actors still face many challenges though, in France and elsewhere. These include food crop trials, moves to undermine existing moratoria in Europe, and aggressive tactics being deployed by the industrial food lobby. This also involves using the French and EU courts to have the French ban on Monsanto’s MON810 maize overturned,2 although the French government has since announced that it intends to maintain the ban anyway.3

Monsanto and other biotech corporations are also facing legal challenges in the US, including lawsuits aimed at stopping GM crops spreading into national wildlife refuges.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa is encouraging local communities to avoid the bad example currently being set by South Africa, which has adopted this failed technology even though the GM varieties in question have been shown not to live up to claims that they are drought and flood resistant. Malian farmers and NGOs are also continuing their struggle - which has been successful so far - to prevent the commercialisation of GM crops in Mali.

In every continent then, communities are fighting against GMOs and for food sovereignty. Yet there is an unprecedented agribusiness offensive underway, under the banner of the new ‘green economy’, a concept that is – in the run up to Rio+20 – being framed with a view to creating an even greater role for corporations and markets. This could allow agribusiness, including Monsanto, to reassert and tighten its grip on food and farming, and facilitate the spread of genetic engineering – worsening the food and climate crises.

* Complete document in PDF

- Joseph Zacune with contributions from activists around the world

La Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth International, Combat Monsanto

https://www.alainet.org/es/node/156968