Reasons Why Biotech Crops Flourish
in Spite of Being a Failure

PAUL GOETTLICH 30jan2005

1. Popular mass media is owned by right-wing corporations that regularly censor and falsify news to suit their political and ideological aspirations. Advertising profits keep the rest in line.  — Fox News and rBGH
2. Academia is now owned by corporations —  Ignacio Chapela: Enemy of the State
3. In the US, Monsanto plays a big role in government at all levels — The Revolving Door
4. The biotech industry gives free "educational" material to all levels of schools when teachers are starving for any kind of classroom material — Your World: Biotechnology and You
5. Laws were written by the corporations to protect corporate profits (not people's physical or economic health) — more revolving door, see above.
6. US Patents insure that intellectual property rights of those corporations are protected. The WTO, NAFTA, and so on abide by those patents and force them on member countries, thus bypassing each country's sovereignty. — The True Cost of Genetically Engineered Crops
7. Subsidies are also a major reason for the proliferation and continuance of GMOs. The US taxpayers pay for their own stupidity by funding a technology that: is less productive; less nutritious; uses more pesticides, and therefore more expensive for farmers and less healthy to grow and eat. These subsidies take a heavy toll on poor farmers in places like India where the WTO is demanding an end to Indian subsidies to farmers as being unfair to US farmers. — Devinder Sharma on Subsidies
8. Some farmers like this technology because, in spite of it costing more, they work less. It's partly ego-based reasoning as well, where it keeps them ahead or beating the Joneses. Fields look prettier... nice and neat... just spray that Roundup and away go your troubles. Right?  Well, OK, your troubles just begin!  Some farmers even have a fear of diversity in wildness, as well as a liking of reproductive sterility. The farmers who use pesticides also become infertile and increasingly unable to have children. Even the children of farmers who use pesticides are having reproductive problems. I don't think this is a desired effect. But none the less, quite true. — Cryptorchidism and Hypospadias in Sons of Gardeners and Farmers