Monsanto’s magic beans

Jeff Taylor
The Economic Voice
January 6, 2011

Give a person food and you feed them for a day, show them how to grow their own food and you feed them for life or so the adage goes in one form or another. But I would add ‘force them to buy your food every year just to survive and you enslave them‘.

One of the stories to come out of Wikileaks does not seem to have been given the exposure it deserves. This is that the former US Ambassador Craig Stapleton said in 2007 in response to the French ban on Monsanto’s GM corn that “Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. …… In our view, Europe is moving backwards not forwards on this issue with France playing a leading role, along with Austria, Italy and even the Commission … Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices“.

I’m not sure that any retaliation plan was ever put in place or implemented, but that an ambassador felt themselves in a position to push retaliation as a trading strategy to support Monsanto’s ‘Mon810′ is interesting. Sounds like a modern version of the Chinese opium wars to me. But the push was also not limited to France.

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This article was posted: Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 10:32 am

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