10.19.09
Bill Gates Takes His GMO Patent Investments/Experiments to India
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Summary: Not only Africa but India too is now on the radar of Gates’ for-profit crusade with GMO (and Monsanto’s patents)
SOME things are not as good as they appear on the surface. We gradually gather more external links about the subject of the Gates Foundation (more in this Microsoft index) and just the other day we showed how Bill Gates protects his monetary investments in GMO. We have just found a batch of new articles about the subject, but they totally miss the point while Bill Gates dismisses his opponents as “environmentalists”.
We add highlights to the portions below.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates said on October 15 that environmentalists who are adamantly opposed to using genetically modified crops in Africa are hindering efforts to end hunger on that continent.
[...]
The Gates Foundation is also partnering with researchers who are using both conventional crop-breeding and biotechnology to produce drought-tolerant corn. And other work is being conducted on flood-tolerant rice and wheat that is resistant to a virulent form of rust disease.
“The technologies will be licensed royalty free to seed distributors so that the new seeds can be sold to African farmers without extra charge,” Gates declared.
It will be “licensed”. It means patents that are external to Africa. For how long will they be “licensed”?
The article above also does not say that Gates invests in those commercial companies with their precious patents, whose dissemination he promotes under the guise of “charity” (which is always immune to criticism).
Looking at feedback on this article, we mostly find ignorant comments that fall victim to the PR presented in the post’s body. However, one enlightened commenter says:
GMO Dangerous!
Genetically modified plants are extremely dangerous and DO NOT provide higher yields. Read about the Indian farmers who commit suicide by drinking their own pesticides after their GMO crops continue to fail while driving them further into debt and dependency.
Monsanto’s business model is criminal: the genes spread to unwitting farmers’ fields, a which point private investigators obtain DNA samples and then sue the poor farmer. It would be like throwing a rock through my window and suing me for my house because you’re rock is in it.
Also, the idea of patenting LIFE is preposterous. Consumers should avoid GMO food at all costs. These people our playing God with our lives and the planet.
We wrote about GMO (including Monsanto) in [1, 2]. Based on this new article from AFP, Gates is passing/spreading this patent scheme to India as well, where literally hundreds of thousands of farmers (and their peers) publicly protested against those patents whose impact and real purpose they understand (it’s usually people in the West who don’t understand this because it hardly affects them and actually facilitates cross-border exploitation that benefits them).
In all the articles presented above, it is almost shocking that they never give a voice to the opposition; they only hail and echo the spokespeople from Gates’ team which profits from “licensing”. The bottom line is that it’s not giving, it’s licensing, i.e. getting people addicted to (dependent on) the foreign technology until they need to pay for patents (or give away their natural resources). Has Western society no humility left? How about basic morality? █
“Any scientist who tells you they know that GMOs are safe and not to worry about it, is either ignorant of the history of science or is deliberately lying. Nobody knows what the long-term effect will be.”
–Geneticist, David Suzuki, giving the 2008 Commonwealth Lecture in London
“As far as genetic engineering for food, that is the great experiment that has failed. They literally have the entire world market against them. All those dreams… the blind will see, the lame will walk… has turned out to be science fiction. They are basically chemical companies selling more chemicals. They’ve been able to spread these herbicide-promoting plants around because it is more convenient for farmers who can just mass-spray their crops. But they’ve given absolutely nothing to the consumer while causing more chemical pollution and contamination.”
–Lawyer, Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety (USA)
