Manifest Haiti: Monsanto's Destiny
"Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible." -Monsanto's former motto.
Monsanto is also responsible for other life-changing inventions, such as the crowd-pleasing Agent Orange.A year earlier in Brazil, Monsanto sold a farm to a senator for one-third of its value in exchange for his work to legalize glyphosate, the world's most widely used herbicide.
In Colombia, Monsanto has received $25 million from the US government for providing its trademark herbicide, Roundup Ultra, in the anti-drug fumigation efforts of Plan Colombia.
With more than 11.7 billion dollars in sales in 2009 and more than 650 biotechnology patents - most of them for cotton, corn and soy - Monsanto is an economic powerhouse.
Together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer, Monsanto controls more than half the world's seeds with no effective anti-trust oversight.
Distributing Monsanto's seeds on this auspicious occasion was a $127 million project funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), called "Winner," designed to promote "agricultural intensification."
Agroecologists Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer, at the University of Michigan, have recently published a study showing that sustainable, small-scale farming is more efficient at conserving and increasing biodiversity and forests than industrial agriculture.
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