Except for an occasional new piece, or a pre-section wrapper, the material in this tome is mostly cut-and-paste from the GeneWatch archives. The introduction by Krimsky and Gruber offers this odd conflation and incomplete information:
In fact, there have been only two commonly applied major innovations in GMO agriculture: 1) crops resistant to herbicide, and 2) crops that contain their own insecticide. Both methods were designed to find synergies with their corporate sponsor’s existing pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer businesses in order to maximize profits. For example, a farmer who buys Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans would also need to buy Monsanto’s Roundup Ready herbicide.
Ok, we’ll note that they were unable to include the hugely successful publicly-funded papaya project that had nothing to do with these “synergies”. And in addition they are just making up the relationship to fertilizer–the 2 innovations they cite have zero to do with fertilizer. Bt crops do not sell more pesticide–that’s just completely absurd. Dog-piling on the #fail, they neglect to include the fact that Monsanto Roundup has long been off patent and is not needed for Monsanto seeds–farmers can buy this from other sources. They also wildly mis-characterize farmer’s realities about the tech agreements and seed choices. They also leave out the fact that these issues are not unique to GMOs–because that doesn’t suit the case they are making.
Read full original post: “The GMO Deception” is, in fact, deceptive