One Company's Toxic Agenda or Our Poisonous Way of Life?

[kpete]

One Company's Toxic Agenda or Our Poisonous Way of Life? Marie-Monique Robin's "The World According to Monsanto"

Wednesday 12 November 2008

by: Leslie Thatcher, t r u t h o u t | Review

How did a nation of would-be self-sufficient yeoman farmers and master craftsmen become the wellspring of the new thralldom? Can we blame corporate barons and their enablers in government for our dependence on "systems that mask and disperse responsibility while simultaneously spreading and intensifying risk" or have our own frivolity and negligence perverted the American dream?

Dominique Dhombres' review of Marie-Monique Robin's movie, "The World According to Monsanto", shown on French TV this spring, provoked so much reader interest, I obtained a copy of the book in French (to be released this coming spring in English) and the movie in English to see for myself.

Both text and film are extraordinary models of investigative reporting, each comprising chilling and compelling indictments of a company with a long history of producing varieties of poison. I have no doubt that had a human individual, rather than a multinational corporation, been responsible for the death, suffering and destruction Marie-Monique Robin documents, the International Criminal Court and other jurisdictions around the world would be clamoring for that person's head. Yet, Monsanto continues to operate so much more freely than the disguised Radovan Karadzic. Only last week The Independent reported that Gordon Brown and other European leaders are secretly planning to promote GMO food - 90 percent of which is produced by Monsanto - over the objections of their own populations.

While "The World According to Monsanto" excoriates Monsanto executives and their enablers, what Marie-Monique Robin most effectively documents are the perverse effects - the moral, social, technological, economic and market failures - of Western society's economic organization, most specifically with respect to science and the products of science, and, ultimately, with respect to the preservation of the public commons and human life on the planet.

very xlnt - read the rest at:
http://www.truthout.org/111208A

[Hannah Bell]

1. gates foundation 3rd world initiatives + monsanto: what's the real agenda?

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_3167.cfm

Monsanto Vice President Joins the Gates Foundation


He's not the only monsantan working with gates, either.