Climate activists have hung Copenhagen’s "Angry Mermaid Award" around Monsanto’s neck for being a "corporate climate criminal." Monsanto, perhaps the world’s most hated corporation, is a major driving force in polluting the atmosphere with billions of pounds of climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases (Co2, methane, and nitrous oxide), while at the same time offering false high-tech solutions– profiting off biotech bullying, environmental destruction, a highly subsidized and unhealthy food chain, and rural poverty.
Even though food security experts agree that mitigating and adapting to climate change is going to require a return to non-GMO organic agriculture, Monsanto has been successful in promoting itself in the US and among world leaders as a so-called no-till "sustainable agriculture" company helping farmers survive climate change by selling them genetically engineered seeds that resist drought and flood.
In fact, Monsanto has never commercialized a single drought or flood-resistant crop. Monsanto’s seeds are resistant to one thing: Monsanto’s toxic (and increasingly expensive) herbicide RoundUp, which farmers are forced to buy, (and consumers are forced to consume) in ever-larger quantities.
Monsanto’s goal is to patent living organisms, monopolize seeds, outlaw seed saving, and economically and legally enslave farmers, thereby destroying the "competition," the seed and crop biodiversity that farmers have painstakingly cultivated over the last 10,000 years. Life on Earth will become Life in Hell if Monsanto is allowed to tighten its stranglehold over our seeds and food. To mitigate climate change, we need to shift from chemical and energy-intensive industrial agriculture to organic farming practices on the world’s 12 billion acres of farm, pasture, and rangeland (thereby cleaning up 40-100% of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere) and at the same time drastically reduce the 44-52% of greenhouse gases directly or indirectly caused by industrial agriculture: carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels, cutting down rainforests and destroying soil fertility; methane (CH4) from animal factory farms and rotting non-composted waste in garbage dumps; and nitrous oxide from billions of pounds of nitrate-based fertilizer. To save the climate and ourselves, we need to break Monsanto’s stranglehold over food and farming, and instead protect and support the world’s remaining 1.5 billion traditional and organic small farmers – the peasants and family farmers who produce 75% of the world’s food and fiber and steward what’s left of the world’s crop and animal biodiversity.
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