Longtime anti-GMO activist and OCA ally Mitch Cohen writes:
“Ten months before Russian troops poured into Ukraine, that country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bill into law authorizing the private sale of farmland, reversing a moratorium that had been in place since 2001.
An earlier administration in Ukraine had instituted the moratorium in order to halt further privatization of The Commons and small farms, which were being bought up by oligarchs and concentrated in fewer and fewer hands…
The marketization of farmland is part of a series of policy ‘reforms’ that the International Monetary Fund stipulated as a precondition enabling Ukraine to receive $8 billion in loans from the IMF…
Six years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to seize economic opportunities around the growing of food by opposing genetically engineered agriculture and Monsanto’s Roundup, the world’s most widely used herbicide; he initiated a program to eliminate pesticides and genetically engineered crops from Russia’s fields. The goal was to out-compete the U.S. and Canada as the world’s number one and two grain exporters by going organic, which mattered especially in Europe with its stricter laws regarding the import and planting of GMOs.
Monsanto had planned to open its first plant in Russia, but in June 2016 Russia’s State Duma adopted a government bill banning the cultivation and breeding of genetically modified plants and animals, except as used for scientific research purposes. A few weeks later, Putin signed federal law No. 358 prohibiting cultivation of genetically engineered crops. The law also made it illegal to breed genetically engineered animals on the territory of the Russian Federation.”
Read more: War Within the War: The Fight Over Land and Genetically Engineered Agriculture
Join Mitchel Cohen Live Online June 16, at 1 pm Central: Monsanto’s War in Ukraine