KeepGreenGoing

 Another highlight from Vanity Fair’s Green Issue: Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear.

Not having come from a farming background, I’d never heard of Monsanto. So, though this is old news for many, I only took notice last week when it popped up literally side-by-side in my reading material. On one side, Vanity Fair. On the other, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Monsanto appeared in both.

Why the fuss? Monsanto wants to own the entire world’s food supply. Does that sound almost cartoonishly evil? Well. Does it sound overly reductive? I’m afraid it’s not.

If you saw last year’s Clooney heavy-hitter Michael Clayton, you’ll remember the fictional bad-guy agri-giant U-North, accused in the film of selling GM seeds that cause cancer. Do a quick Google search for “Michael Clayton Monsanto” to see just how many immediately recognized the thinly-veiled connection.

Kingsolver discusses the dangers of a company like Monsanto eliminating seed variety and choice from an evolutionary standpoint — the less varied our crops are genetically, the more we endanger ourselves. She references the Irish potato famine. I’ve got a better example that’s a bit closer to home: our current, much-publicized World Food Crisis. Monsanto, and a few others like them, have supplied GM seeds to struggling farmers in developing countries in order to induce dependency and cut out any notion of sustainability. Now that the addicts are going into withdrawal, Monsanto steps in like a street corner dealer with the fix. But the solution is the problem.

Monsanto has helped create a crisis. Does it seem silly that anyone would celebrate Monsanto as the savior of a disaster it set up in the first place? No matter. It seems to have paid off.