Original posted by Anthony Gucciardi on JUNE 5 2012 on Natural Society
Launching a lawsuit against the very company that is responsible for a farmer suicide every 30 minutes, 5 million farmers are now suing Monsanto for as much as 6.2 billion euros (around 7.7 billion US dollars). The reason? As with many other cases, such as the ones that led certain farming regions to be known as the ‘suicide belt’, Monsanto has been reportedly taxing the farmers to financial shambles with ridiculous royalty charges. The farmers state that Monsanto has been unfairly gathering exorbitant profits each year on a global scale from “renewal” seed harvests, which are crops planted using seed from the previous year’s harvest.
The practice of using renewal seeds dates back to ancient times, but Monsanto seeks to collect massive royalties and put an end to the practice. Why? Because Monsanto owns the very patent to the genetically modified seed, and is charging the farmers not only for the original crops, but the later harvests as well. Eventually, the royalties compound and many farmers begin to struggle with even keeping their farm afloat. It is for this reason that India slammed Monsanto with groundbreaking ‘biopiracy’ charges in an effort to stop Monsanto from ‘patenting life’.
Jane Berwanger, a lawyer for the farmers who went on record regarding the case, told the Associted Press:
“Monsanto gets paid when it sell the seeds. The law gives producers the right to multiply the seeds they buy and nowhere in the world is there a requirement to pay (again). Producers are in effect paying a private tax on production.”
The findings echo what thousands of farmers have experienced in particularly poor nations, where many of the farmers are unable to stand up to Monsanto. Back in 2008, the Daily Mail covered what is known as the ‘GM Genocide’, which is responsible for taking the lives of over 17,683 Indian farmers in 2009 alone. After finding that their harvests were failing and they started to enter economic turmoil, the farmers began ending their own lives — oftentimes drinking the very same insecticide that Monsanto provided them with.
As the information continues to surface on Monsanto’s crimes, further lawsuits will begin to take effect. After it was ousted in January that Monsanto was running illegal ‘slave-like’ working rings, more individuals became aware of just how seriously Monsanto seems to disregard their workers — so why would they care for the health of their consumers? In April, another group of farmers sued Monsanto for ‘knowingly poisoning’ workers and causing ‘devastating birth defects’.
Will endless lawsuits from millions of seriously affected individuals be the end of Monsanto?
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thats a bullsh**t law , how would the rich like it if that was the stuff they were consuming how could they do that to people…..
Monsanto is being taken to the World Court at the Hague for crimes against Humanity, and hopefully this is start of the downfall of the corp. One thing that I can say about the company is this, is not Monsanto like an X-files story?
Jan/2016
If someone took someone else’s logo for their business and changed it they would not be able to sue someone else for modifying the logo they stole from somone else. Monsanto modified a seed that did not belong to them to begin with. If anything the people of the world should be suing them for a portion of their profits for sealing our seed we originally planted and grew over the years. When someone took apples logo and altered the bite in it to have a shadow of Steve jobs face and tried to say that was theirs now, apple could actualy them. Legally people are looking at how to take down Monsanto all wrong. Monsanto did not create the seed from the ground up. They stole seeds that belong to world food supply and modified something that was not theirs to begin with.
That’s a dumb analogy…By that logic, any trademark created by using a pencil would belong to everyone since the carbon in the pencil wasn’t created by the trademark creator. Monsanto has ownership of the product they create. If that product reproduces itself however, that offspring belongs to Monsanto if, and only if, Monsanto sold the original modified seed with the condition that any future seeds remain the property of Monsanto. The farmers are aware of the conditions of the sale before purchase and understood that they would be required to pay royalty for future crops. They were not forced to buy Monsanto products, they chose to purchase them and accepted all the conditions of the sale. I’m not advocating for Monsanto and I think their modified seeds are producing dangerous produce. I won’t eat their GMOs and I would like to see a ban on their use in the US.
Yours is a dumb analogy as well. By that logic, Monsanto created the pencil. Monsanto didn’t create seeds. Monsanto took God’s design and altered it. Yet, even after they altered it, it IS still a seed. By your logic, someone else could duplicate the pencil using different materials and it’s no longer a pencil anymore? Is the purpose of the product still the same?
Why don’t the farmers buy organic seeds elsewhere?
They are under contract
Date your pages please. If this page is 10 years old, I would like to know that, as opposed to a few months.
Monsanto sold their crops saying there would be increased yield, and probably less pesticide use… didn’t they? (They tempted farmers with SOME promises, right…So what were they?) I’m sure whatever farmers were TOLD WOULD happen, didn’t!! So couldn’t there be a lawsuit against MONSANTO saying there was false advertising? I would think they would then owe refunds to every farmer they ever sold seed & RoundUp to, so maybe they could FINALLY be put out of business. Certainly all the suicides in India might be a GOOD INDICATOR something happened that didn’t match their ‘sales pitch’. Super-weeds of course are another big problem…Kansas Farm Agency just sent notice about ANOTHER such super-weed this year. It’s really an unimaginable disaster for farmers AND nature (and health for those exposed to more and more glyphosate!) Also there are youtube videos about how old varieties of wheat in Mexico are being destroyed too…Gee, great, less bio-diversity==>how much MORE danger can there be to our future food supply eh? It’s all corruption at FDA etc…the FOOD-SAFETY head is actually ..FROM..MONSANTO, thanks to Obama! [Don’t you wonder what Michelle Obama thinks about that??? ] –Oct. 8, 2015
The Monsanto sons of b****** wouldn’t make it in Iceland. They’d be dead or or imprisoned. We need to get our government back from the whores they have turned into.
I strongly agree with Patrick S. The only date I see is at the end of Kris Mower’s comments. Undated web articles are almost useless as a resource. Hm, at the top it says ‘by Natural Society.’
I found the article. It’s dated JUNE 5, 2012:
http://naturalsociety.com/5-million-farmers-sue-monsanto-for-7-billion/
One more reason this article is “journalism light.” It does not give the venue for the lawsuit. The amount of money is stated in euros…Would this be in a court of the European Union? India? United States? International Court of Justice?
Evidently I have to provide my own date of commenting. Today is Monday, January 25, 2016.
Thought long and hard about these ‘dating issues’ – I have altered the comment platform software to now show the date.
Although, I do believe that comments should always be dated by the author of the comment (within the comment) as the platform software can be easily manipulated to show any date and time.
This also applies to articles the date can be easily manipulated.
I will leave the articles undated as this should help ensure that further research is carried out. As should always be the case with any document, dated or not.
Would love to know how to join that lawsuit!
I ‘googled’ “class action suit against monsanto” and found several links including this one:www.monsantoclassaction.org
Maybe that could help. There are also other links that look promising. I own farmland in Kansas, but am not the farmer. However, I was wondering why all the farmers caught in this horrid GMO-seed cycle (e.g., a new “super-weed” now reported etc.) couldn’t sue Monsanto for false advertising…but…looks like it is in progress!! Time to learn more. Good luck!
I’ll eat GMOs all day. I’m not some sort of crazy person who thinks they are poisonous.
However, this is immoral and people should be outraged at both Monsanto and the government. Seeds are a material good produced by plants that a farmer owns. Once a farmer buys the seeds from Monsanto, they own the plant. It doesn’t make any sense that further seeds should be owned by Monsanto because they are produced by what the farmer owns. This is nonsense.
Genetics are one of those things that we should not have patent laws for. I’d donate to a charity that genetically alters plants for the benefit of society, and I bet millions of people would do the same. But we should not stand for allowing a company to control the entire supply of seeds and then punish farmers when the plants they own produce seed. It is a severe violation of property rights.
By the way, the government is the only thing that allows Monsanto to do this. If they didn’t sanction the patents and enforce them, there would be no problem here.
Its about damn time.
It’s about time we put an end to manosanto