GMWatch News Review archive

QUOTES OF THE WEEK
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+ ON SEED SAVING
"I'm concerned just like all the other farmers that Monsanto is a parasite, sucking all the money out of the community." - Mitchell Scruggs, one of several US farmers who are being sued by Monsanto in the courts for saving seed
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4472

"I don't think farmers ought to have a legal right to save seeds." - Bill Leask, executive director of the Canadian Seed Trade Association, one of four groups that initiated the Seed Sector Review that proposes the collection of royalties on virtually all farmer-saved seeds

+ ON FACTORY HOG FARMS IN THE US
(WITH OBVIOUS RELEVANCE TO GM MULTINATIONALS' GROWING CONTROL OF AGRICULTURE)
"Twenty years ago there were 27,500 family hog farmers in North Carolina alone. Now there are none. Today, a single company named Smithfield owns more than 70 percent of the state's hogs. Small farmers are learning that you can't beat Big Meat.

"Nobody claims that factory farming is pretty. But its defenders say that it brings economies of scale that drive down the price of meat for consumers. This is true as long as you don't factor in the shit. Bobby Kennedy, Jr, president of the Waterkeeper Allliance, told me that, if the waste were disposed of legally, the cost of pork from factory farms would be higher than pork from family farms:

"'They cannot produce hogs, or pork chops, or bacon, more efficiently than a family farm without breaking the law. They aren't about the free market, because they can't compete without committing criminal acts every single day. Their whole system is built on being able to disable or capture government agencies.

"'They're not in favor of responsibility, or democracy, or private property. It's just about privatizing the air, water, all the things that the public's supposed to own. They are trying to take them away from us, privatize them, and liquidate them for cash.

"'That's the only coherent philosophy they have. That's it.'"
- Al Franken, "Vast Lagoons of Pig Faeces", in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (Penguin, 2003)

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