The main  objective of U.S./Monsanto is to dominate world agriculture with genetically modified seeds in the absence of labeling of genetically engineered foods

Contries like South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand have all  passed laws requiring the labeling of GM foods. Nepal should pass such law as well.

Mosanto seeds are patented and to use them, farmers must buy new seeds from Monsanto every year. Thus, a farmer who adopts GM seeds could become dependent upon a transnational corporation.

Thus, nations, whose farmers are dependent upon corporations for seed, might forfeit considerable political independence.

It is always my way deal or no deal at all! Many poor nations are too screwed up to know what is good and what is bad.

Nepalese are beholden to the writer Sascha F�ller to have revealed this another con game getting displayed just in front of us. Had our American friends be sincere and had done in a way a bout of soul-searching, they would never have dared bringing with them this society called as Monsanto or erstwhile known as Union Carbide, the infamous society which provoked the deadliest of the chemical disaster causing the death of thousand and thousand of the population at Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India.

The US must revise its way of doing diplomacy. Have they already forgotten the suicides of thousands of farmers in India thanks to the Monsanto seeds?

No go! Monsanto must be ousted at once to save our agriculture. It is even more devastating than the Maoism for the rural farmers. Because it is for sure to become 'designated slaves' of an international society.

Catastrophe can come in many ways, but a sure fire one is to deliberately deny people the information that could save their source of income!?!

kudos to Sascha Fuller for standing up against the might of USAID, Monsanto and corrupt, unpatriotic and obsequious high ranking Nepali officials.

Saroj from USA

Thanks for this article and very much hope that readers will take note that for USAID to introduce any Monsanto productts in any country is a disgrace.  GMseeds have proved to be a failure, scientists of international repute have exposed the claims of Monsanto.  But, the US Government has decided to encourage countries to take Monsanto's Seeds, why?  Within the Obama Government leading positions are held by Ex-Monsanto directors.

Can I ask that readers view this website: www.aoag.org We have just released a Cal for Action for Monsanto's Annual General Meeting being held on 24th January 2012.  See text below:

Monsanto, the company that manufactured Agent Orange used on Vietnam resulting in the deaths of many thousands of Vietnamese and the abnormal births of many thousands more, and also among military forces from the US and other countries who served during the Vietnam War, announced on 25th October that its Board of Directors has designated

Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2012 as the date of the next annual meeting of shareowners. 

Monsanto's annual meeting will be held at the company's headquarters facility in suburban St. Louis. Additional meeting details will be included in the company's proxy statement, which will be available in December.  

Len Aldis, Chairman of Agent Orange Action Group called upon all who are suffering from the effects of Agent Orange to take this opportunity to purchase shares in the company in so doing they can express their anger and concerns by asking questions to the board members for the criminal damage Agent Orange has caused to all victims and their families. 

For those unable to purchase share, to encourage others to join you outside the meeting in a peaceful expression of your anger. 

Len Aldis. Chairman

Agent Orange Action Group

[email protected]

Visit our website: www.aoag.org

Reply to Arthur,

You must be totally ignorant.You can not even understand the passage.Let me put it in a simple way.

Just to promote their seeds,Monsato would use test plots(land),saying let's just try.'That's enough for Monsato ,it means ,the rest is done by nature,wind.Within four years of presence of such contaminated organisms even if they don't replant them again, is enough to destroy the crops originally grown in that area.GMO has done its job ,there are no pure canola seeds nor pure soybean seeds left.Mr.Arthur would you prefer to drink pure orange juice or the one made with artificial flowours.We can produce more for a while,we can have quick fixes for a while ,the consequences is the main concern of such actions for anything we choose to do.If Monsato seeds would be so qualitative,why till now millions of people go hungry???????????????????Which of these contains more vitamins.In the end of the day,nature itself decides ,soil,the environment keeps it balanced,one can not plant crops that require different conditions and environment to produce.One can not continue generations of any living thing by introducing artificial,quick genes to produce,With the years,it just grows extinct.Most of the third world countries and many Eurozone countries have become the experimental playground for big companies of USA etc and not just in agriculture.

I totally agree with Mrs.Fuller. It is through the experience and accounts of the ill-effects suffered that we can learn about the true nature of Monsanto's seed products and the Nepali Government and Nepali citizens should take heed. It is a pitty,that so called leaders of the governments,turn away from most basic problems,from most basic needs of their own people.

Nepali Government with leaders such as Dahal,Bhattarai and all those who signed 7point Pact Agreement care less about the consequences,their thinking haven't reached this level yet,they are just at the level of self -safety.

Love,self-estime,self-actualization,self-transcendence,these levels come after one has mastered all the previous levels as an individual .So let's start with the love directed with understanding towards consequences from our responsibilities and duties as human beings.

Canadian activists say Monsanto uses test plots to introduce GMOs into a country because the dominant gene in the new seeds spread through pollination, contaminating conventional and organic farms. Only four years after the introduction of Monsanto's seeds in Canada, no pure canola seeds and no pure soybean seeds remain.

'unsuccessful in the developed world and are therefore trying to prevent poor countries like Nepal from doing what they were unable to prevent in a developed country like the USA.'

This is your answer,it is easier in Nepal where people don't have rules and regulations,currency is the regulator and quality of life.Made in USA ,is the label that atracts Arthur the most,consequences,Arthur doesn't think about them too much to expect and the answer to that you can not find in the dictionary.Grow up !

Kamred Arthur not only knows what is good for Nepali politics but also what is the solution for Nepali agriculture.

There is some consistency though- Monsanto probably have loot and extortion in common with the Maoists.

Journalists should understand the science behind this issue before regurgitating enviromentalist sound bites. Demands for farmers to be organic and in perfect harmony with nature ignores their day-to-day realities and is an idealistic Western bias pushed on the poor. No farmer would reject hybrid seeds if they yield profits high enough to offset their increased costs of production. Math should be applied before ideology. Monsanto is no saint, but don't confuse them with the science of hybrid seeds and GMOs.

We urgently require a strong crown research body to monitor the impact of GM crops, and how international corporate companies operate in countries like Nepal. 

http://www.agbioforum.org/v1n2/v1n2a02-hayenga.htmhttp://www.springerlink.com/content/p53622jp9lg26202/

There is also a potential suicidal aspect to the uncritical imposing of technologies; Nepal and the rest of SE Asia is threatened by flooding from melting Himalayan glaciers/lakes; global warming is only added to by the production and use of ammonium- and nitrogen-based fertilisers.

Farmers in the US, which is the largest user of GMO seeds in the world, are not dunderheads; they are businesspeople interested in maximizing profits.  If GMO crops in general really caused yields to decline 10-15%, while all other costs remained the same, then GM would not have quickly expanded across the US to claim ~90% of the market for soybeans, for example.  The author didn't get into specifics, but let's look at what GM soybeans really are.  They contain a genetic modification that makes them immune to the broad spectrum weedkiller Roundup, allowing the soybean plant to thrive while competing weedgrowth is killed by the pesticide Roundup.  One of the primary benefits of so-called Roundup Ready soybeans is that they require up to 40% less conventional pesticides to control weeds, directly benefiting the farmer's bottom line, and reducing the amount of pesticide chemicals spread into the environment and consumed by humans. 

GM crops have been used extensively in the United States and other top tier agricultural countries such as Canada, Brazil, and Argentina for the past 15 years, consumed by hundreds of millions of consumers, with no scientifically-proven ill effects.  While conspiracy theorists (and there are plenty of those in the West, not just in Nepal) may claim this GM-dominance is due to collusion between Monsanto and western governments, American trial lawyers have no loyalty to either Monsanto or the US government and would happily sue GM seed producers for billions if any credible evidence of adverse health consequences could be found and proven.

As Sjustice (#42) wrote above, the discussion about GMOs should really be a small part of the overall discussion on how to improve agricultural productivity growth in Nepal.  A pilot maize production program to demonstrate (or not) the advantages of GM maize seems perfectly appropriate, but must be just one small part of a multi-pronged and continuous program to pilot and then bring the latest techniques (like SRI), appropriately-sized machines, inputs, and financing to all of Nepal's farmers.  No doubt agricultural extension programs, as so many other facets of Nepali life, would benefit immensely from having a stable and focused government in Kathmandu.

I agree with the author. WE HAVE TO SAY JUST NO TO MONSANTO. It will destroy our tranditional system and genetic resources. The intention of MONSANTO is clear where it want to spread hegemony and control over genetic resources in the world. It will be suicide for our agriculture system and farmers.

SAY NO TO MONSANTO

It is interesting that foreign advisers come to Nepal with the claim that they will feed people so much better with their miraculous seeds than Nepal seed without any understanding of Nepal's agriculture or, if that agriculture is having problems, why it is having problems. But even anthropologists, who probably have the most intimate understanding of Nepal's farmers than anybody outside farmers themselves, still have much a very incomplete knowledge of the intricate details of the cultural-environmental interface of Nepal's agriculture.

USAID test plots are grown under ideal conditions with free financing and all the proper inputs and machinery provided in ample supply, so of course they are going to look good. But these test plots, which aim only at demonstrating that these seeds can produce a lot, don't ask any questions of what will happen when the rice seed is brought to the villages in real conditions.

What happens when farmers borrow money to finance purchases? We know that in India some 200,000 cotton farmers have committed suicide when the couldn't pay back the loans they took to purchase Monsanto products. Even in the United States, 100s of thousands of farmers have been losing their land due to foreclosure on their farms for decades now. Over the last century American agriculture has been characterized by depopulation of the land, from 70% of the population in agriculture at the end of the 19th century to 3% at the end of the twentieth. Currently a major proportion of American farms are owned by banks which engage contract farmers to do the farming. Emblematic of how farmers with no long-term interest in the land or local communities are ruining the land, an elderly retired farmer sitting in front of a store told me how the when he was young you could dig down to fresh water while now the water is murky and full of chemicals.

The first few years chemical fertilizer may seem to work well, but what happens to the land when you apply chemical nitrogen and imported minerals to it over the long term? Nepal's farmers' land rainwater currently creates acids from the composted manure which peculates gradually into the soil and creates mineral salts which is taken up by plants. Chemical fertilizers burn up the the organic matter too quickly allowing it to be washed out of the soil, leading to decreasing organic content and compaction of the soil. Thus the farmer has to buy more and more of the imported fertilizers to maintain poorer and poorer quality soil.

The first few years that you put pesticides on the plants you get more product than your neighbors, but gradually the herbivore insects gain resistance leading to more and more volume and potency of pesticides being put on the land. Meanwhile, natural populations of predator insects and chordates concentrate the pesticides in the food chain and decrease in numbers, leading to a collapse of the natural control mechanisms. The response is to apply more pesticides, which compounds the problem.

All these chemicals together kill the life in the soil which keeps it friable and productive. Plants work in complex and poorly understood relationships with billions of microbes in every gram of soil. The micro-root system of the plant, for example, is made up of filaments of fungi which live in mutually benefit relationship with the plant. Due to destruction of these relationships and loss of organic conversion of minerals in the soil, key micro nutrients are no longer taken up in chemical agriculture, leading plants to be more prone to insects and diseases, and yet more dependent on chemicals.

This of course is not seen as a problem for Monsanto, since the problems created by chemicals create demand for more chemicals, but it is problem for the agricultural communities and human populations experiencing higher rates of auto-immune diseases and cancers. Another business-making opportunity for Nepal is cancer hospitals, but this this probably is not seen as a problem for the policy makers who can afford using them or for markets . The farmers in the fields of course experience the greatest impact of agricultural chemical. A study of a valley in Mexico where chemical agriculture was introduced for the first time documented a shocking increase of cancers, auto-immune disease and increased childhood learning difficulties among the local population with the introduction of agricultural chemicals. A study of golf courses in New Jersey documented higher rates of leukemia and brain cancer among children of neighboring houses due to heavy use of agricultural chemicals required to maintain the the grass mono-crop. As the human mammary gland concentrates poisonous agricultural chemicals, it is no surprise that among women in the United States breast cancer reached epidemic proportions of one in eight women acquiring the disease.

From a simple matter of energetics, there is also also major problems with high-input agriculture. Peasant agriculture, interestingly enough, produces 7 or more kcal of energy for every kcal energy that the farmer puts into it with his and his animals' labor. This 6 kcal of energy profit is of course captured from the sun, just as all life has been doing nearly since its inception. Industrial agriculture, in contrast, requires 7 kcal energy to produce one kcal of food energy. This energy comes from petroleum, natural gas and coal. Peasant agriculture is able to produce excess energy because most of the services that industrial agriculture gets from chemicals and machines are provided gratis by nature or from the labor of the peasant family and community.

Furthermore, because the need to pay for the inputs requires the farmers to sell into the same centralized markets that produce the inputs, rather than nearby local markets, transport, storage, packaging and processing the food means that by the time it gets to the consumer's plate 1 kcal of food will represent 20 or more kcal of fossil fuel energy. This does not include all the social energy required to control these processes.

Evolution of life on earth, including human communities, has over the long run been all about most efficient use of energy. Any system that profligately uses such energy is eventually eliminated by natural and cultural selection. The energy debt of this system is reflected in a corresponding growing financial debt in countries and enterprises that have subscribed to it. Not only has the US's farming population essentially disappeared over the last half century as a result, most industrial type farms operate heavily in debt, meaning that agricultural production is operated according to the requirements of finance capital rather than those of local communities. The growing dictatorial dominance of Monsanto corporation over agriculture is the result.

In a world faced by increasing energy scarcity, a small country in Nepal that has neither the market nor military power to control energy nor economic power to leverage debts, the assumption of a system that requires large energy inputs portends certain slavery to financial institutions and social suicide. Development 'experts' often disparage peasants for their conservatism, but my sense is that much of the conservatism that is associated with peasants stems from a long-term view that respects the laws of thermodynamics, since they confront them every day in a very practical way.

If agriculture is going to feed the growing population, it will require getting the most from the smallest amount of land. This is not what industrial agriculture does. The heavy use of inputs it can get pretty high production from single crops, but such a measure is meaningless from the perspective of peasant agriculture. What anthropologists and agronomists who have studied peasant agriculture know is that peasant agricultural, when measured in terms of combined output per unit land, is generally far more productive than industrial agriculture, and it is even more productive when compare inputs versus outputs. It does this in the manner of nature by combining many different kinds of plants in interactive relationships called companion planting, as well as planting different species and varieties to take advantage of the complex local environmental conditions. For example, one Tai, Lao, or Hmong farmer on the southern border of China's Yunnan Province will cultivate as many as 15 different varieties of rice, each adapted to some local feature of the environment to make the most of local micro-environmental conditions and cultural values.

Even in the United States there is not a fully wholesale acceptance of these kinds of seeds and industrial farming as some of the comments assume. In fact, the only sector of farming in the United States that is actually growing is organic farming, at 20 percent a year.

The other farming which is growing is the "traditional" farming being done by religious groups such as Amish and Menonnites, who are moving into areas all over North America that are experiencing economic depression due to over-dependence on industrial methods. So large numbers of Amish, who eschew all forms of petroleum-driven agriculture and even electricity, and who live and work communally, have been moving into the wheat growing areas of Alberta, Canada, in such large numbers that the Alberta government has restricted them from taking two adjacent quarter-mile sections of land, just so the entire state doesn't turn Amish. The Amish are also spreading into Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and North Dakota, among other places. Where other farmers are being forclosed by multinational banks, a show on NPR interviewed a local banker doing business with Amish who said in his 35 years of work not one Amish farmer has ever not paid a loan back, ones who do run into trouble are backed up by their community. In a reversal of finance capital's invasion into the countryside, Amish farmers by purchasing and using their communal labor rebuild condemned urban buildings are quietly become some of the largest urban landlords in cities such as Minneapolis. The Hutterites in turn are moving in northern Michigan, where they not only are reviving the farm economy but small towns as well.

There are many others who are setting up small communities of farmers who have turned away from industrial farming and rediscovering peasant-style mixed agriculture. My wife and I rode our tandem bike 150 km to a farm in western Wisconsin started by two of women who are raising mixed animal and crop farm; after ten years they feed from their own land a growing group of young and old people who've joined them, and they have a theater, classroom, run workshops, and rent out cottages. Unlike the wage economy, they turn no person or animal who comes to them away, but value each for his or her particular capability and treat the land in the same way.

A whole movement of small farmers has started called Community Supported Agriculture in which small organic farms are taking the lands of bankrupted farms around cities and towns to supply food to urban consumers on subscription basis, directly tying consumers and farmers together in a union of common interest. There are more than thirty such farms around Madison, Wisconsin, the largest feeding more than 600 families. Urban farms and community gardens are becoming ubiquitous in every city and town, and local farmers markets are growing in cities all across the United States. There are organizations such as Ecology Action in Northern California which has been working with more than two million farmers in Mexico and India, as well teaching farmers and gardeners in the United States, to use cultural and human-intensive methods in what they call bio-intensive techniques that emulate nature to grow as much food as possible on as small area as possible. After 35 years of research which have combined age-old peasant techniques with modern ecological research, they can feed one person on one thousand square feet of land while increasing the fertility of the soil using no chemicals. Even the president of the United States has established, against resistance of chemical companies such as Monsanto, an organic farm on the White House lawn which distributes food to communities in the area.

"On Friday this week [25th November] many citizens (Nepalis and non-Nepalis alike) have planned a protest to the proposed USAID-Monsanto company tie up, made public on September 12 this year, to promote several of the latter's hybrid corn seeds among 20,000 farmers of Chitwan, Nawalparasi and Kavre districts. ...

People who  are protesting in front of USAID office in Maharajgunj should ask it not only to stop making secret deals with Monsanto, but also to seek advice from many others who are involved in creating ecologically sound, small-scale, highly productive, economically profitable and highly bio-diverse farming practices." http://www.ekantipur.com/2011/11/22/oped/sensible-agriculture/344203.html