Monsanto and Their Patented Seeds

Introduction

Monsanto is a company providing products for agriculture. It is known for producing glyphosate, a popular herbicide, under the trademark Roundup. Seed producer also genetically modified. Throughout its history, Monsanto has evolved in their business. At its inception, in 1901 distributed saccharin, for 1938 were chemical business as plastics and resins, in 1976 raided the herbicide business and in 1981 joined the race biotechnology (Berry, p. n.d). In the year 2000 helped decipher the genetic code of rice, and announced that information obtained in the investigation would be shared with the global scientific community.

Discussion

Controversy

Monsanto has been and remains one of the companies that has created more controversy worldwide due to potential or real danger of their products on human health, animals, plants and the environment in general.

In the decade of the 60 Dow Chemical , Uniroyal, Hercules, Diamond Shamrock, Thompson Chemical, TH and Monsanto were hired by the U.S. government to produce a herbicide called Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War to destroy jungle Vietnamese and Vietnamese depriving crops of food and vegetation to hide. Agent Orange was a potent chemical that caused among the Vietnamese population around 400,000 dead and 500,000 children born with birth defects as well as declines in the U.S. military itself Since Article 38 of the Constitution of the United States prohibits veterans sue the government for injuries sustained in the war, many victims have tried to sue the chemical companies who initially manufactured the Agent Orange herbicide use as an agronomic and not war. The U.S. government has tried to evade responsibility in fixing companies whom they used to produce this chemical. The problem was that the rush for these companies to produce herbicide quickly and at minimal cost to the final product did contain large amounts of tetra-chlorodibenzo dioxin; a highly carcinogenic byproduct also causes malformations in fetuses. This coupled with the large capacity of Agent Orange to remain active in the soil has caused serious damage to the jungles of that country, as well as generations of children with birth defects and cancer problems.

Monsanto was producing synthetic hormone bovine somatotropin (or rGHB recombinant). There are scientific studies to prove that the hormone caused significant changes in the biology of cows (mastitis, infertility, and increased growth hormone and other hormones in milk produced) and there are also studies that attempt to prove otherwise, the hormone is safe. Because of this divergence of views, milk from cows treated with rGHB is allowed for marketing in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Korea, Colombia, Egypt, Costa Rica, UAE, Israel, Honduras, Kenya, Jamaica, Peru, Namibia, Slovakia, Turkey, South Africa and Zimbabwe, but is banned in Canada and the European Union, who say that the hormone can cause damage not only to the problems already mentioned, but the extra dose of antibiotics in milk from cows treated with HGH supplied to the treatment of mastitis (infection in the breast). Consumer protection groups in the United States requested that could label the milk from ...