Monsanto needs to be crushed

First, though, I'm noting that the fervent, eloquent tsunami of criticism of Tom Vilsack as the pick for Ag Secretary is entirely valid. Lost in that is that Rep. David Scott (D-GA) is the pick to replace Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN) as chair of the House Ag Committee. He's saying, or rather posting, the right things.

“I will use this critical opportunity to represent the values of our entire caucus and advance our priorities for trade, disaster aid, climate change, sustainable agriculture, SNAP, crop insurance, small family farms, specialty crops, and rural broadband,” - Black Enterprise

Getting back to the title, Rep. Scott needs to set his sights on the likes of this.

This real­i­ty is what Mon­san­to was count­ing on when it launched dicam­ba-tol­er­ant crops, an inves­ti­ga­tion by the Mid­west Cen­ter for Inves­tiga­tive Report­ing found.

Monsanto’s new sys­tem was sup­posed to be the future of farm­ing, pro­vid­ing farm­ers with a suite of seeds and chem­i­cals that could com­bat more and more weeds that were becom­ing hard­er to kill.

Instead, the system’s roll­out has led to mil­lions of acres of crop dam­age across the Mid­west and South; wide­spread tree death in many rur­al com­mu­ni­ties, state parks and nature pre­serves; and an unprece­dent­ed lev­el of strife in the farm­ing world.

Exec­u­tives from Mon­san­to and BASF, a Ger­man chem­i­cal com­pa­ny that worked with Mon­san­to to launch the sys­tem, knew their dicam­ba weed killers would cause large-scale dam­age to fields across the Unit­ed States but decid­ed to push them on unsus­pect­ing farm­ers any­way, in a bid to cor­ner the soy­bean and cot­ton markets. - In These Times