This is not a spoof from the Daily Show. This story is real.
A top-level Monsanto executive has won the prestigious World Food Prize, known as the “Nobel Prize of Agriculture.”
Sharing the glory in an upcoming ceremony less than two weeks away is the founder of Syngenta, a biotech company that is part of a lawsuit in regarding its ability to continue to sell a pesticide in Europe that kills massive amounts of bees.
Monsanto is receiving the prize for creating GMOs — genetically modified organisms, which are rapidly replacing real food.
Many nations in Europe and other parts of the world refuse to import seeds and food products that include GMOs. However, this is not the policy of the United States.
Congress has been very accommodating toward the corporate giant that helped to develop Agent Orange, invented and sold pesticides and now is in the food business. A top-level Monsanto executive even serves in the FDA.
Monsanto is benefiting financially for patenting seeds and plants and suing farmers, so it’s not a stretch to say the World Food Prize is lauding corporate executives for products that threaten people and the planet.
This honor makes these brutal tactics a growing norm in a very competitive industry, specifically dealing in pesticides and frankenfoods which are affecting the world food supply and killing large swaths of the bee population.
The award has been met with wide protest, with 81 members of the World Future Council releasing a statement slamming the World Food Prize.
“GMO seeds reinforce a model of farming that undermines sustainability of cash-poor farmers, who make up most of the world’s hungry,” they said in the statement. “The most dramatic impact of such dependency is in India, where 270,000 farmers, many trapped in debt for buying seeds and chemicals, committed suicide between 1995 and 2012.”
