Major Writing Assignment “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear”
Award winning authors Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele in their article “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear” tell only a handful of the many situations where the major agricultural company Monsanto’s, strong-arms those who it believes are disregarding their patents. As well as, their involvement with chemicals such as dioxins, Agent Orange, and PCB’s. Along with, their implementations of the bovine growth hormones, rBGH (Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone), rBST (Bovine Somatotropin) and the growing popularity against them. Throughout the article, the authors bring up many cases of Monsanto’s bullying farmers and businesses they range from any number of issues from farmers in violation of their seed patents, to their involvement contaminating a small town with PCB. In one of these cases a small town business owner “Gary Rinehart” is wrongly accused by a Monsanto investigator of disobeying their patent on “genetically modified soybeans”.…show more content… The process of which Monsanto’s comes to know information regarding such situations is through a system of private investigators, that shadily follows and photographs unsuspecting farmers and businesses owners. They do not only do this in secret but also openly threaten farmers “to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records” if they believe they are in violation of their patents. And while they are protecting their assets some would say they are over aggressive in their approaches. Authors Barlett and Steele make clear that they asked a representative of the overzealous approaches, Monsanto’s comments that “the company is simply protecting its
