While responsibility for regulation falls to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the FDA. However, industry experts say that the green light is given mostly by the companies developing the technology. It is no surprise, then, that Monsanto owns 90% of the domestic genetically-modified seed market. (The rest is split among other companies, including Dow Chemical and Syngenta AG.) The FDA has a unique policy for determining the safety of GM foods: Genetically-modified foods simply need to be 'substantially equivalent' to non-modified foods. This is hardly a scientific approach.
In the meantime, Monsanto's unregulated march to control the world food supply continues with its recent announcement of the purchase of Marmot SA, which operates Central America's largest corn seed company. This purchase will solidify Monsanto's position as the leading corn seed supplier to the Latin American and Central American regions. Monsanto's assault on the public food supply now moves to milk. Its synthetic Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, known as rBGH, has been banned for health reasons in every industrialized country except the United States, of course. Oakhurst Dairy of Maine, like many other milk suppliers, has been responding to the desire of American consumers and providing milk free of rBGH, and they have been labeling their containers as such. Monsanto sued Oakhurst to prevent them from telling their customers that the milk is free of the Monsanto chemical. Faced with intense pressure from a multinational corporation and rising legal costs, Oakhurst was forced to settle out of court.
In spite of this, Monsanto's ruthless march to control the world's food supply continues unabated, financially devastating America's small family-owned farms, putting untested food on our shelves for unwitting Americans to consume, and generally wreaking worldwide havoc.
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