Monsanto Protection Rider

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beenthere Posted - 3/28/2013 2:45:17 PM | show profile | flag this post

Safe food products? Consumer protection? Truth in labeling?

Bottom Line: If you get sick from one of their products, you have zero recourse. None. They are exempt from prosecution. Just a brilliant move by a multi-billion dollar company.

Sigh. If this were a company that made baby formula, people would be screaming from the rooftops. Because it is a science-y thing, where they do something engineer-y to our food supply, well, nobody cares.

Monsanto brought us DDT and told us how safe that was and is the world's biggest manufacturer of pesticides. Facts. Do you really want to eat food (seeds) made by this company? How do you go from being a leading industrial chemical producer to engineering products that are included in almost 100% of the US food supply?

And then are not held liable for the damage you cause?

cdnreprtr Posted - 3/28/2013 8:46:22 PM | show profile | flag this post

Nice rant.

Now, maybe, you could add a link to what you're talking about, because no lawyer, anywhere in the US, has managed to draw up any rider, contract, EULA that materially prohibits an individual filing a civil suit (including class action) against a company for tortuous harm.

That's the law.

In simple words: if GMOs make some sick, you can sue .. and a court of law will adjudicate the science and argument.

(Not that anyone, in my knowledge, has ever been found to have suffered any scientifically proven ill effects from GMOs)

Labelling is a whole different matter. ...

Grateful Deadline Posted - 3/28/2013 11:00:58 PM | show profile | flag this post

orthicon Posted - 3/28/2013 11:12:02 PM | show profile | flag this post

well, beenthere has to make hay on this..

before it expires in the fall..

beenthere Posted - 3/29/2013 10:00:06 AM | show profile | flag this post

Wow. Try this:


2. Snopes is not an investigative site. It is a mom and pop operation that cherrypicks which stories it "investigates." If you are basing every single decision you make on information provided by snopes you are ill/mis/disinformed. Continuing to rely on it as a major source is misguided.

3. Obama said in 2007 one of the first things he would do is mandate GMO labeling. Instead, this is what he has done.

Here are some key Obama appointees:

KEY APPOINTEE, MAJOR Conflict of Interest??:
As deputy commissioner of the FDA, the new food-safety-issues czar, Michael Taylor,i s the former vice-president for public policy for Monsanto. Taylor had been instrumental in getting approval for Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.







You know what is served in the White House? Organic food from the organic garden that was created in 2009. Michele Obama's "healthy eating/exercise" mantra is a smokescreen for the public, as the president has done everything he can to support the bioengineering industry.

Re "lack of studies": If you buy Monsanto seeds in the USA, Monsanto requires that you sign a legal document stating that you will NOT use the seeds for research purposes. Legally, they do NOT allow anyone who is not associated with Monsanto to conduct any studies. Every "safe" study that has come out in the USA has been funded, directly or indirectly, and approved by Monsanto.

The French Serlini study used the EXACT, SAME protocol Monsanto used in its own study of GMOS, the only difference is that Serlini ran his study for TWO YEARS, which is the true lifespan of the rats. Monsanto's study ran for 90 days.

Monsanto does not allow testing of its products, the FDA does not demand safety testing, and know the federal courts are unable to rule against the company.

But keep eating that crap. It was proved by Serlini that by third generation, GMOS caused infertility (hmmm, why have infertility rates been rising steadily in the US). Other findings including kidney tumors, autoimmune disease, cancer (also rising in the US).

And one last remark: The Tobacco Industry published more than 1,500 scientific studies that claimed cigarettes were perfectly healthy and did no harm.

If these GMO products are so safe, why doesn't Monsanto allow independent testing of its seeds? Why does it need a rider hidde

beenthere Posted - 3/29/2013 10:07:03 AM | show profile | flag this post

Sorry, post was cut off. Ask yourselves this:

If a manufacturer has a safe product, why does it legally refuse to allow any independent testing of its product? Why does it seek protection from the federal courts through a LAW placed as a rider in a budget bill?

Logic dictates that if a product is safe, none of this is necessary. If a product is harmful, than ALL of this is necessary.

Which do you choose to believe?

Grateful Deadline Posted - 3/29/2013 6:59:42 PM | show profile | flag this post

Could you please boil that down to a paragraph for those of us who are working? We already had to take the time to look up what the heck you might have been talking about in the original post.

cdnreprtr Posted - 4/3/2013 1:13:17 PM | show profile | flag this post

An interesting article...

... doubt Forbes would ever, ever, take the side of activists (the language used is clearly hostile) ... but I haven't heard any challenges to these facts:

"To date, no court has ever held that a biotechnology crop presents a risk to health, safety or the environment. But make no mistake: it’s not because the courts or the government approval process is lax. Just the opposite. Getting approval for any transgenic crop or food is like running a torturous gauntlet, both arduous and bureaucratic. Companies are required to provide years of internal and independent data, which are carefully reviewed by various government agencies.

Beyond that, the USDA cannot approve a new seed variety until it conducts an Environmental Assessment.

By law, the EA must consider any and all factors relating to the “human environment,” which is very ambiguously defined, leaving all kinds of legal openings for hostile groups to target. If an anti-science group such as the Center for Food Safety or the Institute of Responsible Technology or the Union of Concerned Scientists challenges the EA for not considering one issue or another, the assessment can be deemed insufficient and a new one must be ordered.

In fact, this has happened twice in recent years, with alfalfa and sugar beets. Alfalfa hay, a nutritious, easily digestible livestock feed and $8 billion a year business, is the country’s fourth-most-valuable crop. Monsanto makes GM alfalfa seeds, as part of the company’s Roundup Ready line. They are genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate, an herbicide that is commercially known as Roundup. When farmers use Roundup, which is considered a mild herbicide, instead of other harsher chemicals to kill weeds, they actually cut down on overall toxic chemical use.

After an exhaustive review, the USDA gave Roundup Ready Alfalfa the green light in 2005. But the Center for Food Safety contended that the government hadn’t adequately evaluated the potential environmental consequences, although the agency believed it had. In 2007, in Monsanto Co. v. Geertson Seed Farms, a federal court agreed with CFS, prohibiting Monsanto from selling Roundup Ready Alfalfa pending yet another assessment.

Just as campaigners had hoped, the order was incredibly disruptive to thousands of farmers, who had planted alfalfa and now were being told that they could be in violation of a court order. The industry screeched to a halt, dealing a sizable economic blow to one of the country’s most important export crops. The ongoing chaos was exactly the kind of commercial uncertainty that anti-GMO forces were hoping to manufacture in its Hail Mary attempt to prevent transgenic crops from being embraced or rejected on their own merits.

The alfalfa case standoff eventually made it to the Supreme Court. The evidence in support of the safety and public benefits of GM alfalfa was so strong that in 2009, the Obama Administration had Solicitor General Elena Kagan file a brief on the biotechnology company’s behalf, even though the government was not a defendant in the appeal. To no scientist’s surprise, in June 2010 SCOTUS overturned the lower court’s injunction that had prohibited Monsanto from selling pesticide-resistant alfalfa seeds.

“An injunction is a drastic and extraordinary remedy, which should not be granted as a matter of course,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the 7-1 majority, concluding that the US District Court in San Francisco had “abused its discretion.”

The so-called Monsanto Protection Act has nothing to do with consumer safety or limiting biotech’s liability for making “dangerous” products limited liability, as even quasi-mainstream news outlets, like Salon, have claimed. That’s just ignorant reporting. In the two cases heralded by campaigners—alflafa and sugar beets—only technical legal concerns were raised; consumer safety and the environment was never the issue.

No product is exempt from the law when health or environmental problems are identif

beenthere Posted - 4/10/2013 10:04:30 AM | show profile | flag this post

NYT chimes in re Monsanto Rider:



There is far from any scientific consensus on this, because there’s currently little or no reliable evidence that food manufactured with ingredients from genetically engineered plants is directly harmful to humans[4]. That’s not the same thing as saying that the potential isn’t there for novel proteins and other chemicals to generate unexpected problems, which is why we need strict, effective testing and regulatory systems.

It’s also why the pre-emptive “biotech rider” is such an insult: Congress is (again) protecting corporations from the public interest. This is all the more reason that food derived from genetically modified organisms should be so labeled, especially since the vast majority of Americans want them to be.


You, as a consumer, cannot perform ANY independent testing on Monsanto seeds. To purchase them, you MUST sign a legal doc that you will NOT use them for research purposes. If you don't sign, they will not sell them to you.

Monsanto has also patented the seeds. Because of that, any farmer that uses the seeds can only use them for one season of planting. Re another legal agreement that they must sign with Monsanto, the farmers have to throw away any remaining seeds and cannot "replenish" seed stock using traditional farming methods (farmers use seed from year to year, re heirloom varieties and in doing so create their own seeds each year from the previous year's crop).

This creates 100% dependence on ONE CORPORATION for food supply. The implications of that alone are chilling.

And, in fact, most seed companies are OWNED by Big Pharma and Chemical companies. Why?


Here's a clearer reproduction of the chart:

For more info to understand GMOs, see:

Grateful Deadline Posted - 4/10/2013 10:58:12 AM | show profile | flag this post

Bittman didn't write all-caps words, and his piece doesn't include any "note."

Seeing those differences, I don't see a reason to finish reading your post due to a credibility issue: yours. If you want your posts to be read, don't alter the source material.

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