Vegetable seed companies succumb to corporate whoredom

As much as we possibly can, we should be examining our values, our locality, our abilities and rejecting corporations in favor of what we know and hold dear to ourselves or family. Even the family garden is paying the price of our inattention to what they are doing to our seed supply. The banks and Wall Street have proven we can't trust others to do what is right for our society as a whole.

The more I delve into the journey of becoming as self-sufficient as I can and move closer to the land, the more I discover the manipulation of corporations in our everyday lives. Oh, I've always seen the obvious: a good example is the commercial on television right now promoting more exploration for natural gas and oil using what looks like everyday people saying how taxes on the industry don't make sense in this economy. Wind and solar threaten their bottom line.

No, it's the subtle things that slipped by me. Like the fact that the big seed companies have now bought up the garden seed suppliers and are reducing the number of seeds made available for even the home gardener. I noticed something was wrong this year when I got my Henry Fields and Gurney seed catalogues. Most of the pictures, names and descriptions of the vegetables were the same in both catalogues. Since then I've learned how Monsanto and other big seed corporations have made these bought up garden seed suppliers.

As a result, in catalogs in 1981, there were about 5,000 non-hybrid vegetable varieties. Today, thanks to these corporate thinkers who count money and push the hybrids their companies produce, they have reduced that number to 600 non-hybrid vegetable varieties. Obviously the corporate whores who work for the suit and ties in these companies think they are doing a good thing. In 2005, Monsanto bought Seminis, another large corporation, and as a result owns 75 percent of the world's tomato seed supply. While garden catalog companies like Burpee may not be owned by Monsanto, they now get many of their seeds from them as a result of the 2005 purchase.


What's next: they'll genetically modify these seeds so they can sell people the chemicals they make and are being used by the millions of pounds on our commercial food supply? For what, corporate profits at the expense of human health, that's the definition of corporate whore – they have no allegiance other than to make money for shareholders – who are the corporate pimps running the world and most of Washington.