Is the Academic and Scientific World Selling Out to Monsanto?
By Silvia Casabianca, Saludify
We were talking the other day on how the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) message to its 74,000 members became almost automatically compromised as soon as they decided to accept sponsorship from Big Food companies. But what about Monsanto donating half a million dollars to, for example, the 4-H youth development?
Thank you very much!
The 4-H organization promotes hands-on learning in its clubs, camps, school-based and after-school programs. Although the funding amounts to less than a dollar per volunteer, Big Ag money (Monsanto, DuPont, John Deere, Philip Morris, Kraft, Cargill) grants the training for these volunteers.
What kind of training?
With more than six million members, 4-H is one of the largest youth organizations in the world. Through volunteers, the movement supports youngsters who learn to engage in hands-on learning activities in the areas of science, citizenship and healthy living.
So far, so good.
The 4-H AgriScience curriculum and supporting programming continues promoting the study and exploration of possible innovations in biotechnology, which is the use of living systems and organisms to develop or make useful products like soy ink, to cite but one example.
Is Monsanto’s sponsorship influencing what the 4-H children are taught? There is no reason to trust that they will keep their hands out of he curriculum.
Monsanto sponsorships: Money buys
As of now, it looks that the values taught by the club continue to be quite distant from industrial agriculture (Big Ag’s signature), which includes innovation in machinery, genetic engineering, chemical-based crops, global trade and other techniques with the goal to produce food at mass scale.
At least on paper, 4-H says its approach is comprehensive and holistic – from agriculture to climate change to alternative energy. And the curriculum seems to still be focused on sustainable agriculture.
However, it’s difficult to abstain from wondering what requests Monsanto might be making in retribution for its generous sponsorship.
Funding 4-H is not an isolated event. Monsanto systematically targets educational institutions across the United States. It pays for research that later can be commercialized and turned into profits, steering research efforts in favor of genetically engineered organisms and chemical-based crop systems.
Clearly revealing its ties with the corporation, Danforth Campus at Washington University, for example, has thanked a 100 million dollars grant by naming their life science building “The Monsanto Laboratory of the Life Sciences.”
What’s in the agreement signed between the corporation and the university?
Academic freedom compromised
By definition, universities have the mission to work for the common good. Research and publications are the way universities undertake their operation.
Manipulating youngsters with the idea that genetic engineering or chemicals in the crops are a necessity is even more deplorable than influencing research in the academic world.
Fears that academic freedom are compromised by afflux of private money have proven reasonable.
Linda Ferris wrote in “Mother Jones,” that agricultural schools have become “Monsanto’s new incubator of technology and propaganda – a factory of making money on the cheap by controlling these institutions and using their students to do their research and work.”
Before the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, any invention funded with federal money automatically became the property of the federal government. The Act facilitated technology transfer from universities to industry and encouraged relationships between biomedical researchers and biotechnology companies.
“Bayh-Dole transformed the university’s public mission,” Risa L. Lieberwitz said at a speech given at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting in January 2005, “by emphasizing private corporate interests through the commercialization of publicly funded research discoveries.”
The universities can now license patents for use to for-profit corporations such as Monsanto, for commercial development.
Funding might be necessary for the sake of furthering research, but what good does it make if it leads to slanted research?
It is well known that studies tend to benefit sponsors and cases of negative data from research being withheld have been reported.
President of the Commonwealth Fund, Dr. David Blumenthal and colleagues at the Harvard Institute of Health Policy reported that one in every five professors in the life sciences has delayed publication of their research to protect financial interests. Geneticists among other researchers were the most likely to withhold information.
This article was first published in Saludify.
Silvia Casabianca graduated and practiced as a medical doctor in Colombia and has a master degree in Art Therapy from Concordia University (Montreal). She is the director of the Eyes Wide Open holistic center in Bonita Springs, FL. where she has a private practice as a psychotherapist and bodyworker.
[Photo by IRRI Images]