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Launching a lawsuit against the very company that is responsible for a farmer suicide every 30 minutes, 5 million farmers are now suing Monsanto for as much as 6.2 billion Euros (around 7.7 billion US dollars).
The reason? As with many other cases, such as the ones that led certain farming regions to be known as the ‘suicide belt’, Monsanto has been reportedly taxing the farmers to financial shambles with ridiculous royalty charges.
The farmers state that Monsanto has been
unfairly gathering exorbitant profits each year on a global scale
from “renewal” seed harvests, which are crops planted using seed
from the previous year’s harvest.
Eventually, the royalties compound and
many farmers begin to struggle with even keeping their farm afloat.
It is for this reason that India slammed Monsanto with
groundbreaking ‘biopiracy’
charges in an effort to stop Monsanto from ‘patenting
life’.
The findings echo what thousands of farmers have experienced in particularly poor nations, where many of the farmers are unable to stand up to Monsanto.
Back in 2008, the Daily Mail covered
what is known as
the ‘GM Genocide’,
which is responsible for taking the lives of over 17,683 Indian
farmers in 2009 alone. After finding that their harvests were
failing and they began to enter economic turmoil, the farmers began
ending their own lives - oftentimes drinking the very same
insecticide that Monsanto provided them with.
After it was ousted in January that Monsanto was running illegal ‘slave-like’ working rings, more individuals became aware of just how seriously Monsanto seems to disregard their workers - so why would they care for the health of their consumers?
In April,
another group of farmers sued Monsanto
for ‘knowingly poisoning’ workers and causing ‘devastating birth
defects’.
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