"Monsanto, one of the world's most evil corporations!"

Dear Joseph,

Monsanto, one of the world’s most evil corporations, just keeps getting worse. Monsanto's latest victims? Poverty-stricken Indian farmers.

Back in 2012, 13,754 farmers in India committed suicide. That’s one suicide every 38 minutes.

Why? Massive, crippling debts, made worse by exorbitant annual fees charged by Monsanto for seeds.

There’s no way poor Indian farmers can stand up to Monsanto alone. So we’re launching a campaign to demand that Monsanto stop charging the crippling annual royalties causing so much suffering.

Monsanto's GMO crops were introduced in India in 2002, and since then there’s been a sharp rise in the suicide rate among Indian farmers -- and it’s not hard to see why.

For centuries, farmers made a living by saving seeds from one year’s crop to the next.

But today, Monsanto is claiming patent rights over seeds -- the fundamental source of all plant life -- and forcing farmers to pay for new seeds every single year.

The result is a crippling cycle of poverty, from which farmers see no way out.

Mega-corporations like Monsanto act like they can destroy people’s lives as long as they’re improving shareholder returns. But time and again we’re showing these corporations that we will shine a light on the practices they want to hide in the shadows.

Like when Newmont mining company sent a private security firm to intimidate Máxima Acuña Chaupe, thousands of us chipped in to bring her allies to Newmont’s shareholder meeting where the CEO pledged to stop development of the mine.

As Vandana Shiva has said, when corporations control seeds, they control life. Monsanto is taking a renewable common resource and turning it into a non renewable, patented commodity.

We know that Indian farmers can’t fight Monsanto alone. That’s why SumOfUs was created -- to leverage the global power of consumers from around the world to fight multinational corporations together.

Thanks for all you do, 

Kaytee, Jon and the team at SumOfUs 

P.S. Over 100,000 of us have signed to keep Monsanto's lobbyists at arms distance in the U.S. Presidential race -- but Monsanto's reach is truly global. Will you make a donation today to help farmers in India too?

 Will you chip in CA$1 to help get this campaign off the ground?

*********
For more information: 

Monsanto and the Seeds of Suicide, Common Dreams, March 27, 2013
Monsanto’s Shares Surge as its Drive to Force GM Crops into India Gathers Pace, RINF, February 4, 2015

 

SumOfUs is a worldwide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy. This email was sent to human4us@bell.net.