Puerto Rico: Monsanto's Caribbean paradise island

Monsanto's Caribbean experiment

Eliván Martínez

Lunes 21 de Noviembre de 2011

Versión en español

The largest producer of transgenic seeds in the world is leasing some of the best agricultural lands on the Island with a pattern of questionable legality, while receiving incentives from the Fortuño administration.

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When environmentalist Juan Rosario traveled to an Amish religious community in Iowa, to learn to make compost, he was surprised that they had a laboratory and the services of an expert in chemistry. What was a scientist doing in a place where people live far from technology and practice ecological farming with the simplest of methods?

An Amish dressed in their style, with a wide-brimmed black hat, white shirt, and black pants and black jacket, pointed toward a large cornfield on a nearby farm. "The scientist helps us verify that pollen from genetically modified corn does not contaminate our crops," he told Juan Rosario. "It's the same corn that you develop in Salinas."
Puerto Rico, laboratory for corn, sorghum, cotton and transgenic soybeans.

The island is hosting a reality that the government hides and sponsors: the island is an important center for eight companies, seven of them multinationals, that are developing the first generation of genetically modified seeds for distribution to United States and around the world. The strongholds of these corporations extend into public and private farms, especially in the best farmland along the island's southern coast, which in the last century was under the rule of His Majesty sugarcane, exalted by large landowners that sought to take over the land.