July 9, 2012

Mon­santo May Lose Bil­lions In Brazil Over “Mon­santo Tax”

July 07 2012 | By Dr. Mercola

Brazil, the second-largest pro­ducer of genet­i­cally mod­i­fied (GM) crops (after the U.S.), is the lat­est coun­try to take a stand against biotech giant Mon­santo, which could end up hand­ing over at least $2 bil­lion as a result.

A war has been wag­ing against Mon­santo in Brazil for nearly a decade, vir­tu­ally ever since the coun­try legal­ized farm­ing of GM crops in 2005.

Since then, Mon­santo has been charg­ing Brazil­ian farm­ers dou­ble –
once for their seeds, and again when they sell their crops.

Farm­ers Have Had Enough With Monsanto’s Roy­alty Taxes and Penalties

In case you’re won­der­ing how Mon­santo has risen to the ranks of a super­power, a major rea­son is their patent on GM seeds, like the GM soya seeds in Brazil, which account for nearly 85 per­cent of the country’s total soy­bean crop. Each GM seed is patented and sold under exclu­sive rights.

There­fore, farm­ers must pur­chase the GM seeds every year, because sav­ing seeds (which has long been the tra­di­tional way) is con­sid­ered to be patent infringe­ment. Any­one who does save GM seeds must pay a
license fee to actu­ally re-sow them.

But that’s not all.

In Brazil, Mon­santo has charged farm­ers a 2 per­cent roy­alty fee on all of their Roundup Ready sales since 2005! And, they test all of the soy seeds mar­keted as “non-GM” to be sure they don’t con­tain any Mon­santo seeds. If they are found to con­tain the patented seeds, the farmer is penal­ized close to 3 per­cent of his sales!

The issue with the lat­ter penalty is that GM soy is very hard to con­tain, and often con­t­a­m­i­nates nearby fields. So farm­ers are forced to pay a penalty for hav­ing their fields con­t­a­m­i­nated with GM crops, through no fault of their own – and likely against their wishes entirely!

For years now, farm­ers have been tak­ing Mon­santo to court over their exces­sive fees and taxes, and in 2009, a group of farm­ers sued the com­pany, claim­ing the Mon­santo tax was ille­gal because it was impos­si­ble to keep the GM seeds away from the non-GM varieties.

A judge ruled that the tax was ille­gal, espe­cially since the patents on Roundup Ready seeds in Brazil already expired. Mon­santo was ordered to stop col­lect­ing all roy­al­ties … and to return all the roy­al­ties col­lected since 2004 – an amount that could add up to a min­i­mum of $2 billion!

Mon­santo appealed, but in June 2012 the Supreme Court dis­missed it, so it looks like Mon­santo is going to be get­ting their just deserts.

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