For about three hundred and sixty million years, plants have been producing fertile seeds that generate new plants and new seeds, and never have they ever charged anyone for the favour.
But in 1998 a patent gave its blessing to the company Delta and Pine to produce and sell sterile seeds, which meant new seeds had to be purchased for every planting. In the middle of August of the year 2006, Monsanto, blessed be thy name, bought out Delta and Pine and also its patent.
Thus Monsanto consolidated its universal power: sterile seeds, known as ‘suicide seeds’ or ‘terminator seeds’, form part of a lucrative line that also obliges farmers to buy herbicides, pesticides and other poisons from the genetically modified pharmacy.
At easter in the year 2010, a few months after the earthquake, Haiti received a grand gift from Monsanto: sixty thousand bags of seed produced by the chemical industry. Farmers gahtered to receive the offering, and they burned every sack in an immense bonfire.
Eduardo Galeano, Children of the days, A calendar of human history (16 August)