U.S. agriculture giant Monsanto is donating $4 million worth of seeds to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
Monsanto said Friday the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture has approved the donation, ensuring the selected seeds are appropriate for Haitian growing conditions and farming practices.
Monsanto’s director of global development,Elizabeth Vancil, said the need in Haiti is “incredible.”
The first 60 tons of the 475-ton donation of seeds arrived in Haiti last week. That shipment consisted of corn and vegetable seeds. Upcoming seed shipments will also include cabbage, carrot, eggplant, melon, onion, tomato, spinach and watermelon.
Monsanto said the U.S. freight company UPS and the Switzerland-based logistics firm Kuehne and Nagel are donating their services to the seed program.
Seed distribution in Haiti is being handled by the WINNER project, a program designed to increase farmer productivity funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Haiti’s devastating earthquake in January left at least 217,000 people dead and one million others homeless.
Haiti is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
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Just like the Americans dumping rice.
It makes the country more dependent upon their sources.
The seed thing could be a real disaster since farmers can hardly afford any seed now. If they are forced to buy new seed, each planting season, food prices will skyrocket – damaging the economy more.
Some expert investigation of the seed types is a must.
This is really a potential disaster in the making.
Hybrid seeds are a one shot affair. You plant and harvest…then buy new seeds.
The Haitian peasant is in for another bad shock.
Food production will drop like a lead brick after the first round.
Someone will have to step in and buy more seed. We should stick to non-hybrid stock and leave the traditional society a way to collect seeds from each planting.
I am an agricultural specialist in eed production.
This gift is no gift att all.
It is very difficult to convince a peasant society that the seeds they save will not work the next time they plant.
It will take one famine in production to start the lesson. People will die because of this choice of seed stock….in a nation that is already on the very of starvation.
The people trust us and this is what we do to them.
Disgusting.
Another Trojan horse by the Monsanto Company. Farmers in Latin America are crippled by the debt and unsustainable cost of using Monsanto seeds. Even more, since the genetically modified seeds are dominant they contaminate other farms, and potentially ruin organic produce. Since these seeds are intellectual property, even the seeds that propagate are economically unsustainable, and those farmers whose farms are contaminated by the GMOs are subject to costly litigation and penalties.
Unfortunately, Haiti has the highest number of NGOs per capita in the world, and the US has been involved in development for years, and it has achieved its goal to create a dependent state, for the benefit of wealthy agricultural companies.