Monsanto U: Agribusiness's Takeover of Public Schools
By Nancy Scola, AlterNet. Posted February 15, 2008.
Thanks to Bush's new cuts on public funding for land-grant schools, agribusiness is gaining a huge foothold in the future of our food.
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That was until America's land-grant system met George W. Bush. Tucked into the appendix of his latest national budget is a nearly one-third cut in the public funding for agriculture research at the land grants. The size of the cut is surprising, but not its existence -- it's part of a multiyear drive by the Bush administration to completely eliminate regular public research funding. In a press briefing last week, a USDA deputy secretary illuminated the Bush administration's rationale for the transition to competitive grant making: "That's how you get the most bang for the buck."
Wallace Huffman, an Iowa State agro-economist, is deeply unimpressed with Bush's "bang" approach to land-grant research. "There's a sense in the president's office that you invest in research like you invest in building cars," Huffman told me last week. Land-grant school officials are similarly skeptical. In a survey, Kansas State argued that the loss of regular funding would upend education. Minnesota complained that cuts would undermine ongoing research projects. North Dakota simply asked, "What is the future of ag research?"
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But, it doesn't take a presidential invitation to get Monsanto to sink its roots in the land-grant system. Those roots are already planted. Iowa State's campus boasts a Monsanto Auditorium and the school offers students Monsanto-funded graduate fellowships on seed policy with a special focus on "the protection of intellectual property rights." Kansas State has spun off Wildcat Genetics, a side company whose purpose is the selling of soybean seeds genetically engineered to survive the application of Roundup® -- the result of a decades long relationship with Monsanto, the pesticide's maker.
But don't get the wrong idea about Monsanto's land-grant activities. By that, I mean, don't think the company is the only multinational biotech conglomerate firmly rooted in American land-grant soil. Head on down to Texas A&M. There you'll find the a chair for the "Dow Chemical Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering." Similar chairs exist at West Virginia State and Louisiana State. The agricultural college of the University of California at Davis is funded in part by DuPont and Calgene.
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/76804/