Free Republic

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday it’s seeking nearly $5 million in fines against a unit of the Swiss chemical giant Syngenta for the company’s alleged violations of pesticide regulations in Hawaii. The violations allegedly occurred on Jan. 20 at Syngenta Seeds’ crop research farm on Kauai where workers entered a field recently sprayed with a restricted insecticide. The EPA said 10 workers were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. Syngenta failed to tell the workers to avoid the fields, and then allowed them to enter the fields without protective gear, the agency said. Further, the EPA said...

Although considerable progress has been made on the regulatory front concerning ChemChina’s $43 billion acquisition of Syngenta, the transaction now is not expected to close by the end of the year, said Erik Fyrwald, chief executive officer of Syngenta. “We achieved national security clearance from CFIUS in the U.S. and anti-trust clearance from a total of 11 regulatory authorities,” Fyrwald said during an Oct. 25 conference call with analysts. “The key outstanding anti-trust approvals are the E.U., for which we filed on Sept. 23, and the U.S., where we are ready to file, subject to updated feedback from the FTC,...

July 16, 2014 (LocalOrg) - Corporate biotechnology monopolies like Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, and others have met increasing resistance to their attempts to patent and control global agriculture. They have spent untold fortunes attempting to sway the public but to no avail. Local, organic agriculture is growing in popularity and proliferating across all social-strata. The introduction of technology to automate and augment organic farming is making it as competitive and accessible or more so than the capital-intensive models of monopoly employed by big-ag. In response, big-ag has attempted several distasteful public relation stunts, including "super bananas for Africa" and "Golden Rice" to allegedly...

A German farmer has revealed shocking GMO company tactics to silence him in an exclusive interview with RT Op-Edge. German dairy farmer, Gottfried Glöckner, has told William Engdahl about attempted blackmail, character assassination and, ultimately, wrongful imprisonment he suffered when he refused to back off his charges that the Anglo-Swiss GMO company, Syngenta, had provided him with highly toxic GMO Maize seeds that ruined his prize dairy herd and his land. After spending two years in prison, Glöckner is traveling round the world to tell the story and warn the public of the extreme danger of GMO seeds....

This story appears in the April 14, 2014 issue of Forbes. On one of the windiest days in recent memory Harry Stine, the richest man in Iowa, cranes his neck to examine the elevator shaft inside the 110-foot steel observation tower next to his garage. “The cables look awfully frayed. Who knows if it will last one more time?” he chuckles. Nonetheless, we hop into the elevator cab, he flips the switch to get it moving, and up we go as the wind rips into us at 40mph. Stine, the 72-year-old founder and owner of Stine Seed, the largest private...

Monsanto is hosting a "Bee Summit." Bayer AG is breaking ground on a "Bee Care Center." And Sygenta AG is funding grants for research into the accelerating demise of honeybees in the United States, where the insects pollinate fruits and vegetables that make up roughly a quarter of the American diet. The agrichemical companies are taking these initiatives at a time when their best-selling pesticides are under fire from environmental and food activists who say the chemicals are killing off millions of bees. .. Die-offs of bee populations have accelerated over the last few years to a rate the U.S....

The Illinois Ag Dept. illegally seized privately owned bees from renowned naturalist, Terrence Ingram, without providing him with a search warrant and before the court hearing on the matter, reports Prairie Advocate News. Behind the obvious violations of his Constitutional rights is Monsanto. Ingram was researching Roundup’s effects on bees, which he’s raised for 58 years. “They ruined 15 years of my research,” he told Prairie Advocate, by stealing most of hisstock.

The shocking minutes relating to President Putin’s meeting this past week with US Secretary of State John Kerry reveal the Russian leaders “extreme outrage” over the Obama regimes continued protection of global seed and plant bio-genetic giants Syngenta and Monsanto in the face of a growing “bee apocalypse” that the Kremlin warns “will most certainly” lead to world war. According to these minutes, released in the Kremlin today by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation (MNRE), Putin was so incensed over the Obama regimes refusal to discuss this grave matter that he refused for three...

BOISE, Idaho (AP) - Four major agricultural companies and a nonprofit organization were sued in federal court Wednesday by Canyon County commissioners, accused of conspiring to hire and harbor illegal immigrants. The lawsuit in U.S. District Court contends the four companies - Modesto, Calif.-based Harris Moran Seed Co., Syngenta Seeds, Sorrento Lactalis and Swift Beef Co. - and the nonprofit Idaho Migrant Council have violated the federal Racketeering influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was designed to target the mafia. Canyon County in southwestern Idaho alleges it's been damaged by an "illegal immigrant hiring scheme," paying millions of dollars for...