Environmentalists throughout the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to political prisoner Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of Wikileaks — and most of them don’t know it.
It wasn’t only secret recordings pertaining to war and crimes-against-humanity that Wikileaks published, based on the heroic work of Chelsea Manning who downloaded thousands of secret US military files. A slew of cables Assange published revealed massive U.S. government attempts on behalf of Monsanto to coerce governments to allow foreign corporate land ownership, and with it genetically engineered agriculture throughout the world, and to squelch opposition to GMOs, breaking down existing laws prohibiting the genetic engineering of agriculture.
The cables revealed U.S. officials applying financial, diplomatic, and frequently military pressure on behalf of Monsanto and other biotech corporations.
These cables were followed by revelations that U.S., the World Bank and IMF loans “opened up Ukraine to major corporate inroads,” writes Joyce Nelson in The Ecologist and also in Counterpunch. “Loan conditions are forcing the deeply indebted country to open up to GMO crops, and lift the ban on private sector land ownership. U.S. corporations are jubilant at the ‘goldmine’ that awaits them.”