Word: plant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Monsanto has been incorporating flashy traits like herbicide and pest resistance into everything from canola to corn. But such supercrops don't come cheap. Farmers pay a premium for Monsanto seeds, and to make sure they keep paying, the company requires them to sign an agreement promising not to plant seeds their crops produce. If farmers want the same bountiful harvest next year, they must return to the company for a new load of seeds...
...science take hold, opponents warn darkly, and farmers could find themselves coming to Monsanto, seed cup in hand, paying whatever the company demands before they can plant that season's crop. Worse still, some doomsday scenarios suggest, pollen from Terminator plants could drift with the wind like a toxic cloud, cross with ordinary crops or wild plants, and spread from species to species until flora all around the world had been suddenly and irreversibly sterilized...
Opponents don't care who made Terminator. To them the idea is Frankensteinian on its face. After tweezing out a toxin-producing stretch of DNA from a noncrop plant, gene scientists managed to knit the lethal genetic material into the genome of commercial plants. They also inserted two other bits of coding that would keep the killer gene dormant until late in the crop's development, when the toxin would affect only the seed and not the plant. But because the seed company needs to generate enough product to sell in the first place, the scientists included one more...
Your article "Five Ways Out," accompanying your series on tax incentives and subsidies for companies [SPECIAL REPORT: CORPORATE WELFARE, Nov. 30], mentioned Hobart Corp., a unit of PMI Food Equipment Group, stating that in 1995 the company moved its Dayton, Ohio, plant to Piqua, Ohio, as a result of tax incentives, and that employees had only three days' notice before the closing. In fact, the relocation decision occurred only after Hobart determined that its Dayton facility was antiquated and inefficient. The move would have occurred regardless of any tax incentives, which to date have been less than...
Your report on what it cost the city of Phoenix, Ariz., to encourage Sumitomo Sitix of Japan to locate a silicon-wafer plant there was intellectually dishonest in describing what occurred [SPECIAL REPORT: CORPORATE WELFARE, Nov. 23]. You ignored the fact that this company brought 400 new high-tech jobs and an annual payroll of $14 million to a section of Phoenix that offered few employment opportunities. You failed to note the additional wealth created by yearly payments to vendors of $10 million, a $1 million payment to Phoenix for development and impact fees and $5 million in construction sales...