A recent public poll of American citizens asking them what they thought was the most evil American corporation had the majority pointing their fingers at Monsanto, so even Americans are aware of the monster (unlike some US corporations whose affects can only be felt by foreigners).
What was interesting was how universal the hate was across both Blue and Red states.
Blue-staters hate the company because they don't like the idea of genetically modified food being shoved down their throats without them at least having the option of knowing what they're eating.
Red-staters hate the company because those states tend to be agricultural, and Monsanto has been systematically suing into the ground any farmer who doesn't buy their seed.
That's done by sending agents to inspect non-Monsanto crops growing next to crops that had been Monsanto the year before.
If the non-Monsanto farmer is of the traditional type who saves some of his harvest to be next year's seed, and if some of his seeds got pollinated by the Monsanto crop next door, he gets sued out of existence for growing plants containing Monsanto patented genes without a license.
Consequently, traditional farmers are terrified of Monsanto.
The ACLU has been trying to counter with an argument that, since pollen-carrying winds are an act of God, the farmer who gets his crops dusted with Monsanto pollen from next door shouldn't be held responsible for the cross-pollenization, such that if Monsanto wants to protect their monopoly on specific plant genes, then they should use some of the standard, old plant-genetics tricks used by plant-geneticists with other species to stop them from pollinating (think seedless grapes).
The fact that Monsanto is so opposed to this idea when it's a relatively easy-and-standard process to make strains that won't pollinate has some people in the ACLU scratching their heads, given how it would be the most straightforward way to protect one's monopoly on various genes, which is leading some to think that Monsanto deliberately *wants* their crops to cross-pollinate in order to give them legal leverage to wipe out competition.
Political Geographers will be the first to tell you it's a known historical fact that ample production of a stable food supply is the number-one key factor to the establishment and maintenance of a first-world industrial society. No nation has ever become wealthy and industrial unless it was first able to feed itself on a regular and affordable basis, such that even Japan, with so little cultivatable land, maintains self-sufficiency in rice because they know that.
If there's *anything* the Canadian border should be used for, it's protection against the tyranny of something like a Monsanto, yet the current government has been amazingly passive about surrendering it's job of governing over to corporate-rule, and it's starting to hurt what used to be Canada's greatest power: food production.
80% of Saskatchewan family-farmers are having to find supplementary work in part-time jobs to keep their farms running against the corporate-farms seeding nutritionally vacuous mono-culture crops... the kind of crops where consumers are forced to buy vitamin-supplements to live on.
What's weird is, all those boards (wheat board, dairy board, etc.) were originally set up to protect consumers from erratic supply and to protect family-farmers from unfair competition, all of which was done to secure citizens from hunger, yet, somehow, corporate-agriculture has found a way around all that, and the elected reps who's job it is to watch out for and stop dangerous situations like that have been looking the other way.
Corporate competition for monopolistic domination in things like portable media players is one thing, because items like that aren't vital to survival, but when it comes to food... if there's *anything* one should never allow corporate-monopoly control of, it's food.
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