i'm just going to POST THIS AS LOUD AS I CAN and crush all arguments-MONSANTO=root of all evil.

[farminator3000]

228. MONSANTO and BAYER are PARTNERS in BUSINESS. get it?

Unprecedented Market Consolidation

Through a mix of tactics outlined below, the agricultural input sector has become one of the most highly consolidated, integrated and collusive in the world.

Mergers & acquisitions. Since the 1990s, the Big 6 have been on a spending spree, buying up the three key segments of the agriculture industry (pesticides, seeds, and biotech) to assemble proprietary lines of chemicals, seeds, and genetic traits that are engineered to go together.
Cooperative strategies and collusive practices between the few major competitors, notably through the establishment of elaborate cross-licensing structures (see box).
Vertical integration upward along the food chain, with the establishment of food chain clusters that combine agricultural inputs with the grain handlers' extensive processing and marketing facilities.
http://www.panna.org/issues/pesticides-profit/chemical-cartel

***

As we head into peak corn planting season throughout the U.S. Midwest, bees will once again “get it from all sides” as they:

fly through clothianidin-contaminated planter dust;
gather clothianidin-laced corn pollen, which will then be fed to emerging larva;
gather water from acutely toxic, pesticide-laced guttation droplets; and/or
gather pollen and nectar from nearby fields where forage sources such as dandelions have taken up these persistent chemicals from soil that’s been contaminated year on year since clothianidin’s widespread introduction into corn cultivation in 2003.

GE corn & neonicotinoid seed treatments go hand-in-hand.

Over the last 15 years, U.S. corn cultivation has gone from a crop requiring little-to-no insecticides and negligible amounts of fungicides, to a crop where the average acre is grown from seeds treated or genetically engineered to express three different insecticides (as well as a fungicide or two) before being sprayed prophylactically with RoundUp (an herbicide) and a new class of fungicides that farmers didn’t know they “needed” before the mid-2000s.....

.....It’s expensive to use inputs you don’t need, and was once the mark of bad farming.

Then, in the mid-to-late 1990s, GE corn and neonicotinoid (imidacloprid) seed treatments both entered the market — the two go hand-in-hand, partly by design and partly by accident. Conditions for the marketing of both products were ripe due to a combination of factors:

regulatory pressures and insect resistance had pushed previous insecticide classes off the market, creating an opening for neonicotinoids to rapidly take over global marketshare;
patented seeds became legally defensible, and the pesticide industry gobbled up the global seed market; and
a variant of the corn rootworm outsmarted soy-corn rotations, driving an uptick in insecticide use around 1995-96.

Then, as if on cue, Monsanto introduced three different strains of patented, GE corn between 1997 and 2003 (RoundUp Ready, and two Bt–expressing variants aimed at controlling the European Corn Borer and corn root worm). Clothianidin entered the U.S. market under conditional registration in 2003, and in 2004 corn seed companies began marketing seeds treated with a 5X level of neonicotinoids (1.25 mg/seed vs. .25).

... and in the space of a decade, U.S. corn acreage undergoes a ten-fold increase in average insecticide use. By 2007, the average acre of corn has more than three systemic insecticides — both Bt traits and a neonicotinoid. Compare this to the early 1990s, when only an estimated 30-35% of all corn acreage were treated with insecticides at all.
http://www.panna.org/blog/ge-corn-sick-honey-bees-whats-link