15 Apr 2007
Easter has come and gone already!
I had a great break in Clarens over Easter- took Rodrigus with so he could see the funky little town and also Golden Gate nearby. You can read about it on Rodrigus the frogs blog here.
All on the way to Clarens, along the roadside, where signs saying "Dis mos... mielies" next to fields of mielies! What's that about? Are there that many tourists that go on that road to Clarens who have never seen Mielies and need signs to point them out? But then again, if they are tourists, they probably don’t understand Afrikaans... so what's with these signs, hmm?
- Powered by
I wrote to Monsanto to ask them about these signs, which appear all over the country. Their reply was:
"DEKALB is one of the brands Monsanto use globally for our seed products. In South Africa we sell white and yellow maize, as well as sunflower seed under this brand. The DEKALB brand has been on the market since the early 1900 and was named after a town in the midwest region of the USA.
Dis mos mielies – means “This is maize” and is a slogan used for marketing purposes. In this sense it refers to the idea that the maize you see here in the field, is how maize should look. This slogan actualy comes from the “old” seed company Carnia and has been used since the 1990‘s in South Africa. In 1998 Monsanto bought two seed companies in South Africa Carnia, which was part of Omnia (fertilizer company) and Sensako. We sold our seed under these two brand names but as we owned both we consolidated in one brand, DEKAB, in 2005.
Both conventional maize seed as well as GM-seed are sold under the DEKALB brand. The particular product on the photo (CRN3505) is a conventional white maize product."
Monsanto is one of the most evil conglomerates in the world. Dr Vandana Shiva has exposed them time and time again. Farmers in South Africa seem to be lulled into a sense of passivity and will wake up with a big shock when they realise how deep the fangs of this vampire has been sunk into their necks, sucking them dry from the very lifeblood that made Afrikaaners such good farmers.