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Maui County
The Maui 10
Who's the county's most powerful player?
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October 05, 2006
RANK PREVIOUS COMPANY
1
2 Tesoro Hawai`i
2
1 Maui Land
& Pineapple Co.
3
4 Maui Electric
Co.
4
3 Alexander
& Baldwin
5
5 Makena Resort
6
6 Dowling Co.
7
7 Weinberg
Foundation
8
9 Wailuku Water Co.
9
8 Monsanto
Hawai`i
10 10 Hawaiian Telcom
Monsanto Afghanistan?
Monsanto sells its Roundup brand of herbicide just about everywhere
around the world—and not just to family farmers, either. In Equador, a
bunch of unruly peasant farmers are currently suing the privately owned
military corporation DynCorp for allegedly poisoning them through their
spraying—under contract from the U.S. Government—of Roundup Ultra on
their crops in an attempt to eradicate cacao. This isn't exactly
breaking news—the case has been pending under the Alien Tort Claims Act
for some time—but what is new is that similar charges are now being
leveled at DynCorp in Afghanistan for alleged anti-poppy spraying,
again under the auspices of the U.S. Government. While old Monsanto is
almost certainly not involved there—the herbicide in Afghanistan is in
pellet form, which isn't available for Roundup Ultra—Monsanto can't
help the fact that its worldwide name recognition means that it's
doomed to sit atop the list of suspects in cases like this.
Slow Growth
Looks like 2007 is going to be tough on big landowners and
developers like ML&P and A&B. They've been enjoying
double-digit growth in real estate prices the last couple of years, but
now local economists are saying the housing market is cooling—possibly
a lot. "If this cycle follows past ones," First Hawaiian Bank economist
Leroy Laney said in early September according to the Sept. 9, 2006
Honolulu Advertiser, "an actual mild decline in median [home] prices
next year would not be surprising." Mild decline!? Doesn't he know Maui
Land has hundreds of homes to build at Pulelehua on the Westside? Or
that A&B has tons of commercial and residential construction to do
in Wailuku and Kahului? What's this island coming to? MTW
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