World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Politics and Power

357 Pages·2010·2.62 MB·English

by  Marie-Monique Robin

The World According to Monsanto
Pollution, Politics and Power
MARIE-MONIQUE ROBIN
Translated from the French by George Holoch
Published in Australia by Spinifex Press by arrangement with The New Press,
New York
Published in Australia by Spinifex Press in 2010
Published by arrangement with The New Press, New York
Spinifex Press Pty Ltd 504 Queensberry Street North Melbourne, Victoria 3051
Australia [email protected]
www.spinifexpress.com.au
© 2008 by Marie-Monique Robin © 2008 by Éditions La Découverte / Arte Editions English translation by
George Holoch © 2010 by The New Press
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NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA CATALOGUING-IN-
PUBLICATION DATA Robin, Marie-Monique. The world according to
Monsanto : pollution, politics and power / Marie-Monique Robin ; translated by
George Holoch.
Translation of: Monde selon Monsanto.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Monsanto Company. 2. Agricultural innovations—United States—Social
aspects. 3. Agricultural chemicals industry—Social aspects. 4. Agricultural
chemicals—Environmental aspects. 5. Social responsibility of business. 6. Food
supply. 7. Human rights and globalization. I. Title. II. Holoch, George.
338.7660973
ISBN 978-1-876-75683-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 978-1-74219-504-9 (ePub Format)
ISBN 978-1-87675-683-3 (pbk.)
Composition by NK Graphics
This book was set in Fairfield
Cover design by Ann Weinstock
To my parents, Joël and Jeannette, farmers who taught me to love the good
things of the earth, and so to love life.
Contents

Preface: A Book for Public Health by Nicolas Hulot

Introduction: The Monsanto Question

PART I: ONE OF THE GREAT POLLUTERS OF INDUSTRIAL HISTORY

1. PCBs: White-Collar Crime
2. Dioxin: A Polluter Working with the Pentagon
3. Dioxin: Manipulation and Corruption
4. Roundup: A Massive Brainwashing Operation
5. The Bovine Growth Hormone Affair, Part One
6. The Bovine Growth Hormone Affair, Part Two

PART II: GMOs: THE GREAT CONSPIRACY

7. The Invention of GMOs
8. Scientists Suppressed
9. Monsanto Weaves Its Web, 1995–1999
10. The Iron Law of the Patenting of Life
11. Transgenic Wheat: Monsanto’s Lost Battle in North America

PART III: MONSANTO’S GMOs STORM THE SOUTH

12. Mexico: Seizing Control of Biodiversity
13. In Argentina: The Soybeans of Hunger
14. Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina: The “United Soy Republic”
15. India: The Seeds of Suicide
16. How Multinational Corporations Control the World’s Food
Conclusion: A Colossus with Feet of Clay

Notes
Index
Preface
A Book for Public Health
Nicolas Hulot
As I progressed in my reading of Marie-Monique Robin’s book, a flood of
weighty questions overwhelmed me, filling me with anxiety that I might sum up
in a single question: how is this possible? How can Monsanto, that emblematic
firm of global agrochemistry, have made so many fatal mistakes, and how can it
have marketed products so harmful to human health and to the environment?
How has the company succeeded in conducting its business as though nothing
had happened, constantly extending its influence (and its wealth), despite the
tragedies its products have caused? How has it so quietly managed to continue
its activities unconcerned and fool everyone? Why has it been able to carry on
despite the heavy legal penalties it suffered and despite the bans imposed on
some of its products (unfortunately, after they had already caused a good deal of
irreparable harm)?
This book discloses a reality that hurts the eyes and grips the heart: that of a
calmly arrogant company heedlessly profiting from the suffering of victims and
the destruction of ecosystems. As the pages go by, the mystery is revealed. They
show the prospering of a company whose history “constitutes a paradigm of the
aberrations in which industrial society has become mired.” You may often shake
your head in disbelief, but the demonstration is limpid, and we understand where
Monsanto gets its power, how its lies have won out over the truth, and why
many of its allegedly miraculous products in the end turned out to be nightmares.
In other words, at a time when the North American company has taken on an
even more totalizing ambition than before—imposing genetically modified
organisms (GMOs) on farmers and food consumers around the world—this
indispensable book raises the question, while there is still time, of whether it is
necessary to allow a company such as Monsanto to hold the future of humanity
in its test tubes and to impose a new world agricultural order.
Consider the facts. How did Monsanto become one of the major industrial
empires on the planet? By accomplishing nothing less than the large-scale
production of some of the most dangerous products of modern times: PCBs,
which were used as coolants and lubricants, are devastatingly harmful to human
health and the food chain and were banned after massive contamination was
observed; dioxin, a few grams of which is enough to poison a large city and the
manufacture of which was also banned, was developed from one of the
company’s herbicides, which was the basis for the grimly famous Agent Orange,
the defoliant dropped on Vietnamese jungles and villages (which enabled
Monsanto to secure the largest contract in its history from the Pentagon); bovine
growth hormones—the first test products for GMOs—are intended to cause the
animal to produce beyond its natural capacities regardless of the known
consequences for human health; the weed killer Roundup used to be presented in
endless advertising as biodegradable and favorable to the environment, a claim
flatly contradicted by legal decisions in the United States and in Europe.
I have had serious doubts regarding certain practices of this company,
particularly its use of police tactics against farmers. Marie-Monique Robin’s
book not only confirms them but reveals both a company driven by the engine of
business alone, which is hardly surprising, and, more troubling, a company
whose actions are based on an extraordinary sense that it can do as it likes. She
sketches a portrait of a firm that is expert at slipping through the cracks and
persisting in its practices against all comers, no doubt convinced that it knows
better than anyone else what is good for humanity, persuaded that it is
accountable to no one, appropriating the planet as its playing field and profit
center. In Monsanto’s position outside democratic control, it is hard to tell
whether it is commercial blindness, scientific arrogance, or pure and simple
cynicism that dominates.
Robin’s investigation is both dense and laser sharp; testimony is abundant and
concordant, documents are revealed, and archives are deciphered. Her book is
not a pamphlet filled with fantasy and gossip. It brings to light a terrifying
reality. For, in the course of many years of marketing its products— PCBs,
herbicides, dioxin, bovine growth hormones, Roundup—Monsanto was fully
aware of their harmfulness. The documents that the book reveals leave no doubt
on that subject. Monsanto developed the habit of publicly asserting the opposite
of what was known inside the company. Thanks to Robin, we now know what
Monsanto knew. The company was aware of the toxic effects of its products. It
persevered nonetheless, and it was allowed to go on.
Monsanto is now coming back in force and claims that the GMOs for which it
is the principal seed producer have been developed out of its concern to help the
farmers of the world to produce healthier food while at the same time reducing
the impact of agriculture on the environment. The company claims that it has
changed and that it has broken with its past as an irresponsible chemist. I don’t
have the scientific competence to assess the toxicity of certain molecules or the
risks incurred by genetic manipulation. I only know that the scientific
community is sharply divided about the effects of transgenesis and that the
results of experiments with cultivated GMOs have not provided proof that they
cause no harm to health or the environment or that they are able to intensify food
production to conquer hunger. The balance sheet Robin draws up for Mexico,
Argentina, Paraguay, the United States, Canada, and India is in any case
distressing. I also know that the use of Monsanto 810 corn seeds, the only
variety grown in France for commercial purposes, was wisely suspended by the
French government in January 2008, after an administrative authority set up in
the wake of the major environmental conference held in October 2007 pointed to
new scientific findings and raised troubling questions. More generally, I know,
as does any citizen on Earth with a grain of common sense, that one has to call a
halt when it is obvious that industrial and commercial considerations have gone
beyond the limits of the most basic precautions.
Today, while a real scientific, economic, and social debate is stirring France
and Europe about the health and environmental effects of GMOs, as well as their
consequences for the condition of farmers and the question of patents of living
things, Marie-Monique Robin’s book is timely. It should be considered a work
promoting public health and read with that in mind.
The global ecological crisis calls for a major transformation of the economic
and social organization of human communities. It calls into question the capacity
of world agriculture to provide sufficient food resources for the future nine
billion inhabitants of the planet. There is no doubt that scientific and
technological innovation can play a dynamic role—but not in just any way and
not in everyone’s hands.
Indeed, what exactly would the world according to Monsanto be like?