Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).

 

Monsanto

 

MONSANTO :

WHO'S AFRAID OF MONSANTO?

BRITAIN'S BEST-LOVED NEWSAGENTS BEND TO HISTORY OF INTIMIDATION.

Leading newsagents WHSmith and John Menzies have confirmed today that they will not be selling the latest controversial issue of The Ecologist magazine for fear of being sued by the giant biotechnology company, Monsanto.

The special issue is a direct response to Monsanto's large-scale Europe-wide advertising campaign, in which the company claims among other things that "Food biotechnology is a matter of opinions. Monsanto believes you should hear all of them."

The magazine highlights Monsanto's track record of social and ecological irresponsibility, and illustrates its readiness to intimidate and quash those ideas which conflict with its immediate interests. "Through reputation alone," says Zac Goldsmith, the magazine's co-editor, "Monsanto has been able time and time again to bring about what is in effect a defacto censorship.

Their size and history of aggression has repeatedly brought an end to what is undeniably a legitimate and very important debate. They believe in information, but only that which ensures a favourable public response to their often dangerous products." The Ecologist's office has been inundated with phone calls from the public wanting but unable to buy copies of the magazine

Earlier this month the printers of The Ecologist, fearing legal action from Monsanto, pulped their entire print-run just hours before it was due to be released. They had worked in partnership with The Ecologist for over twenty-five years without conflict of any sort. Now, with highly respected retailers like Menzies and WHSmith refusing to stock the magazine, citing "potential legal problems", the very independence of the press is being called into question.

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Printers pulp Monsato edition of the Ecologist

The Ecologist, the flagship of radical green thought for 30 years, has become involved in a row with its printers after an edition of the magazine was pulped.

It had used the edition to attack Monsanto, the mu1tinational genetic engineering company. But the Ecologist's printers - Penwells of Saltash, Cornwall destroyed the 14,000 print run without notice. Although it refused to comment on its decision, it is understood the company was afraid of laying itself open to a libel action.

Penwells has been printing the Ecologist for 29 years without complaint. Zac Goldsmith, the magazine's co-editor and son of the late Sir James Goldsmith, only discovered at the weekend that no copies of the edition, which took two months to produce, had survived.

His uncle, Teddy Gold smith, Sir James's brother, funds the magazine. Mr Goldsmith is known well in green circles for his environmental views.

The Ecologist has been controversial since it was founded. It is read on both sides of the Atlantic and was one of the first publications to point to the potentially dangerous power of multinational companies.

We are shocked and amazed. We have a long history of being forthright about environmental issues and attacking powerful organisations, yet not once in 29 years has this printer complained or expressed the slightest qualms about what we were doing," Zac Goldsmith said yesterday.

"We have been good friends, but suddenly out of the blue, this happens. I asked if they could send us just one copy but they said no, the lot had to be destroyed. I just cannot find out what happened; they are not returning mycalls.'

Penwells were not prepared to discuss their decision to destroy the edition. "We cannot comment on what has happened at all, or our reasons,' a spokesman said.

The relationship between Penwells and the Ecologist had ended, Mr Goldsmith was told.

Daniel Verakis. UK spokesman for Monsanto, said he was mystified by the printer's action. "I had talked to Zac Goldsmith way back in September about the fact that this edition was a special one about biotechnology, and I guess as the biggest company in that field I knew we would be mentioned, hut I did not know it was especially about

Monsanto. The fact that the edition has been pulped is news to me. We had nothing to do with it.

Mr Goldsmith said: "The fact that Monsanto had nothing to do with the decision to pulp is, if anything, more scary that if they had made some kind of legal threat. It goes to show what a powerful force a reputation can be."

He said he was determined to get the Monsanto edition published. The Ecologist should have heen in the shops yesterday, but the Goldsmiths were looking for printers.

The pulped edition opened with an open letter to Robert Shapiro, chief executive of Monsanto, describing it as one of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world.

It says the issue was put together in response to Monsanto's advertisements in which it claimed it wanted a free and open discussion about the impact of its work.

The editorial then accuses Monsanto of working against sustainable agricultural practice by undermining the annual saving and improving of locally adapted seeds. "In the past you have had a hard time accommodating the view of your critics. Indeed, as the following pages make clear, you have been quick to stifle any debate that might threaten your interests.'

Among the issues examined are the recent injunctions against the Genetic Snowball movement, which symbolically pulls up a few plants in genetically modified crops as a protest. It has been the subject of blanket injunctions banning its activities against Monsanto.

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Monsanto: A Checkered History

by Brian Tokar

Monsanto's high-profile advertisements in Britain and the US depict the corporation as a visionary, world-historical force, working to bring state-of-the-art science and an environmentally responsible outlook to the solution of humanity's pressing problems. But just who is Monsanto? 14/here did they come from? How did they get to be the world's second largest manufacturer of agricultural chemicals, one of the largest producers of seeds, and soon - with the impending merger with American Home Products - the largest seller of prescription drugs in the United States? 14/hat do their workers, their customers, and others whose lives they have impacted, have to say? Is Monsanto the "clean and green" company its advertisements promote, or is this new image merely a product of clever public relations? A look at the historical record offers some revealing clues, and may help us better understand the company's present-day practices.

Headquartered just outside St. Louis, Missouri, the Monsanto Chemical Company was founded in 1901 by John Francis Queeny. Queeny, a self-educated chemist, brought technology to manufacture saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, from Germany to the United States. In the 1920s, Monsanto became a leading manufacturer of sulphuric acid and other basic industrial chemicals, and is one of only four companies to be listed among the top ten US chemical companies in every decade since the 1940s.

By the 1940s, plastics and synthetic fabrics had become a centrepiece of Monsanto's business. In 1947, a French freighter carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer blew up at a dock 270 feet from Monsanto's plastics plant outside Galveston, Texas. More than 500 people died in what came to be seen as one of the chemical industry's first major disasters.2 The plant was manufacturing styrene and polystyrene plastics, which are still important constituents of food packaging and various consumer products. In the 1980s the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) listed polystyrene as fifth in its ranking of the chemicals whose production generates the most total hazardous waste.3

PCBs

In 1929, the Swann Chemical Company, soon to be purchased by Monsanto, developed polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were widely praised for their nonflammability and extreme chemical stability. The most widespread uses were in the electrical equipment industry, which adopted PCBs as a nonflammable coolant for a new generation of transformers. By the 1960s, Monsanto's growing family of PCBs were also widely used as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, cutting oils, waterproof coatings and liquid sealants. Evidence of the toxic effects of PCBs appeared as early as the 1930s, and Swedish scientists studying the biological effects of DDT began finding significant concentrations of PCBs in the blood, hair and fatty tissue of wildlife in the 1960s.

Research in the 1960s and seventies revealed PCBs and other aromatic organochlorines to be potent carcinogens, and also traced them to a wide array of reproductive, developmental and immune system disorders [see J. Cummins in this issue].5 Their high chemical affinity for fat tissue, is responsible for their dramatic rates of concentration and bioaccumulation, and their wide dispersal throughout the North's aquatic food web: Arctic cod, for example, carry PCB concentrations 48 million times that of their surrounding waters, and predatory mammals such as polar bears can harbour tissue concentrations of PCBs more than fifty times greater than that. Though the manufacture of PCBs was banned in the United States in 1976, its toxic and endocrine-disruptive effects persist worldwide.6

The world's centre of PCB manufacturing was Monsanto's plant on the outskirts of East St. Louis, Illinois. East St. Louis is a chronically economically depressed suburb, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, bordered by two large metal-processing plants in addition to the Monsanto facility. "East St. Louis", reports education writer Jonathan Kozol, "has some of the sickest children in America." Kozol reports that the city has the highest rate of fetal death and immature births in the state, the third highest rate of infant death, and one of the highest childhood asthma rates in the United States.7

Dioxin: A Legacy of Contamination

The people of East St. Louis continue to face the horrors of high-level chemical exposure, poverty, a deteriorating urban infrastructure, and the collapse of even the most basic city services, but the nearby town of Times Beach, Missouri was found to be so thoroughly contaminated with dioxin that the US government ordered it evacuated in 1982. Apparently the town, as well as several private landowners, hired a contractor to spray its dirt roads with waste oil to keep dust down.

The same contractor had been hired by local chemical companies to pump out their dioxin-contaminated sludge tanks. When 50 horses, other domestic animals, and hundreds of wild birds died in an indoor arena that had been sprayed with the oil, an investigation ensued that eventually traced the deaths to dioxin from the chemical sludge tanks.8 Two young girls who played in the arena became ill, one of whom was hospitalized for four weeks with severe kidney damage, and many more children born to mothers exposed to the dioxin-contaminated oil demonstrated evidence of immune system abnormalities and significant brain dysfunction.9

While Monsanto has consistently denied any connection to the Times Beach incident, the St. Louis-based Times Beach Action Group (TBAG) uncovered laboratory reports documenting the presence of large concentrations of PCBs manufactured by Monsanto in contaminated soil samples from the town.'0 "From our point of view, Monsanto is at the heart of the problem here in Missouri," explains TBAG's Steve Taylor. Taylor acknowledges that many questions about Times Beach and other contaminated sites in the region remain unanswered, but cites evidence that close investigations of the sludge sprayed in Times Beach were limited to those sources traceable to companies other than Monsanto.

The cover-up at Times Beach reached the highest levels in the Reagan Administration in Washington. The nation's environmental agencies during the Reagan years became notorious for officials' repeated backroom deals with industry officials, in which favoured companies were promised lax enforcement and greatly reduced fines. Reagan's appointed administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Gorsuch Burford, was forced to resign after two years in office and her special assistant, Rita Lavelle, was jailed for six months for perjury and obstruction of justice.

In one famous incident, the Reagan White House ordered Burford to withhold documents on Times Beach and other contaminated sites in the states of Missouri and Arkansas, citing "executive privilege", and Lavelle was subsequently cited for shredding important documents." An investigative reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper identified Monsanto as one of the chemical companies whose executives frequently hosted luncheon and dinner meetings with Lavelle. The evacuation sought by residents of Times Beach was delayed until 1982, eleven years after the contamination was first discovered, and eight years after the cause was identified as dioxin.

Monsanto's association with dioxin can be traced back to its manufacture of the herbicide 2,4,5-T, beginning in the late 1940s. "Almost immediately, its workers started getting sick with skin rashes, inexplicable pains in the limbs, joints and other parts of the body, weakness, irritability, nervousness and loss of libido," explains Peter Sills, author of a forthcoming book on dioxin. "Internal memos show that the company knew these men were actually as sick as they claimed, but it kept all that evidence hidden."'3 An explosion at Monsanto's Nitro, West Virginia herbicide plant in 1949 drew further attention to these complaints.

The contaminant responsible for these conditions was not identified as dioxin until 1957, but the US Army Chemical Corps apparently became interested in this substance as a possible chemical warfare agent. A request filed by the St. Louis Journalism Review under the US Freedom of Information Act revealed nearly 600 pages of reports and correspondence between Monsanto and the Army Chemical Corps on the subject of this herbicide byproduct, going as far back as 1952.'

Agent Orange: The Poisoning of Vietnam

The herbicide "Agent Orange", which was used by US military forces to defoliate the rainforest ecosystems of Vietnam during the 1960s (see H. Warwick in this issue) was a mixture of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D that was available from several sources, but Monsanto's Agent Orange had concentrations of dioxin many times higher than that produced by Dow Chemical, the defoliant's other leading manufacturer.

This made Monsanto the key defendant in the lawsuit brought by Vietnam War veterans in the United States, who faced an array of debilitating symptoms attributable to Agent Orange exposure. When a $180 million settlement was reached in 1984 between seven chemical companies and the lawyers for the veterans, the judge ordered Monsanto to pay 45.5 per cent of the total.'5

In the 1980s, Monsanto undertook a series of studies designed to minimize its liability, not only in the Agent Orange suit, but in continuing instances of employee contamination at its West Virginia manufacturing plant. A three and a half year court case brought by railroad workers exposed to dioxin following a train derailment revealed a pattern of manipulated data and misleading experimental design in these studies. An official of the US EPA concluded that the studies were manipulated to support Monsanto's claim that dioxin's effects were limited to the skin disease chloracne. Greenpeace researchers Jed Greer and Kenny Bruno describe the outcome:

"According to testimony from the trial, Monsanto misclassified exposed and non-exposed workers, arbitrarily deleted several key cancer cases, failed to verify classification of chloracne subjects by common industrial dermatitis criteria, did not provide assurance of untampered records delivered and used by consultants, and made false statements about dioxin contamination in Monsanto products."'7

The court case, in which the jury granted a $16 million punitive damage award against Monsanto, revealed that many of Monsanto's products, from household herbicides to the Santophen germicide once used in Lysol brand disinfectant, were knowingly contaminated with dioxin. "The evidence of Monsanto executives at the trial portrayed a corporate culture where sales and profits were given a higher priority than the safety of products and its workers," reported the Toronto Globe and Mail after the close of the trial.'8 "They just didn't care about the health and safety of their workers," explains author Peter Sills. "Instead of trying to make things safer, they relied on intimidation and threatened layoffs to keep their employees working."

A subsequent review by Dr. Cate Jenkins of the EPA's Regulatory Development Branch documented an even more systematic record of fraudulent science. "Monsanto has in fact submitted false information to EPA which directly resulted in weakened regulations under RCRA [Resources Conservation and Recovery Act] and FIFRA [Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act] .. reported Dr. Jenkins in a 1990 memorandum urging the agency to undertake a criminal investigation of the company.

Jenkins cited internal Monsanto documents revealing that the company "doctored" samples of herbicides that were submitted to the US Department of Agriculture, hid behind "process chemistry" arguments to deflect attempts to regulate 2,4-D and various chlorophenols, hid evidence regarding the contamination of Lysol, and excluded several hundred of its sickest former employees from its comparative health studies:

Monsanto covered up the dioxin contamination of a wide range of its products. Monsanto either failed to report contamination, substituted false information purporting to show no contamination or submitted samples to the government for analysis which had been specially prepared so that dioxin contamination did not exist.'9

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Roundup: The World's Biggest-Selling Herbicide

Today, glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup account for at least one sixth of Monsanto's total annual sales and half of the company's operating income,20 perhaps significantly more since the company spun off its industrial chemicals and synthetic fabrics divisions as a separate company, called Solutia, in September 1997.

Monsanto aggressively promotes Roundup as a safe, general purpose herbicide for use on everything from lawns and orchards, to large coniferous forest holdings, where aerial spraying of the herbicide is used to suppress the growth of deciduous seedlings and shrubs and encourage the growth of profitable fir and spruce trees The Oregon-based Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides (NCAP) reviewed over forty scientific studies on the effects of glyphosate, and of the polyoxyethylene amines used as a surfactant in Roundup, and concluded that the herbicide is far less benign than Monsanto's advertising suggests [For more on Roundup, see J. Mendelson in this issue]:

In 1997, Monsanto responded to five years of complaints by the New York State Attorney General that its advertisements for Roundup were misleading: the company altered its ads to delete claims that the herbicide is "biodegradable" and "environmentally friendly", and paid $50,000 toward the state's legal expenses in the case.22

In March 1998, Monsanto agreed to pay a fine of $225,000 for mislabelling containers of Roundup on 75 separate occasions. The penalty was the largest settlement ever paid for violation of the Worker Protection Standards of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). According to the Wall Street Journal, Monsanto distributed containers of the herbicide with labels restricting entry into treated areas for only four hours instead of the required 12 hours.23

This is only the latest in a series of major fines and rulings against Monsanto in the United States, including a $108 million liability finding in the case of the leukaemia death of a Texas employee in 1986, a $648,000 settlement for allegedly failing to report required health data to the EPA in 1990, a $1 million fine by the state Attorney General of Massachusetts in 1991 in the case of a 200,000 gallon acid wastewater spill, a $39 million settlement in Houston, Texas in 1992 involving the deposition of hazardous chemicals into unlined pits, and numerous others.24 In 1995, Monsanto ranked fifth among US corporations in the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory, having discharged 37 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air, land, water and underground.25

Monsanto's pharmaceutical products also have a troubling track record. The flagship product of Monsanto's GD Searle pharmaceuticals subsidiary is the artificial sweetener aspartame aspartame, sold under the brand names Nutrasweet and Equal. -In. 1981, four years before Monsanto purchased Searle, an FDA Board of Inquiry consisting of three independent scientists confirmed reports that had been circulating for eight years that "aspartame might induce brain tumours." The FDA revoked Searle's licence to sell aspartame, only to have its decision reversed under a new commissioner appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

A 1996 study in the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology has renewed this concern, linking aspartame to a sharp increase in brain cancers shortly after the substance was introduced. Dr. Erik Millstone of the University of Sussex Science Policy Research Unit cites a series of reports from the 1980s linking aspartame to a wide array of adverse reactions in sensitive consumers, including headaches, blurred vision, numbness, hearing loss, muscle spasms and induced epileptic-type seizures, among numerous others.27

In 1989, Searle again ran foul of the FDA,28 which accused the company of misleading advertising in the case of its anti-ulcer drug, Cytotec. The FDA said that the ads were designed to market the drug to a much broader and younger population than the agency had advised. Searle/Monsanto was required to take out an ad in a number of medical journals, which was headed "Published To Correct a Previous Advertisement Which The Food And Drug Administration Considered Misleading."29

Biotechnology's Brave New World

Monsanto's aggressive promotion of its biotechnology products, from recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), to Roundup Ready soybeans and other crops, to its insect-resistant varieties of cotton, is seen by many observers as a continuation of its many decades of ethically questionable practices.

Originally, Monsanto was one of four chemical companies seeking to bring a synthetic Bovine Growth Hormone, produced in E. coli bacteria genetically engineered to manufacture the bovine protein, to market. Another was American Cyanamid, now owned by American Home Products, which is in the process of merging with Monsanto.

As Jennifer Ferrara describes in this issue, Monsanto's 14-year effort to gain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to bring recombinant BGH to market was fraught with controversy, including allegations of a concerted effort to suppress information about the hormone's ill effects. One FDA veterinarian, Richard Burroughs, was fired after he accused both the company and the agency of suppressing and manipulating data to hide the effects of rBGH injections on the health of dairy cows.30

In 1990, when FDA approval of rBGH appeared imminent, a veterinary pathologist at the University of Vermont's agricultural research facility released previously suppressed data to two state legislators documenting significantly increased rates of udder infection in cows that had been injected with the then-experimental Monsanto hormone, as well as an unusual incidence of severely deforming birth defects in offspring of rBGH-treated cows.3' An independent review of the University data by a regional farm advocacy group documented additional cow health problems associated with rBGH, including high incidences of foot and leg injuries, metabolic and reproductive difficulties and uterine infections.

The US Congress's General Accounting Office (GAO) attempted an inquiry into the case, but was unable to obtain the necessary records from Monsanto and the University to carry out its investigation, particularly with respect to suspected teratogenic and embryotoxic effects. The GAO auditors concluded that cows injected with rBGH had mastitis (udder infection) rates one third higher than untreated cows, and recommended further research on the risk of elevated antibiotic levels in milk produced using rBGH.32

Monsanto's rBGH was approved by the FDA for commercial sale beginning in 1994. The following year, Mark Kastel of the Wisconsin Farmers Union released a study of Wisconsin farmers' experiences with the drug. His findings exceeded the 21 potential health problems that Monsanto was required to list on the warning label for its Posilac brand of rBGH. Kastel found widespread reports of spontaneous deaths among rBGH-treated cows, high incidences of udder infections, severe metabolic difficulties and calving problems, and in some cases an inability to successfully wean treated cows off the drug.

Many experienced dairy farmers who experimented with rBGH suddenly needed to replace large portions of their herd.33 Instead of addressing the causes of farmers' complaints about rBGH, Monsanto went on the offensive, threatening to sue small dairy companies that advertised their products as free of the artificial hormone, and participating in a lawsuit by several dairy industry trade associations against the first and only mandatory labelling law for rBGH in the United States.34 Still, evidence for the damaging effects of rBGH on the health of both cows and people continued to mount.35

Roundup-Ready Soybeans (RRS)

Efforts to prevent labeling of genetically engineered soybean and maize exports from the United States suggest a continuation of the practices that were designed to squelch complaints against Monsanto's dairy hormone. While Monsanto argues that its "Roundup Ready" soybeans will ultimately reduce herbicide use, the widespread acceptance of herbicide-tolerant crop varieties appears far more likely to increase farmers' dependence on herbicides [see J. Mendelson in this issue].

Weeds that emerge after the original herbicide has dispersed or broken down are often treated with further applications of herbicides.36 "It will promote the overuse of the herbicide," Missouri soybean farmer Bill Christison told Kenny Bruno of Greenpeace International. "If there is a selling point for RRS, it's the fact that you can till an area with a lot of weeds and use surplus chemicals to combat your problem, which is not what anyone should be doing."37 Christison refutes Monsanto's claim that herbicide-resistant seeds are necessary to reduce soil erosion from excess tillage, and reports that Midwestern farmers have developed numerous methods of their own for reducing overall use of herbicides.

Monsanto, on the other hand, has stepped up its production of Roundup in recent years. With Monsanto's US patent for Roundup scheduled to expire in the year 2000, and competition from generic glyphosate products already emerging worldwide, the packaging of Roundup herbicide with "Roundup Ready" seeds has become the centrepiece of Monsanto's strategy for continued growth in herbicide sales.

The possible health and environmental consequences of Roundup-tolerant crops have not been fully investigated, including allergenic effects, potential invasiveness or weediness, and the possibility of herbicide resistance being transferred via pollen to other soybeans or related plants.39

While any problems with herbicide-resistant soybeans may still be dismissed as long-range and somewhat speculative, the experience of US cotton growers with Monsanto's genetically engineered seeds appears to tell a very different story. Monsanto has released two varieties of genetically engineered cotton, beginning in 1996. One is a Roundup-resistant variety and the other, named "Bollgard", secretes a bacterial toxin intended to control damage from three leading cotton pests.

The toxin, derived from Bacillus thuringiensis, has been used by organic growers in the form of a natural bacterial spray since the early 1970s. But while B.t. bacteria are relatively short-lived, and secrete their toxin in a form that only becomes activated in the alkaline digestive systems of particular worms and caterpillars, genetically engineered B.t. crops secrete an active form of the toxin throughout the plant's life cycle.40 Much of the genetically engineered maize currently on the market, for example, is a B.t. secreting variety, designed to repel the corn rootworm and other common pests.

The first widely anticipated problem with these pesticide-secreting crops is that the presence of the toxin throughout the plant's life cycle is likely to encourage the development of resistant strains of common crop pests. The US EPA has determined that widespread resistance to B.t. may render natural applications of B.t. bacteria ineffective in just three to five years and requires growers to plant refuges of up to 40 per cent non-B.t. cotton in an attempt to forestall this effect. Second, the active toxin secreted by these plants may harm beneficial insects, moths and butterflies, in addition to those species that growers wish to eliminate.4'

But the damaging effects of B.t.-secreting "Bollgard" cotton have proved to be much more immediate, enough so that Monsanto and its partners have pulled five million pounds of genetically engineered cotton seed off the market and agreed to a multimillion dollar settlement with farmers in the southern United States.

Three farmers who refused to settle with Monsanto were awarded nearly $2 million by the Mississippi Seed Arbitration Council.42 Not only were plants attacked by the cotton bollworm, which Monsanto claimed they would be resistant to, but germination was spotty, yields were low, and plants were misshapen, according to several published accounts.43 Some farmers reported crop losses of up to 50 per cent. Farmers who planted Monsanto's Roundup-resistant cotton also reported severe crop failures, including deformed and misshapen bolls that suddenly fell off the plant three quarters of the way through the growing season.4'

Despite these problems, Monsanto is advancing the use of genetic engineering in agriculture by taking control of many of the largest, most established seed companies in the United States. Monsanto now owns Holdens Foundation Seeds, supplier of germplasm used on 25-35 per cent of US maize acreage, and Asgrow Agronomics, which it describes as "the leading soybean breeder, developer and distributor in the United States".45

This past spring, Monsanto completed its acquisition of Dc Kaib Genetics, the second largest seed company in the United States and the ninth largest in the world, as well as Delta and Pine Land, the largest US cotton seed company.46 With its Delta and Pine acquisition, Monsanto now controls 85 per cent of the US cotton seed market.47

The company has been aggressively pursuing corporate acquisitions and product sales in other countries as well. In 1997, Monsanto bought Sementes Agroceres S.A., described as "the leading seed corn company in Brazil", with a 30 per cent market share.48 Earlier this year, the Brazilian Federal Police investigated an alleged illegal importation of at least 200 bags of transgenic soybeans, some of which were traced to an Argentine subsidiary of Monsanto.49 According to Brazilian law, foreign transgenic products can only be introduced after a period of quarantine and testing to prevent possible damage to native flora.

In Canada, Monsanto had to recall 60,000 bags of genetically engineered rape ("canola") seed in 1997. Apparently the shipment of Roundup-resistant seed contained an inserted gene different from the one that had been approved for consumption by people and livestock.

Shapiro, The Image-Maker

Given this long and troubling history, it is easy to understand why informed citizens throughout Europe and the US are reluctant to trust Monsanto with the future of our food and our health. But Monsanto is doing everything it can to appear unperturbed by this opposition. Through efforts such as their massive advertising campaign in Britain, their sponsorship of a new high-tech Biodiversity exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and many others, they are trying to appear greener, more righteous and more forward-looking than even their opponents.

In the US they are bolstering their image, and likely influencing policy, with the support of people at the highest levels of the Clinton administration. In May 1997, Mickey Kantor, an architect of Bill Clinton's 1992 election campaign and United States Trade Representative during Clinton's first term, was elected to a seat on Monsanto's Board of Directors. Marcia Hale, formerly a personal assistant to the President, has served as Monsanto's public affairs officer in Britain.51

Vice President Al Gore, who is well-known in the US for his writings and speeches on the environment, has been a vocal supporter of biotechnology at least since his days in the US Senate.52 Gore's Chief Domestic Policy Advisor, David W. Beier, was formerly the Senior Director of Government Affairs at Genentech, Inc.

Under CEO Robert Shapiro, Monsanto has pulled out all the stops to transform its image from a purveyor of dangerous chemicals to an enlightened, forward-looking institution crusading to feed the world. Shapiro, who went to work for GD Searle in 1979 and became the president of its Nutrasweet Group in 1982, sits on the President's Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations and served a term as a member of the White House Domestic Policy Review.54 He describes himself as a visonary and a Renaissance Man, with a mission to use the company's resources to change the world:

"The only reason for working at a large company is that you have the capability of doing things on a large scale that really are important," he told an interviewer for Business Ethics, a flagship journal for the "socially responsible business" movement in the United States.55

Shapiro harbours few illusions about Monsanto's reputation in the United States, recounting with sympathy the dilemma of many a Monsanto employee whose neighbours' children might wince when they find out where the employee works. He is anxious to demonstrate that he is in step with the widespread desire for systemic change, and is determined to redirect this desire toward his company's ends, as he demonstrated in a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review: "It's not a question of good guys and bad guys. There is no point in saying, ‘If only those bad guys would go out of business, then the world would be fine.' The whole system has to change; there's a huge opportunity for reinvention."56

Of course, Shapiro's reinvented system is one where huge corporations not only continue to exist, but exercise an ever-increasing control over our lives. But Monsanto has reformed, we are told. They have successfully cast off their industrial chemical divisions and are now committed to replacing chemicals with "information", in the guise of genetically engineered seeds and other products of biotechnology. This is an ironic stance for a company whose most profitable product is a herbicide. It is an unlikely role for a company that seeks to intimidate critics with lawsuits and suppress criticism in the media [see Peter Montague in this issue].

Monsanto's latest Annual Report, however, clearly demonstrates that it has learned all the right buzzwords. Roundup is not a herbicide, it is a tool to minimize tillage and decrease soil erosion. Genetically engineered crops are not just about profits for Monsanto, they're about solving the inexorable problem of population growth. Biotechnology is not reducing every-thing alive to the realm of commodities - item's to be bought and sold, marketed and patented - but is in fact a harbinger of "decommoditization": the replacement of single mass-produced products with a vast array of specialized, made-to-order products.57 This is Newspeak of the highest order.

Finally, we are to believe that Monsanto's aggressive promotion of biotechnology is not a matter of mere corporate arrogance, but rather the realization of a simple fact of nature. Readers of the Monsanto Annual Report are presented with an analogy between today's rapid growth in the number of identified DNA base pairs and the exponential trend of miniaturization in the electronics industry, a trend first identified in the 1960s.

Monsanto has dubbed the apparent exponential growth of what it terms "biological knowledge" to be nothing less than "Monsanto's Law". Like any other putative law of nature, one has little choice but to see its predictions realized and, here, the prediction is nothing less than the continued exponential growth of Monsanto's global reach.

But the growth of any technology is not merely a "law of nature". Technologies are not social forces unto themselves, nor merely neutral "tools" that can be used to satisfy any social end we desire. Rather they are products of particular social institutions and economic interests. Once a particular course of technological development is set in motion, it can have much wider consequences than its creators could have predicted: the more powerful the technology, the more profound the consequences.

For example, the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture in the 1 960s and seventies temporarily increased crop yields, and also made farmers throughout the world increasingly dependent on costly chemical inputs. This spurred widespread displacements of people from the land, and in many countries has undermined the soil, groundwater and social land base that sustained people for millennia.58 These large-scale dislocations have fuelled population growth, urbanization and social disempowerment, which have in turn led to another cycle of impoverishment and hunger.

The "second Green Revolution" promised by Monsanto and other biotechnology companies threatens even greater disruptions in traditional land tenure and social relations. In rejecting Monsanto and its biotechnology, we are not necessarily rejecting technology per se, but seeking to replace a life-denying technology of manipulation, control and profit with a genuinely ecological technology, designed to respect the patterns of nature, improve personal and community health, sustain land-based communities and operate at a genuinely human scale.

If we believe in democracy, it is imperative that we have the right to choose which technologies are best for our communities, rather than having unaccountable institutions like Monsanto decide for us. Rather than technologies designed for the continued enrichment of a few, we can ground our technology in the hope of a greater harmony between our human communities and the natural world. Our health, our food and the future of life on Earth truly lie in the balance.

Let us now examine the true nature of Monsanto's flagship products, and their effects on our health and the world's s environment.

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Revolving Doors: 

Monsanto and the Regulators

Traditionally, key figures at the FDA in particular have either held important positions at Monsanto, or are destined to do so in the future. Is it surprising therefore that Monsanto gets clearance frr its often dangerous products?

Though the evolution of genetic engineering from a laboratory science to a method of creating commercial products happened very fast-within a decade-the US government saw the commercialization of biotechnology coming and deliberately chose a path that has amounted to nonregulation.

Genetic engineering broke through natural barriers of reproduction and sped up plant and animal breeding processes, but agribusiness corporations were wary that burdensome regulations would hinder new discoveries and therefore the commercial development of the technology. The federal government took up industry's cause. Instead of establishing strict, precautionary regulations that gave priority to public and environmental health, the government patched together an inadequate regulatory system that relied on risk assessment, industry science, and corporate volunteerism.

The US was in the heat of a high-tech economic race with Japan, and, as far as agriculture was concerned, lawmakers saw genetic engineering as the new technology that would allow the US to maintain its position as the world's agricultural "leader".The federal government would erect no law that might reduce America's competitiveness in the future world market for bioengineered products.

From the beginning, the NIH guidelines relied on the scientific community's and industry's self-regulation, starting a trend that continues today. As corporations became more involved in genetic engineering, NIH guidelines made accommodations for field tests and mass production of genetically engineered organisms. In 1977 and 1978, 16 bills to regulate genetic research were introduced in the US Congress. None was passed, and the NIH guidelines - which dealt primarily with medical and pharmaceutical research and did not take a precautionary approach - remained the sole regulatory mechanism for biotechnology research.

In the early 1980s, agribusiness corporations were developing genetically engineered plants, animal drugs, and livestock, but no system was in place to regulate the development, sale, or use of these products.2 This was the era of the deregulatory Reagan/Bush administration, which developed the framework by which bioengineered products, including food, are "regulated" today. Industrial profit, not public safety, was the administration's top priority.

Government officials in the Office of Management and Budget, the Departments of State and Commerce, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy wanted to ensure that the administration did not do anything to "stifle" the development of biotechnology or to send the "wrong" message to Wall Street.3 The Bush-era President's Council on Competitiveness, chaired by Vice-President Dan Quayle, joined the biotechnology industry in opposing strong regulations and close oversight by federal agencies.4

The result was a 1986 "biotechnology regulatory framework".5 The policy was founded on the corporate-generated assertion that bioengineering was just an extension of traditional plant and animal breeding, and that bioengineered products did not differ fundamentally from non-engineered organisms.6 The administration determined that existing federal agencies could regulate bioengineered products sufficiently and gave them overlapping regulatory authority.7

For instance, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would regulate bio-engineered organisms in food and drugs. The United States Department of Agriculture would regulate genetically engineered crop plants and animals. The Environmental Protection Agency would regulate genetically engineered organisms released into the environment for pest control. And the NIH would look at organisms that could affect public health. In determining that existing agencies could do the job of regulating bioengineered products, the administration avoided passing new, more stringent federal laws or establishing a new regulatory agency devoted to the task.

The policy left gaping communication gaps between agencies, plenty of regulatory ground uncovered, and confusion over who would regulate what.8'9 But most importantly, the regulations were founded on the false premise that bioengineered organisms used for food and agricultural products are no different from non-engineered, conventional products.10 In fact, to produce genetically engineered foods, researchers take genes from food or non-food organisms and add them to another organism to alter its genetic makeup in ways not possible through sexual reproduction.

The process deletes essential proteins or adds entirely new ones, and can modify genetic characteristics in entirely unexpected ways. As long as the new genes come from an approved food source, the government treats new or altered genes in bioengineered foods as natural, not novel, additives. So in most cases regulators are not required to take a precautionary approach when evaluating new genetically engineered food products; products are considered safe until proven otherwise.

As late as 1994, it appeared that the federal government was still playing catch-up in establishing working biotechnology safety regulations. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which monitors the biotechnology industry and the federal regulatory system, was pointing out big holes in the so-called framework." "Fundamentally, it does not contain sufficient statutory authority to oversee all of the products and activities entailed in genetic engineering," wrote UCS in February 1994. "Where authority does exist, there are problems with implementing regulations and policies."

For example, a 1992 FDA policy exempted corporations from having to test bioengineered food for safety and get FDA approval before the foods are put on the market.'2 Unless the corporation determined that "sufficient safety questions exist",'3 corporations could undergo voluntary, private "consultations" with the agency before marketing their product.'4

It is not unusual for agribusiness corporations like Monsanto to manipulate the limited safety regulations that exist. To establish safety standards for new products, federal agencies rely on studies performed by the very corporations that are trying to get their products on the market. Studies to determine the long-term health consequences of new products are not always required.

Over the years, many corporations have submitted fraudulent test results showing that their products are safe, or they have simply withheld information or studies indicating otherwise. Because the federal government protects corporate safety studies as trade secrets, they are not available for public scrutiny. By sheltering corporations in this way, federal agencies hold corporations' pursuit of profits above the public's right to good health and a safe environment.

The Regulatory Irony

Laws governing biotechnology continue to favour agribusiness and biotechnology corporations, but as the industry has developed, the corporate push for specific types of regulations has taken ironic twists. The initial lack of a cautious regulatory approach enabled small biotechnology companies to develop and market new bioengineered products at a rapid pace. In the meantime, larger agribusiness corporations like Monsanto and Ciba-Geigy were buying up these small companies while developing their own expansive in-house biotechnology research and marketing operations.

During this time, Monsanto, Ciba-Geigy, and several other agribusiness corporations came virtually to dominate the world market for bioengineered food products, strengthening their hold over much of the world's food supply.

From their position at the top, Monsanto and other corporations have actually favoured some seemingly tight regulations, but, it turns out, only when the regulations serve corporate marketing purposes. Regulations that require corporations to submit a plethora of costly scientific data to regulatory agencies, for example, discourage competition from smaller biotechnology and seed companies while giving the public the illusion that new biotechnology products undergo rigorous safety evaluations and are therefore safe.

In 1995, for example, Monsanto lobbied against a provision in the EPA funding bill that would have prevented the EPA from regulating agricultural plants bioengineered to contain the toxic bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Genetically engineered foods had just hit the market, and Monsanto was fully aware that almost any EPA regulations for Bt plants would publicly sanction the genetically engineered products and defuse resistance from public interest environmental groups.

Furthermore, corporations could only get their Bt products to market if they had extensive money and resources to jump through all the regulatory hoops. Big corporations alone can meet data requirements and, once in the system, manipulate and pass the EPA's safety evaluation process. With the competition out of the way, the market is theirs.

FDA Scandals and Revolving Doors

To better understand how genetically engineered foods and the associated safety hazards were unleashed onto the American public, take a look at the story of the first mass-marketed bioengineered food product, the Monsanto corporation's recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). rBGH has been linked to cancer in humans and serious health problems in cows, including udder infections and reproductive problems. rBGH's development and approval was rife with scandal and protest. But the right combination of government backing, corporate science, and heavily-funded corporate public relations schemes paved the way for the first major release of a genetically engineered food into the nation's food supply.

The roles played by the FDA and the Monsanto corporation in the development, safety evaluation, approval, and marketing of rBGH led to the exposure of the American public to the multiple hazards of bioengineered foods. These organizations hid important information about safety concens, masked disturbing conflicts of interest, and stifled those who were asking the "wrong" questions and telling the truth about rBGH.

The FDA declared rBGH-milk safe for human consumption before important information about how rBGH-milk might affect human health was even available.'6 When critical information about how rBGH raised the levels of insulin-like growth factor, IGF-1, in milk'7 and the possible link between IGF-1 and human cancer began to emerge,'8 [See Kingsnorth in this issue] the FDA was already apparently in too deep to change its mind or ask more questions about the drug's effect on human health.

Instead, the agency relied almost exclusively on data generated by the Monsanto corporation and highly criticized by independent scientists to justify a decision it had made years Many independent scientists have called for more extensive, long-term studies, which have never been done.

In 1991, a researcher at the University of Vermont (UVM). where Monsanto was spending nearly half a million dollars to fund test trials of rBGH, leaked information about severe health problems affecting rBGH-treated cows, including mastitis and deformed births)1 The scientist heading the research had already made numerous public statements to state lawmakers and the press and released a preliminary report indicating that rBGH-treated cows suffered no abnormal rates of health problems compared with untreated cows.'2 The US General Accounting Office (GAO) investigated.

During the investigation, the FDA stalled in providing the GAO with original Monsanto test data.23 and the GAO was unable to obtain critical data from UVM and Monsanto24 The GAO terminated its investigation, concerned that Monsanto had had time to manipulate the questionable data and that any further investigation would be Fruitless. In an effort to dissipate public concern, UVM scientists finally released information showing rBGH's negative effect on cow health, years after the findings had been made."

Even FDA insiders have criticized the agency for its slack review of the drug, but the FDA has dismissed these concerns and fired at least one official who blew the whistle on the organisation's corrupt drug approval process. Veterinarian Dr. Richard Burroughs reviewed animal drug applications at the FDA's Center for Veterinary Sciences from 1979 until he was ; fired in 1989.?6

In 1985, Burroughs headed the FDA's review of t rBGH and remained directly involved in the review process for almost five years. Burroughs wrote the original protocols for animal safety studies and reviewed the data that rBGH developers, including Monsanto, submitted as they carried out safety studies.

A 1991 article in Eating Well magazine quotes Burroughs describing a change in the FDA beginning in the mid-1980s. "There seemed to be a trend in the place toward approval at any price. It went from a university-like setting where there was independent scientific review to an atmosphere of ‘approve, approve, approve.  "27

This is the atmosphere in which the FDA carried out its review of rBGH. According to Burroughs, the FDA was totally unprepared to review rBGH, the first bioengineered animal drug to go through the FDA's approval process; rBGH was out of the scope of most FDA employees' knowledge. But rather than admit incompetence, the FDA "decided to cover up inappropriate studies and decisions," and agency officials "suppressed and manipulated data to cover up their own ignorance and incompetence?28

Burroughs himself was faced with corporate representatives who wanted the agency to ease strict safety testing protocols, and he saw corporations drop sick cows from rBGH test trials and manipulate data in other ways to make health and safety problems disappear. According to Burroughs, the raw, untouched data stashed away behind the agency's doors and protected as trade secrets would show otherwise.

Burroughs challenged the agency's lenience and its changing role from guardian of public health to protector of corporate profits. He criticized the FDA and its handling of rBGH in n statements to Congressional investigators, in testimony to state legislatures, and to the press.29 Inside the FDA, he rejected a number of corporate-sponsored safety studies as insufficient and was prevented by his superiors from investigating data submitted by industry revealing possible health problems caused by rBGH.

Though Burroughs had a record at the FDA showing eight straight years of good performance, he began receiving poor performance reports, for which he claims he was set up. Finally, in November 1989, he was fired for "incompetence"

Not only did the FDA fail to act upon evidence that rBGH was not safe, the agency actually promoted the Monsanto corporation's product before and after the drug's approval. In doing so, the FDA took on the impossible double role of regulator and promoter of bioengineered foods. Dr. Michael Hansen of Consumers Union notes that the FDA acted as an rBGH advocate by issuing news releases promoting rBGH, making public statements praising the drug, and writing promotional pieces about rBGH in the agency's publication, FDA Consume;:

This dual role also manifested itself in other ways. In an apparent attempt to quell public controversy over rBGH, for example, two FDA researchers published industry and "independent" data in the journal Science in 1990 to show that rBGH was safe for consumers)' Gerald Guest, the director for FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine told Science, "We'd like to get our side of the story out, to show why we're comfortable with the safety. We'd like for people to know that ifs a thoughtful process. and we want it to be open and credible

Guest was apparently doing a lot of wishful thinking. Professor Samuel Epstein criticized the FDA for acting "as a booster or advocate for an animal drug that hasn't yet been approved." Epstein and others faulted the FDA for including only pieces of unpublished studies about rBGH in the Science article. but not making the full studies available for independent review.34

The FDA's pro-rBGH activities make more sense in light of conflicts of interest between the FDA and the Monsanto corporation." Michael R. Taylor, the FDA's deputy commissioner for policy, wrote the FDA's rBGH labelling guidelines. The guidelines, announced in February 1994, virtually prohibited dairy corporations from making any real distinction between products produced with and without rBGH." To keep rBGH-milk from being "stigmatized" in the marketplace, the FDA announced that labels on non-rBGH products must state that there is no difference between rBGH and the naturally occurring hormone. In March 1994,

Taylor was publicly exposed as a former lawyer for the Monsanto corporation for seven years. While working for Monsanto, Taylor had prepared a memo for the company as to whether or not it would be constitutional for states to erect labelling laws concerning rBGH dairy products. In other words. Taylor helped Monsanto figure out whether or not the corporation could sue states or companies that wanted to tell the public that their products were free of Monsanto's drug.

Taylor wasn't the only FDA official involved in rBGI-1 policy who had worked for Monsanto. Margaret Miller, deputy director of the FDA's Office of New Animal Drugs was a former Monsanto research scientist who had worked on Monsanto's rBGH safety studies up until 1989. Suzanne Sechen was a primary reviewer for rBGH in the Office of New Animal Drugs between 1988 and 1990. Before coming to the FDA. she had done research for several Monsanto-funded rBGH studies as a graduate student at Cornell University.

Her professor was one of Monsanto's university consultants and a known rBGH promoter. Remarkably. the GAO determined in a 1994 investigation that these officials' former association with the Monsanto corporation did not pose a conflict of interest. But for those concerned about the health and environmental hazards of genetic engineering, the revolving door between the biotechnology industry and federal regulating agencies is a serious cause for concern.