Forty percent of the crops grown in the United States contain their
genes. They produce the world’s top selling herbicide. Several of their
factories are now toxic Superfund sites. They spend millions lobbying
the government each year. It’s time we take a closer look at who’s
controlling our food, poisoning our land, and influencing all three
branches of government. To do that, the watchdog group Food and Water
Watch recently published a
Patty
Lovera, Food and Water Watch assistant director, says they decided to
focus on Monsanto because they felt a need to “put together a piece
where people can see all of the aspects of this company.”
“It
really strikes us when we talk about how clear it is that this is a
chemical company that wanted to expand its reach,” she says. “A chemical
company that started buying up seed companies.” She feels it’s
important “for food activists to understand all of the ties between the
seeds and the chemicals.”
Monsanto
was founded as a chemical company in 1901, named for the maiden name of
its founder’s wife. Its first product was the artificial sweetener
saccharin. The company’s
emphasizes
its agricultural products, skipping forward from its founding to 1945,
when it began manufacturing agrochemicals like the herbicide 2,4-D.
Prior to its entry into the agricultural market, Monsanto produced some harmless – even beneficial! –
like
aspirin. It also made plastics, synthetic rubber, caffeine, and
vanillin, an artificial vanilla flavoring. On the not-so-harmless side,
it began producing toxic PCBs in the 1930s.
According to the new
report, a whopping 99 percent of all PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls,
used in the U.S. were produced at a single Monsanto plant in Sauget, IL.
The plant churned out toxic PCBs from the 1930s until they were banned
in 1976. Used as coolants and lubricants in electronics, PCBs are
carcinogenic and harmful to the liver, endocrine system, immune system,
reproductive system, developmental system, skin, eye, and brain.
Even after the initial 1982 cleanup of this plant, Sauget is still home to two Superfund sites. (A Superfund site is
defined by
the EPA as “an uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is
located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people.”) This is just
one of several Monsanto facilities that became Superfund sites.
Monsanto’s Shift to Agriculture
Despite
its modern-day emphasis on agriculture, Monsanto did not even create an
agricultural division within the company until 1960. It soon began
churning out new pesticides, each colorfully named under a rugged
Western theme: Lasso, Roundup, Warrant, Lariat, Bullet, Harness, etc.
Left
out of Monsanto’s version of its historical highlights is an herbicide
called Agent Orange. The defoliant, a mix of herbicides 2,4-D and
2,4,5-T, was used extensively during the war in Vietnam. The nearly 19
million gallons sprayed in that country between 1962 and 1971 were
contaminated with dioxin, a carcinogen so potent that it is measured and
regulated at concentrations of parts per
trillion. Dioxin was
created as a byproduct of Agent Orange’s manufacturing process, and both
American veterans and Vietnamese people suffered health problems from
the herbicide’s use.
Monsanto’s fortunes changed forever in 1982,
when it genetically engineered a plant cell. The team responsible, led
by Ernest Jaworski, consisted of Robb Fraley, Stephen Rogers, and Robert
Horsch. Today, Fraley is Monsanto’s executive vice president and chief
technology officer. Horsch also rose to the level of vice president at
Monsanto, but he left after 25 years to join the Gates Foundation.
There, he works on increasing crop yields in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Together, the team received the
National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1998.
The
company did not shift its focus from chemicals to genetically
engineered seeds overnight. In fact, it was another 12 years before it
commercialized the first genetically engineered product, recombinant
bovine growth hormone (rbGH), a controversial hormone used to make dairy
cows produce more milk. And it was not until 1996 that it first brought
genetically engineered seeds, Roundup Ready soybeans, onto the market.
By
2000, the company had undergone such a sea change from its founding a
century before that it claims it is almost a different company. In
Monsanto’s telling of its own history, it emphasizes a split between the
“original” Monsanto Company and the Monsanto Company of today. In 2000,
the Monsanto Company entered a merger and changed its name to
Pharmacia.
The newly formed Pharmacia then spun off its agricultural
division as an independent company named Monsanto Company.
Do the
mergers and spinoffs excuse Monsanto for the sins of the past committed
by the company bearing the same name? Lovera does not think so. “I’m
sure there’s some liability issues they have to deal with – their
various production plants that are now superfund sites,” she responds.
“So I’m sure there was legal thinking about which balance sheet you put
those liabilities on” when the company split. She adds that the notion
that today’s Monsanto is not the same as the historical Monsanto that
made PCBs is “a nice PR bullet for them.”
But, she adds, “even
taking that at face value, that they are an agriculture company now,
they are still producing seeds that are made to be used with chemicals
they produce.” For example, Roundup herbicide alone made up more than a
quarter of their sales in 2011. The proportion of their business devoted
to chemicals is by no means insignificant.
Monsanto’s pesticide
product line includes a number of chemicals named as Bad Actors by
Pesticide Action Network. They include Alachlor (a carcinogen, water
contaminant, developmental/reproductive toxin, and a suspected endocrine
disruptor), Acetochlor (a carcinogen and suspected endocrine
disruptor), Atrazine (a carcinogen and suspected endocrine disruptor),
Clopyralid (high acute toxicity), Dicamba (developmental/reproductive
toxin), and Thiodicarb (a carcinogen and cholinesterase inhibitor).
Roundup: The Benign Herbicide?
Defenders
of Monsanto might reply to the charge that Roundup is no Agent Orange.
In fact, the herbicide is viewed as so benign and yet effective that its
inventor, John E. Franz,
won the
National Medal of Technology. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in
Roundup, kills everything green and growing, but according to Monsanto,
it only affects a metabolic pathway in plants, so it does not harm
animals. It’s also said to break down quickly in the soil, leaving few
traces on the environment after its done its job.
Asked about the
harmlessness of Roundup, Lovera replies, “That’s the PR behind Roundup –
how benign it was and you can drink it and there’s nothing to worry
about here. There are people who dispute that.” For example there is an
accusation that
Roundup causes birth defects.
“We don’t buy the benign theory,” continues Lovera, “But what’s really
interesting is that we aren’t going to be having this conversation
pretty soon because Roundup isn’t working anymore.”
Lovera is referring to “
Roundup-resistant weeds,”
weeds that have evolved in the past decade and a half to survive being
sprayed by Roundup. Nearly all soybeans grown in the United States is
Monsanto’s genetically engineered Roundup Ready variety, as are 80
percent of cotton and 73 percent of corn. Farmers spray entire fields
with Roundup, killing only the weeds while the Roundup Ready crops
survive. With such heavy use of Roundup on America’s farmfields, any
weed – maybe one in a million – with an ability to survive in that
environment would survive and pass on its genes in its seeds.
By
1998, just two years after the introduction of Roundup Ready soybeans,
scientists documented the first Roundup-resistant weed. A second was
found in 2000, and three more popped up in 2004. To date, there are
24 different weedsthat
have evolved resistance to Roundup worldwide. And once they invade a
farmer’s field, it doesn’t matter if his crops are Roundup-resistant,
because Roundup won’t work anymore. Either the weeds get to stay, or the
farmer needs to find a new chemical, pull the weeds by hand, or find
some other way to deal with the problem.
“We’ve wasted Roundup by
overusing it,” says Lovera. She and other food activists worry about the
harsher chemicals that farmers are switching to, and the genetically
engineered crops companies like Monsanto are developing to use with
them.
Currently, there are genetically engineered crops waiting
for government approval that are made to tolerate the herbicides 2,4-D,
Dicamba and Isoxaflutole. (These are not all from Monsanto – some are
from their competitors.) None of these chemicals are as “benign” as
Roundup. Isoxaflutole is, in fact, a carcinogen. Let’s spray that on our
food!
Corporate Control of Seeds
No discussion of Monsanto is complete without a mention of the immense amount of control it exerts on the seed industry.
“What
it boils down to is between them buying seed companies outright, their
incredible aggressive legal maneuvering, their patenting of everything,
and their enforcement of those patents, they really have locked up a
huge part of the seed supply,” notes Lovera. “So they just exercise an
unprecedented control over the entire seed sector. Monsanto products
constitute 40 percent of all crop acres in the country.”
Monsanto began buying seed companies as far back as 1982. (One can see an infographic of seed industry consolidation
here.)
Some of Monsanto’s most significant purchases were Asgrow (soybeans),
Delta and Pine Land (cotton), DeKalb (corn), and Seminis (vegetables).
One that deserves special mention is their
purchase of Holden’s Foundation Seeds in 1997.
George Naylor, an Iowa farmer who grows corn and soybeans, calls Holden’s “
The independent
source of germplasm for corn.” Small seed companies could buy inbred
lines from Holden’s to cross them and produce their own hybrids. Large
seed companies like Pioneer did their own breeding, but small operations
relied on Holden’s or Iowa State University. But Iowa State got out of
the game and Monsanto bought Holden’s.
Monsanto’s
tactics for squashing its competition are
perhaps unrivaled. They use their power to get seed dealers to not to
stock many of their competitors products, for example. When licensing
their patented genetically engineered traits to seed companies, they
restrict the seed companies’ ability to combine Monsanto’s traits with
those of their competitors. And, famously, farmers who plant Monsanto’s
patented seeds sign contracts prohibiting them from saving and
replanting their seeds. Yet, to date, U.S. antitrust laws have not
clamped down on these practices.
With the concentrated control of
the seed industry, farmers already complain of lack of options. For
example, Naylor says he’s had a hard time finding non-genetically
engineered soybean seeds. Most corn seeds are now pre-treated with
pesticides, so farmers wishing to find untreated seeds will have a tough
time finding any. Once a company or a handful of companies control an
entire market, then they can choose what to sell and at what price to
sell it.
Furthermore, if our crops are too genetically homogenous,
then they are vulnerable to a single disease or pest that can wipe them
out. When farmers grow genetically diverse crops, then there is a
greater chance that one variety or another will have resistance to new
diseases. In that way, growing genetically diverse crops is like having
insurance, or like diversifying your risk within your stock portfolio.
Food and Water Watch Recommendations
At
the end of its report, Food and Water Watch lists several
recommendations. “There are a lot of ways that government policy could
address the Monsanto hold on the food supply,” explains Lovera. “The
most important thing is that it’s time to stop approval of genetically
engineered crops to stop this arms race of the next crop and the next
chemical.”
She also calls Monsanto “the poster child for the need
for antitrust enforcement” – something that the Justice Department has
yet to successfully deliver up. In fact, last November the government
ended a three-year antitrust investigation of Monsanto.
A
third recommendation Lovera hopes becomes a reality is mandatory
labeling of genetically engineered foods. “If we had that label and we
put that information in consumers’ hands, they could do more to avoid
this company in their day-to-day lives,” she says.
In the
meantime, all consumers can do to avoid genetically engineered foods is
to buy organic for the handful of crops that are genetically engineered:
corn, soybeans, canola, cotton, papaya, sugar beets, and alfalfa.
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