The World According to Monsanto

Food, Health and Hope: This is the way the agricultural and biotechnology company Monsanto would like you to think of them. But French journalist Marie-Monique Robin has a different slogan in mind: Pollution, Corruption and Control. In her devastating new book, The World According to Monsanto, Robin chronicles the damage to the environment and human welfare the ”world’s most controversial company” has done over the past six decades. And it’s not a pretty sight.

Robin’s stance on Monsanto is clear from the opening pages. ”The arrogance revealed by some company representatives in the trial transcript is truly chilling,” she writes of a court case involving Monsanto’s pollution of Anniston, Alabama in the 1960s. Similar language peppers Robin’s work, giving her book a harsh tone of anger and judgment.

But the history of the infamous company explains why she writes this way. Founded in 1901 in St. Louis, Missouri, Monsanto began as a chemical company that produced saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, for the Coca-Cola Company. As it acquired other chemical companies, it shifted toward industrial products such as rubber, plastics and other synthetic materials.

In 1944, Monsanto manufactured the insecticide DDT for the U.S. government to eliminate the typhus and malaria-carrying mosquitoes that were killing American troops in Western Europe. (Decades later, of course, the adverse environmental and health effects of DDT were exposed, and the product was banned in the United States in 1972.) During the war Monsanto scientists were also involved in the Manhattan Project, commissioned by the Pentagon to develop the world’s first nuclear bomb, which decimated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war in Vietnam erupted, Monsanto once again made huge profits from war by continuing its collaboration with the Pentagon—this time to produce Agent Orange. The U.S. military poured millions of gallons of the herbicide over Vietnam to defoliate the land, which would deprive the guerillas of food and cover. The effects on Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers—who were never told the dangers of the toxic chemical—have been heartbreaking: cancer, stillbirths and dramatic birth defects.

Through this history, Robin shows clearly the original intent of the chemicals now used in industrial farming. As she writes: ”This is proof, if any were needed, that industrial agriculture never would have seen the light of day without close cooperation between the military and scientific establishments, whose respective goals are not exactly to produce healthy food that respects the environment.”

Meanwhile, Monsanto was also wreaking havoc back home by polluting many of the small towns it operated in with dangerous dioxins and PCBs. The company had also developed a synthetic hormone that made it possible to milk cows beyond their natural lactation cycle, recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, or rBGH, setting the stage for what Monsanto is best-known for today: genetically modified organisms.

In 1993, the company finalized its Roundup Ready soybean, a genetically modified soybean resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. Soon, it had engineered other genetically modified vegetables with qualities—such as a slow ripening process to ensure longer shelf life—that made them easier to sell. Here, it’s not just Monsanto’s product that outrages Robin—it’s the way the company has bullied everyone around it to get ahead.

For instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration shockingly decided that GMOs wouldn’t be regulated or labeled since they are ”substantially similar to substances commonly found in foods.” This decision, as Robin shows, was more political than scientific; in the case of Monsanto’s genetically modified tomatoes, it flew in the face of research showing the fruit may have caused stomach lesions in rats. The reason she suggests is the infiltration of the regulatory body—the FDA’s Michael Taylor, for example, was once a Monsanto lawyer and was now in charge of regulating his former client’s products.

After pushing its products on the market, Monsanto achieved another stunning victory: patenting life. U.S. patent law from 1951 clearly states that living organisms are excluded from the patent process, but in 1983, the Supreme Court reversed this, and in 2001, ruled that transgenic seeds could also be patented. Clarence Thomas, a former Monsanto attorney, wrote the opinion on this decision.

What followed is well-known: Monsanto launched an aggressive legal campaign against any farmer found growing patented products without permission, even though many of these seeds grew because wind, insects or animals carried them into a farmer’s field unknowing—not intellectual property theft. As Robin chronicles, the company is leaving farmers in the United States and across the world in ruins, particularly in India, where rates of farmer suicide (usually by swallowing Monsanto pesticides) are staggering.

Robin packs an enormous amount of information into her thick book, but at times it’s confusing, poorly organized and too dense to get through. Her tendency to use long quotes shows the primary sources she grappled with, but ultimately it’s tiring, and readers will quickly realize her 329-page work could have easily been 200. Despite the book’s difficulty, Robin’s remains an important one. Monsanto is shaping the future of our food system and our environment, and we must understand how. Not everyone is convinced of the harms of GMOs, but Robin’s thorough history of Monsanto points to perhaps the most persuasive argument of all: With such a terrible track record, what are the odds they got it right this time?