I heard The Noise (check out the site redesign!) hit the streets today, and finally, I’m in it again. I’m sitting here with strep throat, Yogi “throat comfort” tea, and a huge wool blanket.
eeeer it is.
On my knees, I part the leaves of my garden looking for the perfect ripen tomato. Today is one of those propitious September afternoons in Northern Arizona where the sun is bright above my head while storm clouds build and grumble in all directions. I find two tomatoes, one for now and one for later, and gently twist them off their branches.
I roll one of them into my shirt in a half-assed attempt toward removing the dirt. It’s more of an empty gesture really, as I secretly enjoy the complementary taste of rich earth in the food that comes from my garden. As I puncture it’s soft skin with my teeth, I slurp and swirl and savor. Only seconds after removing it from the plant, the fruit is warm; if I close my eyes, I swear I can taste the sun.
This is my second successful attempt at a garden in Northern Arizona and it has quickly and dramatically altered my understanding of food. Tomatoes from the grocery store, even organic tomatoes, seem bland and lifeless. Still, it isn’t so much the taste of the tomatoes from the store that turn me off, as it is my lack of a relationship to them. While I am overjoyed to directly experience such a beautiful gift from the land, I do not rely on my garden to live and therefore, I will never fully understand the value of this gift.
There is an ever-shrinking population of people on this planet who know and understand the true value of food. In fact, the poorest two-thirds of humanity live in what can be appropriately called the biodiversity-based economy: corn farmers in Mexico, subsistence farmers in India, and indigenous populations throughout the world. Still, I do not aim to illustrate the lives of these people as idealistic. In 2008, those people who rely on the land to live lead increasingly despondent lives, through dismantled communities, impossibly large debts, and uncertain futures, where fields of cotton function more like giant prison cells and stocks of corn function more appropriately as enclosing iron bars.
It may seem impossible to ensure a harvest is stolen before it is planted. There is, however, one transnational corporation that has figured out how to achieve this while maintaining an increasingly desperate supply of workers.
The Monsanto Corporation was founded in 1901. A recent Vanity Fair article noted that it’s founder, John Francis Queeny, was a “tough, cigar-smoking Irishman with a sixth-grade education.” He named his company, Monsanto Chemical Works, after his wife’s maiden name. Queeny originally went into business selling an artificial sweetener called saccharin, which was then imported from Germany. After the German cartel that controlled the market dramatically lowered the price of saccharin, Queeny nearly went out of business. In fact, if it weren’t for the steady business of a new soft drink company in Georgia called Colca-Cola, it is likely that Monsanto would have gone under.
After the U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to ban saccharin after questions about it’s safety, Monsanto began to add more products like vanillin, caffeine, and drugs used as sedatives and laxatives. Monsanto also became the world’s largest producer of aspirin and after World War 1, it’s legacy as a leading global chemical manufacturer was secured.
Just before Queeny ironically died of cancer in the 1920’s, his only son, Edgar, became president. Under Edgar’s watch, Monsanto was built up like a toxic empire, producing plastics, resins, rubber goods, fuel additives, artificial caffeine, industrial fluids, vinyl siding, dishwasher detergent, anti-freeze, fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Through out the sixties and seventies, Monsanto was perhaps best known for its production of an extremely toxic chemical used during the Vietnam War. This chemical, which instantly and painfully seared the flesh of any southeast Asian who was unfortunate enough to come in contact with it—and there were millions who did—was known as Agent Orange.
During this chemical boom, Monsanto produced some of the deadliest chemicals known to man. Among the worst of these chemicals, dioxin and poly chlorinated biphenyls, better known as PCBs, reign supreme. Dioxin is one chemical among many listed by the U.S. Government as a “known human carcinogen,” that is, a cancer causing agent. Even in small amounts, dioxin has been linked to heart disease, liver disease, human reproductive disorders, and developmental problems. Dioxin is a substance that remains and accumulates in the environment and the body. Recent studies have found significant traces of dioxin in mother’s breast milk.
PCBs are classified as a group of chemicals that act as hormones and have been linked to damage to the liver and irreversible damage in the neurological, immune, endocrine, and reproductive systems. Though Monsanto no longer produces these toxins, there are places such as Nitro, West Virginia and Aniston, Texas where spills and chemical plant explosions left an environmental legacy that continues to kill people to this day. Further, the Environmental Protection Agency has listed Monsanto as being a “potentially responsible party” for 56 contaminated sites in the U.S. And today dioxin is released into the atmosphere every time a flame is put to plastics.
In an effort to change it’s tarnished image and secure a legacy of future profits, Monsanto rebranded itself, no longer as a chemical manufacturer, but as a “life sciences” company, thus it began pooling more and more of it’s resources into biotechnology. In 1981, Monsanto scientists became the first to genetically modify a plant cell. Earnest Jaworski, the director of Monsanto’s Biological Sciences Program at the time noted “It will now be possible to introduce virtually any gene into plant cells with the ultimate goal of improving crop productivity.”
Under the guise of productivity, Monsanto has since introduced the hormone supplement, rBGH, also known as rBST, a hormone that increases the output of milk in cows. Though, the growth hormones are banned in all of Canada and Europe, Monsanto’s independent scientists insist that it is safe. They have even unsuccessfully tried to sue dairy farmers who label their products as being “growth hormone free” stating that it sends mixed signals to consumers. Even if it is safe, the artificial growth hormone speeds up the metabolism of cows and increases their chances of contracting illnesses, which causes great pain and shorter life spans among those cows unfortunate enough to be injected.
Today, 15 years after the Food and Drug Administration’s (F.D.A.) approval of the hormone, no long-term studies have been done regarding the safety of the milk from cows injected with the hormone. And Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist for Consumer’s Union told Vanity Fair that the only data that does exist all comes from Monsanto. “There is no scientific consensus about the safety,” he added.
The fact that this hormone is widely banned throughout the world, yet was approved by the F.D.A. in the U.S. says more about Washington’s “revolving door” than it does about the safety of Monsanto’s products. Former Monsanto employees such as Clarence Thomas, Michael R. Taylor, Ann Veneman, Linda Fisher, Michael Friedman, and William D. Ruckelshaus, currently hold positions in U.S. government agencies such as the F.D.A., E.P.A. and even the Supreme Court. Even Donald Rumsfeld who used to be chairman and C.E.O. of the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Co, reportedly gained $12 million in increased stock value after Monsanto acquired the company in 1985.
Despite all the atrocities committed by Monsanto in the name of progress and productivity, it is the tight stranglehold it has on the distribution of genetically modified seeds that has garnered the most attention world-wide. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, since the 1980’s, Monsanto has acquired 674 biotechnology patents, taking advantage of a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1980 that broadened the definition of a patent to include “live human-made microorganisms.” Monsanto’s patents cover herbicide resistant corn, wheat, rice, cotton, sugar beet, rapeseed, canola, flax, sunflower, potato, tobacco, alfalfa, poplar, pine, apple, and grape among others.
Traditionally, when farmers planted seed and grew food, the best, strongest seeds were selected and saved to ensure an even stronger crop for the next growing season. In the late spring, when I go to Warner’s Nursery & Landscaping or Flagstaff Native Plant & Seed, either to buy seed or budding plants to make their home in my garden, I am reaping the benefits of thousands of years of this selection process. When I bite into a delicious tomato, I have thousands of years of poor farmers and desperate seed savers to thank.
Through the use of genetically modified “terminator” seeds and their patented Round-up Ready seeds, among other patented seed products, Monsanto has systematically undermined one of the oldest, life-sustaining traditions in our history of life on this planet.
Monsanto has aggressively entered the corn market in Mexico with their patented genetically modified seed. The trouble comes when Monsanto seeds cross-pollinate with the native seeds. When this happens, the results are what Mexican farmers refer to as “monster plants,” which are corn stocks that branch off in freakish ways, shooting 5 or 6 stocks in all directions from a single plant. Co-opts warn farmers to destroy these plants as soon as they are sighted. Farmers are increasingly finding themselves in a loosing battle because when the seeds cross-pollinate, Monsanto’s plants dominate and destroy the native seeds. Thus Monsanto slowly dominates the market.
Northern Arizona University Professor of Ecology and Evolution, Dr. Tom Whitham, has argued in many high profile journals, concluding that “community and ecosystem phenotypes of genetically modified organisms need to be evaluated as part of the approval process.” Company’s like Monsanto and Dupont, Dr. Whitham continues, “need to have their products evaluated at higher levels than is currently standard…to avoid the problems that have arisen or are likely to arise with unregulated GMOs”
The biggest tragedy is taking place in India where Monsanto owns the two biggest seed distributors available to subsistence farmers. The real danger of patenting seed lies in the “terminator” technology, which was created to prevent farmers from saving seed. When these seeds are planted, the seeds that are reproduced are sterile. Farmers are given little information on the seeds they are purchasing, just promises of higher yields, fewer weeds, and less hassle. Then after farmers have purchased and planted the seeds, which can cost up to four times more than the native seeds, they are locked into a system where they quickly discover that they need to purchase patented herbicides that are necessary to ensure the success of the harvest.
In debt to Monsanto, and because of the subsequent shame that comes with an inability to feed their family, subsistence farmers in India are committing suicide in astonishing numbers.
From this writer/gardener’s perspective, the gravest injustice is the ethics, or lack thereof, of patenting life. The biggest fear in journals, documentaries, and those working on these issues revolves around the issue of control. By controlling the means of food production, Monsanto is systematically controlling the world’s food supply under the guise of ending food shortages.
I am reminded of a famous line coined by the 19th century French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “La propriété, c’est le vol!” or “property is theft!” The Latin root of private property is privare, which means “to deprive.” By patenting the means of food production around the world, Monsanto, is depriving the poorest two-thirds of humanity of their human right to self-determination.
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.
In her essay “Biotechnical Development and the Conservation of Biodiversity,” Vandana Shiva states that “during periods of rapid technological transformation, it is assumed that society and people must adjust to change instead of technological change adjusting to the social values of equity, sustainability and participation.” She further described a view of technology that places it as a “a process that is shaped by and serves the priorities of whoever controls it.” Monsanto needs to be stopped.
