Prairie View

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Spitting Nails

On a field trip with the high school students several years ago, we passed by a large business building near Halstead. I read aloud the name on the building: Monsanto. I didn't know we lived so close to enemy territory.

"You don't like Monsanto very much, do you?" one of the students said.

Understatement. No documentation, but I suspect my blood pressure rises when I read yet another account of their devious machinations. I know I feel like spitting nails. I lay sins like greed, dishonesty, cruelty, assault, and murder squarely at their door. Meanwhile, they nurture the public image of being a company focused on alleviating poverty and hunger, and working on behalf of farmers everywhere.

While the name Monsanto now is associated with biotechnology or "life science" products, they have simply renamed the part of their company that was responsible for producing Agent Orange, PCBs, and Dioxin--all highly toxic chemicals that have caused sickness and death on a massive scale. Some of the victims were fish downstream from Monsanto factories, (One researcher lowered 25 fish into polluted waters. In 10 seconds, they all turned over on their sides, and in 3 1/2 minutes they were all dead.) but the mischief did not stop there. Some of the damage occurred to employees who were exposed to chemicals during the manufacturing process. Other people lived in the vicinity of those factories, and swam in the creeks that served as the toilet for Monsanto factory wastes. Still others were soldiers who were exposed when they sprayed Agent Orange on Viet Nam jungles to defoliate the area so enemy soldiers had no place to hide.

In some cases Monsanto knew very well that the product they were offering for sale was highly toxic, and they deliberately withheld that information from the people who were being harmed. When investigative reporters inquired, through them, Monsanto reassured the public that there was nothing to fear. When lawsuits were filed later, Monsanto brought the full force of its considerable financial and legal resources into the fight, and made the conflict so distasteful for its opponents that they often "paid up" through counter-suits, or simply abandoned the challenge rather than be destroyed.

In recent years, the lengths that Monsanto has gone to to protect its patents on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) regularly triggers my revulsion mechanism.

Beginning in the early 1980s, for the first time, man made genetic materials could be patented in the United States. Monsanto began to insert new genes into the seeds of familiar crops and receive patents on the products. In the most familiar case, they inserted a gene that made crops grown from the seed impervious to the herbicide Roundup, which kills almost everything it's sprayed on. What this means is that people can plant a whole field to one Roundup-ready crop, and when weeds grow that compete with the intended crop, the whole field is sprayed and the crop survives while everything else dies. It's a tidy little arrangement since Monsanto manufactures and holds the patent on Roundup, as well as on the Roundup-ready seeds.

So far, this doesn't sound so different from what many business-savvy companies might do. But the similarities soon disappear. What Monsanto does is engage in all sorts of clandestine surveillance to "catch" people in violation of the terms of the patent. Once targeted by this wealthy and powerful company, even innocent people often give up the fight almost before it starts, or they work for years to comply with the terms of the legal process, and then give up after their resources are exhausted. Some of these cases involve sins like a farmer saving seed from a crop he has grown, and replanting it on his own land for an additional crop. (Not allowed. None of the yield may be saved for seed.)

Others have had the misfortune of having fields located near other fields where GMO crops were growing. Pollen drift has turned up some GMO organisms in the fields of someone who never purchased (or planted) GMO seed. Monsanto considers these people fair targets for legal action. Monsanto usually wins.

In cleaning, storing and shipping, it's difficult to keep GMO crops separate from non-GMO products, and some have tangled with the legal system for mix ups that occurred there.

Sometimes the fact that GMO grain passed through a company's facility is enough to become ensnared. A co-op in Missouri, for example, that cleaned grain for farmers that were later charged with patent violations, was charged along with the farmers, although they never sold any of the grain for replanting. Monsanto contended that by cleaning seeds—a service which it had provided for decades—the co-op was inducing farmers to violate Monsanto’s patents. In effect, Monsanto wanted the co-op to police its own customers. After complying with requests for thousands of pages of records, and years of time, and thousands of dollars in legal fees, the case continues to drag on. One of Monsanto's latest tactics is to ask for punitive damages, in an amount quadrupling the monetary damages they have claimed so far.

GMO crops are not welcome in European markets because of perceived threats to human health from consumption of these products. Monsanto apparently has a fairly cozy arrangement with people in US regulatory agencies, and the publicity on health implications of GMO products is minimal in America, by comparison with Europe. This was emphasized for me last summer when my cousin Erlis, who lives in England, asked in my hearing if people here are concerned with consumption of GMO foods. He had noticed that it's a very big issue overseas, and was surprised at the low level of concern here. Ahhhhh. Lobbying.

In our state right now, there's a controversy over the labeling of milk from cows that have not been given hormones made by Monsanto. The controversy is alive in many other states as well. Because some consumers prefer such milk, some producers labelled their milk accordingly, as being from non-rBGH-treated cows. Federal regulations supported by Monsanto now require such milk labelling to be accompanied by an additional label saying that “Government studies have shown no significant difference between milk derived from rBGH-treated and non-rBGH-treated cows.” Monsanto, however, wants more. They want to see the labelling outlawed entirely because it implies that milk from rBGH-treated cows may not be safe. I'm peeved that Monsanto wants to keep me from being able to identify the source of the milk I'm drinking. And I certainly do not trust them to know what's good for me. Monsanto looks very like "Big Brother" in the 1984 use of the term.

Read the article at the following site for more information: www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805?currentPage=1

If your reaction is similar to mine, before doing so, you may want to tape your mouth shut. I can't be held responsible for anyone around you suffering any nail wounds.

4 Comments:

  • While I also find myself annoyed/angered by Monsanto's approach to intellectual property and general "bad actor" characteristics, a few points:
    * Jon Franklin's Poisons of the Mind speech to the 1994 Convention of the Society of Toxicology has a fascinating "war story" regarding Agent Orange (which he covered as a journalist). It starts on p. 71, according to the page numbers in the PDF. (Although...why not read the whole speech?)
    * In a very real sense, humans have been engaging in genetic engineering for millennia--they've just been doing so fairly clumsily, in a process involving random combination of sets of genes, followed by selection of phenotypes that seem likely to have the desired gene or set of genes. Over time, this process increases the probability of organisms having the desired genes in their DNA. That process is called "breeding", and has resulted in such unnatural organisms as many purebred dogs, chickens that grow so rapidly that many can't walk, cattle that produce more milk than their offspring could ever consume, etc.. Modern genetic engineering also has potential for problems and ethical issues, but in many ways it's simply a more precise, predictable approach to something in which people have engaged for a long time.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1/08/2009  

  • From what I understand, Fox News more or less fired a couple of investigative reporters after they wanted to do a story on Monsanto and Monsanto said "no way."I've seen interviews with them on DVDs before. This seems to be a location to begin learning about them: http://www.foxbghsuit.com/

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1/08/2009  

  • Your reaction here sounds a lot like my reactions to the music and movie industries. Under the name of "protecting the artist" (the artist gets a tiny fraction of the revenue that the record labels get), they pull stunts very much like Monsanto. A few examples:
    * Using DRM to force people to repurchase any music when they move from one music player to the next, without telling the purchaser of what's happening. No, you don't own your music anymore.
    * Extending copyright lengths repeatedly, keeping hundreds of thousands of high-quality books from entering the public domain, where they could be digitalized and read. Of course, these books that are protected are never printed; it wouldn't make enough money for the publishers.
    * Using illegal methods to find people copying their music, and suing punitive damages (one case was awarded $4000 PER SONG that was copied). Oh, and suing grandmothers, pre-teens, etc.

    -Anonymous Coward

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1/09/2009  

  • This leaves me 'spitting nails' also, even though my brain is a bit too foggy to comprehend it all. (It's my bedtime :) Those are the types of things that tend to raise my blood pressure a bit and make me want to move far, far away to an area that is not polluted by chemicals and such like....Wait...someday I will be there- heaven. How is your mother? I have enjoyed following your tales. We have had our own hospital experiences, but that would be another story for another day.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1/10/2009  

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