excerpted from the book

The World According to Monsanto

Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of the World's Food Supply

by Marie-Monique Robin

The New Press, 2008, paperback

 

p4
In 2007, transgenic crops ... covered about 250 million acres: more than half were located in the United States (136.5 million acres), followed by Argentina (45 million), Brazil (28.8 million), Canada (15.3 million), India (9.5 million), China (8.8 million), Paraguay (5 million), and South Africa (3.5 million). This "surge in GMO land" has spared Europe, with the exceptions of Spain and Romania... 70 percent of the GMOs cultivated in the world were at the time resistant to Roundup, Monsanto's prize herbicide ... and 30 percent were manipulated to produce a toxic insecticide known as Bt toxin.

p42
[In Vietnam] between 1962 and 1971, an estimated 20 million gallons of defoliants were sprayed on 8 million acres of forests and crops. More than three thousand villages were contaminated, and 60 percent of the defoliants used were agent Orange.

p177
Manuela Malatesta, researcher at he University of Pavia, 2006

Research on GMOs is now taboo. You can't find money for it. We tried everything to find more financing, but we were told that because there are no data in the scientific literature proving that GMOs cause problems, there was no point in working on it. People don't want to find answers to troubling questions. It's the result of widespread fear of Monsanto and of GMOs in general. Besides, when I discussed the results with some of my colleagues, they strongly advised me against publishing them, and they were right, because I lost everything-my laboratory, my research team.

p245
"Industrial corn" means the 6 million tons of corn that flood in every year from the United States into Mexico, 40 percent of which is transgenic. Because of NAFTA, the 1992 free trade agreement with Canada and the United States, Mexico has been unable to prevent the massive importation of corn; heavily subsidized by the American administration, it threatens local production because it is sold at half the price. It is estimated that between 1994 and 2002, the price of Mexican corn fell by 44 percent, forcing many small farmers to head for city slums.

p252
Ignacio Chapela one of the authors of the "Nature Study"

In the United States now you can't work in biology if you don't accept funding from biotechnology firms. There was a time when science and the university loudly proclaimed their independence from governmental, military, and industrial institutions. That's over, not only because scientists depend on industry to survive, but because they themselves are part of industry... we're living in a totalitarian world, ruled by the interests of multinational corporations who recognize their responsibility only to their shareholders.

p255
Aldo Gonzalez one of the leaders of the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca, 2006

[GMO] contamination benefits only multinational corporations like Monsanto. Once everything is contaminated, the company will be able to take control of the most widely grown grain in the world and collect royalties as in Argentina and Brazil.

p257
If there was a country where Monsanto could do whatever it wanted without the slightest obstacle, that country was Argentina... half the cultivated land the country was planted with transgenic soybeans -- 35 million acres and million tons harvested, 90 percent of which was exported, primarily to Europe and China.

p259
Walter Pengue, an agricultural engineer at the University of Buenos Aires

The introduction of GMOs into Argentina came about with no public or even parliamentary debate. There is still no law regulating their marketing... After they were authorized in 1996, RR soybeans spread through Argentina at an absolutely unprecedented speed in the history of agriculture: an average of more than two million acres a year. We now have a veritable green desert devouring one of the world's breadbaskets.

p261
[Monsanto's] RR soybeans spread from the pampas like wildfire, steadily heading north into the provinces of Chaco, Santiago del Estero, Salta, and Formosa. Covering only 90,000 acres in 1971, soybeans spread over 20 million acres in 2000, 24 million in 2001, 29 million in 2002, and reached more than 39 million acres in 2007, accounting for 60 percent of the cultivated land.

... RR soybeans continued their irresistible advance, transforming what was once the breadbasket of the world into a producer of cattle feed for the European market.

... From 1996-97 to 2001-2, the number of tambos (dairy farms) decreased by 27 percent and, for the first time in its history, Argentina had to import milk from Uruguay. Similarly, the production of rice fell by 44 percent, corn by 26 percent, sunflowers by 34 percent, and pork by 36 percent. In tandem with this movement came a staggering rise in the prices of basic consumer products: in 2003, for example, the price of flour went up 162 percent, lentils - a major element in the national diet - by 272 percent, and rice by 130 percent.

p265
The intensive use of [Monsanto's] Roundup [herbicide] tends to make the earth sterile.

p267
Health professionals pointed out that soy is much less rich in calcium than cow's milk, and its heavy concentration phytates blocks the body's absorption of metals such iron and zinc, increasing the risk of anemia. Above all, they strongly advised against the consumption of soy products by children younger than five for a commonsense reason: it is known that soy is very rich in isoflavones, which act as hormone substitutes for premenopausal women and can therefore cause significant hormonal imbalances in growing bodies.

p281
[In Paraguay] 2 percent of the population owns 70 percent of the land.

p286
Tomás Palau - a sociologist who specializes in agrarian questions, 2007

Monsanto does now control the agricultural and trade policy of Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and soon of Uruguay, and its power greatly exceeds that of the national governments. It's the company that decides what seeds and what chemical products will be used in those countries, what crops will be suppressed, and in the end what people will eat and at what price. The recalcitrant are taken to court, because the patents are the final link in the totalitarian chain.

p288
Walter Pengue, an Argentine agronomist and one of the world's best known specialists on the impacts of transgenic soybeans

The transgenic model is the latest incarnation of industrial agriculture. It's the last link in a model of intensive production, based on a technological package that includes not only seeds and herbicide but a whole series of inputs, such as fertilizer and insecticides, without which there is no yield, that are sold by the multinational corporations of the North to the countries of the South. That's why we can speak of the second agricultural revolution. The first, the one that came in the postwar years, was piloted by national agricultural organizations, like INTA in Argentina, and was aimed at developing countries' food-producing capacities relying on the peasant class. The second is driven by supranational interests and leads to an agricultural model turned toward exports, where there are no more active participants in the fields. This model is directed purely toward supplying low-cost fodder for the large industrial feedlots in the countries of the North, and leads to the development of monocultures that threaten the food security of the countries of the South. In ten years, the Argentine economy has gone back a century by becoming dependent on commodity exports whose prices are set in world markets where the power of multinational corporations is decisive. When the price of soybeans collapses, we can expect the worst.

p288
Walter Pengue, an Argentine agronomist and one of the world's best known specialists on the impacts of transgenic soybeans

The transgenic model is the latest incarnation of industrial agriculture. It's the last link in a model of intensive production, based on a technological package that includes not only seeds and herbicide but a whole series of inputs, such as fertilizer and insecticides, without which there is no yield, that are sold by the multinational corporations of the North to the countries of the South. That's why we can speak of the second agricultural revolution. The first, the one that came in the postwar years, was piloted by national agricultural organizations, like INTA in Argentina, and was aimed at developing countries' food-producing capacities relying on the peasant class. The second is driven by supranational interests and leads to an agricultural model turned toward exports, where there are no more active participants in the fields. This model is directed purely toward supplying low-cost fodder for the large industrial feedlots in the countries of the North, and leads to the development of monocultures that threaten the food security of the countries of the South.

p289
[Monsanto] is seeking to control the food produced in the world. To do that, it has to get its hands on the seeds in the locations where they are used by farmers. First it appropriates the seeds, then the processing of grains, then the supermarkets, and in the end it controls the entire food chain. The seeds are the first link in the chain: whoever controls seeds controls the food supply and thereby controls mankind.

p316
The TRIPS [Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property] agreement ... is under the jurisdiction of the WTO, which obeys the orders of multinational corporations like Monsanto, which, under cover of the globalization of trade, in fact rule the world.

p316
a UN report published by the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, June 2009

The greater percentage of global trade is controlled by powerful multinational enterprises. Within such a context, the notion of free trade on which the rules [of the WTO are constructed is a fallacy... The net result is that for certain sectors of humanity - particularly the developing countries of the South - the WTO is a veritable nightmare.


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