The World According to Monsanto

Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of Our Food Supply

Marie-Monique Robin

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781595585363
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Agribusiness
• Index: Business

An investigation of the massive agribusiness company, from a winner of the Rachel Carson Prize: "Well supported by wide-ranging scientific evidence." — Kirkus Reviews The result of a remarkable three-year-long investigation that took award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin across four continents, The World According to Monsanto tells the little-known yet shocking story of this agribusiness giant—the world's leading producer of GMOs (genetically modified organisms)—and how its new "green" face is no less malign than its PCB- and Agent Orange–soaked past. Robin reports that, following its long history of manufacturing hazardous chemicals and lethal herbicides, Monsanto is now marketing itself as a "life sciences" company, seemingly convinced about the virtues of sustainable development. However, Monsanto now controls the majority of the yield of the world's genetically modified corn and soy—ingredients found in more than 95 percent of American households—and its alarming legal and political tactics to maintain this monopoly are the subject of worldwide concern. Released alongside the documentary film of the same name, The World According to Monsanto is sure to change the way we think about food safety and the corporate control of our food supply.

PART I

One of the Great Polluters of Industrial History

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1

PCBs: White-Collar Crime

We can’t afford to lose one dollar of business.

—“Pollution Letter,” declassified Monsanto document, February 16, 1970

Anniston, Alabama, October 12, 2006: With trembling hands, David Baker put the cassette into his VCR. “It’s an unforgettable memory,” the six-foot-tall man murmured, furtively wiping away a tear. “The greatest day in my life, the day when the people of my community decided to take back their dignity by making one of the largest multinationals in the world, which had always despised them, give in.” On the screen were images filmed on August 14, 2001, of thousands of African Americans who walked silently and firmly in the golden late-afternoon light toward Anniston’s cultural center on 22nd Street. The Anniston Star reported the next day that at least five thousand residents attended the meeting, the largest group many had ever seen in Anniston.

Asked why she had come, a fifty-year-old woman explained, “Because my husband and my son died of cancer.”

A man pointed to a little girl perched on his shoulders. “She has a brain tumor. We had lost hope of getting Monsanto to pay for all the harm its factory has done us, but if Johnnie Cochran is working for us, then it’s different.”

The name was on everyone’s lips. In 1995, the United States had held its breath as the celebrated Los Angeles lawyer defended O. J. Simpson against the charge of murdering his ex-wife and her friend in 1994. After a long and highly publicized trial, Simpson had been acquitted, thanks to the skill of his lawyer, the great-grandson of a slave, who had argued that his client was the victim of a racist police frame-up. From then until his death in 2005, Cochran was a hero to the American black community. “A god,” David Baker said to me. “That’s why I knew that by persuading him to come to Anniston, which he didn’t even know existed, I had practically almost won the fight.”

“Johnnie!” the crowd roared as the elegantly dressed lawyer climbed onto the stage. And Cochran spoke to a reverently silent audience. He was able to find the words that would resonate in this little southern town that had long been torn by the civil rights struggle. He spoke of the historic role of Rosa Parks, an Alabama native, in the struggle against racial segregation in the United States. He quoted the Gospel of Matthew: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Then he spoke of the story of David and Goliath, paying tribute to David Baker, the man who had made this unlikely meeting possible. “I look at this audience and I see a lot of Davids,” he said with passion. “I don’t know if you know what power you have. Every citizen has the right to live free from pollution, free from PCBs, from mercury and lead—that’s a constitutional principle! You will rise up against the injustice Monsanto has done you, because the injustice done here is a threat to justice everywhere else! You are doing a service to the country that must no longer be ruled by the private interests of the giants of industry!”

“Amen!” cried the crowd, giving him a standing ovation. In the course of the next few days, 18,233 inhabitants of Anniston, including 450 children with neurological defects, filed through the small office of the Community against Pollution organization, set up by Baker in 1997 to bring legal action against the chemical company. They joined the 3,516 other plaintiffs, including Baker himself, who were already engaged in a class action suit that had been filed four years earlier. After a half century of silent suffering, almost the entire black population of the town was challenging a company with a decades-long history as a major world polluter, and would soon receive the largest known settlement paid by an industrial company in U.S. history: $700 million.

“It was a tough battle,” commented Baker, still stirred by emotion. “But how could we imagine that a company could act so criminally? You understand? My little brother Terry died at seventeen from a brain tumor and lung cancer.¹ He died because he ate the vegetables from our garden and the fish he caught in a highly contaminated stream. Monsanto turned Anniston into a ghost town.”

The Origins of Monsanto

Yet Anniston had had its glory days. Long known as the “model city,” or the city with the “world’s best sewer system” because of the quality of its municipal infrastructure, the little southern town, rich in iron ore, was long considered a pioneer of the industrial revolution. Officially chartered in 1879 and named after the wife of a railroad president, “Annie’s Town” was celebrated as “Alabama’s magnificent city” in the Atlanta Constitution in 1882. Run by a minority of white industrialists who were smart enough to reinvest their money locally to foster social peace, it competed with the nearby state capital, Birmingham, to attract entrepreneurs. In 1917, for example, Southern Manganese Corporation decided to establish a factory there for the manufacture of artillery shells. In 1925, the company changed its name to the Swann Chemical Company, and four years later it launched production of PCBs, universally hailed as “chemical miracles,” which would soon make Monsanto a fortune and bring disaster to Anniston.

PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are chlorinated chemical compounds that embody the great industrial adventure of the late nineteenth century. While working to improve the techniques for refining crude oil to extract the gasoline needed for the infant automobile industry, chemists identified the characteristics of benzene, an aromatic hydrocarbon that would later be widely used as a chemical solvent in the manufacture of medicines, plastics, and coloring agents. In the laboratory, the sorcerer’s apprentices mixed it with chlorine and obtained a new product that turned out to be thermally stable and to possess remarkable heat resistance. Thus PCBs were born, and for half a century they colonized the planet: they were used as coolants in electric transformers and industrial hydraulic machines, but also as lubricants in applications as varied as plastics, paint, ink, and paper.

In 1935, the Swann Chemical Company was bought by a rising enterprise from St. Louis, the Monsanto Chemical Works. Established in 1901 by John Francis Queeny, a self-taught chemist who also wanted to honor his wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto, the small company, set up with a $5,000 personal loan, began by manufacturing saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, which it then sold exclusively to another rising company in Georgia, Coca-Cola. It soon began supplying the soft drink company with vanillin and caffeine, and then started manufacturing aspirin, of which it was the largest American producer until the 1980s. In 1918, Monsanto made its first acquisition, buying an Illinois company that made sulfuric acid.

This shift to basic industrial products led to the purchase of several chemical companies in the United States and Australia after its shares went on sale at the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, one month before the crash, which the company survived, renamed the Monsanto Chemical Company. In the 1940s, it became one of the world’s major producers of rubber, followed by plastics and synthetic fibers such as polystyrene, as well as phosphates. At the same time, it reinforced its monopoly in the international PCB market, guaranteed by a patent that enabled it to sell licenses almost everywhere in the world. In the United States and the United Kingdom (where the company had a factory in Wales), PCBs were marketed under the name Aroclor, while they were known by the name Pyralène in France, Clophen in Germany, and Kanechlor in Japan.

“That’s how Anniston became the most polluted city in the United States,” Baker explained to me as we got into his car for a tour of the area. First came Noble Street downtown, which was the pride of the city in the 1960s, with two movie theaters and many stores, most now closed. We then drove through the east side, dotted with pleasant houses where the white minority traditionally lived. Finally, on the other side of the tracks, came the west side, the home of the city’s poor, mostly black, in the middle of an industrial area. That was where David Baker was born fifty-five years ago.

We were going through what he had rightly called a ghost town. “All these houses have been abandoned,” he told me, pointing to dilapidated and tumbledown houses on both sides of the street. “People ended up leaving because their vegetable gardens and water were highly contaminated.” We turned the corner from a lane full of potholes onto a wide thoroughfare with the sign “Monsanto Road.” It ran alongside the factory where the company had produced PCBs until 1971. A fence surrounded the site, which now belongs to Solutia (motto: “Applied Chemistry, Creative Solutions”), an “independent” company also based in St. Louis, to which Monsanto turned over its chemical division in 1997, in one of the company’s typical sleights of hand likely intended to protect it from the storm that its irresponsible conduct in Anniston was about to unleash.

“We weren’t fooled,” Baker said. “Solutia or Monsanto, it’s all the same to us. Look, here’s the channel of Snow Creek, where the company dumped its waste for more than forty years. It ran from the factory through the town, and flowed into the surrounding creeks. It was poisoned water. Monsanto knew it but never said anything.”

According to a declassified report, secretly prepared in March 2005 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 680 million pounds of PCBs were produced in Anniston from 1929 to 1971.² Sixty thousand pounds of PCBs were emitted into the atmosphere, 1.8 million pounds were dumped in streams such as Snow Creek (following facility-cleaning operations), and 68 million pounds of contaminated wastes were deposited in an open pit located on the site, in other words, in the heart of the city’s black community.

Half a Million Pages of Secret Documents

As we started to go around the site on foot, we met a hearse that honked its horn and stopped alongside us. “This is Reverend Jeffrey Williams,” Baker explained. “He runs an Anniston funeral home. He succeeded his uncle, who recently died from a rare cancer, typical of PCB contamination.”

“Unfortunately, he’s not the only one,” said Reverend Williams. “This year I’ve buried at least a hundred people who died of cancer, many young people between twenty and forty.”

“I learned about the tragedy that’s affecting all of us from his uncle,” Baker went on. “For decades we accepted the deaths of our family members as a mysterious fate.”

When his seventeen-year-old brother Terry collapsed and died in front of the family home, Baker was living in New York, where he was working as an officer of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. After twenty-five years of good and faithful service, he decided in 1995 to go back home, where his experience as a union leader would soon be of great help to him. By chance, he was hired by Monsanto, which was then recruiting “environmental technicians,” responsible for decontaminating the factory site. “It was in the mid-1990s,” he said, “and we weren’t yet informed of the pollution dangers, but the company was quietly starting to clean up. That was where I heard about PCBs for the first time, and I began to suspect that they were hiding something.”

At the same time, Donald Stewart, an Anniston lawyer who had briefly been a United States senator, was contacted by a black resident of the west side of town, who asked him to come to the Mars Hill Baptist Church, located directly opposite the PCB factory. Accompanied by his congregants, the pastor informed him that Monsanto had offered to purchase the church from the community as well as a number of houses in the neighborhood. The lawyer understood that something was going on and agreed to represent the interests of the small church. “In fact,” said Baker, “the company was in the process of clearing the ground around itself to avoid having to compensate property owners.” Baker thought he knew why Monsanto was doing this, explaining that “it sensed that sooner or later pollution would come out into the open.”

In any event, people started to talk in Anniston. The former union organizer from New York set up a first meeting in the funeral parlor of Russell “Tombstone” Williams, Jeffrey’s uncle, which fifty people attended. They spoke late into the night of the deaths and illnesses that were devastating families (including those affecting young children), repeated miscarriages, and learning-related problems for the younger children. From this meeting came the idea of setting up an organization called Community against Pollution, presided over by Baker.

In the meantime, the Mars Hill Church affair had progressed: Monsanto offered a settlement, putting a million dollars on the table. During a meeting with the small Baptist community, Stewart found out that Monsanto’s offer to buy several of its members’ houses was contingent upon them promising never to take the company to court. The lawyer understood that Monsanto was hiding something big, and he suggested that they file a class action suit. Baker’s committee was asked to recruit the plaintiffs, with the maximum number set by Stewart at 3,500.

Stewart had caught a whiff of the case of his life, but he also knew that it was likely to be long and costly. To deal with legal costs, he decided to contact the New York firm Kasowitz, Benson, Torres, and Friedman, famous for its litigation against the tobacco industry. The joint adventure would last more than seven years and would involve an investment of $15 million, with lawyers’ fees sometimes running as high as $500,000 per month. The first stage consisted of organizing blood tests and fatty tissue analyses of the 3,500 plaintiffs, to measure their PCB levels. These tests, which could only be conducted by specialized laboratories, cost about $1,000 each.

While the complaint was being prepared under the title Abernathy v. Monsanto , Stewart moved heaven and earth to get his hands on company documents proving that it had known of the toxicity of PCBs. He knew that without this incriminating evidence, the fight would be hard to win, because the company could always offer the defense of ignorance. Intuitively, he was convinced that a multinational full of scientists would operate in a very bureaucratic fashion, with a hierarchy that controlled everything through a very sophisticated document system; the slightest event or decision, he thought, had to have left written traces. He minutely scrutinized the depositions of Monsanto representatives, and he came across a pearl: according to a company lawyer, a “mountain of documents”—500,000 pages that had disappeared from the St. Louis offices—had been deposited in the library of a New York law firm that represented Monsanto.

Stewart asked to consult them, but he was told that the documents were inaccessible because they were protected by the work product doctrine, which allows attorneys to keep documents secret before a trial in order to avoid providing ammunition for the opposing party. Stewart turned to Judge Joel Laird of the Calhoun County court, who was handling Abernathy v. Monsanto: in a crucial decision, the judge ordered Monsanto to open up its internal archives.

Monsanto Knew, and Said Nothing

The “mountain of documents” is now accessible on the Web site of the Environmental Working Group, an NGO dedicated to environmental protection and headed by Ken Cook, who met with me in his Washington office in July 2006.³ Before meeting with him, I spent many nights combing through this mass of memoranda, letters, and reports drafted over decades by Monsanto employees with truly Kafkaesque precision and coldness.

Indeed, there is something I still have trouble understanding: how could people knowingly run the risk of poisoning their customers and the environment and not stop to think that they themselves or their children might be the victims of, to put it mildly, their negligence? I am not speaking of ethics or morality, abstract concepts foreign to the logic of capitalism, but merely of the survival instinct: was it lacking in the managers of Monsanto?

“A company like Monsanto is a world of its own,” Cook told me, admitting that he had been plagued by the same questions. “The pursuit of profit at any price anesthetizes people devoted to a single purpose: making money.” He showed me a document that summed up this way of operating. Entitled “Pollution Letter,” it was dated February 16, 1970. Drafted by N.Y. Johnson, who worked in the St. Louis office, this internal document was addressed to the company’s marketing staff to explain to them how to answer their customers who had learned of the first public disclosures of the potential dangers of PCBs: “Attached is a list of questions and answers which may be asked of you by customers receiving our Aroclor-PCB letter. You can give verbal answers; no answers should be given in writing.... We can’t afford to lose one dollar of business.”

What is absolutely breathtaking is that Monsanto knew that PCBs presented a serious health risk as early as 1937. But the company carried on regardless until the products were finally banned in 1977, the date when its W.G. Krummrich plant in Sauget, Illinois (an eastern suburb of St. Louis, the site of Monsanto’s second P...