The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of the World's Food Supply by Marie-Monique Robin

Author:Marie-Monique Robin [Robin, Marie-Monique]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Biotechnology, Environmental Science, Social Science, Agriculture & Food
ISBN: 9781595585363
Google: 1g4ciqBJgFgC
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2013-12-12T13:00:00+00:00

The New Monsanto Will Save the World

Right after becoming CEO of Monsanto in April 1995, Shapiro launched the great “cultural revolution” that was intended to move the old chemical company into the era of “life sciences.” This new concept, based on the application of molecular biology to agriculture and health, was officially presented at a Global Forum the “guru” organized in June 1995 in Chicago. Five hundred employees from all company divisions were invited to discover his new policy in a convivial atmosphere that contrasted with the company’s legendary rigidity. Encouraging the participants to call him Bob, the “Renaissance man” in shirtsleeves moved the audience to tears when he spoke of the shame that some employees felt in saying what company they worked for.31 This time was past, because the “new Monsanto” was going to “save the world.” Armed with the new slogan, “Food, Health, Hope,” Shapiro electrified his troops by talking of plants producing biodegradable plastics, corn supplying antibodies against cancer, canola or soybean oil protecting against cardiovascular disease. Witnesses have told of how an employee, Rebecca Tominack, excited by his speech, went up to the CEO and said, “I’m with you,” took her name tag off, and put it on Shapiro in a gesture of allegiance repeated by a hundred other employees.

“I was really very impressed by Robert Shapiro’s visionary speech, which made us want to work to make the world better,” I was told by Kirk Azevedo, a Monsanto employee from 1996 to 1998, whom I met on October 14, 2006, in a small town on the West Coast where he was working as a chiropractor. Trained as a chemist, he had been contacted by a headhunter and resigned from Abbott Laboratories, where he had been in charge of testing new pesticides, to join what he then considered to be the “enterprise of the future.” His job was to promote two varieties of transgenic cotton that Monsanto was about to launch on the market to seed dealers and California farmers: a Roundup Ready cotton and a Bt cotton, genetically manipulated to produce an insecticidal lectin (like Arpad Pusztai’s transgenic potatoes) because of the insertion of a gene taken from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis.

“I was really very enthusiastic,” Azevedo told me. “I did think that these two GMOs would bring about a reduction in the use of herbicides and insecticides. But the first dissonant note came three months after I was hired. I’d been invited to St. Louis to visit headquarters and participate in a training program for new hires. At one point, when I was speaking fervently in favor of biotechnology that would make it possible to reduce pollution and hunger in the world, a Monsanto vice president took me aside and said to me: ‘What Robert Shapiro says is one thing, but what counts for us is making money. He talks to the public, but we don’t even understand what he’s talking about.’ ”

“Who was it?”

“I’d rather not identify him,” Azevedo said hesitantly. “In any event, at the time I thought that he must be an exception.

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