by Marie-Monique Robin
I have said on this site previously that I don’t do politics and I don’t do peoples motivations – at least as much as possible. I have good reasons for this, for one the science is enough of a topic unto itself. Secondly, I am not a politician or a psychiatrist. Thirdly, let’s suppose I spend hours and hours of time and finally conclude two things 1) take 50 mg of A and 250 mg of B to be happy and healthy and 2) So and So is a jerk. What has 2) really added, especially on the happy and healthy front?
Then again there are times when the “so-and-sos” really impact on health in a way that one can’t so easily avoid.
In such cases, with recent reading I have found new respect for investigative journalists, who do such a great job with the wither dos and why fors. My first introduction to this was Mr. Chris Bryson’s excellent tome “The Fluoride Deception.” If you have read this yourself or realize how highly I think of this work, then you can see what a great compliment I give by saying that Marie-Monique Robin’s “The World According to Monsanto” is in the same realm, both as regards the quality of writing and as regards the dramatic importance of what she discusses.
Also like the Fluoride Deception, The World According to Monsanto is deeply and viscerally disturbing, while if anything the potential for harm being discussed is far greater than that even from water fluoridation. While I have an extensive background looking at the genomics of rare diseases, I suspected the topic of GM foods would be incredibly broad, even overwhelming to get a handle on. Instead, I came to realize from this book, that due to specific policies, the exact opposite is true. There is almost nothing at all that has been peer-reviewed published on the topic and that is the result of very specific regulatory decisions taken concerning GM foods. I will say again, there are hardly a handful of articles in the peer-reviewed literature looking at the health effects of any given GM food, let alone the incredibly complex issue in general.
As noted in the book, this is due to a curious decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators to declare a-priori, and over the objection of FDA scientists, that GM foods are “substantially equivalent” to non genetically modified foods and thus can be released without any oversight, studies or regulation. The terrible absurdity of this position (and why there are no studies on the health effects of these new organisms) takes a moment to sink in and requires departure from the book review for a brief moment.
Prior to Oswald Avery’s experiments in the 1940s proteins were thought to be the molecule of genetic inheritance. Avery showed this wasn’t the case by inoculating mice with a lethal and a non-lethal strain of bacterium. When mice were inoculated with dead lethal bacterium and live non-lethal bacterium, the non-lethal bacterium somehow became lethal and killed the mice. Avery showed that the lethal “transforming principal” from the dead bacterium was in fact DNA paving the way for the whole science of genomics.
The key word in all this is “lethal.” As Watson and Crick showed us, DNA is the blueprint of life. One can now, through genetic engineering add any given gene to a food. One could add the gene for botulinum toxin, or Avery’s lethal transforming factor; one could add the sequence for a bacterial pesticide toxin – oh wait, that is what is being done.
The reason, again as brought out in the book, why this is being done goes back to an equally preposterous position and to money. You see it is the position of the U.S. government, as it also attempts to “harmonize” with other governments around the world, that genes are patentable. This is “patently” absurd. Genes are products of nature, one could just as easily patent hydrogen. Nor does it acknowledge the poorly understood potentials and dangers of dealing with self-replicating organisms, not to mention the ethical problem of patenting the mechanism for inheritance in life. As Crystal Gayle sang, “Don’t it make my brown eyes blue.”
Still, having no regulation and being able to patent the food supply raises the possibility of both enormous profit and draconian control. The self-contradiction of being able to “patent” a novel food, which has already been declared as not needing to be regulated by the FDA as it is “substantially equivalent” to the un-modified food hasn’t apparently concerned any of the involved business interests. Well, so there is a real theoretical danger here, but how bad could things really be, who would exploit all this? Here the author does a great service in detailing the history, behavior and ongoing policies of the Monsanto company.
Monsanto got its start as a chemical company in St. Louis, Missouri. In part I of the book, “One of the Greatest Polluters in Industrial History”, Ms. Robin details an astonishing number of environmental tragedies that Monsanto either directly caused or has played a large role in. One of these is the widespread production of polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. These persistent organic pollutants (POPs) have devastated whole towns, led to massive litigation, against Monsanto and as the name implies are difficult to remove from the environment, increasing in concentration as one goes up the food chain. Indeed, a scientific paper caused some stir, years back, when researchers documented PCB contamination in the food supply within the Arctic circle. Another, persistent organic pollutant, is the well known, DDT, the subject of Rachael Carson’s book “Silent Spring“
Monsanto has always maintained close ties with the defense industry, being an important participant in the WW II Manhattan project to develop the atom bomb. However, where they really made their money in this area was with the production of the defoliant Agent Orange, which they supplied to the military throughout the Vietnam War. Again this product has led to the deaths, disability and/or congenital deformity of thousands of U.S. citizens and untold thousands of Vietnamese citizens. In chemical consumer products, Monsanto cut its teeth with the artificial sweetener saccharine and for a time was a major producer of aspartame.
In recent decades Monsanto has transitioned towards agricultural products and this remains its focus today. Monsanto has championed the use of chemical herbicides and much of its revenue stream is built around its RoundUp(Tm) brand herbicide. When Monsanto became aware of GM technology they refocused much of their company around it. So we have Monsanto to thank for recombinant bovine growth hormone in North America, a topic I hope to address on the blog and one which itself could be the subject of a whole book.
Far worse than the recombinant bovine growth hormone debacle has been Monsanto’s entrance into the realm of genetically modified seeds. As I said at the start of this review I expected this topic would be enormously complex. The genome is the whole blueprint of life, there must be all sorts of approaches to make foods more nutritious, drought resistant, tailored to certain soils and climates. Nope, Monsanto produces 90% of the GM foods in the world and they have two primary GM product approaches. One is a manipulation that makes plants resistant to their RoundUp(Tm) herbicide so they can sell more of it, the second is the insertion of gene for a bacterial pesticide, B. thuringiensis toxin. So we now have round-up ready corn, soybeans, cotton etc., and likewise Bt corn, soybeans and so forth. While there is lip service paid to things like vitamin A enhanced rice and the like, the truth of the matter is this manufacturer of Agent Orange views the genetic modification of the world’s food supply as entirely a commercial opportunity to exploit to enhance their market share and claim legal rights over the food supply.
How they were allowed to get away with this is a study in regulatory capture. Michael Taylor who served as a lawyer for Monsanto went to work for the FDA as the Deputy Commissioner for Policy. There he guided and signed off on the policy of “substantial equivalence” between GM and non GM foods, meaning no toxicity studies were needed for marketing and even no labeling required of GM foods for consumers. This is how companies, most notably Monsanto are able to modify the genetic blueprint of a food in any way, be it the addition of a gene for vitamin A, or rattlesnake venom, market the food as though it is unchanged from the natural food, yet use bogus patent law to claim ownership not merely of say a bushel of rice seeds, but of the whole abstract concept of a particular variant of modified rice. After getting the policy passed Mr. Taylor returned to Monsanto where he served as a vice president.
In part III of The World According to Monsanto the author explains just how ruthlessly and rapidly Monsanto pressed its advantage. Over whole countries and whole continents in the time frame of a couple decades crops have shifted from no GM, to 80, 90% and more GM. There are no published safety studies on these modified foods. The few people who have looked into it, such as highly respected plant expert Dr. Árpád Pusztai have reported very disturbing health findings in mice. Dr. Pusztai was soon sent unceremoniously packing, fired from his job of 36 years at the Rowett Research Institute for having the misfortune of publicizing valid but politically unpopular findings concerning the safety of GM foods.
While there is not time to go into it in this book review, I would just say that the process of inserting a gene into DNA is not single technology but a whole family of varied approaches, while genetic uptake is both unreliable and sloppy, or imprecise if you prefer. Even if one used the exact same approach with the exact same gene and plant a second time one would get a different product depending on where the gene gun (the most common technology for commercial plant genetic manipulation) happened to shoot the gene into the host genome on that particular attempt.
Upon reflection I am not certain if “terrifying” isn’t too strong a word to use (see The Armageddon Bug) when contemplating that these untested, self-propagating organisms have been released into the wild and now comprise a significant portion of the world’s food supply. We are conducting a massive, unmonitored experiment, with unknown consequences upon billions of people.
Ms. Robin describes the lengths to which Monsanto goes to ensure monopolistic, even feudal control over farmers. In North America a veritable army of private detectives is sent throughout farmland trying to spy if any farmers might be illegally harvesting and storing patented seeds from year to year, and ruthlessly prosecute them if any suspicions arise. In other countries whole ecosystems are wiped out to be replaced by monocultures of herbicide ridden land. Farmers are sold on the purported benefits of Monsanto’s GM products, less pesticides and herbicides, better harvests, only to find that after a few short years they are using more pesticide and herbicide have less yield and unhealthy plants in addition. However, because of the seed patents, the farmers contracts have often trapped them in money losing bondage to Monsanto. There has been a documented spike in suicides amongst Indian farmers who adopted GM seeds, with one of the most frequently seen forms being death by ingestion of the RoundUp(Tm) herbicide. In America, non GM farmers have had to band together to pool legal resources, amazingly enough to defend themselves from being charged as thieves when their crop lands are harmed by Monsanto’s patented GM seeds blowing onto their lands.
In summary, Monsanto has been an astonishingly destructive company, they are the primary financial impetus behind the whole global GM food campaign, their policies and influence pose a threat to the health and food supply of much of the world.
This brief review doesn’t begin to do justice to the excellent, detailed investigative work of Marie-Monique Robin, work for which she won the 2009 Rachel Carson award. It is an astonishing piece of investigative journalism on a vitally important topic that was desperately in need of some light. I can just say that she has done us all a great service by putting out this disturbing and authoritative book.
The World According to Monsanto has been translated into over a dozen languages and is available at Amazon. Ms. Robin has also directed a groundbreaking movie covering the same topic.
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