Almost every day articles appear in the media claiming we must embrace GM foods if we are to feed the world, with the emphasis on solving the food and climate crises via hardier, cheaper, more sustainable and abundant GM crops. In India, we have a brand of scientists who have been holding onto this view and telling about the ‘glory’ of this path, and we seem to be veering round to this view. In short, the view now is, salvation of Indian agriculture is through a ‘gene revolution’, now that the ‘green revolution’ seems to have fallen on its face, with many environmental hazards.
The ‘feed-the-world’ rhetoric emerged early on in Monsanto’s development of its biotech sector. During the 1960s and ’70s, Monsanto recognised that they needed to radically transform a company increasingly threatened by the emergence of the environmental movement and by tougher environmental regulation: This was the result of the fallout from the high chemical input driven technology of the so-called green revolution, which in its wake created a host of environmental related problems all due to unbridled use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Monsanto knew then that a gene revolution had to replace a green revolution.
Monsanto had acquired a particularly unenviable reputation in this regard, as a major producer of both dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — both persistent environmental pollutants posing serious risks to the environment and human health. Lawsuits and environmental clean-up costs began to cut into Monsanto’s bottom line, but more seriously there was a real fear that a serious lapse could potentially bankrupt the company.
Senior executives were becoming convinced that Monsanto’s long-term viability required it to take a new direction, Monsanto launched a herbicide called Roundup (glyphosate) which became a runaway commercial success. Today, glyphosate remains the world’s biggest herbicide by volume of sales. By 1990 with the help of Roundup, the agriculture division of Monsanto was significantly outperforming the chemicals division. Monsanto’s management knew that the last of the patents protecting Roundup in the US, its biggest market, would expire in 2000. The company needed a strategy to negotiate this hurdle and prolong the useful life of its ‘cash cow’.
This led to the chemicals division being sold off in September 1997. The spin-off indicated a major departure for Monsanto, since the chemicals division could be regarded as the historical core of the company. But the increasing importance of agriculture became very clear, primarily because the green revolution had run out of steam and scientists were looking for an alternative. Monsanto’s transformation into a ‘life science’ company, with an agriculture strategy increasingly focusing on biotechnology, was by no means smooth or seamless. Disagreements within the company, between the formerly unchallenged chemicals camp and the supporters of the emerging biotechnology, were a source of significant tension and conflict over a number of years.
In the early 1980s, Monsanto scientists had noticed that certain bacteria inhabiting the waste outflows from the company’s glyphosate manufacturing plants were impervious to the chemical. Ernie Jaworski and some of his colleagues reasoned that they could dramatically enhance Roundup’s commercial value if they could introduce the genes responsible for this resistance to glyphosate into crop plants. Farmers would then be able to spray Roundup onto their fields even during the growing season, killing unwanted weeds without harming the crop. This would significantly expand the market for Roundup and, more importantly, help Monsanto to negotiate the expiry of its glyphosate patents. With glyphosate-tolerant GM crops, Monsanto would be able to preserve its dominant share of the glyphosate market through a marketing strategy that would couple proprietary ‘Roundup Ready’ seeds, priced at a level high enough to recoup the company’s substantial investment in R&D. Thus was born the idea of the ‘Bt crops’, because, the bacteria is the ubiquitous Bacillus thuringiensis, known popularly as Bt. The fact that Monsanto’s strength lay primarily in herbicides rather than insecticides meant that GM insect-resistance technology opened up a new market segment without conflicting with or undermining any significant ‘pesticide interest’ within the company.
Monsanto’s managers embarked on a concerted PR campaign to depict GM crops — and Monsanto as their chief provider — as an essential tool for addressing critically important future challenges in hunger, environmental sustainability and international development. It is important to note that these altruistic goals were not Monsanto’s own. Monsanto’s leaders’ target was to ensure that their company, and its technologies, would be perceived as indispensable steppingstones to meet those challenges. They sought to convince employees and investors that the company would be a vital player in future markets for agricultural technology, and so mobilised their support for the emerging corporate strategy.
In PR terms this framing of GM crops as a technology for the poor proved a highly alluring one. It also helped Monsanto, once it became clear that European and Scandinavian markets were largely closed to GM crops, to target developing-country markets. In addition, developing country farmers became key symbolic stakeholders in debates about GM crops, and in assisting the branding of the technology. India, thus, became the prime target for Monsanto’s grand strategy, or a very willing platform for its ware. The debate on Bt brinjal, which shook the nation, is ample testimony to this truth.
But the gap remains between the storyline of GM crops as a pro-poor technology and the types of crops and traits that have actually been commercialised, ie, the crops that Monsanto has marketed to developing-world farmers have been those that it developed for its existing customer base — large-scale commercial farmers primarily in the industrialised world (Bt cotton is a classic example).
Although there was and remains a logical disconnect between the types of GM crops that have actually been commercialised by Monsanto, on one hand, and the company’s rhetoric surrounding GM crops as a technology for the poor, on the other, the production of both the technology and the rhetoric can be seen to have been produced in tandem, driven and shaped by the mixture of commercial, institutional and technical considerations. This is how the hyping of GM crops as a solution to hunger and poverty can truly be described as ‘Made by Monsanto’.
About the author:
K P Prabhakaran Nair is an agricultural scientist