Monsanto - Agrobusiness Gone Bad?

At the bottom of this post I’ve linked an interesting documentary on the huge multinational company Monsanto. Chances are that you’ve heard of them and if not, you’ve at least heard of one of their prime products, “RoundUp.” It’s easy to think that Monsanto is an evil company and this movie will enforce that idea. Of course there are defenders of Monsanto, but whether by design and intent or not, it has to be said that Monsanto (and other companies like it) are purely driven by profits and money as opposed to making a positive impact on the world. This enables individual employees to make small decisions that when grouped as a whole, can have disastrous effects. With Monsanto specifically, it is very difficult to believe that any of the major decision makers actually care about the well-being of people or the planet. I’m sure there are numerous researchers and scientists that work for Monsanto whom believe they are working for the betterment of our world, but it also seems that whatever benefits that exist are swallowed by much less altruistic mechanisms.

There have been two somewhat well-known cases with Monsanto in Canada. There is Percy Schmeiser’s battle with Monsanto and the spread of Monsanto seeds on to his land, and there was Health Canada’s rejection of rBGH and Monsanto’s attempted bribery to get the drug approved in Canada. Excerpted The Ottawa Citizen, Fri 23 Oct 1998, Page A1, by James Baxter:

Scientists `pressured’ to approve cattle drug: Health Canada researchers accuse firm of bribery in bid to OK `questionable’ product

Veterinary scientists from Health Canada’s Human Safety Division testified yesterday that they are being pressured to approve a controversial hormone intended to boost milk production in dairy cattle. ``We have been pressured and coerced to pass drugs of questionable safety, including rBST,’’ Dr. Shiv Chopra told the Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.

The senators sat dumbfounded as Dr. Margaret Haydon told of being in a meeting when officials from Monsanto Inc., the drug’s manufacturer, made an offer of between $1 million and $2 million to the scientists from Health Canada – an offer that she told the senators could only have been interpreted as a bribe.

Dr. Haydon also recounted how notes and files critical of scientific data provided by Monsanto were stolen from a locked filing cabinet in her office. Dr. Chopra said that all files pertaining to rBST are now controlled by one senior bureaucrat and can only be viewed by gaining permission. ``I can’t even believe I’m in Canada when I hear that your files have been stolen and that all the files are now in the hands of one person,’’ said Senator Eugene Whelan. ``What the hell kind of a system have we got here?''