Monsanto's Cozy Government Relations

In January 2004, after FDA inspectors broke their silence by declaring having found unacceptable levels of contamination in rBGH, Monsanto finally announced it would reduce the supply of Posilac by 50%. Many thought Monsanto would quietly discontinue production of the dangerous hormone. Not easily deterred by anything, least of all evidence of danger to human health, Monsanto announced a year later that they planned to increase the supply of Posilac again, initially to 70% of its peak level. They had come under enormous pressure not only from citizens concerned about health consequences, but also from farmers who realized that the 30% rise in national milk output from dairy herds had only served to create an even larger glut of unsold milk in a nation already in surplus. It had also triggered collapsing milk prices.

By then, Monsanto had moved on to corner the global market in seeds for the most important staples in the human and animal diets.

Monsanto's Cozy Government Relations The relation between the US Government and giant GMO seed producers such as Monsanto, DuPont or Dow AgriSciences was not accidental. The Government encouraged development of unregulated GMO crops as a strategic priority, as noted, since the early years of the Reagan Presidency, long before it was at all clear whether such engineering of nature was at all desirable. It was one thing for a government to support long-term laboratory research through science grants. It was quite another thing to open the market's floodgates to untested, risky new procedures which had the potential to affect the basic food supply of the country and of the entire planet.

Washington was becoming infamous for what some called "revolving door government." The latter referred to the common practice of major corporations to hire senior government officials directly from government service into top corporate posts where their government influence and connections would benefit the company. Similarly, the practice worked in reverse,where top corporate persons got picked for prime government jobs where they could promote the corporation's private agenda inside the government.

Few companies were more masterful at this game of the revolving door than Monsanto. That corporation was a major contributor to both Republican and Democratic national candidates. During the controversy over the labeling of Monsanto's rBGH milk, the 12 members of the Dairy Subcommittee of the House Agricultural committee were no strangers to Monsanto's campaign largesse. They had won a total of $711,000 in Monsanto campaign finance. It is not possible to prove that this fact influenced the Committee's decision. However, it evidently did not hurt Monsanto's case. The Committee killed the proposed labeling law.

Monsanto had a special skill in placing its key people in relevant Government posts. George W. Bush's Agriculture Secretary, Ann Veneman, came to Washington in 2001 from a job as director of Calgene, a biotech cOll).pany which became a Monsanto subsidiary. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been CEO of Monsanto subsidiary G.D. Searle, producer of GMO-based artificial sweetener and carcinogen, Aspartame. Rumsfeld had also been Chairman of California biotech company Gilead Science, which held the patent on Tamiflu.

Former US Trade Representative and lawyer to Bill Clinton, Mickey Kantor, left Government to take a seat on the Board of Monsanto. Monsanto also had on its board William D. Ruckelshaus, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Michael A. Friedman, M.D., senior vice-president of clinical affairs for Monsanto's pharmaceutical division G.D. Searle, was once acting director of the FDA. Marcia Hale, Monsanto's director of UK government affairs, was formerly an assistant to President Clinton for intergovernmental affairs. Linda J. Fisher, Monsanto vice president of public affairs, was once administrator of EPA's Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances. Monsanto legal adviser, Jack Watson, was chief of White House staff in the Carter Administration.

This pattern of revolving door conflicts of interest between top officials of government agencies responsible for food policy and their corporate sponsors, such as Monsanto, Dow, DuPont and the

other agribusiness and biotech players, had been in place at least . since the time of the Reagan Administration.

Unmistakable was the conclusion that the US Government was an essential catalyst for the "gene revolution" of GMO-altered food crops and their proliferation worldwide. In this they acted in concert with the corporate giant agrichemical firms such as Monsanto, Dow and DuPont, as if public and private interests were the same.

What could explain the extraordinary backing of no fewer than four US Presidents for the GMO agrichemical industry? What could explain why Bill Clinton put the very authority of his office on the line to demand that the British Prime Minister silence a critic of the genetic manipulation of plants?

What could explain the extraordinary ability of firms such as Monsanto to get their way among government officials regardless of overwhelming evidence of potential health damage to the population? What could cause four Presidents to expose the health of their nation and the entire world to untold risks, against the warnings of countless scientists and even government officials responsible for public health regulation?

The answer to those questions was therefor anyone willing to look. But it was an answer so shocking that few dared to examine it. A press conference in 1999 gave a hint as to the powerful interests standing behind public players. On October 4, 1999, Gordon Conway, the President of an influential private tax-exempt foundation based in New York, applauded the announcement by Monsanto that it agreed not to "commercialize" its controversial "terminator" seed genetics.21

The organization was the Rockefeller Foundation. It was no coincidence that the Rockefeller Foundation and Monsanto were talking about a global strategy for the genetic engineering of plants. The genetic revolution had been a Rockefeller Foundation project from the very beginning. Not only, as Conway reminded in his public remarks, had the Rockefeller Foundation spent more than $100 million for the advance of the GMO revolution. That project was part of a global strategy that had been in development for decades.

At the 1999 press conference, Conway declared, "The Rockefeller Foundation supports the Monsanto Company's decision not to commercialize sterile seed technologies, such as the one dubbed "the Terminator." He added, "We welcome this move as a first step toward ensuring that the fruits of plant biotechnology are made available to poor farmers in the developing world."22

Conway had gone to Monsanto some months before to warn the senior executives that they risked jeopardizing the entire GMO revolution and that a tactical retreat was needed to keep the broad project on track. 23

Terminator seeds had been designed to prevent the germination of harvested grains as seeds, and had engendered strong opposition in many quarters. This technology would block farmers in developing from saving their own seed for re-sowing.24

The involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in Monsanto's corporate policy was not by chance. It was part of a far more ambitious plan rooted in the crisis of the post-war dollar order which began in the era of the Vietnam War.

This technology would prevent farmers in developing countries from saving their own seed for re-sowing.25

The involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in Monsanto's corporate policy was not by chance. It was part of a far more ambitious plan which began in the era of the Vietnam War. The GMO project required that scientists should serve their agribusiness patrons. The development of a research project in Scotland was intended to send a strong signal to biologists around the world as to what happens when the results of GMO research contradict the interests of Monsanto and other GMO producers.

Notes

1. Quoted in Kurt Eichenwald et aI., "Biotechnology Food: From the Lab to a Debacle", New York Times, 25 January 2001. 2. Ibid.

3. Dr. Henry Miller, quoted in Eichenwald et ai., op.cit. Miller, who was responsible for biotechnology issues at the Food and Drug Administration from 1979 to 1994, told the New York Times: "In this area, the u.s. government agencies have done exactly what big agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do." 4. Eichenwald, op. cit. 5. Claire Hope Cummings, Are GMOs Being Regulated or Not?, 11 June 2003, in http://www.cropchoice.com/leadstry66t7.htrnl?recid= 1736. Cummings was a senior US Department of Agriculture official at the time. 6. Jeffrey Smith, Got Hormones-The Controversial Milk Drug that Refuses to Die, December 2004, http://www.responsibletechnology.org. 7. Robert P. Heaney, et ai., "Dietary Changes. Favorably Affect Bone Remodeling in Older Adults;' Journal of the American Dietetic Association, vol. 99, no. 10, October 1999, pp. 1228-1233. Also, "Milk, Pregnancy, Cancer May Be Tied", 'Reuters, 10 September 2002. 8. Dr. Robert Collier, quoted in Jane Akre & Steve Wilson, from text of banned FOX TV documentary, "The Mystery in Your Milk;' in http://www.mercola.coml 2001lmay/26/mystery _milk.htm. 9. Jennifer Ferrara, "Revolving Doors: Monsanto and the Regulators", The Ecologist, September/October 1998. 10. Michael R. Taylor, "Biography", in Food Safety Research Consortium, Steering Committee, in http://www.rff.orglfsrc/bios.htm. 11. Robert .cohen, FDA Regulation Meant to Promote rBGH Milk Resulted in Antibiotic Resistance,S May 2000, in http://www.psrast.orglbghsalmonella.htm. 12. James Maryansky, quoted in Julian Borger, "Why Americans are Happy to Swallow the GM Food Experiment", The Guardian, 20 February 1999. 13. Steven M. Druker, Bio-deception: How the Food and Drug Administration is Misrepresenting the Facts about Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods ... , http://www.psrast.orglfdaiawstmore.htm. Druker drafted the statement in May 1998 as part of a lawsuit against the FDA to demand mandatory testing and labeling of GMO food, both of which are not, as of 2007, done in the United States. 14. In his book, Milk, the Deadly Poison, Argus Press, Inglewood Cliffs, NJ, 1997, pp. 67-96, Robert Cohen describes his efforts to obtain a copy of this unpublished study from the FDA. Cohen filed a Freedom of Information Act request

for the study and it was denied; he appealed within the FDA and lost. He then filed a lawsuit in federal court and again, lost. The FDA and the courts agree that the public should never learn what happened to those rats fed BGH because it would "irreparably harm" Monsanto. Based on the scant information that has been published about the weight gains of the rats during the 90-day study, Cohen believes that many or perhaps all of the rats got cancer. 15. In November 1994, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) program The Fifth Estate televised a one-hour documentary reporting that Monsanto had tried to bribe Health Canada (Canada's equivalent to the FDA), offering to pay as much as two million dollars under the condition that Monsanto receive approval to market rBGH in Canada without being required to submit data from any further studies or trials. According to journalists who worked on the documentary, Monsanto tried to kill the show, arguing through its lawyers that CBC had maliciously rigged the interviews. But CBC stuck to its guns and ran the program. 16. PRNewswire, Monsanto's Genetically Modified Milk Ruled Unsafe by the United Nations, Chicago, 18 August 1999. John R. Luoma, "Pandora's Pantry" , Mother Jones, January/February 2000. 17. Robert Cohen, FDA Regulation Meant to Promote rBGH Milk Resulted in AntibioticResistance, http://www.psrast.org, 5 May 2000. 18. Ibid. 19. RBGH Bulletin, Hidden Danger in Your Milk?: Jury Verdict Overturned on Legal Technicality, http://www.£oxrBGHsuit.com. 2000. 20. The Agribusiness Examiner, Kraft "Cheese?": Adulterated Food?-FDA: Don't Ask! Don't Tellf, 7 May 2001, http://www.mindfully.org/Food/Kraft-CheeseAdulterated:htm.

21. Dr. Gordon Conway in a speech to Directors of Monsanto, "The Rockefeller Foundation and Plant Biotechnology", 24 June 1999, in http://www.biotechinfo.net/gordon_conway.html. 22. Rockefeller Foundation, Press Release, "Terminator' Seed Sterility Technology Dropped, 4 October 1999, in http://www.rockfound.org!. 23. John Vidal, "How Monsanto's Mind was Changed", The Guardian, 9 October 1999. 24. Rockefeller Foundation, "Terminator" Seed Technology Dropped, Press Release, New York, 4 October 1999.