War, globalization and the demise of Monsanto.

• Author: Tokar, Brian
• Position: Biodevastation 7

As people were arriving from across the country in May 2003 for the Biodevastation 7 events countering the World Agricultural Forum, the local St. Louis press revealed some interesting news. Since 1998, the case of Canadian wheat and canola farmer Percy Schmeiser has drawn attention to Monsanto's practice of suing hundreds of farmers throughout North America for allegedly "pirating" the company's genetically engineered (GE) seed varieties.

Many, like Schmeiser, swore they had never planted GE seeds on their farms, and that if Monsanto's "gene police" detected DNA from the company's patented varieties, it was a result of contamination from neighboring farms. Unlike Schmeiser, whose case will be heard this coming winter by the Canadian Supreme Court, the vast majority of these farmers settled out of court to avoid the expense of a protracted legal battle.

What was revealed in St. Louis this spring was that Monsanto has an entire department, with a staff of 75 people and an annual budget of $10 million a year, devoted exclusively to suing farmers. This was a surprising revelation, especially for the daily press in Monsanto's home town. It followed on the heels of the very first instance of a farmer being jailed in a Monsanto "intellectual property" case, after allegedly having saved seed and then burned the evidence. It underscored the company's tremendous vulnerability in the present economic and political climate. In the 1980s and '90s, Monsanto staked its future on genetic engineering and, with the continuing worldwide rejection of this technology, the company has had to resort to increasingly desperate and invasive measures to survive.

The Monsanto company is much smaller and far more specialized today than it was in its heyday. Much of the company's value to shareholders was stripped away in the late 1990s, first as its industrial chemical divisions were spun off as a new company, known as Solutia, in 1997.

Solutia also took with it Monsanto's legal liability, resulting from decades of toxic chemical production, from PCBs to organochloride weed killers, including the notorious Agent Orange.

Then, at the end of 1999, Monsanto announced its merger with the pharmaceutical giant, Pharmacia (formerly Pharmacia and Upjohn).

Pharmacia absorbed Monsanto's highly profitable drugs division, R.D. Searle (Donald Rumsfeld was the president of Searle in the 1970s), and created a new "Monsanto" as its agrochemical and agbiotech subsidiary.

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