Scenes from a Poisoning
The Unholy History of Monsanto
The Unholy History of Monsanto
In the 60th year of Rachel Carson’s seminal work, “Silent Spring”, Scenes from a Poisoning tells the story of Monsanto from earliest origins in small town Alabama, to the development of its best-selling herbicide, Roundup. By a surreal thread of the actual and the imagined, including environmental pioneer, Rachel Carson, Californian school groundsman Dewayne Lee Johnson, and the Monsanto family themselves, the play leads us on a journey through the questions and consequences of Modern Society’s addiction to agro chemicals.
Monsanto and Roundup -
Background to the play
In 1970, agricultural giant Monsanto developed the chemical glyphosate as a potent herbicide, which they subsequently marketed as Roundup Weed Killer. By 2007, it had become the most used herbicide in the United States. Today, an estimated 1.4 billion pounds of Roundup are used in more than 160 countries each year.
Glyphosate came off patent in 2000, meaning that Monsanto no longer had the exclusive right to produce it, opening up the market to international, and in particular, Chinese manufacturers. However, Monsanto had another trick up its sleeve, in the shape of its ‘GMO’, or genetic modification technology, specifically designed to confer resistance in seeds against Roundup. This gave the immediate advantage to farmers of being able to spray their land indiscriminately and without tilling, on the basis that only GMO crops will could survive a deluge of glyphosate from a sprayer. Such crops are sold as seeds to farmers, who have to undertake never to ‘save’ or ‘clean’ them afterwards, as farmers in the past have always done, so keeping the seeds from one year’s crop, to the next. GMO seeds must be repurchased anew each year, since they remain the intellectual property of Monsanto, however much they may wander into neighbouring farmland. Indeed any farmer whose own saved seeds have become accidentally contaminated by neighbouring GMOs, is legally liable for this inadvertent breach of Monsanto’s IP, as witnessed in the case of Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, successfully sued by the company in 1998 after their GMO was found in one of his canola crops.
In this way, Monsanto’s pioneering of GMOs has given extra life to its best selling Roundup, way beyond the patent expiry of glyphosate itself. From the first development of GMO soy in the late 1990s, GMOs could now be sold as part of a double package of seeds plus spray. This has proved a winning combination, not just in the US where GMOs account for 90% of corn, soybean, cotton, canola and sugar beet, but also in the developing world, including India, the world’s largest producer of cotton. In this case, the cost to peasant farmers of the new generation GMO seeds, now impregnated with the pesticide Bt, to kill bollworm, has led to continued controversy among agronomists, as well as an alarming rise in suicides.
The Failure of GMO Cotton In India - Resilience
The questions around Roundup and its active ingredient, Glyphosate, are several, and in my play I set out to explore them, along with the rather checkered history of Monsanto. Apart from the issue of agriculture’s increasing dependency on agro-chemicals, there is the further issue around resistance, where farmers find themselves locked in a losing war against invasive and increasingly resistant weeds such as pigweed.
This article from Newsweek gives an account of this.
Glyphosate Now the Most-Used Agricultural Chemical Ever (newsweek.com)
As the use of herbicides (and pesticides) to counteract resistance becomes ever more intensive, the effect on the soil itself is becoming an increasing concern, as highlighted recently by the Netflix film ‘Kiss the Ground’. In the battle against climate change, the health of the soil has moved centre-stage, not just as a necessary condition of the food we eat, but as a way of sequestrating the carbon that is beginning to cook us.
Kiss the Ground Film Trailer (2020) - Bing video
In a bleak echo of the United Nations, Michael Gove in 2016 said that the UK was 30 to 40 years away from “the fundamental eradication of soil fertility” on account of the intensive use of chemicals in agriculture. Yet that comment in the context of Brexit, and the possible choices that the UK would need to make as it strives to deliver on the agenda ‘Global Britain’, may look increasingly hollow, if the UK decides this year to extend the use of glyphosate for its own food system, and indeed, clinch food deals with international partners like the US, where agro-chemicals have long swayed government policy. Incidentally, while GMOs are not currently permitted in the UK, due to widespread public disquiet around so called ‘Frankenstein Foods’, glyphosate itself is permitted. Indeed much of the wheat grown in the UK is sprayed with it, not as a herbicide but as a desiccant, to dry the crop before harvesting. And as environmental journalist Anna Turns has pointed out, this passes right through to the flour we consume in our bread. In tests in Germany, glyphosate was widely found in human urine, from where it can readily cross the placental barrier into the developing human fetus.
Glyphosate Found in Human Urine - Cornucopia Institute
Which leads me onto the final, most impactful area of concern: the impact of Roundup/Glyphosate on human health. In my play, I draw attention to the landmark trial of Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, a Californian school groundsman, who in 2018, successfully sued Monsanto for one third of a billion dollars in damages, having proven to the satisfaction of the court, that the company had not warned sufficiently about the risks of using Roundup. Johnson had developed Non-Hodgkins lymphoma following two spillages of the chemical in the course of his work, applying Roundup to school playing fields. But it’s highly instructive to note that Johnson has never been paid a cent of the money awarded. Monsanto, now owned by the German corporate, Bayer, naturally fears the queue of further litigation, should it effectively concede that Roundup is indeed carcinogenic. And there is a growing pile of evidence to suggest that it is: such as a determination by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that glyphosate was “a probable human carcinogen”. And in 2019, a meta-study by the University of Washington drawing on other studies of the most highly exposed groups of people (including presumably, the likes of Lee Johnson himself) found that glyphosate increased the risk of cancers, including Non-Hodgins Lymphoma, by 40%.
Exposure to chemical in weedkiller increases risk for cancer | Population Health (washington.edu)
An earlier, controversial study published in 2012 by French professor Gilles-Éric Séralini showed that rats fed on a Roundup-Ready GMO maize developed tumors, along with kidney and liver damage. Unusually, the article was retracted following publication, but not on the basis of ‘unsound’ science, but rather because the study was held to be ‘inconclusive’, requiring further research, to establish beyond doubt the rather alarming indication of carnogenicity. Many would agree that further such research was indeed needed, but curiously, Monsanto has never conducted experiments on Roundup itself, only the underlying chemical, Glyphosate, which is tested only on rats of up to 3 months. Rats that are allowed to live beyond that age, such as those in Seralini’s experiment, being considered to have too much latent risk of cancer for the data to be reliable.
Moreover, Monsanto continues to argue that Roundup is safe when used in accordance with instructions, pointing to a slew of their own research. Equally, critics of Monsanto and the US Environmental Protection Agency, which controls the use of glyphosate, point to an overly cosy relationship between corporate money and public policy, and even some of the scientists responsible for publishing papers on the subject. At the extreme end of there appeared to be a phenomenon of near fraudulent ‘ghostwriting’, unearthed during Johnson’s trial. Essentially, Johnson’s lawyers obtained freedom of information requests to view internal memos in which Monsanto scientists effectively wrote the content that then appeared in published articles by supposedly independent scientists. This revelation was a further shock to the jury in the case, and no doubt influenced their decision. However, Monsanto would continue to dispute that any such jury would be inadequate to the task of judging what should essentially be a scientific question: is Roundup carcinogenic? And if so, to what degree of risk?
A Short History of Glyphosate - Sustainable Pulse