Monsanto Crises Mount — Why Has US Government Oversight Repeatedly Failed?

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Do We Really Understand Today’s Agriculture and Food?

When agriculture is mentioned, the image that springs to mind for many people is still the ancient picture of a farmer bent over, face to the yellow earth and back to the sky. Yet in reality, driven by technology and capital, the landscape of modern agriculture has already undergone a complete upheaval: herbicides, insecticides, genetic modification, digital agriculture … our food has long since made bold, far more aggressive strides into the world of new technologies.

To gain a deeper understanding of the systemic changes in food and agriculture over the past century, the American agricultural giant Monsanto serves as an excellent point of observation. From its rise in 1901 to its acquisition by the German multinational Bayer in 2016, Monsanto has been the most consequential participant in the transformation of the global food system. From food additives and chemical pesticides to agricultural seeds, its influence continues to shape our lives to this day.

● This year, Foodthink and many partners have hosted a series of The Seed Empire sharing sessions across the country, inviting scholars and practitioners to discuss their observations and actions in the food and agriculture sector. Recordings are available on Foodthink’s WeChat Channels.

This year, Sanlian Academic published The Seed Empire, a new title that, through extensive field research across the globe, traces the harrowing history of Monsanto’s expansion across commercial frontiers and reveals how its chemical products and genetically modified technologies have seeped into virtually every crevice of the global food supply.

In August 2024, Tencent News’s series Species on the Table, in partnership with Foodthink, Sanlian Academic, Yali, and the Peasant Seed Network, brought experts together to revisit the history of Monsanto’s rise and examine how capitalism has reshaped today’s food and agriculture system.

Why, as Monsanto repeatedly caused harm, did US government oversight always come so painfully late? Can scientific research that claims to be objective still be trusted today? And as ordinary people and consumers, what kind of regulation can truly protect us?

In these discussions, we may not find the simplest or most reassuring answers, but at the very least, every one of us can raise our own questions.

● This article has been adapted from a Tencent News live stream on 9 August. Scan the QR code to watch the replay.

I. The History of Monsanto’s Rise

Tian Le (founding editor of Foodthink, convener of the Beijing Organic Farmers Market): Zhang Jing works at Sanlian Academic Publishing, the academic imprint of the SDX Joint Publishing Company, and is the editor of The Seed Empire. Let us first ask her to tell us why Sanlian considered publishing a book like this, and what sort of company Monsanto is.

Zhang Jing (editor, Sanlian Academic Publishing): This book is a joint project between Sanlian and Yali. Sanlian has always engaged with contemporary intellectual life through the construction of scholarship and thought, and we hope to use the book as a medium to reveal the complex dimensions of contemporary issues, rather than simply taking sides or offering surface-level critiques of phenomena. Food and agriculture are one of the issue domains we simply cannot bypass, because our survival depends on food. Yet the vast majority of us know very little about how the food we eat is actually produced, or how it reaches our plates through so many stages of consumption. One key reason for this gap is that the entire shape of modern agriculture is already completely different from that of traditional agriculture.

The Seed Empire takes the American Monsanto as a representative case and presents, in historical terms, the systemic changes in food and agriculture over the past century — and especially the past half-century. It tells the full story of Monsanto from its founding in 1901 to its acquisition by Bayer in 2016, and devotes considerable space to its product development, production methods, and corporate operations. As we read, we find that these patterns continue to shape our lives to this day, whether in plain sight or beneath the surface.

● The 2009 Monsanto Agricultural Fair. Image source: Wiki

Zhang Jing: In recent years, Monsanto has been known primarily as an agricultural company. But it began as a chemical enterprise, entering the commercial arena by producing saccharin. Its saccharin was already being sold in China by 1918, and it later began producing caffeine, becoming one of Coca-Cola’s core ingredient suppliers. After demand for saccharin and caffeine declined, Monsanto sought new avenues of survival and turned to distilling other chemical products from coal tar — including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), one of its most profitable products. The manufacture of these products quickly triggered severe toxic pollution problems.

Subsequently, because of the toxic effects of its products, Monsanto came under scrutiny from regulatory authorities, and its original profit model fell into crisis. So it pivoted into agriculture, producing herbicides. The precursor to its herbicides was the notorious Agent Orange of the 1960s (a powerful herbicide named for the orange colour of its spray). During the Vietnam War, the US military widely used Agent Orange to clear the rainforest for combat operations, which inflicted a host of lasting problems on Vietnamese society, including birth defects, disfigurement among the Vietnamese population, and widespread land contamination. Yet Monsanto, as the single largest supplier of Agent Orange, raked in enormous profits.

● During the Vietnam War, a US military helicopter sprays Agent Orange over farmland. Image source: wiki
● A group of disabled Vietnamese children, most of them victims of Agent Orange. By 2002, approximately 100,000 children in Vietnam were born with congenital disabilities caused by Agent Orange contamination. Image source: wiki
Zhang Jing: Building on Agent Orange, Monsanto developed its flagship herbicide Roundup in the 1970s, which was enormously popular at the time for its effectiveness in killing weeds. But there was a problem: while the herbicide could kill weeds effectively, it could only be used before sowing or after harvest; applying it during the growing season would damage the crops themselves. So, to expand its pesticide sales, Monsanto jumped onto the biotechnology bandwagon, began breeding herbicide-resistant seeds, and swiftly transformed itself into a seed company.

This was the era when genetically modified technology was on the rise. Monsanto carried out GM modifications on cash crops such as soybeans, corn, and cotton, successfully conferring resistance to herbicides on the crops. As a result, herbicides and seeds became tightly bundled together in sales — to use this herbicide, farmers had to buy the matching seeds. But soon a new problem emerged: the weeds developed resistance. Monsanto was forced to upgrade its herbicide formula yet again, introducing the more potent dicamba. Problems kept recurring, and Monsanto continued iterating and upgrading its products. Farmers, in turn, had no choice but to keep buying these upgraded products to cope with ever more resistant superweeds. It was through this process that Monsanto gradually built itself into a seed empire. By 2005, it had become the world’s largest seed vendor, and its seeds were being rolled out across Vietnam, Brazil, India, and many other countries.

II. How Has Capitalism Transformed Agriculture?

Tian Le: Thank you, Zhang Jing, for that very concise overview. Some people say this book would be perfectly at home in an airport bookshop as a sort of success-story marketing read — you can see in Monsanto’s rise how a company seized every opportunity to turn the weaknesses in its products into strengths, endlessly reinventing itself into a new company. Professor Xu, how should we understand the influence that a giant agribusiness like Monsanto exerts on the global food system today?

Xu Zhun (Professor, Department of Economics, Sun Yat-sen University): Monsanto, as a quintessential large capitalist enterprise, is representative of a historical pattern. For the past two or three centuries, ever since the rise of capitalism, its relationship with agriculture has been deeply intertwined. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of capitalism would know that its very opening chapter was closely bound up with agriculture — take, for instance, the Enclosure Movement in England, the infamous episode in which “sheep devoured people.”

● Remains of an English Enclosure wall. Image source: wiki
Xu Zhun: Capitalism views all production through a single lens — can it generate more profit, and can that profit be generated in ever-shorter timeframes? On that basis, capitalism set about a whole series of transformations of agriculture. Before the advent of modern chemical industry, enterprises or technicians could not directly control the growth rate of crops; they could only rely on natural means of supplementing the nutrients plants received.

But once the chemical industry emerged, those means became far richer. In animal husbandry — rearing chickens, sheep, and the like — feed and other inputs could accelerate the growth cycle, pushing animals to reach market as quickly as possible so they could be sold for profit. This is a form of control over livestock and poultry, a transformation of how they are reared. Once biotechnology rose, this control became even more direct — animal breeds could be modified outright.

Large agribusinesses like Monsanto, on the one hand, have an enormous incentive to control agriculture — using pesticides and seeds to control the various things we eat and use, and profiting from that control. On the other hand, the products driving their production are not necessarily aligned with the interests of ordinary people. The Seed Empire does a fine job of illustrating this misalignment, and showing how this company has been able to conceal it by various means.

Tian Le: Professor Xu has just described the capitalist agricultural system, which seeks to produce food on ever-shorter cycles. Monsanto’s flagship products have been GM soybeans and corn, which rapidly captured more than 90 per cent of the US market. Most of those soybeans and corn are used as feed for cattle, sheep, and other livestock and poultry. On the one hand, these technologies seem to lower the cost of meat, which sounds like a good thing. On the other hand, they also generate certain contradictions that may ultimately harm consumers.

Zhou Mujun (food and agriculture systems researcher, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University): Many of the social movements that criticise Monsanto approach the issue from an environmental perspective, because in the course of its corporate development, Monsanto has indeed caused significant negative impacts on the ecological environment. But one thing that surprised me — and which the book also emphasises — is that when Monsanto first pivoted from chemicals to agriculture, producing insecticides and herbicides, the rhetoric it used in its marketing was explicitly environmental in its appeal. It claimed, for example, that its herbicides and GM seeds would reduce pesticide use and benefit the environment. It even hoped to use this pivot to repair its corporate image, given that many of the chemical products it had previously developed had already caused severe harm to the environment and human health, and the company was rather notorious in the chemical industry.

But in reality, we later found that its herbicides and insecticides caused major environmental problems as well. Why? Because it considered only a very short-term effect, while ignoring the mechanism of co-evolution in nature. In the short term, its herbicide products may have been effective, requiring only small doses. But over time, the weeds evolved and developed resistance, and to keep weeds down, ever-larger doses had to be applied. This is nature’s unexpected revenge.

● The increasing number of weed species resistant to ALS inhibitors, 1982–2000. Data source: Dr. Ian Heap’s 2020 study, International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, weedscience.org. Image source: The Seed Empire
Zhou Mujun: Another detail in the book that astonished me is that when scientists discovered some weeds had developed resistance, those research reports were suppressed by Monsanto to ensure its products continued to be sold on the market. Because of this, people were led a long way astray.

III. Two Biases Concerning Science and Technology

Tian Le: Indeed, not only is research unfavourable to Monsanto difficult to fund, it can even attract threats from the company’s legal team. Meanwhile, Monsanto would bankroll research by other scientists to support its own products, and much of the relevant data was classified by Monsanto as a trade secret, preventing scientists from conducting more independent and impartial research. On the basis of this, can we still believe that scientific research is fair and objective?

Zhou Mujun: The public holds two extreme views of scientific and technological research. One view holds that science and technology are entirely objective and impartial. As the English saying goes, knowledge is the only way of speaking truth to power. If only we do our research well, we can arrive at the truth. The other extreme is more cynical — the belief that scientists, power, and capital are all singing from the same hymn sheet. I think both of these positions are misguided.

We can reflect on the relationship between scientific research and the public interest from two angles. First, while scientific research operates under extensive procedural norms that are designed to help researchers remain objective, neutral, and impartial, free from the influence of preconceived notions, scientists do not conduct their research in a vacuum. The establishment of research agendas, the choice of research questions, what kind of research attracts more funding and support, what kind of research does not — all of these are shaped by the environment and structures of the society in which the researcher operates. Power and capital may not be able to directly make a scientist call black white, but they can certainly influence how a scientist judges the importance of a problem. These are all things worth reflecting upon.

Second, different disciplines approach problems from different vantage points. Nearly all the social problems we face today are systemic, comprehensive, and multi-layered. Tackling them requires the combined effort of many disciplines before we can gradually piece together the full picture. But scientists are specialists — they tend to have deep expertise in only a very narrow slice of a particular field. When discussing questions of a holistic nature, scientists from different disciplines may all need to “explain their findings” to one another in plain terms. If we focus solely on the results of one particular discipline, the conclusions we draw may be very narrow.

The Monsanto case illustrates this point well. From the very beginning, Monsanto emphasised a micro-level biological perspective. But the problems with GM seeds are not merely micro-level problems. Issues involving weed evolution require ecological and environmental perspectives. After the adoption of GM seeds, the way farmers organised themselves and the power dynamics between farmers and seed companies also shifted. If we want to understand the implications of these changes, we may also need a sociological perspective. So it is not the case that having the endorsement of a technical expert means their position necessarily represents the truth. We need to look at what level of analysis these technical experts are actually operating at.

On the other hand, today our expectations of food are high and highly varied. Those flavours cannot simply be conjured up in a laboratory. Can consumers communicate their needs to breeders and farmers? If farmers can collaborate with scientists to help them meet those needs, that would be a very positive development. But from the Monsanto case, we see that many scientists have not been doing this. Modern breeding technology has existed for barely two centuries since Mendel, and it is the efforts of farmers across the world that have preserved these seeds from generation to generation.

IV. Why Has US Government Oversight Repeatedly Failed?

Tian Le: Looking at Monsanto’s history of development, every time something went wrong, US government and social oversight was always stuck playing catch-up, patching holes after the fact — and many policies even ended up pouring fuel on the fire. Why is US government oversight always so far behind?

Zhang Jing: Reading The Seed Empire, it is actually quite easy to become angry. We sometimes joke that it is not a book to read before bed, because once you pick it up you won’t get a good night’s sleep. In the book, the author writes in an interlaced fashion: every time Monsanto launches a new product, after a period of time, the negative effects of that product emerge — either pollution from the manufacturing process, or health and environmental problems once the product enters the market. And then there are almost always lawsuits. These lawsuits tend to drag on for years, and those who have been harmed go without compensation for a very long time. Because the company is the inventor of the new technology and the new product, it holds the technical knowledge, and so once a product hits the market, the company is far more in control. We all know that ethics cannot be regulated — regulation can only target specific problems, and so it can only appear once a problem has surfaced. That is why oversight tends to lag, and in many cases arrives long after the problem first emerged, because a problem can have many possible causes, and ruling them out one by one takes a great deal of time. Add to that the fact that Monsanto has an extremely powerful lobbying group, embedded in government at every level to mount a defence.

● Monsanto’s elemental phosphorus plant in Soda Springs, Idaho, 2016. The elemental phosphorus produced at this facility was used in Monsanto’s best-selling product, the herbicide Roundup. In 1990, the US Environmental Protection Agency designated the site as a Superfund remediation site. Although this facility remains on the Superfund list to this day, and pollutants of concern continue to be discharged from the site into the surrounding environment (as known from the EPA’s most recent assessment of the site at the time of this book’s publication), the US Environmental Protection Agency still permits the plant to continue operating. Image source: The Seed Empire
Zhang Jing: On the one hand, once a problem emerges, Monsanto will fund scientists to conduct all manner of experiments to produce evidence favourable to the company, rather than presenting the issues that experiments and discussion objectively reveal. On the other hand, it will also use certain rhetoric to bind the company’s interests to national interests and humanity’s future. The book contains one particularly telling example: when it comes to Monsanto’s chemical product polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were used in all kinds of electrical equipment, many scientists observed that they caused toxic pollution. Monsanto’s line was that without this compound, the American economy would be thrown into disarray, because it was so widely used that it had become deeply intertwined with the US economy, and therefore the country could only continue to allow PCBs to be sold.

I think this is a particularly important point for us to reflect upon — what kind of mechanisms can guarantee that the public has a basic right to know the true situation, and to face such costs with fairness.

Tian Le: What The Seed Empire makes clear is that many of Monsanto’s products have caused enormous environmental pollution, yet the company has never borne the costs of remediating that environment. It made a fortune selling its products, while all the various negative effects those products produced were borne by society as a whole. From an economics perspective, how should we view this phenomenon?

Xu Zhun: In general terms, market economic behaviour consists of buying and selling, and this buying and selling is voluntary. But behind the act of buying and selling there are in fact a number of assumptions, one of which is that the price of the goods being sold already encapsulates all the consequences that product brings about — that is, every consequence should be reflected in the price.

But in practice, what we observe is rarely so ideal. A company like Monsanto may find that the costs it bears and the costs that society actually bears are very far apart. And in many cases, there is no particularly effective way of dealing with it.

● Phosphate slag dumped at Monsanto’s plant in Soda Springs, Idaho, 2016. During the 1960s and 1970s, Monsanto sold radioactive waste to local residents — a by-product of a key ingredient in its best-selling herbicide, Roundup. Local residents used this waste to build house foundations, footpaths, and roads. After the town finally banned this reuse, Monsanto began dumping slag on the south side of the plant, forming a tailings pile. Image source: The Seed Empire

V. What Kind of Regulation Can Better Address Risks?

Tian Le: When it comes to regulation, government sets the rules governing technology use, but those rules are themselves shaped by big corporations during their drafting. Moreover, the mere move from no regulation to regulation, from no rules to rules, does not necessarily represent a major advance — what matters is whether ordinary people and different groups are able to participate in that process. So how can a productive interplay be fostered between different groups around social regulation and technological development?

Zhou Mujun: The United States has laws, government oversight, and all manner of social resistance movements. Yet reading through the entire book, one can still clearly sense how feeble these ordinary people are compared to a giant corporation like Monsanto, especially in the realm of law. Even when they manage to win what might be called a victory here or there, justice so often arrives far too late — obtained only at the price of many people’s health, or even their lives.

That said, we need not arrive at a wholly pessimistic conclusion about the law. In other circumstances, where legislation is drafted and enforced more justly and government oversight is more effective, it can still make a real difference.

Of course, we need law to balance the private interests of corporations against the public interest, but we cannot simply place all our hopes in a powerful government and very strict laws to solve every problem. For law is drafted and enforced within a particular social environment, and behind it must come a genuine regard for public concern and public will.

Tian Le: The topic of food regulation is particularly interesting. During this Olympic Games, there were international calls to expel sponsor Coca-Cola from the Olympics. Coca-Cola and similar beverage producers use sport to promote their products — running advertisements, signing athletes as endorsers — attempting to link what is fundamentally very unhealthy with healthy lifestyles and people. This is a supremely cunning marketing strategy. And yet it seems people are reluctant to let government or the law decide what they eat. To what extent is regulation effective, and to what extent is it necessary?

Xu Zhun: Regulation is certainly useful. The question is: what do we pay to obtain that usefulness? Law is of course very important, but law tends to be bulky and unwieldy, and expecting it to prevent something from happening in the first place is not very realistic. Relying on a conservative legal system is itself a conservative notion. There is no way of guarding against a thief for a thousand days on end — living in society, given a legal system and a regulatory framework, someone will always, driven by self-interest, find a loophole.

So I think the fundamental issue lies in relationships of interest. For example, with a new technology, every group the technology may affect should have its own representatives of interest, and they should come together to deliberate on some form of committee. The relevant experts need to lay out clearly to everyone what benefits this technology offers and what harms it may cause, and then the floor should be open for questions and discussion — full communication. In short, it requires active, broad participation from society at large.

● For the full discussion, watch the recording of this sharing session.

*This article first appeared on Tencent News’s series Let’s Talk Science

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Published by Foodthink