Through dialogue with many people, Monsanto has learned to appreciate that agricultural biotechnology raises some moral and ethical issues that go beyond science. These issues include choice, democracy, globalization, who has the technology, and who will benefit from it.
—Monsanto, Pledge Report, 2005'
HOW MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS CONTROL THE WORLD'S FOOD
If anyone in India knows the subject of the “green revolution” well, it is Vandana Shiva, one of whose books, published in 1989, is titled 'The Violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological Degradation and Political Conflict in Punjab'. In this fundamental book, the feminist antiglobalization figure dissects the misdeeds of the agricultural revolution, launched in the wake of World War II, that was later called “green” because it was supposed to slow the expansion of the “red revolution” in “underdeveloped” countries, particularly in Asia, where the rise of Mao Zedong to power in China in 1949 threatened to create imitators.
“I’m not saying that the green revolution did not begin with good intentions, namely, to increase food production in Third World countries,” Shiva told me, “but the perverse effects of the industrial agriculture model that underlies it have had tragic environmental and social consequences, particularly for small farmers.” For our second meeting, in December 2004, the militant Indian intellectual had invited me to the farm of Navdayana (Nine Grains), an association for the preservation of biodiversity and the protection of farmers’ rights that she had established in 1987, located in the state of Uttarakhand, in northern India, on the border of Tibet and Nepal. Here, a few miles from Dehradun in the foothills of the Himalayas, where she was born, she has established a center for agricultural education intended to promote the growing of traditional wheat and rice crops that the green revolution almost caused to disappear, replacing them with high-yield varieties imported from Mexico.
The agroindustrial concept that in 1968 was labeled the green revolution was born in 1943 in the capital of Mexico. That year, Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States (and co-founder of Pioneer Hi-Bred, which invented hybrid corn), offered to his Mexican counterpart a “scientific mission” designed to increase national wheat production. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, under the auspices of the Mexican Agriculture Ministry, this pilot project was set up in a Mexico City suburb, where in 1965 it adopted the name of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT, Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo).
In October 2004, I visited this renowned research center, which still operates as a nonprofit organization and now employs a hundred highly qualified international researchers, as well as five hundred associates from forty countries. In the entrance hall, a huge painting pays tribute to the father of the green revolution, Norman Borlaug, born on an Iowa farm in 1914, who was hired by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1944 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 “in recognition of his important contribution to the green revolution.”
For twenty years, this agronomist, who is now an ardent supporter of GMOs, had a single obsession: to increase wheat production by creating varieties permitting a tenfold increase in yields. To reach the goal he came up with the idea of crossing CIMMYT’s varieties with a Japanese dwarf variety, Norin 10. Increasing yields involves forcing the plant to produce larger and more numerous kernels at the risk of causing the stem to break. Hence the trick of “stem shortening,” in breeders’ jargon, through the introduction of a gene for dwarfism.
This is how, in the space of a century, wheat yields increased from about four hundredweight per acre in 1910 to an average of thirty-two hundredweight, while the height of wheat stalks decreased by three feet. But this exploit was accompanied by a side effect criticized by opponents of the green revolution: an increased use of phytosanitary products, without which the “miracle seeds,” as the CIMMYT varieties were called, were of absolutely no use. In order to produce such a large quantity of kernels, the plant had to be stuffed with fertilizers (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium), which eventually brought about a decline in the natural fertility of the soil.
In addition, it had to be watered copiously, which depleted aquifers. Furthermore, extreme vegetal density was manna for insect pests and fungi, which meant the massive use of insecticides and fungicides. Finally, the obsession with yields brought about a general decline in the nutritional quality of the kernels and a reduction in the biodiversity of wheat, a number of varieties of which simply disappeared.
In the 1960s, aware of the irremediable nature of the losses associated with its promotion of high-yield varieties, CIMMYT opened a “germoplasm bank,” which now stores at –3ºC some 166,000 varieties of wheat. To supply it, its associates comb countrysides around the world in search of rare grains, such as the wild wheat specimens found at the Iranian edge of the Fertile Crescent, which its technicians were in the process of labeling when I visited the center.
Nonetheless, CIMMYT’s dwarf varieties have spread around the world. In the North, including the Communist countries, breeders used them in their cross-pollination programs. The countries of the South, led by India, sent technicians to be trained at the center, nicknamed the “School of the Wheat Apostles.” In 1965, an unusual drought devastated the wheat crop in the Indian subcontinent, and there was a threat of famine. The government of Indira Gandhi decided to buy eighteen thousand tons of high-yield seeds imported from Mexico, the largest transfer of seeds in history. Trained by CIMMYT, Indian agronomists propagated the green revolution in the regions of Punjab and Haryana, considered India’s breadbasket.
They were given financial support by the Ford Foundation, which was in a good position to supply tractors and farm machines. At the same time high-yield varieties of rice were introduced into the country, at the initiative of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), established in 1960 by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations on the model of CIMMYT.
“It is always said that thanks to the green revolution, India achieved selfsufficiency in food supplies and that in the five years from 1965 to 1970 its wheat production increased from 12 to 20 million tons,” I was told by Vandana Shiva, whose last book is titled Seeds of Suicide.3 “The country is now the world’s second-largest wheat producer, with a production of 74 million tons, but at what cost? Exhausted soil, a worrying decline in water reserves, widespread pollution, the spread of monocultures at the expense of food crops, and the exclusion of tens of thousands of small farmers who have moved to slums because they could not adapt to an extremely costly model of farming. The first wave of suicides signaled the failure of the first green revolution.
Unfortunately, the second green revolution, the GMO revolution, has been even more deadly, even though it was directly in line with the first.”
“Why? How are they different?”
“The difference between the two is that the first green revolution was led by the public sector: government agencies controlled agricultural research and development. The second green revolution is led by Monsanto. The other difference is that although the first green revolution did have the hidden aim of selling more chemical products and farm machines, its principal motive even so was to provide more food and to guarantee food security. In the end, even though it was done at the expense of other crops, such as leguminous plants, the country produced more rice and wheat to feed people. The second green revolution has nothing to do with food security. Its only aim is to increase Monsanto’s profits, and the company has succeeded in imposing its law around the world.”
“What is Monsanto’s law?”
“Patent law. The company has always said that genetic engineering was a way of getting patents, and that’s its real aim. If you look at the research strategy it is now pursuing in India, you’ll see that it is testing twenty plants into which it has introduced Bt genes: mustard, okra, eggplant, rice, cauliflower, and so on. Once it has established ownership of genetically modified seeds as the norm, it will be able to collect royalties; we will depend on the company for every seed we plant and every field we cultivate. If it controls seeds, it controls food; it knows that, and that’s its strategy. It’s more powerful than bombs or weapons; it is the best way to control the people of the world.”
“But it’s illegal to patent seeds in India,”
I said, a bit staggered by the picture she had painted. “Sure. But for how long? Monsanto and the American government have been pressuring the Indian government for ten years to apply the TRIPS [Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights] agreement of the WTO, and I’m afraid that the barriers will finally collapse.”
Patents on Life, or Economic Colonization
Before explaining the TRIPS agreement, a headache for the WTO since its founding in 1995, I have to come back to the question of patents, which is of capital importance for the future of the planet. After listening to Shiva, one might think that she was exaggerating and that the patenting of seeds is just a gimmick of little concern to us. Skeptics should take a second look: the patenting of living things, particularly of seeds, is the tool through which Monsanto could appropriate the most lucrative of markets, the world’s food. And the company has done everything it can to bring this about. Shiva was quick to take an interest in this colossal challenge “because of the Bhopal disaster,” as she told me the first time we met, in Bhopal, which was then commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the tragedy.4 During the night of December 2, 1984, a cloud of toxic gas descended on the city: within a few hours, ten thousand people had died after suffering terribly, and twenty thousand died in the following weeks. The deadly gas came from a factory belonging to the American multinational corporation Union Carbide, a competitor of Monsanto’s that manufactured chemical pesticides.
“It was the Bhopal tragedy that convinced me we had to promote organic farming, hence the neem tree, as an alternative to the multinational corporations’ deadly pesticides,” Shiva recalled. Remember that the Office of European Patents granted a patent on the use of neem oil to W.R. Grace in September 1994. From that point on, the patenting of life became the Indian activist’s great cause; with the support of Greenpeace, she succeeded she has been fighting against a European and American patent held by Monsanto on a variety of wheat prized for the making of chapatis and cookies because of its low gluten content.5 According to the terms of the patents, Monsanto holds a monopoly on the growing, crossbreeding, and processing of this variety, which originated in northern India.
“The patenting of life is a continuation of the first colonization,” Shiva said. “The word ‘patent’ itself comes from the age of conquest. ‘Letters patent’ was the name given to an official public document—in Latin, patens means ‘open’ or ‘obvious’—bearing the seal of European sovereigns [and] granting to adventurers and pirates the exclusive right to conquer countries in their name. At the time Europe was colonizing the world, letters patent were directed at territorial conquest, whereas today’s patents are aimed at economic conquest through the appropriation of living organisms by the new sovereigns, the multinational corporations like Monsanto.
The same principle was operative in both cases, namely, the patents then and now were based on a denial of the life that existed before the arrival of the white man. When the Europeans colonized America, the land of the New World was declared terra nullius, ‘empty land,’ meaning devoid of white men. In the same way, the patenting of life and of the biosphere is based on an allegation of ‘empty life,’ because as long as the genes of living organisms have not been dissected in a laboratory, the organisms have no value. This is a denial of the labor and knowledge of millions of people who have maintained the biodiversity of life for millennia and who, moreover, live from it.” “What are the consequences of patents on life for the peoples of the South?” I asked, fascinated by the clarity of her thinking.
“They are huge, because patents are playing the same role as enclosures in sixteenth-century England. This movement, originating before the Industrial Revolution, privatized by enclosing common land that had been used communally, where the poorest villagers, for example, could graze their animals. The patent similarly encloses living things, such as plants that feed and heal people, and finally contributes to the exclusion of the poorest from the means of livelihood and even survival. As can be seen with food and medicine, as soon as a patent is filed, it means royalties and consequently an increase in price. This is why food, crop maintenance products, and medicines are excluded from Indian patent law, so that they remain accessible to everyone. The extension of the Western system of patents, as advocated by the World Trade Organization, and before that by the final round of GATT, directly undermines the economic rights of the poorest.”
Monsanto and the Multinational Corporations Behind the WTO Agreement on Intellectual Property Rights
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was put in place in 1947 by the major capitalist powers of the time with the purpose of regulating customs duties on international trade. The 1986 ministerial conference of Punta del Este, inaugurating what became known as the “Uruguay Round,” marked a decisive turning point in the history of GATT, in effect signing its death warrant. It was in the course of the eighth and final session of these intergovernmental trade negotiations in 1994 that the American government won agreement for the inclusion of four areas that had until then been under exclusively national political jurisdiction: agriculture, investments, services (telecommunications, transportation, and the like), and intellectual property rights (IPR).
The U.S. trade representative justified the inclusion of this last area, with which I am particularly concerned, by the fact that “nearly 200 American transnational companies were deprived of 24 billion dollars of copyright earnings because of the weakness or absence of protection for intellectual property in some countries, primarily in the countries of the South,” as a study by the University of Quebec reported.
The inclusion of these new areas under GATT’s jurisdiction, which had at first been a simple customs union, was the focus of intense negotiations, because they “raised questions that went beyond trade,” namely, “fundamental rights” such as the “rights to employment, health, food, and selfdetermination,” as Shiva has pointed out.7 In December 1989, Arthur Dunkel, director-general of GATT, submitted a proposed final document, but it was not until April 1994 that the definitive agreement was signed by the 123 member countries in Marrakesh, ratifying the creation of the World Trade Organization, which officially replaced GATT on January 1, 1995.
The founding document of the WTO, which meets in Geneva, contains twenty-nine sectorial agreements making possible the subjection of any good or service to the laws of the market, and therefore the transfer to private companies (over which governments and citizens have no means of in having the patent rejected ten years later, along with an American patent held by a Texas company, RiceTec, on a variety of basmati rice. Since then, control) of areas that traditionally were a matter of public policy. The association of these sectors with trade is so far from obvious that the drafters of the agreements got around the problem by using the expression “traderelated,” thereby pointing to the subterfuge.
This was notably the case with the TRIPS agreement, which, it turns out, “was largely designed by a coalition of companies gathered under the name of Intellectual Property Committee (IPC),” including the “major players in the area of biotechnology,” as the researchers from Quebec pointed out. Established in the United States in March 1986, the IPC brought together thirteen multinational corporations, principally from the chemical, pharmaceutical, and computer industries: Bristol-Myers, DuPont, FMC Corporation, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Johnson and Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Rockwell International, Warner Communications, and Monsanto.
As soon as it was established, the committee contacted the Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe (UNICE), official organ of the European business world, and the Keidanren, the Japanese employers’ confederation, to draft a common document, which was submitted to GATT in June 1988. Titled “Basic Framework of GATT Provisions on Intellectual Property: Statement of Views of the European, Japanese, and United States Business Communities,” this document, which formed the basis for the TRIPS agreement, was aimed at extending to the rest of the world the patent system that already existed in the industrialized countries, which all told, through the offices in Washington, Munich, and Tokyo, registered 97 percent of the patents filed by companies (the vast majority from the North). The document framed the issue in these terms: “Disparities among systems for the protection of intellectual property result in excessive loss of time and resources in the acquisition of those rights.
Holders find that the exercise of their rights is hindered by laws and regulations limiting market access and the repatriation of profits.” There followed a short paragraph: “Biotechnology, or the use of microorganisms in production, is a sector in which patent protection has fallen behind the rapid progress of medicine, agriculture, pollution reduction, and industry. . . . This protection should apply to the processes as well as the products of biotechnology, whether they be microorganisms, parts of microorganisms (plasmids and other vectors), or plants.”
Seemingly convinced that what might be considered a hijacking of GATT was within its rights, Monsanto proudly asserted in June 1990: “Once created, the first task of the IPC was to repeat the missionary work we did in the U.S. in the early days, this time with the industrial associations of Europe and Japan, to convince them that a code was possible. . . . It was not an easy task but our Trilateral Group was able to distill from the laws of the more advanced countries the fundamental principles for protecting all forms of intellectual property. Besides selling our concepts at home, we went to Geneva where [we] presented [our] document to the staff of the GATT Secretariat. We also took the opportunity to present it to the Geneva-based representatives of a large number of countries.
What I have described to you is absolutely unprecedented in GATT. Industry has defined a major problem for international trade. It crafted a solution, reduced it to a concrete proposal, and sold it to our own and other governments. The industries and traders of world commerce have played simultaneously the role of the patients, the diagnosticians, and the prescribing physicians.” Despite this masterfully conducted collective lobbying, among the many sectors covered by the TRIPS agreement (copyright, trademarks, label of origin, industrial designs and models, and confidential information, including trade secrets), the sector opportunely suggested by Monsanto is the one that has stymied the implacable machine of the WTO since 1995.
The controversy swirls around Article 27, paragraph 3(b), relating to “patentable subject matter.” The official text provides: “Members may . . . exclude from patentability plants and animals other than micro-organisms, and essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals other than nonbiological and microbiological processes. However, Members shall provide for the protection of plant varieties either by patents or by an effective sui generis system or by any combination thereof. The provisions of this subparagraph shall be reviewed four years after the date of entry into force of the WTO Agreement.”
The language of this article is so abstruse that it was partially responsible for the paralysis of the third ministerial conference of the WTO, held in Seattle in December 1999. After reading and rereading it, one can figure out that animals and plants but not microorganisms may be excluded from the patent system. But it also stipulates that “plant varieties” shall be protected “either by patents or by an effective sui generis system.” This apparent contradiction is in fact intended directly for transgenic seeds: they may now, backed by sanctions, be “protected” (that is, manufacturers can collect royalties) at a minimum by the system set up by the UPOV agreements.
It is precisely because the “protection” of seeds also brings about the protection of the foods derived from them that many countries of the South, led by South Africa, India, and Brazil, have demanded that Article 27, paragraph 3(b), be revised. They are also worried about the consequences of the patenting of microorganisms (theoretically including genes), which can only encourage biopiracy, that is, the theft of genetic resources and the traditional knowledge associated with them, to the detriment of the rural and indigenous communities that have maintained those resources for millennia.
The WTO: A Veritable Nightmare
To get a clear picture, I went to Geneva on January 13, 2005, to meet with Adrian Otten, director of intellectual property for the WTO, and I asked at the outset a basic question that suddenly made him tense up: “What is the goal of the TRIPS agreement?” Stammering a bit, he finally answered, “Well, I suppose that one of the fundamental objectives is to establish common international rules for member governments of the WTO to protect the intellectual property rights of certain member countries of the WTO, as well as those of their citizens and companies.”
“And which article has caused a problem?” I asked, to see if I had understood the WTO’s gibberish. “Well, it’s Article 27, paragraph 3(b), which adds a clause to the TRIPS agreement according to which inventions connected to plants and animals should be subject to patenting.”
Put like that, it was as clear as spring water.
“The goal of the TRIPS agreement is that a patent obtained in the United States—for example, by Monsanto—will be automatically applicable everywhere in the world,” I had been told a month earlier in New Delhi by Devinder Sharma. Chairman of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, this noted Indian journalist is a fierce opponent of the WTO.
“If you observe the international evolution of the patent system, you can see that it follows exactly that of the Patent Office in Washington. With the TRIPS agreement, every country has to follow the model of the United States or else suffer severe commercial penalties, because the WTO has absolutely extraordinary respect for Monsanto’s intellectual property rights, for example on a patented seed, the company will inform the American government, which will file a complaint with the WTO Dispute Settlement Body.
The TRIPS agreement was also designed by multinational corporations to seize the genetic resources of the planet, chiefly in Third World countries, which have the greatest biodiversity. India is a particular target, because it is a megadiverse country where there are 45,000 plant species and 81,000 animal species. That’s why so many of us say the world of the living is no concern of the WTO, but rather of the Biodiversity Convention signed under the auspices of the UN in Río de Janeiro in 1992. Signed by two hundred countries, this treaty says that genetic resources are the exclusive property of states, who must commit themselves to preserving them and organizing an equitable sharing of the exploitation of the traditional knowledge associated with those resources.”
“Can the TRIPS agreement be reconciled with the Biodiversity Convention?” “Absolutely not, because the two documents contradict one another. And that’s why the United States didn’t sign the convention. The problem is that the TRIPS agreement takes precedence over the convention, because it is under the jurisdiction of the WTO, which obeys the orders of multinational corporations like Monsanto, which, under cover of the globalization of trade, in fact rule the world.”
By Marie-Monique Robin, translated from the French by George Holoch in the book 'The World According to Monsanto. Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of the World’s Food Supply' 2008 Éditions La Découverte / Arte Editions, English translation 2010 by The New Press, chapter 16 p.307-317- Adapted and edited to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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