

Inside Monsanto, America's Third-Most-Hated Company - zbravo
http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/211107-inside-monsanto-americas-third-most-hated-company

======
bryanlarsen
In the eighties, lots of young ideologues were worried about a Malthusian
future; there would be more people in the world than we could feed. They
decided that genetic engineering was going to save the world by adding micro-
nutrients to rice, by making essential food crops drought resistant and higher
yielding, et cetera. So they studied genetic engineering in University and
joined Monsanto, which was obviously the company that was most likely to make
this happen.

Thirty years later, they are vilified by very similar ideologues.

~~~
biohax2015
Seriously. At this point it's either we use the biotechnology that many
scientists have made their life's work, or millions of people starve.

~~~
Pxtl
The differences in yield between fully modern farming techniques and modern
organic farming is not that massive. It's substantial, I'll grant you -
something like 13-25% difference. And that's with the fully bevy of certified
organic practices - non-fossil-fuel soils, natural pesticides, etc. How much
incremental improvement in yield do you actually think comes from the GMO side
of things? The primary difference seems to be in manpower - Organic practices
require _far_ more manpower... but the world isn't short of manpower.

There is more than enough food in the world. Starvation happens because of
infrastructure and economics, not insufficient yields. Norman Borlaug's green
revolution would have happened with or without GMOs.

My main criticism of GMOs isn't the genetic alterations themselves, but the
way they enable excessive pesticide use, IP law abuses, and monoculture.

~~~
Blahah
_> There is more than enough food in the world. Starvation happens because of
infrastructure and economics, not insufficient yields. Norman Borlaug's green
revolution would have happened with or without GMOs._

Norman Borlaug's green revolution _did_ happen without GMOs - it was all about
breeding (e.g for shorter stems) and intensification of nutrient inputs.

While food distribution is a major problem, it's simply not true that food
supply is not also a problem. It is entirely unfeasible for all the food in
the world to be efficiently distributed to everyone who needs food from the
places it is currently grown in the time we have available before peak
population. Food supply _is_ a limiting factor. Enabling people to grow more
food close to where they live will save lives. This is why we (plant
geneticists) continue trying to raise yields.

Try telling a starving family in (Indonesia|Tanzania|Bangladesh) that the
problem isn't their pathetic rice crop yield, it's that Americans are throwing
away cheeseburgers. We can feed a lot of those people with better agricultural
technology.

 _> My main criticism of GMOs isn't the genetic alterations themselves, but
the way they enable excessive pesticide use, IP law abuses, and monoculture._

GMOs don't enable any of those things. Monoculture is a route to efficient
food production - it was around long before GMOs. We have it because it was
the path of least resistance to massive scale food production.

Total amount of pesticides might be increased in some cases with GMOs (though
in many it is reduced), but the important thing is that current GMOs enable us
to use much, much less harmful pesticides. Glyphosate is probably the safest
herbicide the world has ever seen. Some of the alternatives are just
terrifyingly harmful.

IP law is certainly used by some seed companies, but I'd argue it's generally
not abused to anywhere near the level it is by tech companies. If you read the
court documents from Monsanto cases they are almost always reasonable and
subsequently misrepresented by activists.

------
baby
> While the debate about the impact of GM crops on the environment continues,
> the question of their effect on human health looks increasingly settled. The
> National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the World
> Health Organization, Britain’s Royal Society, the European Commission, and
> the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among others, have
> all surveyed the substantial research literature and found no evidence that
> the GM foods on the market today are unsafe to eat. One of the few
> dissenting research papers, a 2012 study in the journal Food and Chemical
> Toxicology that found tumors in rats fed modified maize, was retracted by
> the journal last fall after questions were raised about the researchers’
> methodology.

There is still a huge sentiment against GMOs, everyone think they are harmful
to health here in France. I don't know how long it will take for the mentality
to change.

~~~
jobu
Where did this idea of GMO being harmful come from? Some of the environmental
concerns seem to be legitimate, but I've never seen or heard a credible source
claim they were harmful to human health.

As a side note, I've always been a bit of a technophile, so eating genetically
modified food seems really cool, and I can't wait until they perfect lab-grown
meat.

~~~
gdewilde
"I've never seen or heard a credible source claim they were harmful to human
health."

Which says a lot about the media you read.

~~~
jobu
"Which says a lot about the media you read."

Would you care to elaborate?

~~~
gdewilde
I respectfully decline.

------
simulate
There's is an old article by Michael Specter in the New Yorker about Robert
Shapiro, the CEO who in the 1990s turned Monsanto from a chemical company into
a biotechnology company. Shapiro is a fascinating CEO-- an anti-war activist
from New York and former folk musician who was on a mission to save the world
through biology. Two of his daughters founded the alt-rock band "Veruca Salt"
who had a hit song "Seether" in the 1990s. Here's a PDF of the New Yorker
article: [http://www.michaelspecter.com/wp-
content/uploads/pharmageddo...](http://www.michaelspecter.com/wp-
content/uploads/pharmageddon.pdf)

------
giarc
One of the big complaints I hear about Monsanto is that using their seeds
forces farmers to throw away their seeds each year (cannot use the seeds that
their crops produce). I spoke with a farmer about this once, and he said they
almost always throw away their seeds, regardless of supplier. Using those
seeds would result in variable growing since you have no clue what cross
pollination happened in the previous season.

Any experience farmers or biogeneticists care to comment?

~~~
pchristensen
Not a farmer, but this was in the article:

"Even before biotech seeds came on the market, corn farmers tended not to save
seeds, since store-bought hybrids delivered higher yields, but the technology
agreement farmers sign when buying Monsanto’s biotech seeds forbids them from
doing it."

~~~
giarc
I didn't get that far I guess.

So if I read this correctly, the only difference from pre-GMO days and now is
that the common practice of buying new seeds every year is in a contract
rather than just "common behaviour".

------
Pxtl
I'm a died-in-the-wool leftish vegetarian, and honestly, I actually am annoyed
by the GMO issue because I think it distracts from the far more important
concern about other modern farming practices that have far more serious
impact.

Excessive pesticides, monocultures, over-intensive factory farms, fossil-fuel-
based fertilizers. Those things worry me far more than GMOs, and they're far
lower on everyone's priority-list.

~~~
marcosdumay
> fossil-fuel-based fertilizers

About that, would you like it better if it was nuclear power based?

~~~
Pxtl
If you can figure out a way to use nuclear power to make ammonia instead of
natural gas, I'm all for it.

~~~
marcosdumay
Great, that's the good kind of green people. Most don't want to solve the
problem.

Ammonia production requires basically heat and electricity, there shouldn't be
a problem. But producing urea should be harder.

------
pchristensen
I just started a new job at Climate Corporation and it has been interesting
seeing the other side of the "Monsanto is the devil" story. Also, David
Friedberg is so smart and impressive.

~~~
cwal37
What are you doing there? As an environmental scientist/economist who loves
working with data-driven projects, that company always really intrigued me.

~~~
pchristensen
One of our products is advice tools for farmers. The free version gives
information about historical and predicted weather over a very precise area -
farmers can select their exact fields from a map and get information via web,
apps, or email. You can sign up and choose whatever land you want to monitor:
[http://www.climate.com/products/climate-
basic/](http://www.climate.com/products/climate-basic/)

The paid product takes more inputs from the farmer (crops, planting
information, etc) and gives recommendations based on crop, weather, soil, and
hydrology models specific to those crops, land, and planting. More details
here: [http://www.climate.com/products/climate-
pro/](http://www.climate.com/products/climate-pro/)

~~~
cwal37
Oh yeah, I know what the company is, that's why I find it interesting. I was
curious what you, personally, were working on.

~~~
pchristensen
Oh, I'm working on the services to move data from the science and models to
the web and mobile apps.

------
pella
Nassim Nicholas Taleb ( 2014 July 1. ) :

 _" The latest version of our precautionary principle, with application to
GMOs, refined thanks to more fallacies in arguments countering it. For
discussion before we move to the final version."_

[https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/...](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/edit)

\---

 _" What people miss is that the modification of crops impacts everyone and
exports the error from the local to the global.

I do not wish to pay —or have my descendants pay — for errors by executives of
Monsanto.

We should exert the precautionary principle there —our non-naive version —
simply because we would discover errors after considerable damage."_

[http://blog.longnow.org/02013/07/08/the-artangel-
longplayer-...](http://blog.longnow.org/02013/07/08/the-artangel-longplayer-
letters-nassim-taleb-writes-to-stewart-brand/)

~~~
lanekelly
I agree with the paper: the principle issue with GMO is the unavoidable,
unpredictable systemic effects it will have.

P.S. I've already found several, almost verbatim, examples of the given
fallacies right here in these comments.

~~~
sampo
I think publishing a book also may have "unpredictable systemic effects"
(there have been several books that have radically altered the course of
history), so it should be approached with extreme caution, don't you think?
However, Taleb has published several books, so I don't think he lives like he
preaches.

------
oliv__
I understand the benefits of GMOs but my question is this: do we really need
the technology?

In other words, is it impossible to grow enough food without using GMOs?

~~~
Pxtl
> In other words, is it impossible to grow enough food without using GMOs?

Of course not. We waste drastic amounts of food every year thanks to spoilage.
We feed food to other forms of food - how much food does it take to raise a
cow to maturity? We turn food into fuel for cars at utterly _dire_ efficiency.

Starvation happens because of economics, warfare, ongoing experiments with
centrally-planned governments (freaking give it up, Kim Jong), things like
that. Not small percentile increments in efficiency.

~~~
Blahah
You've highlighted important problems (spoilage, everyone wanting to eat meat,
economics, warfare). But unless you know of some solution to those things on
the horizon, you've not made a useful point.

Genetic engineering is a toolkit to solve a vast array of problems we face,
and it's available _right now_. With a 1% increase in yield, we can feed 1%
more people. 1% of 7 billion is 70 million.

Starvation happens because we're not making enough small percentile increments
in efficiency.

------
api
I'm not personally afraid of GMOs, but I do not fault people for being
skeptical of them.

Completely synthetic foods and food processing have a mediocre track record,
and in many cases have caused actual harm (e.g. trans fats) for a long time
before that harm was uncovered. Even in cases where there is no active harm,
heavily processed foods very often have lower nutritional content than their
less processed "whole" cousins. Take wheat for instance. We bleach it,
denuding it of its nutritional value, and then try to add back the missing
nutrients. Why?

Obviously that's apples and oranges -- GMO foods don't do the same thing that
food processing, oil hydrogenation, etc. do... they're totally different
technologies. But for the average person who doesn't deeply understand these
issues, it's easy to look at the poor track record of "better living through
chemistry" and be skeptical.

The general perception is that anything that "messes with" food is either
reducing its nutritional content or adding something harmful.

Another reason for skepticism about GMOs stems from the poor track record of
medical studies on the relative benefit or harm of various nutrients and
foods. Take saturated fats for example, which were demonized for decades.
Instead people were encouraged to eat trans fats like margarine, which turned
out to be worse for you. Now apparently saturated fats are not too bad in
moderation, or something. I don't know. That will probably be reversed next
month, then reversed again, then reversed again, and each time the media will
trumpet the news. Each big new finding about nutrition seems to contradict
previous findings, leading to a general view among many people that
nutritional science has no idea what it's talking about.

We can't even figure out after decades of study whether or not fat is bad for
you and you're telling me we're _absolutely 100% sure_ GMOs are safe...? Get
the picture?

Finally, I think there's a problem of institutional trust. I've asked some
organic hippie type friends before if they'd be more open to GMOs if they were
made by non-profits working toward the public interest, if they were open
source, and if all results of all studies were completely public. I've mostly
gotten nods to that. People don't trust closed for-profit companies not to
hide negative results, engage in research study "payola," push things to
market that have known problems, etc.

The trust issue is huge. Any time this comes up around here I tend to post and
bring it up, and for the most part nobody gets it.

People are afraid of GMO foods and parents are not vaccinating their children
because the Bush administration lied about Iraq (to give one example). For
some reason that is just flatly obvious to me. Why does nobody else see this?

~~~
sampo
> _We can 't even figure out after decades of study whether or not fat is bad
> for you and you're telling me we're absolutely 100% sure GMOs are safe...?
> Get the picture?_

There are some cases, like Golden Rice, where it's relatively easy to be 100%
sure of the safety. In Golden Rice, the rice is engineered to produce beta
carotene, and because there is lots of beta carotene e.g. in carrots, we can
be sure that beta carotene is safe to eat.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice)

~~~
api
I personally agree. I was speaking to the general perception that most people
have, and to its social and political roots.

------
fabrice_d
Monsanto is not only active on GMOs, they also have a terrible track record
promoting harmful products like their Roundup.

See "The world according to Monsanto", it's quite edifying
([http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-
monsan...](http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-monsanto/)).

~~~
bryanlarsen
Glyphosate is one of the safest pesticides on the market, and is considerably
safer than some of the so-called "organic" alternatives.

~~~
sampo
> _" Glyphosate is one of the safest pesticides on the market"_

Also, its not a _pesticide_ (pesticides kill pests) but a _herbicide_
(herbicides kill weeds).

