SUNS  4322 Thursday 12 November 1998

Washington, Nov. 9 (IPS/Danielle Knight) -- Environmentalists are counter-attacking Monsanto, the bio-technology giant that launched an advertising blitz aimed at convincing the world that its new seed and pesticide products are safe.

The last time Monsanto's chairman tried to publicly tout the benefits of biologically-engineered products, he was hit in the face with a tofu creme pie - supposedly to symbolise rejection of the company's genetically-altered soy beans.

"Monsanto has embarked upon an aggressive global takeover of seed, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies, with an aim to control world food distribution," said the demonstrators who called themselves the 'Biotic Baking Brigade.'

"The corporation is conducting an intensive PR 'Greenwash' campaign in order to promote itself as an eco-friendly corporation. We will not be fooled, and we will wage our gastronomical struggle with epicurean passion."

Similar sentiments were echoed in a recent story in the New York Times Magazine, which questioned the impact of the company's products on agriculture, environment, and health.

"Monsanto trusts its genetically engineered potato to kill off the Colorado potato beetle, but whether humankind's enduring relationship to food crops is being imperiled by biotechnology is the big question," the magazine article said.

The transnational corporation, however, continued to insist that its biologically-engineered seeds dramatically increased crop yields and lessened the need for harmful chemical pesticides.

At agricultural conferences around the world and in full-page newspaper advertisements here and in Europe, the company that developed such controversial products as Agent Orange, PCBs, and bovine growth hormone, declared that its genetically-altered seeds would help feed the world's growing population.

"Worrying about starving future generations won't feed them," said one Monsanto blurb. "Food biotechnology will."

Since the company began its research, it has amassed numerous bio-tech patents by buying out smaller companies, such as Mississippi-based Delta and Pine Land Co., owner of the controversial "Terminator" technology. This was developed in conjunction with the United States Department of Agriculture and resulted in the production of sterile crops - preventing seeds being saved from year-to-year.

The result could be devastating to farmers in developing countries who depend on saved seed, said Pat Mooney, director of the North America based Rural Advancement International Foundation, who launched an international letter-writing campaign against the 'Terminator.'

The governments of India and the Netherlands also questioned the use of such technology as did the World Bank's Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Environmental activists said their efforts to educate the public on the potential dangers of Monsanto's new hold on world seed production were blunted last month when printers of the British journal 'Ecologist' pulled the issue because they feared a lawsuit from the company.
Monsanto and the publishers deny that the company told them not print the issue.

"We have a long history of being forthright about environmental issues and attacking powerful organisations," says Zac Goldsmith, co-editor of the journal. "Not once, in 29 years, has this printer complained or expressed the slightest qualms about what we were doing."

In the United States, environmentalists and organic farmers feared that Monsanto's 'New Leaf Superior Potatoes' grown throughout the country, would weaken the efforts of organic farmers to fight potato beetles.

Every cell of Monsanto's 'New Leaf Superior' contains a gene snipped from a bacteria called Bacillus Thuringiensis (Bt), that produces a protein highly toxic to Colorado potato beetles.

Organic potato farmers, who depend on using limited quantities of Bt in a spray form, said the beetles constant exposure to the bacteria in the engineered plants will eventually lead to the bug's resistance to the bacteria.
Small farming organisations and scientists also were concerned that modified or added genes of biologically-engineered organisms might "escape" into other related crops or weeds through sexual reproduction or cross-pollination.

"There's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment," said Richard Lewontin, a genetics researcher at Harvard University. "We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another."

Monsanto, however, has resisted attempts to make it accept responsibility for the safety of its food products. "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food," says Phil Angell,
Monsanto's director of corporate communications. "Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) job."

But the FDA says biologically-engineered crops, such as the New Leaf Potato fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because it involves regulating a pesticide.

After tests on animals, the EPA said that Bt was safe but it required a label on every bottle warning people to avoid inhaling the pesticide, or getting it in an open wound. No such label applied to the seed bag.

The FDA doesn't require a label put on the potato once it is in the supermarket because the agency only requires gene-engineered foods to be labelled if they contain allergens or have been "materially changed." The FDA determined that Monsanto had not "materially changed" the New Leaf potato by altering it to contain Bt.

"In sum, biotech is an industry in the grip of a frontier mentality. Anything goes. Government is a willing and servile participant," said Peter Montague, editor of Rachel's Environmental and Health Weekly, a publication of the Maryland-based Environmental Research Foundation. "If it turns out worse than the chemical debacles of the last 50 years, will anyone be surprised?"