Monsanto Scientists Defend Practices

Because of our remote location, Middlebury students do not often get to directly interact with organizations that they study, especially for majors who study those who currently hold great power. Members of the Environmental Studies and Food Studies curriculums enjoyed an exception to this last Tuesday, Nov. 10, in the form of a lecture titled “A Growing World Population and Creating Sustainable Communities: What role is crop biotechnology playing?”

In the lecture, two representatives from the agribusiness giant Monsanto spoke to students, faculty and community members about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture. Monsanto is the leading American producer of genetically modified (GM) seeds, which makes up the bulk of its revenue, and is also a huge pesticide manufacturer, giving it one of the most directly relevant perspectives on issues of biotechnology in agriculture. The talk was given by Dr. Phillip Eckert, an academic engagement lead and former dairy scientist at the company. He was supported by Monsanto scientist Michael Spenzer.

The talk was primarily sponsored by the Environmental Studies curriculum and in particular by William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies Molly Anderson. Anderson is strongly opposed to many of Monsanto’s practices and beliefs about GMOs, but she sponsored the talk on the basis that “it is important for students to understand both sides of the genetically modified crops argument.” She wanted to present Middlebury students with Monsanto’s side of the GMOs argument, and plans to follow this lecture with other talks addressing the controversy over biotechnology in food from other perspectives.

As the title of the talk made clear, Monsanto’s side of the issue is that GM crops are necessary for feeding a growing population. They also argued that biotechnology would help make agriculture sustainable, citing studies arguing that GM crops reduce land use and carbon dioxide emissions. Eckert argued that this reduction in emissions is made possible primarily because of how some GM crops do not require tilling (which releases carbon sequestered in the soil) and also because they “decrease the number of cultivation passes” that pollution-emitting farm vehicles need to make to spray crops with pesticides and herbicides.

Finally, Eckert argued that biotechnology could help agriculture adapt to climate change. Climate change has decreased the arable land available per person, increased the range of pests and made crops vulnerable to hostile weather, increased drought and natural disasters. In Monsanto’s vision, crops should be selectively modified to increase yields, promote better nutrition and adapt to changing conditions.

The presenters were careful to acknowledge that biotechnology cannot solve food insecurity on its own. Eckert noted that a huge amount of food waste in developing countries comes from a lack of infrastructure, saying that “the solution is not always to just double crop yield.” Poor transportation infrastructure and inadequate storage infrastructure and techniques prevent many crops from getting to market and the failure to sync markets with harvests prevents food from reaching the table.

Eckert also took great pains to portray crop biotechnology as safe. He did not make a blanket statement that all GM crops are necessarily safe for human consumption, but that they are “safe when proven to be.” He contended that the long vetting process that new biotechnology is subjected to by both Monsanto and governmental regulators, which takes an average of 13 years and $136 million per product, ensures that no unsafe products reach the market. This argument drew considerable ire from the audience, who raised concerns about research linking pesticides that are used with pesticide-resistant crops (namely Monsanto’s Roundup and other glyphosate-based pesticides) with cancer, hormone issues, and danger to wildlife.

The presentation met with a deluge of questions from the audience, enough that Eckert was only able to finish two-thirds of his talk. One of the most important questions the audience had about the talk was also the most basic: what was Monsanto even doing at Middlebury, a tiny college that also happens to be a bastion of the environmental movement? Both Anderson and Eckert argued that they were in the business of repairing Monsanto’s reputation. The presenters, two jovial scientists, were not what one usually associates with Monsanto, a name that conjures up images of a shadowy megacorporation manipulating policy through an army of lobbyists. But the choice of representatives seemed aimed to recast Monsanto as a progressive, scientific company instead of a self-interested agribusiness giant.
“Their charge was clearly to get people to feel better about Monsanto,” Anderson said. “They were very carefully not argumentative up there.”

Both presenters and audience members played fast and loose with the various types of GM crops and their many purposes. Audience members and Monsanto representatives were sometimes talking about different GM crops with different purposes or about entirely different applications of biotechnology. For example, in response to claims that GM crops were important for addressing global hunger, an audience member questioned how for aesthetic purposes, like apples that do not brown, helps promote food security. Some audience members were particularly critical of how the presenters never explicitly broke down the distribution of uses of GM crops. Anderson and one audience member accused the presenters of not adequately addressing the fact that most GM crops are engineered for pesticide resistance instead of to adapt to a changing climate or a growing demand for food.
“I didn’t like how they evaded some topics,” Anderson said. “Something like 95 percent of crops that are being used around the world that are being genetically engineered are pesticide-resistant crops, not pest-resistant crops; they aren’t being engineered for the things that [Eckert] talked about.”

The fact that many GM crops are engineered specifically to be pesticide and herbicide resistant was displayed briefly on a slide but not explained by the presenters.
Additionally, there was confusion of Monsanto with the broader GM crops industry, with presenters and audience members implicitly or explicitly attributing the ills or benefits of biotechnology in general to Monsanto specifically. Spenzer pointed out that the aforementioned genetically modified apple is not made by Monsanto, for instance. As he noted, “most genetically modified seeds are not made by Monsanto, but [Monsanto] became a byword for the issue.”

Anderson also criticized what she saw as deliberate obfuscation of the definition of genetically modified crops by the presenters. She argued that they confused hybridization (also known as crossbreeding), which is credited with producing high-yield and drought-resistant crops that enabled an explosion in agricultural productivity in the 20th century, with biotechnology, or the direct insertion of a small piece of DNA into an organism.
“In many ways they tried to make [what] biotechnology [is] less clear,” Anderson said. “For example their assertion that we’ve been genetically engineering crops for ages is a little bit of a red herring. We have been genetically modifying only if you think of crossbreeding things that can naturally cross in nature as genetic engineering, but we certainly haven’t been taking a gene from a fish and putting it in a tomato for ages.”