The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of Our Food Supply (review)

How has corporate biotechnology impacted both human health and the way we grow and eat our daily bread? This is the central question that French journalist and documentarian Marie-Monique Robin seeks to answer in this muckraking expose of Monsanto, the controversial American corporation prominent in the manufacture and sale of transgenic seeds and herbicides across the globe. Adapted from Robin's 2008 documentary film of the same name, The World According to Monsanto is a damning critique of a corporation she deems guilty of fraud, misinformation, and profiteering at the expense of individual and societal health, both in the Global North and South.

Rather than begin with Monsanto's entry into the biotech field during the 1980s, Robin's early chapters detail the company's history prior to its work in genetic engineering. Founded in Missouri at the turn of the twentieth century, Monsanto grew to become one of America's largest chemical companies by World War II. One of the earliest manufacturers of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (or DDT, as it is popularly known), the company later turned to 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T (known infamously in southeast Asia as Agent Orange), Polychlorinated biphenyls (or PCB's), and lastly glyphosate, sold under the brand name Roundup and today the world's most popular herbicide. At every step along the way, argues Robin, Monsanto's leadership was well aware of their products' toxicity but chose to ignore their dangers, effectively silencing both internal and external critics through well-financed campaigns of misinformation and discreditation. Government oversight, claims Robin, was of little help as a "revolving door" of company officials, lobbyists, and federal agents ensured that administrators within both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration often shared the interests of the corporation.

The book's primary strength lies in its critique of Monsanto's more recent transformation from a chemical manufacturer to a "green" agricultural biotech company. Faced with mounting criticism to chemical approaches in agriculture, Monsanto during the 1990s reinvented itself as part of the solution, rather than the problem. Championing transgenic corn and cotton that produced their own insecticide as a solution to costly and damaging chemical spraying, along with grain and oilseed crops genetically modified (GM) to withstand glyphosate as an answer to the erosion caused by yearly tilling, Monsanto claimed to stand at a new frontier in agriculture. But despite its posturing, Robin claims that the "new" Monsanto has only exacerbated the problems of the "old." Pesticide use has only risen as insects develop resistance to glyphosate and other GM solutions. The company's successful campaign in the United States to prove "substantial equivalence" between GM and traditional crops has effectively neutralized any federal regulation or attempts at labeling, though contradictions abound: while Monsanto claims GM crops are no different from their traditional equivalents, it nevertheless aggressively seeks patents on its creations. This commodification of biology—"the patenting of life"—is perhaps the greatest danger that a firm like Monsanto presents, argues Robin (p. 201). Intellectual property law, developed in the United States and Europe but quickly being transplanted in the Third World, has developed new dependencies between farmers and seed companies. Monsanto "doesn't sell seeds, it just rents them, for one season" (pp. 205-6). Whether in Iowa, Mexico, Paraguay, or India, farmers hoping to capitalize on GM technology more commonly encountered debt and foreclosure than profit.

Though Robin asks important questions of Monsanto and its allies, her study is not without flaws. Organizationally, the book is quite uneven: parts I and III, describing the company's pre-GM history and then its later work in the Global South, are disorienting in their geographical and chronological leaps and less analytically rich than the book's midsection. Her documentary evidence, composed primarily of newspaper citations, web-based research...