“Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible” – Philip Angell, Monsanto’s director of corporate communications. “Playing God in the Garden,” New York Times Magazine, October 25, 1998.
Earlier this month the autopsy of “Lulu,” a female killer whale that washed up dead on the shores of Scotland’s Isle of Tiree tangled in crabbing nets and cages, produced some results that are not just sensational but also downright disturbing and need to be examined in a deeper light. Lulu has a message for us.
“The Most Contaminated Killer Whale Ever Recorded” ran headlines around the globe as the researchers who examined the 18-foot-long carcass reported finding “shocking” levels of PCB chemicals in the Whale’s body—something like 20 times what is considered safe and manageable for mammals like killer whales.
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are organic chlorine compounds used since the 1930s in everything from electrical equipment to copy paper. Production of them was banned in the U.S. in 1979 after it was discovered that they disrupt hormone function, cause developmental effects and are a “probable” cause of cancer, but unfortunately they are now found in rivers and oceans all over the world as well as just almost every animal on earth and even people.
Yes, you probably have PCBs in your blood right now.
The major U.S. producer of PCBs, Monsanto itself (drum roll), has been sued countless times over its negligence with PCBs, including recently losing a $47 million dollar verdict in St. Louis for not just causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma in more than 100 plaintiffs, but also for lying and covering up the data that had shown just how toxic these chemicals were in the first place.
Monsanto has also been under fire for many of its other products, including the Roundup brand pesticide which was used widely worldwide on everything from backyard weeds in Oregon to coca leaf eradication in Colombia. When the United Nations issued a report two years ago finding that glyphosate, the active ingredient of Roundup, was in fact highly carcinogenic, the backlash was so fierce that Colombia even completely ended its decades-long war on drugs in protest of the injustice of it—after all, they were tricked into spraying something even more toxic than the cocaine they were producing onto large areas of their fertile countryside.
Photo by Mike Charest, CC BY 2.0
You would think that the world has had enough of Monsanto at this point, but unfortunately the toxic tyrant is just warming up. Recently bought out by Pharmaceutical titan Bayer in an 66 billion dollar deal that has been described as a Marriage Made in Hell, Bayer/Monsanto now owns not just nearly a third of the global seed market, but also a quarter of the world’s pesticide market as well. In fact, as now both the largest seed and pesticide company in the world, this corporate conglomerate is “consolidating agriculture’s top seed and chemical producers into a knot of global powerhouses” according to a recent article in Bloomberg.
Isn’t something wrong here, folks? Why is a chemical company with a track record of committing mass damage to humans and the earth becoming the master of our food supply? More than 40 percent of American cropland is already planted with Monsanto products while staples like corn and soy are completely dominated (near 90 percent) by the company. Now they are even working on a Frankenstein version of wheat to complete the unholy trinity, as more than 60 percent of the calories consumed on earth come from these three crops.