The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

146 the world according to monsantohis controlled panic, perceptible only in the nervous blinking that seizedhim on several occasions.To start with, I questioned him on the instructions transmitted by theWhite House regarding the drafting of the regulation of transgenic foods.“Basically, the government had taken a decision that it would not create newlaws,” he explained cautiously. “For the FDA, it felt that the Food, Drug, andCosmetic Act, which ensures the safety of all foods except meat, poultry andegg products, which are regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture(USDA), had enough authority for the agency to deal with new technologies.And actually what occurred at FDA was that the commissioner, Dr.David Kessler . . . established a group of scientists under my authority andlawyers, who were given the charge to see whether in fact we could regulatefoods developed by biotechnology under the existing Food, Drug, and CosmeticAct.”“But this decision that GMOs should not be submitted to a specific regulatoryregime wasn’t based on scientific data, it was a political decision?” Iasked. The question made him a little tense.“Yes, it was a political decision. It was a very broad decision that didn’tapply to just foods. It applied to all products of biotechnology,” he saidhesitatingly.The Amazing Trick of the Principle of Substantial EquivalenceI then proceeded to read a paragraph of the regulation that lies at the heartof the dispute around GMOs: “In most cases, the substances expected tobecome components of food as a result of genetic modification will be thesame as or substantially similar to substances commonly found in food suchas proteins, fats and oils, and carbohydrates.” 27These few apparently anodyne lines pointed to a concept that has beenadopted around the world as the theoretical basis for the regulation ofGMOs: the “principle of substantial equivalence.” Before I dissect why itrepresents the nub of what I called earlier one of the greatest conspiracies inthe history of the food industry, let me give the floor again to James Maryanski,who continued to defend it stubbornly: “What we do know, is that thegenes that are being introduced currently, to date, using biotechnology, produceproteins that are very similar to proteins that we’ve consumed for many