The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

166 the world according to monsantothe Motion Picture Association of America, which brings together the sixmajors in Hollywood. I had asked to interview him, of course, because of theposition he had held in the Clinton administration, but also because he hadexpressed some regrets in a Los Angeles Times article published on July 1,2001: “Regulators even viewed themselves as cheerleaders for biotechnology.It was viewed as science marching forward, and anyone who wasn’tmarching forward was a Luddite.”I read him the quotation and asked him why he had said that.“When I became secretary of agriculture [in 1995], ...most of the regulatoryclimate was basically focused on approvals, approvals of the crops, facilitatingthe transfer of the technology into agriculture in this country andpushing the export regime for these. I found that there was a general feelingin agribusiness and inside our government in the U.S. that if you weren’tmarching lock-step forward in favor of rapid approvals of GMO crops, thensomehow you were anti-science and anti-progress.”“Do you think that the Monsanto soy, for instance, should have receivedmore scrutiny?”“Well, I think that, frankly, there were a lot of folks in industrial agriculturewho didn’t want as much analysis as probably we should have had, becausethey had made a huge amount of investments in the product. And certainlywhen I became secretary, given the fact that I was in charge of the departmentregulating agriculture, I had a lot of pressure on me to push the issue too far,so to speak. But I would say even when I opened my mouth in the Clinton administration,I got slapped around a little bit by not only the industry, but alsosome of the people even in the administration. In fact, I made a speech oncewhere I said we needed to more thoroughly think through the regulatory issueson GMOs. And I had some people within the Clinton administration, particularlyin the U.S. trade area, that were very upset with me. They said: ‘Howcould you, in agriculture, be questioning our regulatory regime?’”Mickey Kantor was probably involved in that pressure. The speech Glickmanmentioned did contain some surprises, breaking as it did with the linehe had followed until then. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washingtonon July 13, 1999, the secretary of agriculture began with a stirringtribute to the “promise of biotechnology,” speaking of “bananas that may oneday deliver vaccines to children in developing countries.” (In this vein, Imight mention that eight years later we were still waiting for the appearance