The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

9Monsanto Weaves Its Web, 1995–1999What you’re seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it’s really aconsolidation of the entire food chain.—Robert Fraley, co-president, Monsanto’s Agriculture Sector,quoted in Farm Journal, October 1996“As a scientist actively working in the field, I find it’s very unfair to use ourfellow citizens as guinea pigs.” Broadcast on August 10, 1998, on ITV’s documentaryprogram World in Action, these few words about GMOs ruinedthe career of Arpad Pusztai, an internationally renowned biochemist whohad worked for thirty years, from 1968 to 1998, at the Rowett Research Institutein Aberdeen, Scotland. “I think they’ll never forgive me for sayingthat,” he told me when I met him at his home on November 21, 2006. A slygrin lit up the face of the nearly eighty-year-old man.“Who are they?” I asked, suspecting the answer.“Monsanto, and everyone in Great Britain who blindly supports biotechnology.I would never have thought that I could be a victim of practices thatrecall what Communist regimes did to their dissidents.”The Accursed PotatoesThe son of a Hungarian resistance fighter opposing Nazi occupation, ArpadPusztai was born in Budapest in 1930. When Soviet tanks invaded the Hun-