The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

monsanto weaves its web, 1995–1999 181tem of the stomach was overactive, which suggests that the rats’ organismswere treating the potatoes as foreign bodies. We were convinced that theprocess of genetic manipulation was the source of these malfunctions andnot the lectin gene, whose safety in its natural state we had tested. Apparently,contrary to what the FDA claimed, the insertion technique was not aneutral technology, because by itself it produced unexplained effects.”The Arpad Pusztai Affair: Hounding the DissidentDeeply troubled, Pusztai spoke of his worries to Professor Philip James, thedirector of the Rowett Institute, who was also one of the twelve members ofthe Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes, the U.K. bodycharged with assessing the safety of GMOs before they were marketed.Convinced of the importance of the study’s results, the director authorizedPusztai to participate in an ITV television program recorded in June 1998,seven weeks before broadcast, in the presence of the institute’s public relationsdirector. “In the interview,” Pusztai explained, “I revealed no detailsabout the study we had not yet published, but I answered frankly the questionsI was asked, because I thought it was my ethical duty to alert Britishsociety to the unknown health effects of GMOs at a time when the firsttransgenic foods were being imported from the United States.”The European Community had adopted directive 90/220, regulating therelease of GMOs in Europe, on April 23, 1990. It provided for a model procedurethat was still in force eight years later (and continues in force today):to obtain authorization for the marketing of transgenic foods or plants, acompany must present a technical dossier to a member state, whose nationalbodies assess the risks of the product for humans and the environment.After examination, the commission sends the dossier to the othermember states, who have sixty days to request additional analyses if theythink it necessary. Following this procedure, the commission authorized theimportation of RR soybeans (as well as a Bt corn produced by Novartis)in December 1996, relying on the 1996 Monsanto study. The stakes wereparticularly high because, in the framework of the 1993 GATT agreements,Europe had agreed to limit the surface planted in oil-producing crops (soybeans,canola, sunflowers) to permit the sale of American stocks, forcingfarmers to buy fodder from the United States. 1