The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

monsanto weaves its web, 1995–1999 191the world.” Armed with the new slogan, “Food, Health, Hope,” Shapiro electrifiedhis troops by talking of plants producing biodegradable plastics, cornsupplying antibodies against cancer, canola or soybean oil protecting againstcardiovascular disease. Witnesses have told of how an employee, RebeccaTominack, excited by his speech, went up to the CEO and said, “I’m withyou,” took her name tag off, and put it on Shapiro in a gesture of allegiancerepeated by a hundred other employees.“I was really very impressed by Robert Shapiro’s visionary speech, whichmade us want to work to make the world better,” I was told by Kirk Azevedo,a Monsanto employee from 1996 to 1998, whom I met on October 14,2006, in a small town on the West Coast where he was working as a chiropractor.Trained as a chemist, he had been contacted by a headhunter andresigned from Abbott Laboratories, where he had been in charge of testingnew pesticides, to join what he then considered to be the “enterprise of thefuture.” His job was to promote two varieties of transgenic cotton that Monsantowas about to launch on the market to seed dealers and Californiafarmers: a Roundup Ready cotton and a Bt cotton, genetically manipulatedto produce an insecticidal lectin (like Arpad Pusztai’s transgenic potatoes)because of the insertion of a gene taken from the bacterium Bacillusthuringiensis.“I was really very enthusiastic,” Azevedo told me. “I did think that thesetwo GMOs would bring about a reduction in the use of herbicides and insecticides.But the first dissonant note came three months after I was hired.I’d been invited to St. Louis to visit headquarters and participate in a trainingprogram for new hires. At one point, when I was speaking fervently in favorof biotechnology that would make it possible to reduce pollution andhunger in the world, a Monsanto vice president took me aside and said tome: ‘What Robert Shapiro says is one thing, but what counts for us is makingmoney. He talks to the public, but we don’t even understand what he’stalking about.’”“Who was it?”“I’d rather not identify him,” Azevedo said hesitantly. “In any event, at thetime I thought that he must be an exception. That lasted until the summerof 1997, when I experienced my second great disillusionment. I was in afield assessing an experimental plot of Roundup Ready cotton, whose cultivationwas not yet authorized. With me was a Monsanto scientist, a cottonspecialist. We were discussing what we would do with the cotton after it was