The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

196 the world according to monsanto1997. But that was not enough: it had had to incur record indebtedness,backed by the stock market, which still believed at the time in the promiseof biotechnology. Monsanto’s stock price climbed 74 percent in 1995 and 71percent in 1996. Investors blindly followed the “guru of St. Louis” until thefalse move in 1998 that initiated his fall from grace.The Terminator Patent: One Step Too Far for MonsantoOn March 3, 1998, a brief article in the Wall Street Journal announced thatthe USDA (then headed by Dan Glickman) and the Delta and Pine LandCompany of Mississippi, the largest American cotton seed company, hadjointly obtained a patent entitled “Control of Plant Gene Expression.” Behindthis mysterious title lay a technique making it possible to geneticallymodify plants so that they produced sterile seeds. Developed by MelvinOliver, an Australian scientist working in the USDA research laboratory inLubbock, Texas, the technique was also called the “Technology ProtectionSystem” (understood to be transgenic), because it was designed to preventfarmers from resowing part of their crop, forcing them to buy seeds everyyear and pay royalties to GMO manufacturers. Concretely, the plant hadbeen manipulated to produce a toxic protein when its growth was completethat made its seeds sterile.Hope Shand, research director of the Rural Advancement FoundationInternational (RAFI), a Canadian NGO since renamed the ETC Group(Erosion, Technology, Concentration), which fights for the protection ofbiodiversity and against the perverse effects of industrial agriculture, cameacross the article in the Wall Street Journal by chance. She immediately informedher boss, Pat Mooney, who said, “It’s Terminator!” referring to thelegendary robot played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The expression stuckpermanently to designate the sterilization technique and, beyond that, theoverall aim of GMO producers. “You understand,” Mooney told me when Imet him in Ottawa in September 2004, “this technique was a direct threatto food security, especially in developing countries where more than 1.5 billionpeople survive by saving seeds. Imagine that Terminator plants crossbreedwith neighboring crops and make the seeds gathered by peasantssterile. It would be a catastrophe for them, but also for the biodiversity they