The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

the iron law of the patenting of life 207“And how can Monsanto know that someone, for instance, replanted harvestedseeds?” I asked Hoffman.“I’m not sure how to answer that, no. That’s a good question forMonsanto.”Unfortunately, as I said earlier, Monsanto executives refused to see me, asI was told by the company’s public relations director, Christopher Horner. Iwould have been interested in interviewing Horner because, according to anarticle in the Chicago Tribune, he was the one who had to come to the defenseof his employer when the Center for Food Safety in Washington publisheda very disturbing report in November 2004. Titled Monsanto vs. U.S.Farmers, this very detailed eighty-four-page document confirmed the existenceof what is known in North America as the “gene police,” operated byPinkerton in the United States and Robinson in Canada. 7 It also reportedthat the company had been conducting a veritable witch hunt in the Americanprairies since 1998, leading to “thousands of investigations, nearly 100lawsuits, and numerous bankruptcies.” 8“The number of farmers sued represents a minuscule number of the300,000 or so who use the company’s technology,” Horner retorted. “Lawsuitsare the company’s last resort.” 9 But Joseph Mendelson, legal director ofthe Center for Food Safety, criticized the company’s “dictatorial methods.”He claimed it was capable of anything to “impose its control over all phasesof agriculture.” The report he supervised does chill the blood. After noting that85 percent of the soybeans grown in the United States in 2005 were transgenic,along with 84 percent of canola, 76 percent of cotton, and 45 percentof corn, it goes on to say: “No farmer is safe from Monsanto’s heavy-handedinvestigations and ruthless prosecutions. Farmers have been sued after theirfield was contaminated by pollen or seed from someone else’s genetically engineeredcrop; when genetically engineered seed from a previous year’s crophas sprouted, or ‘volunteered,’ in fields planted with non–genetically engineeredvarieties the following year; and when they never signed Monsanto’stechnology agreement but still planted the patented crop seed. In all ofthese cases, because of the way patent law has been applied, farmers aretechnically liable.”To conduct its study, the CFS consulted data supplied by the company itself,which frequently publicizes the cases of “seed piracy” it has detected inthe country—an unusual degree of transparency designed to dissuade anyonetempted to violate its iron law. In 1998, for example, the company in-