The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

214 the world according to monsantoter cold, has climbed Kilimanjaro, and attempted Everest three times withoutsuccess.Unfortunately, I was unable to meet him, because when I went toSaskatchewan in September 2004, he was, I believe, in Bangkok, in responseto one of the many invitations from around the world he has been receivingsince he became the “man who rebelled against Monsanto.” 24The case of this farmer, who had been working a fifteen-hundred-acrefamily farm for fifty years, began in the summer of 1997. He had justsprayed the ditches bordering his canola fields with Roundup, and he realizedthat his work had done practically no good: many plants that had germinatedoutside his area of cultivation resisted the spraying. Intrigued, hecontacted a Monsanto representative, who told him that this was RoundupReady canola, put on the market two years earlier. The months went by, andin the spring of 1998, Schmeiser, who was known throughout the region asan expert breeder of canola seeds, replanted seeds from his previous crop.When he was preparing to harvest the crop in August, he was contacted bya representative of Monsanto Canada who informed him that inspectors haddetected transgenic canola in his fields and proposed that he enter into asettlement to avoid being sued.But Schmeiser refused to give in. He turned over documents to his lawyerproving that he had bought a field in 1997 that had been planted withRoundup Ready canola. He also explained that the plant had the strength ofa weed, the very light seed was able to invade the surrounding prairies at thespeed of the wind and be carried for miles by birds, and seeds could lie dormantin the soil for more than five years. Observing that the transgeniccanola was mostly found on the edges of his fields, he concluded that theymust have been contaminated by his neighbors’ GM plantings or by graintrucks passing by on the road. Schmeiser’s resistance was, of course, stimulatedby the revelation of Monsanto’s harsh practices, including the sprayingof Roundup by helicopter of fields of farmers suspected of “piracy,” accordingto what Ed and Elizabeth Kram, a farming couple in the province, saidin August 1998. This was an action that was at least “strange,” and one thatMonsanto has never denied, as Hervé Kempf reports, “also acknowledgingin a statement to the police that its agents had taken samples of canola fromEd Kram for laboratory analysis.” 25Monsanto Canada, in any case, was adamant. Displaying to the press theanalyses of the samples it claimed to have taken (without his knowledge)