The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

218 the world according to monsantoEurope in May 2000 because a Monsanto transgene had been detected init. The Advanta seed company in Canada had to destroy thousands of acres,indemnify its growers, and then shift its seed production from west to east inCanada, where it judged it could better protect itself from cross-pollination,and all of this was followed by a wave of lawsuits. 41The problems posed by transgenic contamination are not only legal butalso environmental. When a transgenic canola seed is blown by the wind, forexample, into a wheat field, the farmer considers it a weed that he finds itvery hard to get rid of: “as this canola is resistant to Roundup, a total herbicide,the only way to get rid of it is to pull it up by hand or use 2-4D, an extremelytoxic herbicide.” 42 Likewise, a GMO producer who wants to rotatehis crops by alternating, for example, Roundup Ready canola with RoundupReady corn, can also confront this problem, intensified by the specificity ofcanola: because its pods ripen at uneven rates, producers have adopted thehabit of cutting the plants and drying them in the fields before harvestingthe seeds. Unfailingly, thousands of seeds stay in the ground and germinatethe following year, or even as much as five years later. This has been dubbed“volunteer” or “rebel” canola, which is in fact a “superweed.”GMOs Mean Ever More HerbicidesThe irony of the story is that Monsanto understood very early on the financialinterest these “rebel” plants might represent. On May 29, 2001, thecompany was awarded patent 6,239,072 covering a “tank mixture” that would“allow control of glyphosate-susceptible weeds and glyphosate-tolerant volunteerindividuals.” 43 As the Soil Association report points out, “the patentwill enable the company to profit from a problem that its products had createdin the first place.” 44Considering developments in the North American prairies, one might expectthat this “tank mixture” will become the company’s next cash cow. Thedevelopment of superweeds has in fact become one of the major headachesof North American agronomists, who have observed that they may emerge inone of three ways. In the first case, which has just been described, they areRoundup-resistant “volunteers” whose destruction requires the use of morepotent herbicides. In the second case, GMOs cross with “adventitious”plants (the technical term for weeds) that are genetically close, transferring