The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

transgenic wheat 227Ian McCreary, who is forty-two, runs a seventeen-hundred-acre farm nearBladworth, in the heart of the vast, flat, dreary province known as the breadbasket.When I met him in September 2004, he and his wife, Mary, weremaking final adjustments to their combine. It looked like the end of theworld, with thousands of acres of wheat stretching to the horizon glitteringunder a steel-blue sky toward which were raised huge grain elevators dottingthe prairie like Lego pieces.“We’re far away from everything here,” McCreary said with a smile, aftersaying grace before the family lunch. “Transport costs are astronomical, andto make a living we have to concentrate on the quality of our wheat, whichis highly valued by millers around the world; they blend it with varieties oflower baking quality. As they did with canola and corn, GMOs would havecreated price declines and we can’t let ourselves sell wheat for fodder.”“But Monsanto says its wheat would have taken care of the weed problem,”I said.“Unlike soybeans, weeds are not really a problem for wheat. I think it wasMonsanto that had a problem: its Roundup patent had just expired and thecompany wanted to make up for it by selling herbicide and seeds for one ofthe largest food crops in the world. As for wheat growers, they were afraidthat Roundup Ready wheat would increase herbicide costs because ‘volunteers’would show up, not to mention the exorbitant cost of patented seeds:in the plains we usually keep our wheat seeds for at least ten years beforebuying new ones.”And so the powerful CWB ended up campaigning alongside Greenpeaceand the Council of Canadians (the country’s largest citizens’ organization),“two organizations it has clashed with in the past,” as the Toronto Star remarked,“to present a united front opposing GM wheat.” 4 The article quotesa letter from Rank Hovis, the leading British flour miller, to the CWB: “Ifyou do grow genetically modified wheat, we will not be able to buy any ofyour wheat, neither the GM nor the conventional. ...We just cannot sellit.” At the same time, Grandi Molini Italiani, the leading Italian miller, senta similar message to North American wheat growers. 5 They were soon joinedby the powerful association of Japanese millers, whose executive director,Tsutomu Shigeta, predicted a “collapse of the market” if Monsanto’s wheatwere to invade the plains, because the majority of consumers didn’t want it. 6(In May 2003, a survey conducted by the Western Organization of Resource