The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

transgenic wheat 229As the French sociologists of science Pierre-Benoît Joly and Claire Marrispointed out in that year, resistance to GMOs was built up around “trials” and“themes” that had specific characteristics on either side of the Atlantic andthat converged at the beginning of the new century, leading to a shared rejectionof Roundup Ready wheat. 11In Europe, the first issue that spawned the anti-GMO movement wasthe mad cow crisis, which broke out in 1996, at the time when the firstshipment of RR soybeans were arriving from the United States. The campaignGreenpeace organized against GMOs won support particularly becauseit was rooted in the cataclysm of the fatal prion, which had revealedthe inability of government institutions to measure the risks of intensiveagriculture and the system of industrial production of food. As Jolyand Marris note, “On November 1, 1996, Libération printed the headline‘Warning: Mad Soybeans,’ which clearly points to the importance of the madcow crisis as a precedent strongly influencing the way in which GMOs wererepresented.” 12Combined with the rising power of the anti-globalization movement thatdenounced the control of multinationals such as Monsanto over world agriculture(consider, for example, the events surrounding the WTO summit inSeattle in December 1999), the theme of junk food underlay the sympathyfelt by the French for the people who, alongside the peasant leader JoséBové, tore down the McDonald’s in Millau in August 1999 and tore up transgenictest plots.In the United States, where junk food was a way of life, what was on theconsumer’s plate was not a mobilizing theme during the entire “calm period”that accompanied the “large-scale spread of GMOs.” But when Terminator,and more broadly the patent issue, caused the first stirrings in the countryside,two other sets of events shifted public opinion, which suddenly beganto question the reliability and impartiality of regulatory agencies in theirmanagement of the risks associated with products derived from biotechnology.The first of these involved the monarch butterfly, a migratory insectwith orange wings that became the most effective symbol for the anti-GMOcause in the United States.On May 20, 1999, Nature published a study conducted by John Losey, aCornell University entomologist. 13 Along with two colleagues, he had studiedthe effects on butterfly larvae of a Bt corn variety produced by Novartis(now Syngenta) that was supposed to fight the corn borer, a plant parasite.