The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

258 the world according to monsantotor, whose protective barriers were annihilated in order to hand productionover entirely to the laws of the market.Monsanto was prepared and entered the breach in the early 1990s, becomingthe privileged interlocutor of Conabia, the National Advisory Commissionon Agricultural Biotechnology, established by Menem in 1991 toprovide Argentina with the appearance of GMO regulation. The commission,under the jurisdiction of the Secretariat of Agriculture, had only advisorystatus and was made up exclusively of representatives from publicbodies, such as the National Seed Institute (INASE) or the National Instituteof Agricultural Technology (INTA), and private players in the biotechnologyindustry, such as Syngenta, Novartis, and, of course, Monsanto,whose persistent interventionism is not hard to imagine. The opinions expressedby Conabia were indeed based directly on North American models;from the outset it adopted the principle of substantial equivalence, as itsWeb site indicated: “The Argentine standard is based on the identified characteristicsand risks of the biotechnological product and not on the processthat made the product possible.” Concretely, the commission did nothingbut analyze the data supplied by the multinational corporations; if tests wereconducted, their only purpose was to test the adaptability of transgenicseeds to Argentine agricultural conditions.Beginning in 1994, Monsanto sold licenses to the principal seed companiesin the country, such as Nidera and Don Mario, who took care of introducingthe Roundup Ready gene into the varieties in their catalogue. By alucky coincidence, the two major newspapers in the country, La Nación andespecially Clarín (which had the largest national circulation), plunged intothe promotion—some called it propaganda—of biotechnology, labeling allopponents, even the most moderate, anti-progress fanatics or Luddites, toadopt the expression of Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Agriculture, DanGlickman.* Countless editorials praised the biotechnological revolutionwith arguments oddly reminiscent of those presented by a certain companyin Missouri: “With GMOs, science has made a decisive contribution to thewar against hunger,” Carlos Menem, for example, declared in an agriculturaljournal. 1 William Kosinski, Monsanto’s “biotechnology educator,” asserted:*The most determined defender of GMOs in Argentina is Héctor Huergo, who edits the supplementClarín Rural.