The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

278 the world according to monsantoTime to CollectMonsanto had been waiting in the starting blocks for a long time. Its entirestrategy in Brazil demonstrates that it had largely anticipated the takeover ofthe country by soybeans, and transgenic crops more broadly. It had beenmarketing its herbicides in Brazil since the 1950s, and it opened its firstglyphosate production facility in São Paulo in 1976. But in the 1990s, whenits RR soybeans were spreading illegally, it launched the construction of anew plant that its Brazilian Web site presented with all the expected fanfare:“In December 2001 Monsanto inaugurated, at the Petrochemical Pole ofCamaçari, the first plant of the company designed to produce raw materialsfor the herbicide Roundup in South America. The investment is equivalentto US $500 million. . . . The Camaçari Plant, the largest unit of Monsantoinstalled out of the United States, is also the only Monsanto plant manufacturingraw materials for the Roundup production line. The production is directedto Monsanto units installed in São José dos Campos (SP), Zarate(Argentina) and Antwerp (Belgium); in the past those units received rawmaterials from the United States.” 2As it was adapting its Roundup production capacities to the huge marketit was seeking to develop, the company took control of Brazilian seedsin 1997 by acquiring Agroceres, the largest seed company in Brazil, andthrough the Brazilian subsidiaries of American seed companies that hadcome under its control in the United States, such as Cargill Seeds, DeKalb,and Asgrow. In 2007, Monsanto was the largest supplier of corn seeds inBrazil, and the second largest for soybean seeds, just behind Embrapa, theNational Institute for Agricultural Research, which was desperately fightingto survive.The culmination of Monsanto’s work was the collecting of royalties, firstin Brazil, followed by Paraguay, and finally Argentina. Scarcely had Lula legalizedthe illegal crops when Monsanto began negotiations with producers,exporters, and processors of the precious grain, brandishing its intellectualproperty rights to the RR gene. Threatened with a cutoff of seed supplies,the Brazilians did not resist for long; by January 2004, they had signed anagreement providing that royalties would be collected when producers deliveredtheir crops to the grain elevators of dealers and exporters of soybeans,such as Bunge and Cargill, the American giant whose foreign operations