The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

288 the world according to monsantobe controlled to annihilate enemy governments. Well that’s exactly whatMonsanto is doing now.”On my way to Asunción, where I would board a plane back to France, Ithought about the conversation I had had two years earlier with WalterPengue, the Argentine agronomist who had become one of the world’s bestknown specialists on the impacts of transgenic soybeans.“The transgenic model is the latest incarnation of industrial agriculture,”he had explained over a glass of Argentine cabernet sauvignon. “It’s the lastlink in a model of intensive production, based on a technological packagethat includes not only seeds and herbicide but a whole series of inputs, suchas fertilizer and insecticides, without which there is no yield, that are sold bythe multinational corporations of the North to the countries of the South.That’s why we can speak of the second agricultural revolution. The first, theone that came in the postwar years, was piloted by national agricultural organizations,like INTA in Argentina, and was aimed at developing countries’food-producing capacities relying on the peasant class. The second is drivenby supranational interests and leads to an agricultural model turned towardexports, where there are no more active participants in the fields. Thismodel is directed purely toward supplying low-cost fodder for the large industrialfeedlots in the countries of the North, and leads to the developmentof monocultures that threaten the food security of the countries of theSouth. In ten years, the Argentine economy has gone back a century by becomingdependent on commodity exports whose prices are set in world marketswhere the power of multinational corporations is decisive. When theprice of soybeans collapses, we can expect the worst.”“What are the consequences of RR soybeans for conventional and organicsoybeans?”“That’s another very important point in transgenic agriculture, whichleads to biouniformity, which is another danger for food security. GM soybeanshave practically made conventional and organic soybeans disappear,because they are contaminated and their prices have declined drastically.But there is something more serious: if half a country is planted with a singlevariety, it creates a veritable highway for natural diseases that can annihilatea country’s entire production. A threat is now hanging over soybeansthat has no phytosanitary remedy, soybean rust. It began in Brazil, spread toParaguay, and then Argentina. The lack of diversity of plant species preventsresistance to disease. Don’t forget what happened in the nineteenth century