The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

india: the seeds of suicide 295Established in India since 1949, Monsanto is one of the country’s majorsuppliers of phytosanitary products. There is a large market for herbicidesand especially insecticides, because cotton is very susceptible to a widevariety of pests, such as bollworms, wireworms, cotton worm weevils, mealybugs,spider mites, and aphids. Before the “green revolution,” which encouragedthe intensive monoculture of cotton with high-yield hybridvarieties, Indian farmers managed to control infestations by these insectsthrough a system of crop rotation and the use of an organic pesticide derivedfrom the leaves of the neem tree. The many therapeutic properties of thistree, venerated as the “free tree” in all the villages of the subcontinent, areso well known that it has been the subject of a dozen patents filed by internationalcompanies, obvious cases of biopiracy that have led to endless challengesin patent offices. For example, in September 1994, the Americanchemical company W.R. Grace, a competitor of Monsanto, secured a Europeanpatent for the use of neem oil as an insecticide, preventing Indiancompanies from marketing their products abroad except if they paid royaltiesto the multinational corporation, which was also flooding the countrywith chemical pesticides. 4These were the chemical pesticides that caused the first wave of suicidesamong indebted cotton farmers in the late 1990s. The intensive use of syntheticinsecticides produced a phenomenon well known to entomologists:the development of resistance by the insects to the products intended tocombat them. The result was that to get rid of the insects, farmers had toincrease doses and turn to increasingly toxic molecules, so much so that inIndia, where cotton covers only 5 percent of the land under cultivation, italone accounts for 55 percent of the pesticides used.The irony of the story is that Monsanto was perfectly capable of benefitingfrom the deadly spiral that its products had helped create and which, inconjunction with the fall in cotton prices (from $98.20 a ton in 1995 to$49.10 in 2001), had led to the death of thousands of small farmers. Thecompany praised the virtues of Bt cotton as the ultimate panacea that wouldreduce or eliminate the need to spray for bollworms, as its Indian subsidiary’sWeb site proclaims.In 1993, Monsanto negotiated a Bt technology license agreement with theMaharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco), the largest seed company inIndia. Two years later, the Indian government authorized the importation ofa Bt cotton variety grown in the United States (Cocker 312, containing the