The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

298 the world according to monsantosands of posters were put up throughout the country showing smiling farmersposing next to shiny new tractors, supposedly acquired with the profitsfrom Bt cotton.The first year, 55,000 farmers, 2 percent of India’s cotton growers, agreedto join the transgenic adventure. “I heard it is a miracle seed that will freeme from the bondage of pesticide spraying,” a twenty-six-year-old farmerfrom Andhra Pradesh, one of the first states to authorize the marketing ofGMOs (in March 2002), told the Washington Post in 2003. “Last season,every time I saw pests, I panicked, I sprayed pesticides on my cotton cropabout 20 times. This season, with the new seed, I sprayed only three times.” 9Regardless of this obvious advantage (which soon disappeared because insectsdeveloped resistance to Bt plants), the remainder of the picture wasmuch less brilliant, as farmers interviewed by the Washington Post reported atthe end of their first GM harvest. “I got less money for my Bt cotton becausethe buyers at the market said the staple fiber length was shorter,” said one.The yield also did not improve. “The price of the seed is so high, now I wonderif it was really worth it.” 10 In fact, because the patenting of seeds has (fornow) remained prohibited in India, Monsanto could not apply the same systemas in North America, that is, require that farmers buy their seeds everyyear under threat of legal action. To make up for its “losses,” it decided to relyon a quadrupling of seed prices: while a 450-gram packet of conventionalseeds sold for 450 rupees, the same amount of Bt seeds cost 1,850 rupees.Finally, the Washington Post reported, “the ruinous boll weevils have not disappeared.”These less-than-stellar results did not keep Ranjana Smetacek,public relations director for Monsanto India* from declaring confidently: “Btcotton has done very well in all the five states where it was planted.” 11The accounts presented by the Washington Post were, however, confirmedby several studies. The first was commissioned in 2002 by the AndhraPradesh Coalition in Defense of Diversity (CDD), which brought together140 civil society organizations, including the Deccan Development Society(DDS), a very respected NGO that specializes in careful farming and sustainabledevelopment. The CDD asked two agronomists, Dr. Abdul Qayum,a former official in the state Agriculture Department, and Kiran Sakkhari, to*The reader will recall the fake scientists under whose names the campaign of defamation againstIgnacio Chapela over Mexican corn had been launched; one of them was named “AnduraSmetacek,” and Jonathan Matthews, the British researcher who uncovered the truth, had remarkedon this unusual name. Perhaps the schemers in St. Louis had simply taken it from their Indian staff.