The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

304 the world according to monsantocousins that had become resistant to Bacillus thuringiensis, thereby causinggenetic dilution. When insects are constantly confronted with a theoreticallyfatal dose of poison, they are all exterminated, except for a few specimensendowed with a gene resistant to the poison. The survivors mate withtheir fellows, possibly transmitting the gene in question to their descendants,and so on for several generations. This is known as “co-evolution,”which, over the long course of the history of life, has enabled species threatenedwith extinction to adapt in order to survive a fatal disease. To keep thisphenomenon from developing among Bt plant parasites, the sorcerer’s apprenticesimagined that they just had to maintain a population of healthy insectson the non-transgenic plots—the refuges—so they could mate withtheir cousins that had become resistant to Bt, thereby preventing the resistantinsects from reproducing among themselves.Once that was established, it remained to determine the size the refugesshould have so that the plan would work. The subject was a matter of intensenegotiations between Monsanto and the scientists, with the EPAmerely recording the outcome. At first, some entomologists argued that thesurface area of the refuges should be at least equivalent to that of the transgenicplots. Monsanto, of course, protested, suggesting at first that the surfacearea of the refuge should equal 3 percent of that of GMOs. In 1997, agroup of university researchers working in the Midwest corn belt courageouslyjumped into the arena with a recommendation that refuges shouldbe equivalent to 20 percent of the transgenic plots, and twice that if theplots were treated with pesticides other than Bt.This was still too much for Monsanto, as Daniel Charles reports in Lordsof the Harvest. “‘Monsanto looked at the recommendations and said, “Wecan’t live with that,”’ says Scott McFarland, a young lawyer who was workingfor Pioneer at the time.” The company contacted “the National Corn GrowersAssociation, which also had its headquarters in St. Louis. Monsanto’srepresentatives convinced the leadership of the NCGA that large refugeswere a threat to farmers’ free use of Bt.” 25 This went on until September1998, when the parties met in Kansas City to come to an agreement. As thediscussions were getting bogged down in battles over arbitrary percentages,an agricultural economist from the University of Minnesota convincinglydemonstrated that, according to his estimates, if the refuges were only 10percent the size of the transgenic plots, then corn borers—the target parasiteof Bt corn—would have a 50 percent chance of developing resistance in