The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

16How Multinational CorporationsControl the World’s FoodThrough dialogue with many people, Monsanto has learned to appreciate thatagricultural biotechnology raises some moral and ethical issues that go beyondscience. These issues include choice, democracy, globalization, who has thetechnology, and who will benefit from it.—Monsanto, Pledge Report, 2005If anyone in India knows the subject of the “green revolution” well, it is VandanaShiva, one of whose books, published in 1989, is titled The Violence ofthe Green Revolution: Ecological Degradation and Political Conflict in Punjab.1 In this fundamental book, the feminist antiglobalization figure dissectsthe misdeeds of the agricultural revolution, launched in the wake of WorldWar II, that was later called “green” because it was supposed to slow the expansionof the “red revolution” in “underdeveloped” countries, particularlyin Asia, where the rise of Mao Zedong to power in China in 1949 threatenedto create imitators.The “Only” Goal of the Second Green RevolutionIs to Increase Monsanto’s Profits“I’m not saying that the green revolution did not begin with good intentions,namely, to increase food production in Third World countries,” Shiva told me,“but the perverse effects of the industrial agriculture model that underlies it