The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

326 the world according to monsantopromised them, such as the golden rice that it announced with great publicfanfare.”To be precise, Monsanto did not invent golden rice, which was cobbled together,with the best intentions in the world, by two European researchers,Ingo Potrykus from Zurich and Peter Beyer from Freiburg. This GM rice wassupposed to produce beta-carotene, the precursor to vitamin A, deficiency ofwhich leads to the death of a million children annually in the Third Worldand causes blindness in 300,000 others. Published in Science in 2000, thelaboratory results seemed so promising that golden rice made headlines inmany newspapers as the embodiment of the great promise of biotechnology. 12Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the two researchers decided tolaunch their creation on the market, but they were confronted by an inextricableproblem of patents: to make their golden rice, they had used genes andprocedures covered by no fewer than seventy patents belonging to thirty-twocompanies or research centers. That meant that unless they sold the preciousgrains at astronomical prices, the business was doomed to failure. At thatpoint a philanthropic association by the name of Monsanto intervened. At anagricultural conference in India in 2000, the company announced that itwould “give away certain patent rights to speed [the] use of a genetically modifiedrice that could save millions of malnourished children.” 13 The developmentof the rice, said Hendrik Verfaillie, who would soon succeed RobertShapiro, “clearly demonstrates that biotechnology can help not only countriesin the West, but in the developing world as well.” 14However, as soon as golden rice was grown in real conditions, it producedsuch a pathetic amount of beta-carotene that it did absolutely no good. “Wenever found out why,” said Brammer, “but this story is a good illustration ofthe unknowns surrounding the process of genetic engineering. They representa medium- and long-term risk for Monsanto; we have no guarantee thatGMOs will not be tomorrow’s Agent Orange.”I will not enumerate all the surprises held in store over the years by productsderived from genetic tinkering, such as, for example, the discovery bya Belgian scientist of an “unknown DNA fragment” in Monsanto RoundupReady soybeans. 15 I merely advise the reader to consult a European CommissionWeb site listing the scientific studies it sponsors on the safety ofGMOs. One example is a research study with the title “The Mechanisms andControl of Genetic Recombination in Plants.” 16 In their presentation of theproject, the authors note: “A major problem with present day technology is