The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

40 the world according to monsantoAugust 3, 1921, to combat a sphinx caterpillar infestation; the pilot wasLieutenant John Macready, and he was accompanied by an entomologistnamed J.S. Houser. The experiment was repeated the following year on acotton plantation in Louisiana, to exterminate boll weevils in similar circumstances.This is proof, if any were needed, that industrial agriculturenever would have seen the light of day without close cooperation betweenthe military and scientific establishments, whose respective goals are not exactlyto produce healthy food that respects the environment.In the 1940s, the aircraft industry perfected spraying tanks that were fixedonto military aircraft to spray DDT in Western Europe and the Pacific, “tosave lives,” according to Major Buckingham, who goes on to say that the Alliesand Axis in World War II abstained from using chemical sprays eitherbecause of legal restrictions or to avoid retaliation in kind. 13The removal of the taboo seems in fact to have had two causes: the emergenceof the Cold War, which justified the use of any means to confront theCommunist menace, and the discovery of the revolutionary herbicides 2,4-Dand 2,4,5-T. I have already noted that they were invented simultaneously byBritish and American laboratories. Researchers soon recognized the potentialthey represented in wartime because they made it possible to destroycrops and thereby starve enemy armies and populations. In 1943, the U.K.Agricultural Research Council launched a secret testing program that wouldbe used in Malaysia in the 1950s when, for the first time in history, theBritish Army used herbicides to destroy the crops of Communist insurgents.In the United States at the same time, the Center for Biological Warfare atFort Detrick, Maryland, was testing dinoxol and trinoxol, mixtures of 2,4-Dand 2,4,5-T, precursors of Agent Orange. It is reasonable to think that thesepreliminary tests were conducted with the close cooperation of Monsanto.The first tests in real-life conditions took place in South Vietnam beginningin 1959. They were apparently such a novelty that the American militarythought it appropriate to film them for a period of two years. In thisextraordinary document, which I have been able to consult, one sees a militaryaircraft flying at low altitude above virgin forest release a milky cloud ina straight line as the aircraft moves forward. “After two weeks, it is obviousthat the treatment has been effective,” the voice-over notes with satisfaction;“90 percent of the trees and bushes have been destroyed for two years.”Aerial shots then show a hole slicing through the luxuriant vegetation for