The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

76 the world according to monsantochemical products in France (as in a number of developed countries) opensthe door to all sorts of abuse and fraud, much to the dismay of consumers.To be more precise, I would even say that the registration process is in facta sham: contrary to what the regulatory authorities would have us believe, itis in reality based entirely on the goodwill of the chemical companies, whichprovide data from studies they are supposed to have conducted to prove theharmlessness of their products. These data are then examined by “experts”who vary widely in their competence, courageousness, and independence.All one need do is read the book Trust Us, We’re Experts by the Americanwriters Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, 14 or Pesticides: Révélations surun Scandale Français by the French writers Fabrice Nicolino and FrançoisVeillerette, 15 to realize that many toxic products have had a long career afterbeing duly approved by the experts, whose names are concealed by opaqueand not very democratic bureaucratic procedures.In this sense, the history of Monsanto is a paradigm of the aberrations inwhich industrial society has become mired, forced to manage as best itcan—that is, badly—the proliferation of toxic chemical substances thathave invaded the planet since the end of World War II. The reasonable solutionwould be to ban outright any molecule that presents the slightest dangerto people and the environment. But instead, to satisfy the interests of themajor chemical companies—and, some would say, the interests of modernconsumers—every effort is made to regulate dangerous substances only asmuch as is necessary to limit the most obvious or immediate damage. Forthe rest, après nous le déluge.The history of pesticides constitutes a perfect illustration of this verytwisted mechanism, whose workings it is important to understand, even ifthat involves entering into rather dry detail—the better to grasp its absurdity.As biologist Julie Marc points out in the doctoral dissertation she defendedin 2004 at the University of Rennes, “the use of pesticides goes backto antiquity,” but until the twentieth century, the pest killers were of naturalorigin: peasants and gardeners used mineral derivatives, such as the copperin the old bouillie bordelaise (Bordeaux mixture), to treat plants affected bycertain diseases or parasites. 16 The development of industrial agriculturewas accompanied by the massive use of chemical pesticides belonging to thefamily of organochlorides, the first of which was DDT. Called “phytosanitaryproducts”—a clever rhetorical trick, replacing the notion of a “killer” with