GMW:_Monsanto_-_the_real_story_-_beyond_all_decency

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GMW:_Monsanto_-_the_real_story_-_beyond_all_decency

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Sun, 6 Jun 2004 11:00:35 +0100

 

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A little while back we circulated details of a report, " Selling

Food.Health.Hope: The Real Story Behind Monsanto Corporation " published by

MASIPAG - www.masipag.org - and researched by Sarah Wright, which documents

Monsanto's terrible history.

http://www.masipag.org/dwnload3.htm

 

We got several enquiries about the origin of the following quote in the report

from a US Court which found Monsanto guilty of " behavior so outrageous in

character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency

as to be regarded atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society. "

 

The first item below puts the quote in context, and the second item gives the

historical background to this item.

 

As BIO2004 gets underway in San Francisco, this is perhaps a useful reminder of

the background and trustworthiness of an industry which is seeking control of

our future food supply.

 

1.Toxic town - CBS News Transcripts

2.Excerpt from: War, Globalization and the Demise of Monsanto - Brian Tokar

---

1.Toxic town; town of Anniston, Alabama, is contaminated due to manufacture of

PCBs

CBS News Transcripts

60 Minutes - CBS

November 10, 2002 Sunday

 

STEVE KROFT, co-host:

Imagine a place so saturated with toxic, cancer-causing chemicals, that it's in

the dirt people walk on, in the air that they breathe, even in the blood that

pumps through their veins. The 24,000 people in Anniston, Alabama, don't have to

imagine this; many of them are living it. In fact, they've been living it for

decades; they just didn't know it. The company responsible didn't tell them, and

neither did the US Environmental Protection Agency.

 

(Footage of people in Anniston, Alabama; David Baker with Kroft)

 

KROFT: (Voiceover) Today, parts of Anniston are so contaminated that residents

have been told not to grow vegetables in the soil, kick up dirt, eat food, chew

gum or smoke cigarettes while working in their own yards. David Baker grew up

here.

 

Mr. DAVID BAKER: Our children have to play in the streets, on the sidewalks,

because they can't play in the grass because it's contaminated. We have to wear

a mask if we cut our grass. Where else in the United States of America is people

doing that?

 

(Footage of bottle of chemicals; electric transformers; printing press; photo of

chemical plant; footage of water tower with Monsanto logo; chemical plant;

people in Anniston)

 

KROFT: (Voiceover) The problem is polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs, one of the

most pervasive and profitable industrial chemicals of the 20th century. They

were used as insulators in electric transformers and mixed into everything from

paint to newsprint. They were invented in Anniston in 1929 and manufactured here

by Monsanto for almost 40 years, a source of wealth and jobs until the 1970s,

when it became clear that PCBs were doing more harm to the environment than good

for industry. They were banned in 1979, but the people here are still living

with the legacy.

 

Dr. DAVID CARPENTER: In my judgment there's no question but what this is the

most contaminated site in the US.

 

(Footage of Dr. Carpenter in lab)

 

KROFT: (Voiceover) Dr. David Carpenter is a professor of environmental health at

the State University of New York in Albany, and an expert on PCBs. He says every

national and international health agency in the world lists PCBs as a probable

human carcinogen.

 

What does that mean?

 

Dr. CARPENTER: That means that there's absolute, definitive evidence that they

cause cancer in animals, and that there is evidence in humans consistent with

the conclusion that they cause cancer.

 

KROFT: Is this still a subject for debate?

 

Dr. CARPENTER: Within the objective scientific community and within the

government bodies, there is no debate at all.

 

(Footage of Carpenter; west Anniston neighborhood; group of people)

 

KROFT: (Voiceover) Dr. Carpenter says PCB exposure increases the risk of almost

all major diseases, including cancer, heart disease and diabetes. PCBs were so

widely used and last so long, that almost all of us have minute levels in our

bloodstreams. The people who live in west Anniston, the area closest to the

plant, have some of the highest PCB levels in the world. Anything above one and

a half parts per billion is considered unusual.

 

Unidentified Man #1: I have 22 parts per billion.

 

Unidentified Woman #1: I have 33.

 

Unidentified Woman #2: I have 77.75.

 

Unidentified Woman #3: I have 65.4 parts per billion in my body.

 

(Footage of group; people in auditorium)

 

KROFT: All of them have major health problems, from diabetes to cancer, and

they're convinced it's because of the PCBs. They're just a handful of some

20,000 current or former residents who have joined five different lawsuits

against Monsanto for polluting their community, threatening their health and

destroying their property.

 

Mr. DAVID BAKER: This is part of Snow Creek. We call it Stink Creek, Snow Creek.

 

(Footage of Kroft with Baker walking along Snow Creek; burial site of PBCs on

hillside)

 

KROFT: (Voiceover) Monsanto dumped tons of raw PCBs directly into Snow Creek,

which runs by the plant. Five thousand additional tons are buried in a hillside,

and David Baker believes they're still giving off fumes.

 

Mr. BAKER: Where is PCB coming from if you stopped making it in 1971? You stop

making this stuff in 1971, and I'm still breathing it in 2002. You're sitting

here now, you're breathing PCBs. There's no question about it.

 

(Footage of Baker; Donald Stewart at office)

 

KROFT: (Voiceover) Baker and 3,500 other plaintiffs are being represented by

Donald Stewart, an attorney and former US senator who lives in Anniston.

 

Former Senator DONALD STEWART: The community that lives in west Anniston,

hardworking kind of folks, decent kind of people, but they're not the wealthiest

people in the world. And so they fish a lot and consume these fish that were

filled with PCBs, raised poultry, raised other animals, hogs, and at no point in

time did the company ever inform the people in that community about the problem

that they were facing.

 

KROFT: Why not, do you think?

 

Mr. STEWART: Well, my suspicion is that they knew that one day we would be in

the situation we're in right now. The internal documents indicate that they knew

they had tremendous liability there at that plant site.

 

(Footage of Monsanto documents; Snow Creek)

 

KROFT: (Voiceover) Stewart uncovered close to a million pages of company

documents that show Monsanto knew PCBs were a problem as early as 1938, when

scientists hired by the company reported that rats exposed to the chemicals

developed liver damage. By the 1950s, Monsanto was urging its own workers to

wear proper protective clothing and respiratory equipment when handling PCBs.

Many of the documents were marked 'confidential: Read and destroy.' In one, from

1966, a scientist working for Monsanto found Snow Creek so polluted with

chemicals that it was devoid of life. Healthy fish submerged in the creek turned

belly-up and died within three minutes.

 

Mr. STEWART: They were warned by the people who did those tests that they should

warn their neighbors because children and animals might be affected by what was

being released from their plant. They knew PCBs were harmful to humans, said not

one word about it.

 

(Footage of Monsanto confidential documents; factory in Anniston)

 

KROFT: (Voiceover) In 1969, Monsanto created a high level PCB Committee whose

mission was to 'protect the image of the corporation' and 'permit continued

sales and profits.' Even they concluded that PCBs will someday become a 'global

environmental contaminant.' But no one passed that information on to the

community or to state and federal regulators.

 

They tried to keep it a secret.

 

Mr. STEWART: Or they lied, is basically what they did. It would be called, I

guess, in our part of the country, a sin of omission.

 

KROFT: In fact, people in Anniston might never have known about the

contamination if it weren't for a man with the Soil Conservation Service who

pulled a badly deformed largemouth bass out of Choccolocco Creek back in 1993.

Instead of throwing it back, he decided to send it off to an independent lab for

analysis. Turns out the fish was loaded with PCBs.

 

(Footage of lake; public health advisory sign; fenced off land; Monsanto plant;

boxes of documents in Stewart's office)

 

KROFT: (Voiceover) By that time, the contamination had spread 40 miles

downstream. The state of Alabama put out warnings not to eat local fish. And

about the same time, Monsanto began quietly buying up property in west Anniston,

bulldozing houses and fencing off the land. Parts of the neighborhood look like

a ghost town. So far, Monsanto has settled three of the lawsuits for nearly $80

million. But Donald Stewart and his clients wanted their day in court, and

earlier this year they won a huge victory.

 

After a six-week trial, an Alabama jury found that Monsanto had engaged in

outrageous behavior, and held the corporation and its corporate successors

liable on all six counts it considered, including negligence, nuisance,

wantonness and suppression of the truth.

 

KROFT: (Voiceover) Now the court is trying to assess damages. John Hunter is a

longtime Monsanto executive, and now the CEO of Solutia, which is what

Monsanto's old chemical business is now called. Monsanto spun it off into a

separate company in 1997, just as the lawsuits were getting under way.

 

The jury in Alabama found you guilty, if that's the right word, of behavior 'so

outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible

bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in

civilized society.' I've never heard a--a--a finding like that before.

 

Mr. JOHN HUNTER (CEO, Solutia): I don't know what influenced the jury in their

finding.

 

KROFT: I think the fact that there were documents going back showing that the

company knew that it was toxic, that it had possible effects on--on humans, and

yet continued to dump large quantities of it in the streams and creek beds was

one of the reasons.

 

Mr. HUNTER: Steve, there are a lot of documents in that trial, and as I have

said, I can't speculate on all of those documents or what decision process led

to those documents. What I do know is that we're committed to cleaning up the

PCBs.

 

KROFT: You understand the anger of the community?

 

Mr. HUNTER: I understand the concerns of the Anniston community. And, you know,

if you're asking me do I wish that things might have been done differently in

the past than they were? Sure I do.

 

(Footage of Anniston; EPA building; Stan Meiburg with Kroft)

KROFT: (Voiceover) But the residents of Anniston aren't just angry with

Monsanto, they're also angry with the EPA, which had been aware of the

contamination since the 1970s and never warned the community, either. Stan

Meiburg is the EPA's deputy regional administrator for the Southeast.

 

How could the EPA know that this pollution and contamination existed and not

alert the people in the community?

 

Mr. STAN MEIBURG (EPA, Deputy Regional Administrator, Southeast): I do think

that if we had known that the contamination was as widespread as we now believe

it to be, there were additional measures that we could have taken, and probably

should.

 

KROFT: But we have a--a 1987 draft report--just a draft, not a final

copy--ordering Monsanto to determine the extent of the problem in Anniston and

take corrective action. Whatever happened to that?

 

Mr. MEIBURG: What happened was that order was not issued.

 

KROFT: Because?

 

Mr. MEIBURG: I do not know.

 

KROFT: Monsanto's known about this problem with the PCBs since 1938, and the

federal government's known about it since the late-1970s. People in Anniston

didn't find out until 1993. How do--how do you explain that?

 

Mr. MEIBURG: We absolutely understand the concerns that people have in Anniston,

and one of the things that has occurred in this is we have learned from the

community.

 

KROFT: This past summer, when it looked like an Alabama judge might order the

company to remove all the PCBs from Anniston, the EPA stepped in and signed a

consent decree with Solutia giving the company two more years to study the

problem, and then propose its own cleanup.

 

Essentially, instead of the government deciding what needs to be done, you're

allowing Monsanto to decide what needs to be done.

 

Mr. MEIBURG: I wouldn't characterize it that way. Any actions that will be taken

on what's going to be done ha--will have to have the approval of the EPA.

 

KROFT: Why give Monsanto the benefit of the doubt? If you look at the records,

and you look at the documents, they've been lying about this for 20 years, 30

years, haven't they?

 

Mr. MEIBURG: And that's why our job is not to trust. Our job is to oversee, to

verify, to use the enforcement tools that we have to make sure that the cleanup

proceeds in the way it should.

 

KROFT: Solutia says it's already spent more than $50 million on the cleanup.

Using its own measurements and EPA standards, it doesn't believe Anniston

residents are being exposed to what it calls significant levels of PCBs.

 

Mr. HUNTER: We've sampled over 1,000 residential properties, and only 24 of

those are required for immediate action. We're taking action on this.

Unfortunately, the lawyers for the plaintiffs are advising the--the property

owners to deny us access for the property. So we stand there ready to clean up

those properties, and can't do it for that reason.

 

Mr. STEWART: We want our clients' property completely cleaned, and not this half

measure that they are proposing. We also want our folks to do the testing. We've

got soil sample experts who can do testing. We don't trust Monsanto's test.

 

KROFT: They don't trust you.

 

Mr. HUNTER: Steve, I think that the best way that you can judge someone's words

is to watch their actions.

 

KROFT: I think that mistrust is based on the company's actions over the last 35

to 65 years.

 

Mr. HUNTER: Steve, I would hope that they would look at Solutia for what Solutia

is doing now.

 

KROFT: What Solutia seems to be doing now is resisting the complete removal of

all the PCBs from Anniston, something that could cost $1/2 billion.

 

Finally, after 15 years, the federal government is promising $3 million to study

the health effects of long-term PCB exposure on the residents of Anniston.

---

2.Excerpt from:

War, Globalization and the Demise of Monsanto

by Brian Tokar, Institute for Social Ecology

http://www.greens.org/s-r/33/33-02.html

 

Monsanto, like most of the major players in agrochemicals and agricultural

biotech today, had its origins in profiting from war. Founded in 1901 to bring

the manufacture of the artificial sweetener, saccharine, to the United States,

Monsanto first became a major player in the US chemical industry during World

War I. As a leading manufacturer of phenol and nitric acid—the main precursors

for that era’s high-tech explosive, TNT—Monsanto’s profits increased 100-fold

during the war.

 

In the 1930s, Monsanto bought the company that invented PCBs, which were very

quickly discovered to be highly toxic. Monsanto monopolized PCB production in

the United States until this entire class of potent carcinogens was banned in

the 1970s. As a result of the 1997 Solutia spin-off, that company, not Monsanto,

is liable for most of the damages in the historic negligence suit by 3500

residents of Anniston, Alabama, one of two historic centers of PCB manufacture.

Residents of Anniston were found to have the highest blood levels of PCBs ever

recorded, triggering a decision under an Alabama law that sanctions behavior “so

outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible

bounds of decency.” Monsanto only becomes liable if the damages exceed Solutia’s

ability to pay.

 

From the 1940s through the 1990s, Monsanto ranked as one of the 10 largest US

chemical companies every year. In the 1940s, they became involved in the

production of organochloride herbicides and DDT. During the 1950s, Monsanto

discovered that a byproduct of its chlorinated pesticide production was causing

severe skin rashes, joint pain and nervous disorders in its production workers.

This mysterious substance turned out to be dioxin, and the US Army Chemical

Corps soon became interested in its potential usefulness as a chemical warfare

agent. The herbicide Agent Orange, which was used by US military forces to

obliterate the dense jungles of Vietnam during the 1960s, was a mixture of the

herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. Although seven different chemical companies had

supplied Agent Orange to the US military, Monsanto’s formulation had as much as

1000 times the concentration of dioxin. Thus the company was ordered to pay more

than 45% of the monetary damages in the famous $180 million

Vietnam veterans’ settlement of the 1980s.

 

 

 

 

--

 

Monsanto has become an international pariah…

 

--

 

The 1970s saw the successful banning of DDT, as well as several of the most

toxic chlorinated pesticides: aldrin, dieldrin, chlordane and heptachlor. By the

mid-eighties, Monsanto had bet its future on Roundup and on the brand new

technology of genetic manipulation. Having acquired a profound degree of control

over agricultural practices in the US during the height of the chemical boom in

the 1950s and sixties, Monsanto and other agrochemical companies saw this new

technology as the means for sustaining that control. As Monsanto’s patent on

glyphosate (Roundup) herbicides was about to expire in the late 1990s, the way

to retain its hegemony over agriculture was to seek to control seed production.

Monsanto spent over $8 billion in the late 1990s acquiring major commercial seed

companies such as DeKalb, Asgrow, Holden’s, and their counterparts in India,

Brazil and other countries.

 

The other so-called Gene Giants—international chemical companies now heavily

invested in GE crop production (Du Pont, BASF, Hoechst, Bayer, and J.R.

Geigy)—all have wartime histories comparable to Monsanto’s.

 

Monsanto’s own role in warfare continues to the present day, especially with the

widespread use of a highly concentrated form of Roundup to eradicate coca and

poppy crops in Colombia. Colombian agronomists have revealed the presence of a

new additive that increases herbicide exposures to more than 100 times

Monsanto’s usual recommended dosage. The aerial spraying of tons of Roundup over

the Colombian countryside has led to the destruction of local subsistence crops

such as manioc, bananas, palms, sugarcane and corn, as well as the poisoning of

creeks, rivers and lakes and the destruction of indigenous fish populations.

 

With this history, it is not surprising that Monsanto has become an

international pariah, far beyond its recent troubles on the stock market.