All Things Considered (National Public Radio)

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And I'm Linda Wertheimer.

In recent years, one company, Monsanto, has led the way in a new technology for developing food crops--genetic engineering. The company's executives say that the new genetically engineered crops Monsanto is developing could help feed the world and preserve the environment. But NPR's Dan Charles reports that in many parts of the world, Monsanto is criticized for taking advantage of farmers and promoting genetically altered food without informing consumers.

DAN CHARLES reporting:

Monsanto hardly seems cut out for the role of global corporate villain. The company's chief executive, Robert Shapiro, seems at least as interested in global poverty as corporate profits.

Mr. ROBERT SHAPIRO (Monsanto's Chief Executive): Poverty is our common ancestor. You don't have to go very far back in my family and my guess is in your family or anyone else's family to find desperately poor people. My guess is, if you go back in any of our families, you find people who died of starvation. And for that to have happened and to remain indifferent for people who are still caught in that seems to me disrespectful of one's own history and one's own ancestors.

CHARLES: Shapiro says biotechnology can put better seeds in the hands of the world's farmers, increase the supply of food and reduce poverty. He set up a division within the company dedicated to sustainability, looking for crops that preserve the world's soil and natural habitats. And he's convinced these are huge business opportunities.

Mr. SHAPIRO: The way on any long-term basis you're likely to produce good returns for share owners and good futures for the people who work here, is by doing things the world wants and needs. I really believe that.

CHARLES: But in much of the world, good intentions aren't what people think of when they hear the name Monsanto.

Mr. TONY JUNIPER (Friends of the Earth): We think of a company which has been exposed really as a profit-making machine driven by public relations rather than consumer demand.

CHARLES: Tony Juniper is a campaigner for the environmental organization Friends of the Earth in Britain where Monsanto's genetically engineered crops are increasingly unpopular.

Mr. JUNIPER: And all this stuff is added up to Monsanto being rather a dirty word over here in Britain.

CHARLES: In India, bands of farmers burned trial plots of Monsanto's biotech cotton last year, and back home in the United States, farmers like Roger Peters, in Oak Harbor, Ohio, resent Monsanto's policy of preventing farmers from saving part of their harvest as seed for the following year.

Mr. ROGER PETERS (Farmer): They aren't really friends of the farmer. It seems like they're more enemies of the farmer.

CHARLES: Monsanto began the work that now arouses such passions 20 years ago. In 1983, young scientists went to work there. Their goal was to splice new genes into plants, creating novel varieties with useful traits. They became the first in the world to succeed. A few weeks from now, President Clinton will award those three men and the executive who hired them the National Medal of Technology. One of the scientists, now a vice president at Monsanto, is Robert Fraley.

Mr. ROBERT FRALEY (Vice President, Monsanto): And it was a real act of faith because back in the early '80s, you know, just the first glimpses of the pharmaceutical applications were in place. No one had at all outlined, you know, the agricultural and ultimately the food and nutrition aspects of biotech.

CHARLES: The agricultural aspects of biotech are on full display at Monsanto's Chesterfield Research Center, an imposing brick building west of St. Louis. Kathy Sanard(ph) leads the way on to the freight elevator and up to the roof. It's covered with greenhouses.

Ms. KATHY SANARD (Monsanto): Thirteen greenhouses on each of two floors--26 total; just about two acres under glass.

CHARLES: It's never winter here; plants are always growing. The lighting and temperature, even the soil, is controlled to duplicate conditions anywhere in the world where Monsanto wants to sell seeds.

Ms. SANARD: It smells like Kansas, doesn't it?

CHARLES: This greenhouse is hot and humid and full of corn. Some of the plants have a gene taken from a kind of bacteria called bacillus thuringiensis, or BT, that makes them poisonous to the European corn borer. That means less spraying of insecticides and higher yields. Other plants have an extra gene that makes them immune to a powerful herbicide, RoundUp, also manufactured by Monsanto.

Ms. SANARD: RoundUp will kill anything green and growing until now, and we have RoundUp-ready technology. So--but this is a regular corn plant, non-RoundUp ready, sprayed with RoundUp. And you can see that it's no longer living.

CHARLES: Behind those plants are several so-called RoundUp-ready corn plants, and they're thriving. The advantage for farmers is they can spray once with RoundUp instead of several times with different herbicides for different weeds. Naturally, that's good for Monsanto's sales of RoundUp, but Monsanto also claims, and there are some independent studies which back this up, planting RoundUp-ready crops can bring benefits for the environment. On average, farmers using these crops sprayed less total herbicide. And with RoundUp controlling the weeds, they can plow the land less, preserving top soil.

These two genes, BT and RoundUp-ready, are the twin flagships of the Monsanto biotechnology empire. The genes are in a third of the soybeans grown in the US, 10 percent of the corn and 15 percent of the cotton. Monsanto's Robert Fraley, who grew up on a farm, says what's more important for him are the stories behind those numbers.

Mr. FRALEY: Soybean farmers who tell me that, you know, that RoundUp-ready soybeans have, you know, really helped to save the family farm because it's lowered their cost of production and improved their yields. Cotton farmers in northern Alabama said, you know, Look, if it hadn't been for the Bollgard gene, we would have been out of cotton after '95.'

CHARLES: And Fraley says what's good for American farmers can be just as good for farmers anywhere in the world. Last year, Monsanto launched BT cotton in China.

Mr. FRALEY: We reached over 600,000 Chinese farmers in the first year of launch, again, because this technology provides such an incredible benefit over spraying with chemicals that are ineffectual or literally having your kids walk through a cotton field, picking off caterpillars one worm at a time.

CHARLES: But then out of the blue came the wave of opposition aimed at genetically altered seeds, in general, and Monsanto, in particular. Tony Juniper, from Friends of the Earth, says it really started, ironically, when Monsanto began a big ad campaign in Britain last year aimed at building support for the new crops. The ads claimed, for instance, that biotechnology would help feed the world by increasing food production.

Mr. JUNIPER: People know over here that, in fact, poverty is the principal cause of hunger in the Third World. There isn't a shortage of food. And people are quite rightly, in our view, interpreted these claims as a means to get bigger markets to get a return on the investments that Monsanto has put into generating these new crop technologies.

CHARLES: Europeans already are eating lots of genetically engineered products derived from RoundUp-ready soybeans. They're mixed in with shipments of regular soybeans. But polls indicate they're increasingly unhappy about it. British tabloids these days refer to mutant grub' and Frankenfoods,' although one columnist recently argued that was unfair to the good name of Frankenstein.

On top of that came a public relations disaster Monsanto truly didn't expect, caused by technology that Monsanto didn't invent but purchased the rights to. It started when Hope Shand, from the Rural Advancement Foundation International, a group that opposes private control over genes, read a small item in The Wall Street Journal. It described an invention called the Technology Protections System, invented by USDA researchers working with a cotton seed company in Mississippi.

Ms. HOPE SHAND (Rural Advancement Foundation International): And it immediately piqued my interest, and I called the company and I called USDA. And when I suddenly realized what we were talking about, I realized right away that this was an explosive issue.

CHARLES: They were talking about adding genes to crops that would prevent farmers from taking part of their harvest and replanting it the following year. Seed companies have tried to keep farmers from replanting seed for 50 years through persuasion and sometimes through laws. Monsanto, in fact, has been doing this most aggressively. The new technology, which is still five or 10 years from any commercial use, would accomplish the same thing. Seed companies could activate the added genes before seeds are planted. The crop would grow normally, but the harvest would be sterile. One of Shand's co-workers immediately called it the terminator gene,' and the name stuck.

Ms. SHAND: I think it struck a cord all around the world. I mean, we at the Convention on Biological Diversity that met in Bratislava last May, delegates to that convention were just shocked to learn that any company was pursuing the goal of genetic seed sterilization. This issue is on the agenda of at least three United Nations' bodies right now. It's a huge issue on the international agenda.

CHARLES: Then Monsanto, which has been buying up lots of seed companies, bought the Mississippi company that owns patents on the terminator gene. For some, it was the final straw. They saw a big American company taking liberties with the Earth's genetic inheritance, exporting genetically engineered food unlabeled and buying up one seed company after another. They accused Monsanto of trying to monopolize the entire trade in seeds for selected crops, giving farmers no choice but to buy seeds that produce sterile plants. When Indian activists burned fields of Monsanto's cotton, the reason they gave was fear of the terminator gene.

All this notoriety produced an anxious moment last summer for a Monsanto vice president named Hugh Grant, who grew up in Scotland. He was in London, trying to defend the company's reputation and went out to get a haircut. The barber quickly found out Grant worked in agriculture in the United States. Well,' he told Grant, I hope you're not involved in any of this genetically modified stuff.'

Mr. HUGH GRANT (Vice President, Monsanto): I'm inside a white sheet looking up in the mirror. He's got the scissors in one hand and the comb in the other. And I said, Yeah, I--that's me. You've got me.'

CHARLES: Grant made the case for genetically engineered crops as though his life depended on it. For all he knew, it did. No,' he told the barber, products from these soybeans won't set off food allergies. They've been tested everywhere. They're even in baby formula. And, no, we're not taking away the God-given right of farmers to replant crops. Farmers can always buy other seeds they can replant. They choose ours because our products put more money in the farmer's pocket.'

Mr. GRANT: And at the end of the final--end of the haircut when we stood up and a lovely evening, he said, You know, I don't hear any of this stuff on TV.' And he said, Are you involved in that Internet thing?' I said, Yeah. I'm on e-mail.' He said, I'm gonna keep in touch with you. I'm gonna be watching you from now on.' And that was late last summer, and I've had three or four e-mails now from that old boy.

CHARLES: Grant is hoping the global debate over genetic engineering in agriculture ends up like that conversation. If it doesn't, though, Monsanto faces even bigger battles down the road, because the company has a host of newly engineered crops in the works--corn plants that are poisonous to root worms or with higher protein content; canola oil that lowers blood cholesterol or that supplies the body with vitamin A. Monsanto's executives seem more confident about their technology, though, than their financial strength. The company's been looking for a partner with deeper pockets. According to news reports, Monsanto wanted to merge with DuPont, a company twice its size which also has big ambitions in agricultural biotechnology. But yesterday, DuPont decided instead to buy the world's largest seed company, Pioneer Hi-Bred. That combination may challenge Monsanto for the lead in agricultural biotechnology and become another powerful force, bringing biotech crops to the world's farms and kitchens.

Dan Charles, NPR News.