There is no doubt about it, Monsanto & Co employees are a scary group when they start to blog.Earlier this month in a post titled I am Monsanto one of these happy clappy souls decided to pose a rather sarcastic hypothetical question; Did you know that pollen from our genetically-modified crops will magically migrate into another farmer's field and contaminate his crop?
Apparently (if one is a Monsanto employee) the well-known natural processes known as pollen drift and cross fertilisation are not within the bounds of our world - for GM traits to be found in non-GM crops or GM plants to be discovered in non-GM fields then something otherworldly has to have occurred.
This will come as a complete surprise to biologists and agronomists:
However Monsanto employees are not finished with spin on the company blog Monsanto according to Monsanto.
In another post called Agent Orange and Monsanto the case is made for a benign and patriotic Monsanto participating in deliberate dioxin contamination on a large scale because; The U.S. government, under the Defense Production Act, directed seven companies – including Monsanto, which was then primarily a chemical company – to manufacture the material.
Yes, the President made me do it appears to be the argument here.
A government contract defence that U.S. courts have not apparently fully supported, as there was a 1984 case in which in has been reported that Judge Weinstein encouraged settlement and eventually directed Monsanto to pay over a large percentage of an $180 million out of court settlement in favour of American veterans.
However, in a classic look-here-not-there manoeuvre Monsanto directs our attention to the unsuccessful 2004 litigation by Vietnamese veterans in which it was also a co-defendant.
All the while remaining silent on the fact that sales of Agent Orange and Lasso were basically what kept Monsanto's agricultural chemical division in the black during the 1960s and the Viet Nam War.
Now I have been wondering of late why it is that Monsanto employees are so cavalier with how they use available fact and historical record.
I refuse to believe that their obvious youth (in comparison to North Coast Voices authors) is a significant factor because older people do not have a monopoly on commonsense or knowledge.
So I am left with the possibility that Monsanto's corporate culture is so intense that employees are totally indoctrinated by the end of their first year with the firm and thereafter are incapable of recognising that Monsanto & Co hasn't been a uniformly ethical company from its inception up to the more recent past.
Graphic from arizona.edu
UPDATE:
In June 2009 the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal by the Secretary of the Dept of Agriculture et al (including Monsanto Company as Defendant-intervenor-Appellant) and upheld a lower court injunction against the USDA's deregulation determination re GMO perennial alfalfa.
Geertson Seed Farms et al had sought relief from the US courts, in part on the grounds that there was a need to wait until there had been sufficient investigation of the potential for pollen drift and cross-pollination.
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