Monsanto : A Checkered History

by Brian Tokar

Monsanto's high-profile advertisements in Britain and the US depict the corporation as a visionary, world-historical force, working to bring state-of-the-art science and an environmentally responsible outlook to the solution of humanity's pressing problems. But just who is Monsanto? Where did they come from? How did they get to be the world's second

largest manufacturer of agricultural chemicals, one of the largest producers of seeds, and soon — with the impending merger with American Home Products — the largest seller of prescription drugs in the United States? What do their workers, their customers, and others whose lives they have impacted, have to say? Is Monsanto the "clean and green"

company its advertisements promote, or is this new image merely a product of clever public relations? A look at the historical record offers some revealing clues, and may help us better understand the company's present-day practices.

Headquartered just outside St. Louis, Missouri, the Mon­ santo Chemical Company was founded in 1901 by John Francis Queeny. Queeny, a self-educated chemist, brought technology to manufacture saccharin, the first artifi­ cial sweetener, from Germany to the United States. In the 1920s, Monsanto became a leading manufacturer of sulphuric acid and other basic industrial chemicals, and is one of only four companies to be listed among the top ten US chemical companies in every decade since the 1940s.1

effects of PCBs appeared as early as the 1930s, and Swedish scientists studying the biological effects of DDT began finding significant concentrations of PCBs in the blood, hair and fatty tissue of wildlife in the 1960s.4

Research in the 1960s and seventies revealed PCBs and other aromatic organochlorines to be potent carcinogens, and also traced them to a wide array of reproductive, developmen­ tal and immune system disorders [see J. Cummins in this issue].5 Their high chemical affinity for fat tissue, is responsi­ ble for their dramatic rates of concentration and bioaccumulation, and their wide dispersal throughout the North's aquatic food web: Arctic cod, for example, carry PCB concentrations 48 million times that of their surrounding waters, and predato­

By the 1940s, plastics and synthetic fabrics had become a centrepiece of Monsanto's business. In 1947, a French freighter carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer blew up at a dock 270 feet from Monsanto's plastics plant outside Galve­ ston, Texas. More than 500 people died in what came to be seen as one of the chemical industry's first major disasters.2 The plant was manufacturing styrene and poly­ styrene plastics, which are still important constituents of food packaging and various consumer products. In the 1980s the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) listed polystyrene as fifth in its ranking of the chemicals whose production gener­ ates the most total hazardous waste.3

From our point of view, Monsanto

is at the heart of the problem here in Missouri" explains

TBAG's Steve Taylor.

ry mammals such as polar bears can harbour tissue concentrations of PCBs more than fifty times greater than that. Though the man­ ufacture of PCBs was banned in the United States in 1976, its toxic and endocrine-disruptive effects persist worldwide.6

The world's centre of PCB man­

PCBs In 1929, the Swann Chemical Company, soon to be purchased by Monsanto, developed poly chlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were widely praised for their nonflammability and extreme chemical stability. The most widespread uses were in the electrical equipment industry, which adopted PCBs as a nonflammable coolant for a new generation of transformers. By the 1960s, Monsanto's growing family of PCBs were also widely used as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, cutting oils, water­ proof coatings and liquid sealants. Evidence of the toxic

ufacturing was Monsanto's plant on the outskirts of East St. Louis, Illinois. East St. Louis is a chronically economically depressed suburb, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, bordered by two large metal-processing plants in addition to the Monsanto facility. "East St. Louis", reports education writer Jonathan Kozol, "has some of the sickest children in America." Kozol reports that the city has the highest rate of fetal death and immature births in the state, the third highest rate of infant death, and one of the highest childhood asthma rates in the United States.7

Dioxin: A Legacy of Contamination The people of East St. Louis continue to face the horrors of high-level chemical exposure, poverty, a deteriorating urban

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The Ecologist, Vol. 28, No 5, September/October 1998
MONSANTO: A CHECKERED HISTORY