The Monsanto Dilemma

INTRODUCTION

“It's a lovely day out, and you decide to go for a walk along the trolley tracks that crisscross your town. As you walk, you hear a trolley behind you, and you step away from the tracks. But as the trolley gets closer, you hear the sounds of panic -- the five people on board are shouting for help. The trolley's brakes have gone out, and it's gathering speed.

You find that you just happen to be standing next to a side track that veers into a sandpit, potentially providing safety for the trolley's five passengers. All you have to do is pull a hand lever to switch the tracks, and you'll save the five people. Sounds easy, right? But there's a problem. Along this offshoot of the track leading to the sandpit stands a man who is totally unaware of the trolley problem and the action you're considering. There's no time to warn him. So by pulling the lever and guiding the trolley to safety, you'll save the five passengers. But you'll kill the man. What do you do?”

The trolley problem and its variants have been used extensively in empirical research on moral psychology and have been a topic of great debate among philosophers. Whenever I encounter the problem, I feel like questioning the existence of trolley (the whole problem took place because someone let that defective trolley run on those tracks!). And then, on a realistic level, I feel the decision of pulling or not pulling the lever won’t even fall on to a man who simply decided to go for a walk, it’s something that is decided by the same entity that let that trolley run on those tracks at the very first place.

Every megacorporation starts with a mission statement and a goal which, more or less, aims at social good. That’s the track on which a company starts. The business model has no defects at that time and it rather motivates people- users, employees and shareholders- to get onboard. Everything goes smoothly until the company realizes that it’s about to come to a resource limit and taking it further down the track will risk the well-being of people onboard. The ideal suggestion would be to put breaks on the growth of the company; however, the ideology of progressing forward to gain more profits won't let that happen. And that is where the hand lever is pulled and the track is changed. The new track has less of a social good agenda, rather it calls for casualties due to no beforehand planning on how to go on with the new track. Everyone knows about the track change, even the people on board, but no one wants to get off since everyone has adapted their life around the company. Eventually, all involved becomes defensive and accusatory, without any resolution in sight.

One such megacorporation is Monsanto- one of the key players in the agricultural industry. Founded in 1901, it's pretty much evident from the company's history that it changed its track several times during its course and has redefined the term agriculture while at it. The article below will discuss about the recent incidents which have favoured and opposed this company and how we can relate it back to the role ethics has to play in it. Moreover, it can be used as a case study to predict red flags in the newly privatised industries.

WHAT IS MONSANTO?

The description of Monsanto as per their website is as follows, “Monsanto is an agricultural company, helping farmers large and small grow food more sustainably. From seed to software, to fibre and fuel, we’re developing tools to help growers protect natural resources while providing nourishment to the world. In the face of a changing climate and other environmental challenges, we’re helping ensure our agricultural system continues to suit the needs of everyone.”

The Monsanto Company was an American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation that existed from 1901 until 2018 when it was acquired by Bayer. It was the company that among other things produced the Herbicide “RoundUp” for which it gained quite a recognition among farmers and gardeners all across the world. The controversy around Monsanto started when the company started producing Genetically Modified seeds (GMOs) that were called “RoundUp Ready”. The “RoundUp Ready” crops are resistant to weed killer and insecticides, and a threat to natural seeds. With rigorous advertising campaigns and outreach, “RoundUp” herbicide and “RoundUp Ready” crops became an heavy demand product within the farming community. Though after a few years of products in the market, several cases of skin and neurological disorder started coming up where victims were using Monsanto products on a regular basis. Adding to that, there are several speculations on how genetically modified seeds negatively impacts the ecosystem. With these concerns, several environmentalists and anti-GMO organisations have started raising awareness among consumers on the usage of Monsanto products and to lobby policymakers to make strict laws against the company. Till this date, there are various beliefs and disbeliefs on GMO seeds being good for health and environment, the debate gets more complex since Monsanto forbids any independent research on its products.

ISSUES AT STAKE?

The company began selling GMOs in the world market in the late twentieth century after a U.S. challenge at the WTO forced many countries to adopt seed patenting, effectively allowing Monsanto to monopolize the market. These seeds were — and still are — advertised heavily to financially illiterate farmers, who have bought the company’s promises of high yields and the material wealth they bring. What the farmers are not told is that these seeds require an expensive regimen of pesticides, and must be fertilized and watered according to precise timetables. And since these farmers lack irrigation systems and modern farming techniques, and instead depend on not-always-predictable rainfall, it’s incredibly difficult to control the success of harvested crops. As farmers bought these GMO seeds in droves, the conventional seed they’d been using — which needed only cow dung as fertilizer — disappeared within few seasons. Now, in farming communities, it’s virtually impossible to buy anything but Monsanto’s seed. Monsanto that started with the motive of providing nourishment to the world eventually changed its track and is now focused on creating a monopoly in the agricultural industry.

With growing pressure from protestors against GMO seeds, United States finally made it mandate on May 2018 for companies to declare if the seeds are modified. But instead of using the familiar term GMO or Genetically Modified, U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed the term B.E. or “BioEngineered” which is unfamiliar to US consumer.

"I mean, they look like a little smiley face," says George Kimbrell, the legal director for the Center for Food Safety, which has pushed for labelling. "They're very pro-biotech, cartoonishly so, and to that extent are, you know, not just imparting information but instead are essentially propaganda for the industry.”

The problem with GMO seeds is much bigger for the farmers. When a farmer produces genetically modified seeds from Monsanto, they sign a licensing agreement promising to use all the seeds and to not use any regenerated seed for the future crop.

Monsanto explains on their website the need of patenting: “Monsanto seeks intellectual property protection, including patents and often plant breeders’ rights, to cover many of the traits and seed varieties we develop. These protections help to ensure we are paid for our products and for the investments we put into developing them. We sell these proprietary products in the market using business models that reinforce our obligations to reinvest, provide a return to our shareowners and provide for our employees.”

MONSANTO AND BAYER

In May 2016, Bayer made an unsolicited offer to buy Monsanto at $122 a share, or about $66 billion. Where Monsanto is an agricultural juggernaut, Bayer is a German drug and chemical maker. Bayer and Monsanto are ostensibly function in different sectors, there is some crossover between their products. Together, they represent the pinnacle of data-driven industrial agriculture, which the companies say will be necessary to feed a planet that hosts 10 billion people. Werner Baumann, the CEO of Bayer, and Hugh Grant, Chairman and CEO of Monsanto, emphasized their companies’ ability to invest more in innovation once joined, pledging to spend $16 billion on research and development worldwide over six years. However, Business Insider points out that this is only a total of $500 million more than what the companies were spending on R&D before the merger.

"By the time 2050 rolls around, the world will have 10 billion people, and the demand for food will double," Robb Fraley, Monsanto's outgoing chief technology officer, told Business Insider last year. "The whole point here is that the business combination between Monsanto and Bayer will allow the companies to invest in and create more innovation, and it's going to take a huge amount of innovation in order to double the world's food supply."

However, farmers in the United States doesn’t share similar thoughts. Farmers have the consensus that the sole purpose of the merger is to corner the market by getting bigger; not by creating new products. And letting it happen will increase the price of agricultural resources.

FBN, a data-distribution network that collects crowd-sourced information from members, analyzed corn-seed yield in relation to the seed brands' market share, based on data from 5.75 million acres of corn. It found that while the greater market share was correlated with higher yield - a primary goal of agricultural innovation - the rise wasn't proportional. After achieving few percent of market share, the production yield gets flat. But the increase in market share is very much proportional to the price of the seed throughout.

MONSANTO AND CANCER LAWSUIT

In August 2018, a jury in San Francisco ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million in damages to a school groundskeeper who developed cancer after years of using Roundup, the company's popular herbicide. A report published by an environmental group shortly after the trial found traces of the chemical in everyday foods, from cereal to granola bars.

Bayer, with Glyphosate under its portfolio now due to merger, believes that the jury’s decision is at odds with the weight of scientific evidence, decades of real-world experience and the conclusions of regulators around the world that all confirm glyphosate is safe and does not cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This claim has been repeatedly mentioned on Monsanto website under different sections of sitemap.

The trial's outcome doesn't mean that Roundup — or its chief chemical, called glyphosate — causes cancer. Instead, it says that members of the jury believed that Monsanto intentionally kept information about glyphosate's “potential” harms from the public. The science linking Roundup to cancer is limited at best, and only further research can change that.

It is an interesting case study as there is no scientific evidence that can connect RoundUp with cancer. Due to limited research on how certain chemicals impact the neurological system of human being, there couldn’t be a concrete lawsuit that can claim the company to be responsible for chronic illnesses. What we can determine is that there is an occurrence of several incidents of cancer with a single commonality that all the victims were using Monsanto pesticides on their plants.

MONSANTO AND GOVERNMENT?

Monsanto is surrounded with various accusations such as exploiting the farmers and manipulating the truth from consumers. But the actual questions is bigger than all the concerns above: what kind of relationship the government plays with this private entity, Monsanto?

Monsanto’s influence over food supply is troubling. Their ability to prevent GMO labelling is also troubling. It is concerning how a private entity decides to choose what kind of food goes onto the plate of consumers worldwide and what kind of cotton they will wear. Their ability to twist and modify regulations to ensure revenue at the expense of farmer’s and consumer’s well-being definitely smells like an economic system with mutually advantageous relationships between business leaders and government officials, or crony capitalism as said by John Mackey. The biggest challenge as consumers, and more importantly as voters, is how to break the nexus between our elected representatives and companies like Monsanto.

CONCLUSION

With all these scenarios, we end up with a complex problem, should we approve Monsanto for a utilitarian approach of providing financial gains to many farmers by increasing their yields and solving world hunger? Or, should we accuse it of being anti-Kantian and exploiting the farmers (and everyone who consumes food on this planet) and using them as an instrument for the sake of making profits and having a bigger market share?

This is not just the dilemma of the trolley problem or agricultural industry, but something that even new industries are facing or will be facing in the near future. From social media to artificial intelligence, we can observe a change of track - the purpose for which they came for and what they are actually doing- but everyone appears to be ignorant of it. We can observe mergers happening among megacorps to create a bigger market share but no benefit to the user to be seen. The behaviour of these new companies is more or less parallel to what Monsanto has done in the past. We can already start to observe unethical situations arising in some companies however the data analytics is still in a very initial stage and is too premature to seek legal justice. And that’s when the question of ethics arises: should we let them go because these companies anyway provide welfare to large human population or should we penalize them because of creating a fragile system that leads to casualties of few?

References:

• https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Megacorporation.html
• Documentary: The True Cost
• https://www.grain.org/article/entries/5070-trade-deals-criminalise-farmers-seeds
• Documentary: The Bitter Seeds
• https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/05/19/612063389/usda-unveils-prototypes-for-gmo-food-labels-and-theyre-confusing
• https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article160086719.html
• https://fortune.com/2018/04/10/bayer-monsanto-deal-doj-approval
• https://www.businessinsider.com/bayer-monsanto-merger-has-farmers-worried-2018-4
• https://www.agriculture.com/crops/farmers-business-network-is-disrupting-how-seed-is-labeled-and-sold
• https://www.businessinsider.com/jury-awards-289-million-in-monsanto-round-up-weed-killer-case-2018-8
• https://www.ewg.org/childrenshealth/glyphosateincereal/