There’s an impressive amount of greenwashing advertising going around these days – big companies trying to act environmentally conscious when their very business is wrecking the environment. The oil companies are among the worst culprits. I’ve been really amazed by how Chevron’s new “Human Energy” advertisements show so much awareness and caring, when they really have nothing to do with Chevron’s policies. You might wonder: if the oil companies really cared about stopping climate change, wouldn’t they encourage us to use less oil?
But then today I opened the newspaper and Monsanto blew my socks off. Many people don’t know too much about Monsanto because they’re making products for farmers, not consumers, but as one of the world’s largest manufacturers of seeds and pesticides, you can be sure that their products are used in a huge amount of the food that goes into your mouth. (Wikipedia has a lot to say about Monsanto, and it provides a good background, but as you might expect, take everything there with a great big grain of salt.)
The ad runs thus: as a planet, we’re running out of water (true) and agriculture uses a huge amount of water (also true). So if we want to feed more people (because the planet needs more people?), we need to grow more with less water in drier regions (um…) and the best way to do that is with Monsanto’s GMO seeds that require less water:
Producing more. Conserving more. Improving farmers’ lives. That’s sustainable agriculture. And that’s what Monsanto seeds are all about.
If you can’t read the full text of the ad in the image here, Monsanto has kindly provided us with a PDF version. And you can, of course, learn all about their plans at www.producemoreconservemore.com.
Whole books have been written on how Monsanto is not a friend to the environment or to farmers, so I’ll do my best to summarize the blatant deceptions in this ad. To read a lot more about them, I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” for a close-up look at industrial agriculture.
Monsanto has a long history of producing genetically modified seeds. One of their crowning achievements was the creation of so-called “terminator” seeds, which produce sterile plants – they cannot reproduce on their own, so farmers have to spend lots of money to buy the same seeds from Monsanto year after year, instead of using seeds from their own crops – the traditional or “old-fashioned” way. What’s old-fashioned about reusing what you already have? Nothing, but it’s hard to make money off people who do that.
They are also the proud creators and promoters of the rGBH growth hormone that is given to most cows that produce non-organic milk – and they’ve been fighting hard to keep companies from labeling their milk as “rGBH-free” because, they claim, there’s absolutely nothing different about milk from rGBH cows. Even now, anyone who does label their milk rGBH-free has to include a disclaimer to that effect. I prefer to know where my food comes from, and to make my own judgments.
It’s especially interesting that the two crops shown in the ad are corn and soybeans, the two signature products of America’s industrial agriculture system. Corn, in particular, is becoming known as an environmental menace when it’s grown on a large scale – it requires a lot of fertilizer (in spite of all Monsanto’s genetic advances) and it does a number on the soil. On a traditional, sustainable farm, corn wouldn’t be grown repeatedly on the same field, but that’s what most farmers do now, because fertilizer is so cheap. And when it rains and the unused compounds in the fertilizer run off the fields, it’s a major contributing factor to huge dead zones in waters like the Gulf of Mexico, oxygen-starved areas where no fish or plants can survive.
So while it’s a nice claim that Monsanto wants to develop new seeds to use less water, they hardly have a track record of sustainability. And improving farmers’ lives? Monsanto’s practices create loyal consumers among farmers by selling them not only GMO seeds, but the exact fertilizers and pesticides needed to bring those seeds to maturity. All these chemicals are the antithesis of organic farming, where fertilizer comes from cows and chickens right on the farm (did you know methane that offgases from manure at industrial animals farms, called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, is a major contributor to global warming?), and pest control is achieved naturally by introducing the right balances of plants and animals, and growing plant varieties with strong natural defenses.
All in all, Monsanto is the leader of Big Agriculture, and this ad is an impressive piece of greenwashing.