My friends and I are young and hip. We buy local, ride bikes, vote for
Nader, and we do not despise conspiracy theory. Corporations and Cheez Whiz, suburbs and
SUVs, global warming and GMOs (that's genetically modified organisms)—all bad.
When our college debts are paid, we'll buy a farm together. Meanwhile, we swap
e-mails: "GMOs Taint Tacos!" "Bt Corn Kills Butterflies!"
"Monsanto Bankrupts Farmers!"
Monsanto is the St. Louis-based Microsoft of the biotech world, best
known for Roundup Ready soybeans, built to withstand a weed-killing dose of the
company's most profitable herbicide, and Bt corn, engineered with a gene from Bacillus
thuringiensis to poison caterpillars. Depending on your perspective, Monsanto's a
start-small, dream-big company that will revolutionize agriculture and end hunger, or a
profit-mad corporation out to crush its competitors and wreck the environment. I have
friends who say "MonSatan," and it always startles me. Surely, I think,
there's more to this story. And so there is—in Daniel Charles' wise and
generous new book, Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food.
"I am a storyteller by profession and with conviction,"
writes Charles, science writer for National Public Radio. And it's true: For all its
sophisticated science (and Charles doesn't dumb-down), Lords of the Harvest
reads like a novel most pages and tells a story stranger than fiction. It all begins early
in the 1980s, when industry starts tinkering with genes and government okays the patenting
of seeds. Life itself can now be manipulated, bought, and sold—which in fact launches
a biotech blowout as big as the dot-com craze to come, and sparks the fiercest opposition
to a new technology since nuclear power. Charles' book chronicles Monsanto's
charge to the front lines of biotechnology, its duel with arch-rival Pioneer Hi-Bred
Seeds, and its PR battles with Greenpeace. Ultimately, however, Lords of the Harvest
is less about conflicting institutions than clashing stories.
First story: Human ingenuity will save the world, the potential for
technology is boundless and ecstatic, genes are commodities like cars or oil, and
patenting seeds is just how you make a buck in biotech. And I almost buy it; Charles'
vignettes make the most profit-grubbing scientist wacky and lovable. A researcher in St.
Louis opens a letter from a competing lab, swabs it with a Q-tip, and streaks a petri
dish, hoping to steal a stray spore of Bt. Some guy in Madison builds a gene gun in his
basement with 25,000 volts and a potato chip bag. Scientists on the fourth floor of
Monsanto's U Building nickname their lab "U4ia." I catch the spirit: these
guys really think their work will feed the hungry and fix the environment, and
they're having so much fun.
Second story: Human folly has ruined the earth, the promises of science
are ambivalent at best, seeds are free as sunlight and rain, and claiming ownership is
hubris. I've always believed this story. Lords of the Harvest, however,
doesn't paint environmentalists all green (turns out many of the e-mails my friends
forward are almost pure propaganda), but they get high marks for creativity. Protesters
meet ships of U.S. soybeans with a flotilla of rubber rafts in the port of Hamburg.
Environmentalists paint their bodies with anti-biotech slogans and strip for the cameras
at the World Food Summit in Rome. One critic hurls a tofu-cream pie at Monsanto's
CEO. And they've got my sympathy: These guys are concerned for the poor, afraid for
the natural world; they know big business, and they're fighting for all they're
worth.
AND UNDERNEATH everything is the longer, older story of agriculture.
The son of a Mennonite farmer, Charles wonders if the modesty and patience required to
care for land are lost on scientists and environmentalists alike. He quotes the CEO of a
failed biotech startup: "You're producing products outside, for God's sake!
The wind blows, the rain falls, the sun shines! It's a crappy business!"
Ultimately, Charles advises biotech's proponents to leave the ivory tower and listen
to Mexican subsistence farmers who can't afford hybrid corn; he counsels
biotech's critics to come off the high horse and chat with Iowa commodity growers who
love Roundup-Ready beans. It'll take all of us and lots of time to reframe
"crappy business" as noble vocation and to reshape the ag and food industry into
a just and sustainable economy.
Meanwhile, says Charles, we've got to hear each other's
stories—beginning, perhaps, with the charming tale of Wolfgang Van den Daele, a
sociologist who attempts to reconcile Germany's biotech scientists with their
harshest critics by inviting both sides to a 10-day retreat in the woods. No one backs
down in the end, but they see each other's faces, learn each other's names, and,
oh, a water-quality specialist finds himself falling for a corporate exec. (They later
marry.) In the end, then, progress and protest are equally human enterprises, marked by
greed and pride, yes, but not untouched by love—and nobody, surely, is organized
enough for conspiracy. In Lords of the Harvest, Charles hosts a retreat of his own.
I'll invite my friends.
Bethany Spicher is editorial assistant at Sojourners and resident
authority on all matters agricultural.
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