HALF A CENTURY OF HEALTH SCANDALS – MONSANTO

The conviction, Monday 13 February, the US giant Monsanto food, pursued by a small farmer Charentais poisoned by a herbicide, is a first in France. On the scale of history of the multinational, centennial, this sentence is only a judicial episode more in an already loaded record.

PCBs, Agent Orange, dioxin, GMO, Aspartame, growth hormones, herbicides (Roundup and Lasso) ... number of products that have made the fortune of Monsanto were marred by health scandals and trials sometimes leading to their ban. But nothing has so far hindered the irresistible rise of this former chemical giant converted in biogenetics and mastered the art of lobbying. Portrait of a multinational repeat offender.

Since its creation in 1901 in St. Louis, the little producer of saccharin become a leading seed companies in the world has continued to make headlines. After the Second World War, the accidental explosion of a Monsanto plastics plant caused by that of a French freighter loaded nitrate, which caused 500 deaths in Texas City in 1947, and remained in history as the one of the first disasters of the chemical industry.

Two years later it was the turn of a second plant of the firm, Nitro Virginia in smoke. This time, the company's liability is incurred. More than two hundred workers develop chloracnés, such a rare disorder that severe skin, reports Marie-Monique Robin, winner of the Albert Londres Prize, in her documentary The World According to Monsanto.

The accident reveals that the flagship of the brand, the herbicide 2,4,5-T, contains high levels of dioxins, highly toxic and carcinogenic substances, composition comparable to that of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The first study suggesting the potential danger of dioxin was known to Monsanto in 1938: commercialization of herbicide yet continue for nearly forty years before its ban in the 1970s.

Monsanto, who led the Nitro plant between 1934 and 2000, has also been the subject of a complaint filed in 2007 by 77 people of Virginia with cancer, who accuse the company of having broadcast "illegally" to dioxin in the vicinity of the plant.

In 2001, 3,600 residents of the town of Anniston, Alabama, attacking Monsanto for PCB contamination. According to a declassified report of the protection of the US Environmental Agency (EPA), Monsanto spilled for nearly forty years thousands of tons of contaminated waste streams and open dump in the heart of black part of town.

How The Washington Post reports the story is revealing: "Thousands of pages of Monsanto documents - many of which are stamped" CONFIDENTIAL: Read and destroy '- show that for decades, the multinational has concealed what it was doing and above all it knew. In 1966, company officials had discovered that fish submerged in the stream turned round on the back in less than ten seconds, pissing blood and lost their skin as if they had been boiled alive. They did tell anyone, "said the American daily.

In 1975, a study conducted by Monsanto revealed that the PCB causes tumors in rats. The multinational decided to change the conclusions of "slightly tumorigenic 'to' does not appear carcinogenic". "We cannot afford to lose a single dollar" and concludes one of the memos consulted by The Washington Post.

Monsanto was eventually convicted in 2002 of having polluted "the territory of Anniston and the blood of its population with PCBs". The firm will be ordered to pay 700 million dollars in damages and ensure the cleaning of the city. No prison were brought against the company officials.

In February 2007, The Guardian reveals that the agrochemical giant applied the same methods on multiple sites in Britain between 1965 and 1972. The newspaper has had access to a government report showing that 67 chemicals, including Agent Orange, dioxin and PCBs, have been identified in a quarry in Wales. In France, the manufacture and use of PCBs are banned since 1987.

During those same years, between 1961 and 1971, Monsanto produced Agent Orange, made from the herbicide 2,4,5-T, whose dangerousness is widely known from the plant explosion Nitro. This will massively defoliant dumped by US aircraft over Vietnamese forests during the war. The consequences are still felt today, with many cancers and birth defects in Vietnam, and the various sequelae in many US veterans.

In the 1970s, Vietnam veterans open a class action against the producers of Agent Orange. Monsanto is found, alongside six other companies, main accused of a repair on trial for poisoning. In 1987, the seven producers of Agent Orange were ordered to pay 180 million dollars to a compensation fund for US soldiers.

During the trial, Monsanto will present scientific studies showing no link between dioxin exposure and cancer suffered by many veterans, to dismiss their action. It will be demonstrated in the early 1990s that the studies based on the consequences of the explosion of the Nitro plant in 1949 were biased.

This scientific fraud will be confirmed by the National Research Council, which found that Monsanto's studies "suffered misclassification between those exposed and not exposed to dioxin, and that they were biased in order to obtain desired effect." The case will be recounted in 1990 by Greenpeace and the researcher Joe Thornton in a report entitled Science for Sale.

Is the Roundup toxic?

Saisi!