Monsanto History• founded in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901, by John Francis

Queeny• company's first product was the artificial sweetener saccharin• 1940s become a leading manufacturer of plastics, including

polystyrene, and synthetic fibers• 1954 partnered with German chemical giant Bayer to form

Mobay• 1960 - 70s their Ag division became a major supplier of

herbicide to the US military • 1985: purchases G. D. Searle & Company (NutraSweet) • 1997: spins off its industrial chemical and fiber divisions into

Solutia, Inc. • 2000: merges with Pharmacia and Upjohn• 2002: Pharmacia spins off its remaining interest in X • 2005: purchases Seminis, the largest seed company not

producing corn or soybeans in the world. • 2008: purchases the Dutch seed company De Ruiter Seeds

for about 855 million dollars.

Meanwhile• Swann Chemical Company manufactured

Aroclors in Anniston, AL• Aroclors were used as coolants and insulating

fluids for transformers and capacitors• Swann was purchased in 1935 by the Monsanto

and continued to produce Aroclors until 1977.• Swedish chemist Soren Jensen, reported on the

appearance of these compounds in the environment and coined the term polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)

• GE was the largest customer for Monsanto’s Aroclors

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PCBs (209 congeners)

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3,3’,4,4’,5,5’-hexachlorobiphenyl (BZ 169)

CoPlanar PCB

There are 75 different types of PCDD congeners

BZ 126 has a TEF of 1/2.5

TEF = toxic equivalent factor (2,3,7,8-TCDD)

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Anniston, ALHome of the worlds largest chair

What did Monsanto know about PCBs?

• test plots back in 1939 during an experiment into the use of Aroclors as termite repellants were tested in 1966 and showed Aroclors still present

• fall of 1966, Monsanto hired a Mississippi State University biologist named Denzel Ferguson to conduct some studies around its Anniston plant

• winter of 1970, an hog incident • summer 1972, “data for the first year of the survey

indicate clearly that the fishes below the Monsanto outfall have concentrated the PCB residues to a very high level”

• 1993 residents of Anniston learned of the high levels of PCBs in local fish

• The story broke in 1993, after a local fisherman caught deformed largemouth bass in Choccolocco Creek. Alabama issued the first advisories against eating fish from the area after tests detected PCBs, --27 years after Monsanto learned about the bluegill experiment

• By 1996, state officials and plaintiffs' attorneys were finding astronomical PCB levels in the area: as high as 940 times the federal level of concern in yard soils, 200 times that level in dust inside people's homes, 2,000 times that level in Monsanto's drainage ditches. The PCB levels in the air were also too high. And in blood tests, nearly one-third of the residents of the working-class Sweet Valley and Cobbtownneighborhoods near the plant were found to have elevated PCB levels. The communities were declared public health hazards. Near Snow Creek, the state warned, "the increased risk of cancer is estimated to be high."

1997 Monsanto splits off its industrial chemical and fiber divisions to Solutia, Inc. to focus on the Ag

sector.

Solutia?• Solutia's Glenn Ruskin, "its spinoff from Monsanto

Co. unjustly saddled it with hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental cleanup costs and other liabilities.... '(Monsanto) sort of cherry picked what they wanted and threw in all kinds of cats and dogs as part of a going-away present,' including $1 billion in debt and environmental and litigation costs accrued by Monsanto and Pharmacia over a century of manufacturing"

• "'Solutia has spent approximately $100 million each year to service legacy liabilities that it was required to accept at the time of the spin-off from Monsanto,' says Solutia chairman, president and CEO John Hunter". In 2003 Solutia filed for bankruptcy.

Not a matter of race

but of socioeconomics

Today

The New Monsanto

• Glyphosate was first discovered to have herbicidal activity in 1970 by John E. Franz, while employed by Monsanto (trade name - Roundup)

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All foods, even natural ones, are made up of chemicals. But natural foods don't have to list their ingredients. So it's often assumed they're chemical-free. In fact, the ordinary orange is a miniature chemical factory. And the good old potato contains arsenic among its more than 150 ingredients.

This doesn't mean natural foods are dangerous. If they were, they wouldn't be on the market. The same is true of man-made foods. All man-made foods are tested for safety. And they often provide more nutrition, at a lower cost, than natural foods. They even use many of the same chemical ingredients.

So you see, there really isn't much difference between foods made by Mother Nature and those made by man. What's artificial is the line drawn between them.

Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible.