WSJ article about Monsanto, Europe resisting genetically altered stuff.
May 11, 1999
Monsanto Fails Trying to Sell
Europe on Bioengineered Food
By SCOTT KILMAN and HELENE COOPER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
LONDON -- Monsanto Co. has done something quite remarkable for a U.S.
company in Europe. It has gone from obscurity to infamy in just a few years.
In March, during a debate about the World Trade Organization in the House of
Commons, MP Norman Baker called the U.S. crop-biotechnology company
"Public Enemy No. 1." Prince Charles recently vowed that Monsanto's biotech
food would never pass his royal lips. Former Beatle Paul McCartney publicly
spurned the company after it was reported that his late wife Linda's line of
vegetarian sausages contained soybeans grown from Monsanto's seeds.
Activists have torn up Monsanto test plots in the United Kingdom. British
newspapers call Monsanto the "Frankenstein food giant" and the "biotech bully
boy" so routinely that some Monsanto employees jokingly refer to their
employer as "MonSatan."
"Many people here really hate Monsanto," says Isabelle Gineste, a member of
the Townswomen's Guilds, a civic group. "The rest of us are just scared."
Designer Beans
Monsanto's sin? It genetically modifies agricultural seeds, including those that
produce many of the protein-rich soybeans Britain imports from America to
make a host of food products.
American farmers love Monsanto's seeds; the seeds make soybean, corn and
cotton crops easier to grow. And American consumers have barely noticed.
But a public-relations campaign by Monsanto to win over Europeans has
backfired -- stoking environmental opposition, riling media commentators and
leading many U.K. food retailers, in response, to bar genetically modified food.
The British units of Unilever NV and Nestle SA have pledged not to use any
genetically modified foods in their products in the future. Politicians from
Dublin to Duesseldorf are talking about a moratorium on such crops, a bleak
prospect for American farmers who already face depressed prices.
Indeed, the fallout is beginning to be felt in the U.S. The European Union
already requires labels on food containing those genetically modified crops
whose import it has approved. And it is so reluctant to approve the import of
more that U.S. farmers have begun avoiding several new seeds. The U.S. grain
industry has nearly stopped shipping corn to Europe for fear that European
laboratory tests might detect kernels from genetically modified crops not yet
cleared by the EU. What was a $200 million annual market for U.S. corn
farmers is now all but closed.
The B List
"This year, we've got the three B's with Europe," says U.S. Trade
Representative Charlene Barshefsky. "Bananas, beef and biotechnology."
Already this year, her office has levied or threatened sanctions on the
Europeans over bananas and beef. But those markets are small compared with
agricultural biotechnology. The European markets for genetically modified
crops and seed is potentially worth several billion dollars a year. Says one
official at the WTO in Geneva, where a trade war over the issue would be
fought if one broke out: "Biotech will make bananas look like peanuts."
U.S. farm groups are itching for a fight, but it's one the Clinton administration
dreads, despite having the rules on its side. The European Union doesn't have
any scientific basis for singling out food containing genetically modified crops;
regulators on both sides of the Atlantic say such crops are safe to eat. But
European public attitudes are a different issue. "It's not going to matter
whether we win" at the WTO, says a Clinton administration official. "These
people aren't going to touch anything that says Monsanto anyway."
One reason Monsanto feels so much heat is simply that it is the furthest along
in a science that inevitably raises questions about man's control over nature.
"We are the bow of a technology that is making a lot of waves," says Philip
Angell, director of corporate communications.
Soy Bomb
But another reason is Monsanto's brash and open approach. It has ignored the
go-slow advice of European companies that work in agricultural
biotechnology, such as Britain's Zeneca Group PLC and Switzerland's Novartis
AG. "Monsanto has just made things a lot worse," gripes Michael P. Pragnell,
head of the agrochemicals division at Zeneca.
Skepticism about genetically modified food is common not just in Europe, but
also in Japan, Australia and New Zealand, all of which are considering
requiring that labels identify such food. In India, farm activists, upset about
work on a gene that would stop them from keeping some of their harvest for
seed, have destroyed Monsanto cotton fields.
Foes argue that whatever regulators say, such food hasn't been proved safe.
They also worry that a gene such as one that conveys resistance to herbicide
could escape into the wild and make other species resistant, or that gene
splicing might transfer not just the desired trait but, for instance, another that
triggers allergies.
And some are concerned with broader, cultural issues, from America's
growing economic power to the impact of technology on Britain's beloved
countryside. "There is a feeling that interfering with nature on this scale is
unethical and immoral," says Sandra Bell, director of a group called the Freeze
Alliance.
In America, such concerns are much fainter. Foods ranging from TV dinners
to french fries regularly contain genetically modified produce. Some potatoes,
for instance, contain a gene -- added by Monsanto -- that repels insects. U.S.
regulators haven't seen a need for such alteration to be mentioned on food
labels, since the technology has a clean bill of health. Partly for that reason,
agricultural biotech hasn't caught on as a hot issue in the U.S.
The biggest crop-biotech venture from St. Louis-based Monsanto, which also
produces drugs, involves soybeans. The company has inserted a gene into
soybean seeds that enables the resulting plants to tolerate a potent herbicide
called Roundup -- also sold by Monsanto. This makes it cheaper and less
labor-intensive for soybean farmers to keep weeds out of their fields. Roughly
half of U.S. soybeans grown this year will be from gene-modified seeds, sold
by Monsanto or by seed companies using its technology.
The EU cleared such soybeans -- indistinguishable except by laboratory test
from any other soybeans -- for import in March 1996. The first bushel hit the
docks at Liverpool a few months after.
Mad Cow
The timing was terrible. Britain was in full panic mode over "mad-cow disease"
after scientists said beef from affected cattle was the likely source of a fatal
brain-wasting disease in some Britons. The announcement crushed public
confidence in regulatory and scientific communities that had long given
assurances that the disease ravaging British dairy herds wasn't a human threat.
And, because mad-cow was thought to be spread by the practice of using dead
livestock as a protein source for cattle, the whole issue caused many to
wonder about the sanity of modern agricultural methods. "The mad-cow
disease seems to many people to be the result of not observing the law of
nature," says Daniel Vasella, chairman of Novartis.
The credibility of environmental activists soared in Britain because many had
prophesied a deadly link between mad-cow disease and people. Now they took
one look at genetically modified food and went on a campaign. This time, they
had a ready audience: Britain's freewheeling press. British newspapers had
largely ignored the environmentalists before; they weren't going to do so again.
The fallout spread across the Continent, which had dined on British beef.
Antibiotech attitudes hardened in Germany and France. Austria and
Luxembourg banned genetically modified crops, flouting EU rules.
To counter mad-cow madness, Monsanto tapped Tom McDermott from its
public-relations staff and a senior vice president, Steven Engelberg. They
decided Monsanto would nip the antibiotech movement in the bud. Mr.
McDermott, feeling that "we weren't getting a fair shake in the British media,"
lobbied his bosses for a campaign aimed directly at consumers.
Chief Executive Robert Shapiro endorsed the idea and invited his European
counterparts to join in campaigns in Britain and France. Zeneca and Novartis
wanted no part of it. Corporate-backed issue campaigns aren't the European
way, and Europeans tend to be a lot more mistrustful of big companies than
Americans. "In the States, P.R. works," says Julie Shepherd, director of the
Consumers Association, a watchdog group. "Over here, it's seen as a species
of corporate lying."
Mr. Shapiro decided to go it alone. He had successfully ignored conventional
marketing wisdom before. Early in his career, he figured out how to brand
what was thought to be unbrandable, a food ingredient -- NutraSweet.
Number to Call
Monsanto picked ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, a London shop known for
sexy ads for Dockers pants. Bartle's plan: Show Monsanto wasn't afraid of
debate.
The ads had their debut in British Sunday newspapers last June. "Food
Biotechnology is a matter of opinions," said one. "Monsanto believes you
should hear all of them." Included were phone numbers of critics, including
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.
One ad, invoking hungry Third World children, said: "While we'd never claim
to have solved world hunger at a stroke, biotechnology provides one means to
feed the world more effectively."
The ads irked some commentators, who slammed Monsanto for exploiting the
plight of starving children. And they angered environmentalists, who said
publishing their phone numbers was a cynical attempt to stage-manage debate.
They did raise Monsanto's profile; polls showed that twice as many Britons
knew its name as Novartis's. But the surveys also showed that people were
mainly identifying Monsanto, not Novartis or Zeneca, with genetically
engineered food.
That wasn't good. Before the U.K. ad campaign, 44% of British consumers
surveyed for Monsanto said they had negative feelings about genetically
modified food. By the time the campaign was over last September, that number
had swelled to 51%. Says Neal Verlander, a Friends of the Earth activist:
"Monsanto has helped us enormously with their blundering."
The ad agency didn't return calls seeking comment. Monsanto denies its
initiative made things worse in Britain but concedes it achieved less than hoped.
"There hadn't been much controversy in the United States. Our problem is we
looked at it too much through a U.S. lens," says Mr. Engelberg, the vice
president. Communications Director Mr. Angell says: "Maybe we weren't
aggressive enough... . When you fight a forest fire, sometimes you have to
light another fire."
Monsanto is happier with the results of a simultaneous ad campaign in France,
where the press wasn't as hostile or the public as suspicious. Its surveys show
the French campaign resonated with high-income readers and opinion leaders;
those who saw the ads were almost twice as likely to say genetically
engineered food was acceptable as those who didn't see them. But among all
the French, the number who said they wouldn't buy food containing genetically
modified ingredients rose to 55% after the campaign from 51% before.
Meet the Press
Monsanto executives also decided to take on the news media directly. They
met with reporters and editors from London's Guardian, which had run a map
of Monsanto test plots. Whether as a result or not, three plots later were
destroyed.
The meeting went badly. "They came in here thumping the table and accusing
us of being bad journalists," says John Vidal, the Guardian's environmental
editor. "We just coalesced against them." Making things worse, Monsanto filed
a complaint against the Guardian with Britain's Press Complaints Board, and
lost.
Some in the media seemed ready to pounce. A biochemist at Scotland's
prestigious Rowett Research Institute told a TV show that his lab rats had their
immune systems damaged by eating genetically modified potatoes, which some
reporters seized on as evidence that genetic engineering might make a plant
toxic. But the institute repudiated his conclusions after reviewing his work.
The potatoes, which were used for research purposes only, weren't cleared for
human consumption. The government-supported institute dropped the
scientist, Arpad Pusztai.
He promptly became a martyr in part of the British press. "I Would Blow
Whistle Again Says Professor," said a headline in the Express.
Dr. Pusztai defends his research but says he doesn't know what in the potatoes
harmed his rats or whether it had anything to do with gene splicing. "What I'm
saying is we need to look at it more," he says.
Wrongful Mowing
Monsanto couldn't seem to get a break. In February, it was fined $28,000 in a
magistrate's court in the tiny village of Caistor for what the media called
"safety lapses" at a test plot. The reality was slightly more benign: A
subcontractor mistakenly mowed down plants that were part of a barrier
separating the plot.
That was enough to engender a carnival scene outside Caistor's court. About
100 activists and reporters descended on the hamlet. Among them was
"Frankenstein," a costumed environmentalist also seen outside groceries
warning that "Frankenstein Food" was sold inside.
His warnings worked. Over the past two months, many of Britain's major food
retailers have pledged to stay free of genetically modified foods. One, J.
Sainsbury, says it got 12,000 phone calls in a single month from worried
shoppers.
Surprisingly, one Monsanto foe does find something to appreciate about the
American company: its candor. "Zeneca and Novartis have just kept quiet --
that's the European way," says Mr. Vidal, the Guardian environmental editor.
"I far prefer the Monsanto way," he says. "Their up-frontness is a rather
wonderful thing. The fact that their vision might be warped is another thing,
but it creates a public debate, which we need."
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