Those who believe and have confidence in the emergence of a more altruistic society should not be discouraged when faced with manifestations of selfishness. The mere existence of real altruism does not make selfishness disappear from society.
We can see that selfishness is the rule in totalitarian regimes that assign little value to the individual. But it also manifests in free and democratic countries, when cynical interest groups make their own profit an absolute priority, ignoring the harmful consequences of their activities on the population. When these groups knowingly resort to all kinds of manipulations to preserve their interests, it is legitimate to speak of institutionalized selfishness.
This is the case for industries, companies, or financial entities that with their considerable means have been able to influence governments to modify laws and regulations to serve their own special interests. These organizations devote fortunes to ad campaigns promoting harmful products, or to hide the deleterious effects of their activities, whatever the price paid by humans and the planet. Their financial clout also allows them recourse to high-ranking lawyers so as to prolong indefinitely court cases brought against them and thereby discourage the victims of their activities, who often have only modest resources.
When these groups can thus concentrate their wealth, pass environmental costs onto society, exploit workers and maintain poverty to use cheap labor—all in the name of an “economic growth” that isn’t even a reality—while their contribution to society is, when all is said and done, a negative one, the responsibility for letting all this happen lies, as Joseph Stiglitz stresses, in uncaring economic and political systems: “Much of what has gone on can only be described by the words ‘moral deprivation.’ Something wrong happened to the moral compass of so many of the people working in the financial sector and elsewhere.”1
Examples of institutionalized selfishness abound, and the aim of this book is not to draw up a list of them. A few particularly emblematic examples will suffice to demonstrate how such practices have been able to arise and continue with impunity.
That is the name of the book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, historians of science, which describes the machinations of the tobacco industry, mainly in the United States, and of interest groups that deny the reality of global warming and the effect of human activities on the climate.2 One of the most disturbing aspects of their investigation is the role played by scientists close to the extreme right in America who, for several decades, have led effective disinformation campaigns allowing them to trick public opinion into doubting well-established scientific facts.
The physicists Frederick Seitz and Fred Singer, among others, took part in the industry’s campaigns. The former was active in the creation of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, the latter in the development of rockets and observation satellites. Seitz also became president of the American Academy of Sciences.3 Nothing in their scientific training, however, gave them the competence required to proclaim, as they did for years, that the links between tobacco and cancer were not proven, that acid rain was not caused by the fumes from the coal industry (but rather by volcanoes, which is false), and that CFC gases (chlorofluorocarbons) had no effect on the destruction of the ozone layer. Joined by the physicists William “Bill” Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow, they also strove for thirty years to deny the planet’s global warming. They began by stating it didn’t exist, then that it was natural, and, finally, that even if it continued to increase, we just had to adapt. They questioned the results of serious studies on global warming and claimed that the scientific community was deeply divided on these questions.
Their tactics were all the more perverse since they presented themselves as defenders of “good science,” accusing their colleagues of manipulating the data and conclusions of their research in the service of anti-capitalist, anti-libertarian, even Communist political trends. Armed with their notoriety and the unconditional support of the industries that feared any regulation of their activities, they managed to influence several American presidents, Ronald Reagan and Bush Senior and Bush Junior in particular (George Bush Sr. called them “my scholars”).4 They also duped media as respectable as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek, who readily made themselves the mouthpieces for these disinformation campaigns, in the aim of “giving equal space to diverse opinions,” placing scrupulous scientific researchers on equal footing with biased, unsubstantiated opinions. These experts acquired by financial lobbies all had in common an anti-Soviet obsession dating back to the Cold War and an avowed sympathy for neoconservative capitalism.5
In the 1930s, German researchers had demonstrated that tobacco leads to lung cancer. But, because of their association with the Nazi regime, their research was ignored. It was in 1953 that Ernest Wynder and his colleagues at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York discovered that cigarette tar applied to the skin of mice led to deadly cancers.6 This news came like a bomb in the media, and the tobacco industry panicked.
In December 1953, the presidents of the four main American cigarette brands7 gathered around John Hill, the head of the leading advertising agency in the United States, in order to devise a media campaign to convince the population that there was “no sound scientific basis for the charges,” and that they were “sensational accusations” concocted by researchers greedy for publicity and subsidies for their laboratories.8 This campaign would later be considered by the courts as the first of many stages of a conspiracy organized to hide the toxic effects of tobacco.
Hill and his accomplices began by forming the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, with Hill insisting on including the word “research” in order, he said, to “spread and maintain doubt” about the validity of the scientists’ discoveries in the mind of the public. This committee distributed to doctors, politicians, and journalists hundreds of thousands of pamphlets that claimed to demonstrate that there was no reason to be alarmed about the harmfulness of tobacco.9 By doing this, they managed to sow discord in public opinion.
“Doubt is our ‘product’, since it’s the best way to fight all the facts that are now known to the public,” declared an internal memo from the director of a large tobacco company in 1957.10 Doubt Is Their Product is also the title of the book by the scientist David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health under the Clinton administration and who, like Oreskes and Conway, shows how the tobacco industry very quickly recruited “experts” charged with providing their communications services with material that would “keep the debate open” where research studies had unequivocally established that tobacco is the cause of millions of premature deaths.11
In 1957, the American Public Health Service ruled that tobacco was “the main cause of increased frequency of lung cancer.” In Europe, other public health organizations made similar declarations.
In 1964, on the basis of over 7,000 studies demonstrating the harmfulness of tobacco, the Surgeon General established in a report entitled “Tobacco and Health” that a smoker was “twenty times more likely to die of lung cancer than a non-smoker,” that tobacco led to a decided increase in other lung and heart diseases, and that the more someone smoked, the more harmful the effect was on the smoker’s health.12
The industry realized it was facing a grave crisis but didn’t concede defeat, and gathered its forces together. The tobacco firm Brown and Williamson chose to act as if nothing had happened and announced, in 1967, that “There is no scientific evidence that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer or any other disease.” In court, the tobacco industry always managed to coax a few scientists over to its side to assert that the scientific data remained inconclusive.
It came to light only later that those scientists working for the industry had actually reached the same conclusion as the others. Even more: they had also noted that nicotine was habit-forming among smokers, two conclusions the industry chose first to hide, then to deny until the 1990s, when it was charged with deception. As a preventative tactic, in the 1960s the industry introduced cigarette brands that were marketed as “better for your health.” If we think of the 5 million people dying at that time all over the world and still dying every year because of cigarettes, we can get some idea of the cynicism of this description.
A new wind of panic blew through the industry in the 1980s, when the Surgeon General concluded that passive smoking was also harmful to the health, and recommended measures limiting the use of tobacco inside buildings. The tobacco industry again united with Fred Singer to discredit not only the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), which had compiled the scientific studies, but also the researchers themselves, accusing them of doing “bad science.”
Here again, as early as the 1970s, the tobacco industry knew that the smoke floating in the air contained more toxic products than the smoke inhaled by smokers.13 The main reason for this is that the combustion of this “lateral” smoke occurs at a lower temperature and in an incomplete way.14
The most convincing study came from Japan in 1981. Takeshi Hirayama, at the Cancer Research Institute, demonstrated that the wives of smokers died from lung cancer twice as often as the wives of nonsmokers. The study involved over 540 women who were followed for fourteen years. The more the husband smoked, the more the mortality rate of the wives increased.15
The tobacco industry then turned to a famous statistician, Nathan Mantel, who declared that Hirayama’s results had been incorrectly analyzed. PR firms then took over, with newspapers displaying front-page headlines denying the risks of passive smoking, while full-page ads announcing the good news were financed by cigarette companies. As another duplicity, internal memos, found later on, confirm they knew very well what the truth was. One of them notes: “Hirayama was right. TI (Tobacco Industry) knew it and attacked Hirayama, knowing all the while that his results were correct.”16
Smoking, then, was not just a question of personal risk. Putting one’s friends, colleagues, and one’s own children in danger was a whole other matter, which public opinion would surely not swallow so easily.
And yet, the tobacco companies persisted in their lying campaign: Sylvester Stallone was paid $500,000 to smoke cigarettes in five of his movies, in order to associate smoking with strength and good health. Philip Morris financed a project called Whitecoat, enrolling European scientists to “reverse the erroneous scientific and popular concept that ETS [environmental tobacco smoke] is harmful to health.”17 Sixteen million dollars were spent with the sole aim of maintaining doubt in the public’s mind. Fred Singer, predictably, sent many articles to the press, denouncing the new scientific reports, which he described as “junk science.” In 1999, analyzing the articles published in the press on passive smoking, two researchers at the University of California, Gail Kennedy and Lisa Bero, established that 62% of articles published in newspapers and non-specialized magazines between 1992 and 1994 continued to assert that the studies concluding on the harmful effects of passive smoking were “subject to controversy,” whereas all the serious scientific studies had confirmed this harmfulness.18
Another stratagem consisted of creating pseudo-scientific journals in which the tobacco industry published articles that would never have passed the threshold of the editorial committees of serious scientific journals. They also organized conferences where it presented scientists won over to its cause, whose opinions were then repeated in “reports.” All these strategies ended up constituting a number of references that, although lacking any scientific value, had the aim of contradicting serious research.19
Finally, in 2006, an American court ruled that “the tobacco industry had developed and applied strategies meant to deceive consumers about the dangers of cigarettes, dangers of which it has been aware since the 1950s, as the internal documents of the tobacco companies themselves proved.”
In November 2012, an American federal judge ordered tobacco companies to publish corrective declarations stating clearly they had lied about the dangers of smoking. These declarations must describe without dissimulation the effects of tobacco on smokers’ health, and mention the fact that smoking kills on average over 1,200 Americans a day, more than murders, AIDS, suicide, drugs, alcohol, and car accidents combined.20
Even today, according to the World Health Organization (WHO),21 tobacco kills almost 6 million people every year. Five million of them are smokers or former smokers, and over 600,000 are nonsmokers involuntarily exposed to smoke.22 Passive smoking, then, is dangerous, even in small doses.23
Tobacco caused 100 million deaths in the twentieth century, more than both World Wars combined. If the present tendency continues, it will lead to up to 1 billion victims in the twenty-first century. Eighty percent of these deaths will occur in countries with low or average incomes.
Despite all that, the tobacco industry has still not thrown in the towel. It is now targeting developing countries, and is prospering in Africa and Asia (which is home to 60% of the billion smokers on the planet, 350 million of them in China alone). In Indonesia, for example, it offers young people a reward if they agree to transform their cars into ads for their brands. On morning television, there are up to 15 ads per hour to promote tobacco consumption. In that country, with 11 million workers, the tobacco industry is the second largest national employer, and 63% of the male population are smokers.24 In India, 50,000 children work in tobacco farms and factories. In China, Marlboro even sponsors school uniforms (with their logo, of course.)25 Worldwide, according to WHO, tax revenue on tobacco sales is on average 154 times higher than the sums spent on the anti-tobacco fight.26 The long-term effects of disinformation campaigns continue to make themselves felt, since 25% of Americans still think today that there is no solid evidence proving that smoking kills.27
According to WHO, gruesome anti-tobacco ads and photos on cigarette packs contribute to reducing the number of young people who begin smoking, and increases the number of smokers who decide to stop smoking. We also know that banning advertising lowers cigarette consumption. So the first thing to do would be to ban all ads.
The studies show that most smokers aware of the dangers of tobacco want to stop smoking. Still, in many countries, few people know the specific risks of tobacco consumption (only 37% in China, where people smoke freely in crowded trains or buses). So governments should start out by correctly informing the population.
We know that a therapeutic regimen, counseling, and taking certain medications can at least double one’s chances of successfully stopping smoking. So consumers need help to break the habit. But only 19 countries, representing 14% of the world population, have national health services offering help with giving up smoking.
The WHO thinks a ban is impracticable in the context of globalization. But we can imagine an organization like the European Union taking the initiative and setting the example. Countries like Finland, Australia and New Zealand have already taken the path of eradication with two initiatives: removing any positive image of tobacco by making all cigarette packs the same, and banning smoking in the streets to put an end to the phenomenon of imitation.
A group of English medical experts also thinks the prospect of a worldwide ban is unrealistic; instead, it is encouraging governments to have the public health bill systematically paid by the tobacco companies, since they are responsible for all these diseases and deaths.28 In Canada, a class action suit is underway, representing 45,000 Quebecois who are demanding 27 billion dollars in damages from these companies. In the United States, the big cigarette companies signed the Master Settlement Agreement in 1998, by which they agreed to pay the record sum of 246 billion dollars over twenty-five years. Obviously, the American legal system has not struck hard enough despite everything, since the tobacco industry continues to do well, unlike those who smoke its products.
In 1965, Roger Revelle, scientific adviser to President Johnson, was ordered to prepare a report on the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His conclusions, presented to the Congress, determined: “The present generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere at a global level by regularly emitting a quantity of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”29 But that was the Vietnam War era, and the government had other priorities. As for climatologists, they had already come up with models predicting, under the effect of the increase of CO2, an increase of the temperature of the surface of the globe, with major consequences from every point of view—biodiversity, human migrations, diseases, and so on.
The American government then asked two groups of experts to study the question further.30 They too reached the same conclusion. This observation made politicians feel very uneasy: intervening effectively would have required considerable changes in the field of energy. So they chose to put the problem aside. One of the scientists recounts that, when the leaders in Washington were told that the rate of CO2 in the atmosphere would double in fifty years, they replied: “Come back in forty-nine years.”31 The American government adopted the strategy of “wait and see” and claimed that in any case humanity could adapt. So why was it necessary to pass regulations to diminish the rate of CO2 in the atmosphere?
As scientists continue to accumulate studies and try to alert those in authority and public opinion, American magnates finance media campaigns to deny global warming, supported by a few laboratories ready to defend this argument. According to the calculations presented in an investigative report by Greenpeace, the brothers David and Charles Koch, two oil industry magnates with ultra-conservative opinions, who are respectively the fifth and sixth wealthiest men in the world, have contributed over 60 million dollars to this campaign since 1997.32 The journalist Chris Mooney showed that Exxon Mobil had, in a few years, paid 8 million dollars to no less than 40 organizations that denigrate scientific research that proves global warming.33 In 2009, there were over 2,300 lobbyists in Congress focused on questions linked to climate change, in the aim of protecting the interests of big industry.34
A researcher with impeccable qualifications, Benjamin Santer works at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, connected with the University of California. He was the one who, in an article in Nature in 1996, offered the decisive proof that global warming was due to human activities and not to variations of solar activity. His studies demonstrated that the troposphere (the area of space closest to us) was getting warmer, while the stratosphere (the space outside the troposphere) was getting colder. It should have been the opposite if the warming of our climate were caused by the sun: since the stratosphere receives the sun’s rays first, it should have begun to get warmer.35
Santer was then put in charge of coordinating writing the eighth chapter of the UN’s IPPC report, dealing with climate changes. This institution received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with Al Gore.
Confronted with the conclusion stemming from the evidence presented by Santer and unable to challenge it scientifically, Seitz, Singer, Bill Nierenberg, and their stooges proclaimed that the researcher had deliberately falsified his results. They also tried to have him fired from his university. Seitz wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “A Major Deception on Global Warming,” as well as other articles of the same sort accusing Santer of suppressing certain parts of that eighth chapter of the IPPC report, passages that cast doubt on global warming and its causes.
Actually, Ben Santer had only made a certain number of revisions following the recommendations of his colleagues. When a researcher submits an article to a scientific journal or presents a review, it is in fact normal for data, analyses, and conclusions to be sifted through by a group of experts. As usual, these experts had asked for details and additional information.
Fred Seitz obviously knew about this process. But he asserted, without the slightest foundation, that the modifications made by the researcher were meant to “deceive policy makers and the public”36 in order to make them believe that scientific proof existed showing that human activities were causing global warming.
Over the years, then, the American media were bombarded with fallacious information meant to provide the most conservative politicians with the arguments they needed. The journal of the American Academy of Sciences, the PNAS, published a study showing that 97% of researchers specializing in climate in the United States attributed to human activity the responsibility for global warming and its predicted consequences. This unanimity of the scientific community was not enough to impress the senator from Oklahoma, James Inhofe, who retorted: “This 97% doesn’t mean anything.”37 In other circumstances, that same senator had described global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people;”38 earlier, he had said, “There is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”39 All the Republican presidential candidates for 2012 vocalized their skepticism about climate change, and refused to consider industrial emissions of carbon dioxide as being the main cause of global warming.40 Sixty-four percent of Americans continue to think the scientific community is deeply divided on the subject.41
“Spreading doubt,” and “keeping the controversy open,” the objectives of interest groups, were crowned with success. But here the interest of a few is being made to triumph over the common good. Making this kind of denial serve special interests does indeed qualify as institutionalized selfishness.
For a century, pharmaceutical companies all over the world have produced medications, antibiotics in particular, that have saved countless lives, and have contributed to increasing life expectancy in the United States from forty-seven in 1900 to almost seventy-nine today. However, these inarguable successes are no excuse for indulging in a series of practices that are certainly not in the interest of patients or of society at large.
It is alarming to note, as the British doctor Ben Goldacre demonstrated in his book Bad Pharma,42 that the private interests of pharmaceutical companies have often been privileged over those of public health. Under pretext of protecting their investments in research, these companies cover up the data from studies they cite to assert a new medicine is effective. In particular, they communicate to the medical and scientific community only the results of studies that are favorable to their products. If we add to that the exaggerations and distortions inherent to every advertising campaign, which boasts of merchandise in a way disproportionate with its actual benefits, doctors don’t have the necessary information that would allow them to choose the best treatments for their patients with full knowledge of the facts. The transparency of the pharmaceutical industry stops where its financial interests begin.
It would be perfectly possible to know unambiguously the effectiveness of medicines sold on the market. But because of a systematic lack of transparency of pharmaceutical companies and a lack of will on the part of regulatory organizations, that is not the case. Why?
Medicines are tested by the same people that make them, and not by independent scientific laboratories. The comparison between the experimental protocols used in rigorous scientific studies and those used in pharmaceutical laboratories shows that, in the latter, they are often ill-conceived, tested on an insufficient number of patients, and over too short a period of time. What’s more, these results are interpreted in such a way as to exaggerate the benefits of the product. When tests produce results that don’t satisfy the companies, the companies are content to ignore them, thus depriving independent investigators of information indispensable to a fair evaluation of the medicine in question.
In 2007, Lisa Bero and other researchers at the University of San Francisco examined all the published tests on the benefits of statins, anti-cholesterol medications that reduce the risk of heart attacks and are widely prescribed. They analyzed 192 tests comparing a specific statin to another or to a different kind of medication, and they observed that studies financed by the industry gave favorable results twenty times more often about their own products than studies carried out by independent scientific laboratories. This example is the rule rather than the exception.
Unfortunately, there are many ways to bias these experimental procedures. One might select patients more likely to react favorably to the treatment. Or, one could be content to look at the results halfway through the study and interrupt the study prematurely to avoid obtaining worse results at the end of the same test. Pharmaceutical companies that use the services of researchers reserve, contractually, the prerogative to interrupt a study at any time if they think it’s not headed in the right direction, which obviously affects the objective evaluation of the medication being tested. Once the study is over, the company has complete control over publishing or silencing the results, depending on what suits it.
An article published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), the main American medical journal, reveals that out of a sample of 44 studies carried out by pharmaceutical companies, in 40 cases, the researchers had to sign a confidentiality contract.43 This confidentiality has nothing to do with the protection of the laboratories’ rights over the product they have produced. It aims solely at disseminating only the tests that show that their products are effective, and to silence with impunity the tests that give negative results. To take an example from the European Union, half of all tests carried out on medical products are never published. But a knowledge of all studies carried out on a new product and comparison with already existent medications are indispensable for doctors to be able to prescribe the most effective medicine. Today, doctors have only results that are pre-selected by laboratories. In fact, the few systematic studies, long and costly, that have been carried out indicate that the majority of new medications placed on the market are no more effective than those that exist already. And, sometimes, they are even less effective.
We’ll cite a revealing example, that of Tamiflu. In 2005, fearing an avian flu pandemic, governments all over the world spent billions of dollars to buy and store this medication purported to reduce complications from flu, which can be fatal. In England, there was enough to treat 80% of the population. However, to date, Roche, the manufacturer, has published no data showing that Tamiflu effectively reduced the rate of pneumonia and death. Roche’s Internet site, however, announces that this medication reduces complications by 67%.
In December 2009, Cochrane Collaboration, a nonprofit organization that aims to facilitate collaboration between scientists all over the world, decided to check what the state of things actually was. Every year this organization carries out and publishes hundreds of systematic, detailed analyses of medical research. Cochrane contacted Roche, which declared it was ready to communicate the data provided it remained confidential, which made no sense for an organization whose goal was to inform the scientific community. What’s more, Cochrane had to agree not to reveal either the conditions imposed by Roche, or the results of their investigation, or even the fact that these investigations existed! All that about a medication that had already been consumed by hundreds of thousands of people and had cost governments and citizens billions of dollars. Cochrane asked for clarifications and Roche didn’t reply.44 In January 2011, Roche announced that all its data had been transmitted to Cochrane, which was false, and, in February, that it had been published, which was also false. In October 2012, the editor in chief of the prestigious British Medical Journal, Fiona Godlee, published an open letter to Roche, asking it to make public the results of a dozen unpublished tests, since Roche had made public only the results of two tests that were favorable to its medication.45 Still in vain.
So Cochrane carried out an analysis on the little data available, and it became clear that the methods described in the articles that were supposed to prove the benefits of Tamiflu were far from optimal: the type of people chosen to be tested, especially, was not random, but determined by the positive result the company wanted to obtain. What’s more, a lot of major data was missing. To date, there is no “double blind,” placebo-comparing study carried out demonstrating the effectiveness of Tamiflu on serious forms of flu. The most that has been observed is a slight reduction of the duration of symptoms on commonplace forms of flu.
After an investigation published in 2008, it turned out that Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK) had neglected to make public the data from nine studies showing not only the ineffectiveness on children of its paroxetine-based antidepressant, but also revealing serious undesirable effects, namely an increase of a risk of suicide among those children.46 GSK made no effort to inform anyone, and an internal memo asserts, “It would be commercially unacceptable to include a declaration in the instructions indicating that effectiveness has not been demonstrated, since that would harm the profile of paroxetine.” In the year following that confidential memo, in the United Kingdom alone, 32,000 prescriptions for paroxetine were written for children.
Vioxx (rofecoxib) was placed on the market by Merck mainly to relieve the pain of osteoarthritis. Merck continued to lead aggressive marketing campaigns to promote the sales of Vioxx even when the laboratory had known since 2000 of the serious cardiovascular dangers of this product. The firm didn’t decide to withdraw it from the market until 2004, after tens of thousands of cardiovascular accidents, often mortal, had been registered.47
During a trial, a group of independent experts showed that Merck had covered up the comparatively high death rate due to rofecoxib, although it had been observed during clinical trials aiming to explore its action on Alzheimer’s disease. Under cover of confidentiality, Merck had provided only partial information and incorrect analyses. According to two unpublished clinical trials, however, mortality was three times higher under rofecoxib as compared to a placebo.48 In the two published articles, the authors, several of whom were employed by Merck, had asserted that rofecoxib was “well-tolerated.”49 By the survivors, perhaps?
During the last decade, various measures and resolutions concerning medications have been made by national and international organizations, as well as by editors of medical journals, but none has been put into practice.50 In 2007, it was decided that the results of all studies, positive or negative, had to be put online on a site created for the purpose. There again, an audit published in the British Medical Journal revealed that only 1 study out of 5 was thus made available to the medical community. Another sham.
The same is true for government regulators who are supposed to verify the quality of the research from laboratories producing medications, and on that basis authorize them to market the medications. They don’t always have access to all the data from the pharmaceutical companies; according to Goldacre, the British doctor and author of Bad Pharma, it is sometimes just as difficult to obtain the data they have as “to squeeze blood from a rock.”
He gives the example of researchers at the Cochrane Center who worked in 2007 on a systematic study of two medications widely used for weight loss, Orlistat and Rimonabant. Such a study requires access to all existing data: if any are missing, especially data that gave negative results, the researchers can only come up with a deformed picture of the situation.
In June 2007, Cochrane asked the EMA (European Medicines Agency), the organization that approves of and supervises medications for all of Europe, to provide it with the experimental protocols and reports on the studies in question. Two months later, the EMA replied it had decided not to provide these reports, invoking the protection of commercial interests and the intellectual property of pharmaceutical companies. The researchers replied by return mail that there was absolutely nothing, in an objective report on the harmlessness and effectiveness of a medication, that could harm the protection of such commercial interests. And even if there were, could the EMA explain why the commercial interests of pharmaceutical companies should be more important than patients’ health?51
As a last resort, the Cochrane researchers turned to the European Ombudsman. “This was the beginning of a battle for data that would shame the EMA, and would last more than three years,” reports Goldacre.52 In 2009, in a dramatic turn of events, one of the two medications, Rimonabant, was withdrawn from the market because it increases the risk of serious psychiatric problems and suicide. The EMA was then forced by the European Ombudsman to provide all the data in its possession. In 2010, the conclusions of the Ombudsman were overwhelming: the EMA had failed to do its duty and to reply to the serious accusation that its withholding of information went against patients’ interest. For all those years, patients had suffered from a lack of transparency on the part of the pharmaceutical companies and of government regulators.
With great fanfare, the European Agency of Medicines created a list of medical tests called EudraCT, and the European legislation requires all studies to be registered with it. But, according to all competent opinions, transparency continues to be lacking, and the WHO, among others, declared that the EudraCT list was practically unusable because it is almost impossible to navigate through the mass of crude, poorly organized data that have been put online.53
Drug companies spend astronomical sums each year on advertising to influence the therapeutic decisions of doctors—60 billion dollars a year in the United States alone, the equivalent of the GDP of Bolivia or Kenya, and three times that of Laos.54
When a pharmaceutical company refuses to let a developing country use a new medication for AIDS at an affordable price, it is, it says, because it needs income to finance costly research. This argument loses all credibility when we learn that the company, like all other pharmaceutical companies, spends twice as much on marketing its products as on research.
It is unacceptable to think of a medication the way we would a product of ordinary consumption, cosmetics or a box of detergent, for example. Medications should have no other reason for existing than their usefulness in the service of public health. Consequently, only strictly scientific criteria should be applied to them, and we should begin by banning all forms of advertising concerning them.
The money spent on advertising, moreover, is entirely paid for by the patients themselves, or by public funding if they are reimbursed by social welfare, or else by the insurance companies that finance patients’ costs. About 25% of the sale price of a medication serves to cover advertising expenses.
Medical advertising does more than draw the attention of doctors to one medication rather than another; it is often deceptive. To check this, you just have to gather the assertions found in medical advertisements and compare them to the data available on the medications in question.
Such a study was carried out in 2010 by a group of Dutch researchers who sorted through the main medical journals throughout the world between 2003 and 2005.55 The results were astonishing: only half the therapeutic effects described by the advertisements were corroborated by scientific studies. What’s more, only half the studies themselves were of good quality.
The largest medical journals worldwide, JAMA and NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine), for example, each receive between 10 and 20 million dollars of income from advertisements paid for by pharmaceutical companies.56
The promotional strategies of pharmaceutical firms encompass the medical press, medical representatives, the various institutions for medical training, and the opinion formers in the field of health.
There are a number of reasons why doctors should stop receiving representatives of pharmaceutical businesses and companies.57 These representatives, called “medical visitors,” come regularly to sing the praises of products manufactured by their laboratory.
Medical visitors certainly do their work conscientiously, and it would be unfair to criticize them on a personal level. Moreover, in the present situation, they facilitate the task of doctors, whose long hours often make it impossible for them to read all the scientific literature published every month in their specialty.
It is the system that is deficient and ethically unacceptable, since we know that drug companies, and by extension those who represent them, offer a deformed image of their products. The general interest would be served if the new medications vaunted by laboratories were more effective than those that exist already, but often, as we shall see, that is not the case.
Most doctors say they keep their critical wits. Studies carried out on this question show that quite the opposite is the case. One of these studies followed, in the United States, a group of doctors before and after a trip paid for by a drug company to a fashionable holiday spot.58 Before they left, most of the doctors had declared they didn’t think this kind of event would change their prescription habits. But it turned out that upon their return they tripled the prescriptions of the products from the company in question. How do we know that? In the United States, it’s easy to find out, since pharmacies are authorized to sell their prescription archives to commercial companies that analyze them for pharmaceutical companies.59 Patients’ names are omitted, but not doctors’ names. So companies can find out which medications the doctors prescribe, and adjust the sales pitch of their representatives. And, unlike in Europe, nothing forbids them from granting favors to the doctors who most prescribe their products.
According to Ben Goldacre and many other experts, doctors should simply refuse to receive medical visitors, and they should be forbidden access to clinics, hospitals, and medical schools.60 Moreover, pharmacists should not under any condition be authorized to divulge information about their prescriptions.
Of course sometimes a drug company discovers and manufactures a new medication that saves hundreds of thousands of lives. But, these days, most new medications contribute no tangible therapeutic progress, while they are sold much more expensively than previous ones. A real improvement would consist of better effectiveness, less frequent dosage, a diminution of risks, or else a simpler or safer administration of treatment.
But a large number of “new” medications belong to two categories known in English by the nickname me-too and me-again, and nothing justifies putting them on the market.
“Me-too” drugs are copies of existent medications sold under different names. “Me-again” drugs are medications whose patent is ending (the legal period of protection is twenty years) and will soon fall into public domain. The manufacturers, anxiously seeing the day when other companies will be free to commercialize generic versions of products that had till then brought them a fortune, hurry to come out with a new version whose chemical formula is slightly modified, without it leading to the slightest therapeutic difference. Renamed and much-publicized, the “me-again” drugs will be sold two or three times more expensively than the patent-defunct product. That isn’t difficult, since, as we’ve seen, in order to obtain authorization to commercialize a medication, you just have to demonstrate that it is slightly better than a placebo, which is the case for 30% of new medications approved by health authorities. What patients need is not a more expensive duplicate, but a more effective medication.
According to an analysis by Adrian Hollis published by the WHO, the main problem with the “me-too” and “me-again” drugs is that they discourage innovation. So before authorizing a new medication for sale, proofs should be required that it is actually superior to those that exist already.61
The ALLHAT study (Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial),62 which began in 1994 and cost 125 million dollars, studied high blood pressure, a disease that affects about a quarter of the adult population. The study compared chlorthalidone, an old, inexpensive compound, to amlodipine (Pfizer’s Norvasc), a new, very expensive compound that is abundantly prescribed. They knew both remedies were equally effective in controlling blood pressure. The goal was to find out the number of heart attacks affecting patients treated by these two medications. At the end of the study, in 2002, it was observed—to the great surprise of all—that the old medication was clearly better. What’s more, the savings for patients and social services if this remedy was used would have greatly exceeded the cost of the study itself. Unfortunately that study did not prevent the sale of amlodipine at top price, highly publicized to doctors and pharmacists.63
For decades in the United States, many new medications were tested on prisoners. Today, it’s the poor people in wealthy countries and populations in developing countries that undergo these tests. Indeed, they are paid, sometimes with enticing sums, but the subcontractors are poorly supervised and often unscrupulous, accidents are frequent, and help for the victims nonexistent in case of accident. Sometimes, people who make it a profession on which their lives depend to act as guinea pigs suffer so much from constantly taking new substances that they end up pretending to swallow the pills. One of these “professionals” describes his ordeal as “a mild torture economy.”64
These tests also have the defect of being carried out on ethnic groups other than the populations to which the medications will finally be administered. It is far from certain that poor inhabitants of rural communities in China, Russia, or India will react to the substances given them in the same way as an inhabitant of New York. If, for example, you give a new medication for blood pressure to people who have never taken it, it is very likely that the effects will be much more encouraging than for someone who has already followed various treatments. In that way the results are distorted. Finally, those who volunteer for these studies will rarely be the beneficiaries of these new medications, which are meant mainly for wealthy countries.
Faced with such indifference to the good of others, faced with such serious offenses, it is important to conceive of possible remedies. We have seen that the drug industry provides only incomplete, biased information. This situation has until recently widely escaped the media and the public, despite the warnings given occasionally by responsible scientists.
So it is indispensable for the regulatory health authorities, independent of the industry, to be the ones to inform practitioners clearly of the virtues and dangers of existing medications, and to ensure continual training of doctors. Independent scientific committees should also judge the validity of studies carried out by laboratories. For that, the indispensable preliminary condition is access to all the experimental data concerning the efficacy of tests of medicinal products. This arrangement would indeed be an onerous one, but in the end, there would be huge savings for governments.
Pharmaceutical companies should also be penalized if it is revealed that they have hidden the results of studies unfavorable to their product, which is common practice today. In Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre argues that devoting resources to improving the system of medication production would be more important and useful to society than carrying out more research.
Monsanto has embodied institutionalized selfishness for almost a century, and because of that deserves special mention. Established in forty-six countries, this company is known above all to the public as the worldwide leader in GMOs, and one of the main firms responsible for the massive expansion of monocultures. It exercises draconian control over the farmers to whom it sells seeds; they are not authorized to reuse them from one year to the next.
What we are not so familiar with is that, since its creation in 1901 by a self-taught chemist named John Francis Queeny, the firm has been one of the largest producers of toxic products, including PCBs65 and the sadly famous Agent Orange used during the Vietnam War. Thousands of people died because of these products, which contained dioxins. For dozens of years, Monsanto covered up, then denied, the harmful effects of these products on health, until a series of trials revealed its criminal actions. Monsanto presents itself today as a company of the “life sciences,” a sudden convert to the virtues of sustainable development.
In her book The World According to Monsanto, Marie-Monique Robin, a journalist who won the Albert-Londres Prize and a documentary filmmaker, reports the results of a detailed investigation she carried out on every continent.
Anniston is a small city in Alabama, which today numbers 23,000 inhabitants, 25% of whom, mainly African-Americans, live below poverty level. Anniston was for a time one of the most polluted cities in the United States. It was there, in fact, that between 1929 and 1971, Monsanto produced PCBs and for forty years dumped with impunity highly toxic waste from that production into Snow Creek, a canal that flows through the city. “It was poisoned water. Monsanto knew it but never said anything,” recounts David Baker, a survivor.66 Today, the most polluted neighborhoods have been abandoned, and look like ghost towns.
PCBs served as lubricants and insulation in machines; they entered into the composition of paint and products for the treatment of metal, welding, adhesives, and so on. They were everywhere. They are now classified among “persistent organic pollutants” (POP), very dangerous substances since they resist natural degradation and accumulate in living tissues throughout the food chain.
Near the end of the 1960s, public information began to circulate about the dangers that PCB cause humans. Monsanto began to get worried… about its own business. An internal memo written in 1970 explains to sales personnel: “You can give verbal answers; no answers should be given in writing.… We can’t afford to lose one dollar of business.”67
In the 1990s, in Anniston, the rate of deaths accelerated, women had miscarriages, and a high proportion of children showed signs of mental retardation. Monsanto offered to buy the houses of poor inhabitants at a good price in exchange for the promise not to sue them. Then the company offered one million dollars to the inhabitants of affected neighborhoods to buy their silence and settle the question once and for all. Before this strategy took shape, a lawyer from Anniston, Donald Stewart, sided with the population and ended up obtaining court authorization to consult Monsanto’s internal archives, a mountain of documents that the company had refused to make accessible before then.
Examination of these archives revealed that, beginning in 1937, the company knew that PCBs presented grave health risks, workers had died after being exposed to PCB vapors containing dioxins, and that others had contracted a skin disease that had disfigured them. This disease, which was named “chloracne,” is characterized by an eruption of pustules all over the body and a browning of the skin, and can last several years, or in some cases never entirely disappear.
In 1955, a researcher from Monsanto based in London suggested that rigorous research be carried out to evaluate the toxic effects of Aroclor. Dr. Kelly, director of Monsanto’s medical service, curtly replied: “I don’t know how you would get any particular advantage in doing more work.”68
But pressure mounted. In November 1966, Dr. Denzel Ferguson, biologist at the University of Mississippi, and his team plunged twenty-five caged fish into the water of the creek that goes through Anniston: “All 25 fish lost equilibrium… and all were dead in 3½ minutes and… blood issues from the gills after 3 minutes exposure.”69 In certain places, the water is so polluted that it kills all fish, even if it’s diluted 300 times. The expert concluded: “Snow Creek is a potential source of legal problems.… Monsanto needs to monitor the biological effects of its effluents as a protection against future accusations.”70
PCBs have contaminated the entire planet, from the Arctic to the Antarctic.71 In 1966, a Swedish researcher, Søren Jensen, discovered an unusual toxic substance in samples of human blood: PCB. As one thing led to another, he saw that PCBs have extensively contaminated the environment, even though they are not manufactured in Sweden. He found large quantities in salmon caught along the coasts and even in the hair of his own children.72 He concluded that PCBs accumulate throughout the food chain in the organs and fatty tissues of animals, and that they are at least as toxic as DDT.
“And yet,” comments Marie-Monique Robin, “Monsanto management did not change its attitude: one year later it allocated an additional $2.9 million to further development of Aroclor products in Anniston and Sauget.”73
For forty years, Monsanto acted as if nothing was wrong, all the way up to the definitive ban of PCBs in the United States in 1977. “The company’s irresponsibility was staggering,” said Ken Cook, director of the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based NGO that houses on its Internet site the “mountain” of Monsanto’s internal documents:74 “It had all the data at its fingertips, but it did nothing. That’s why I say it was guilty of criminal conduct.”
Monsanto ended up asking a private laboratory to perform studies whose results indicate that PCBs “are exhibiting a greater degree of toxicity than we had anticipated.”75 Still, in 1976, the St. Louis offices, the company’s headquarters, sent a letter to Monsanto Europe, warning them that if questions were asked about PCB’s carcinogenic effects, they should reply that “preliminary health studies conducted on our workers making PCBs, as well as long-term studies carried out on animals, do not lead us to think that PCBs are carcinogenic.”76
A trial finally took place, in 2002, thanks to a big law firm from New York entering the scene. Monsanto and its subsidiary company Solutia were judged guilty of having polluted the territory of Anniston and the blood of its population with PCBs. The grounds for the verdict were “negligence, wantonness, fraud, trespass, nuisance, and outrage.” The verdict was accompanied with a severe judgment that deemed Monsanto’s behavior went “beyond all possible bounds of decency, so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society.”77 Monsanto and its subsidiaries were ordered to pay 700 million dollars in damages.
Despite that, “They never showed the slightest compassion for the victims,” Ken Cook, who followed the entire trial, confirmed to Robin, “not a word of excuse or a sign of regret, just denial now and forever!”78
“Integrity, transparency, dialogue, sharing and respect,” proclaimed Monsanto’s Pledge in 2005. Today, the company’s website goes further:
Integrity is the foundation for all that we do. It includes honesty, decency, consistency, and courage.… We will ensure that information is available, accessible, and understandable.… The safety of our employees, the communities where we operate, our customers, consumers, and the environment will be our highest priority.79
Safety, a high priority for Monsanto? It certainly has not been so in the past, and nothing yet shows it will be so in the future.
In 1959, Monsanto launched into production of the herbicide Lasso, better known under the nickname “Agent Orange,” which would be sold to the American army to defoliate the Vietnamese jungle from 1962 to 1971.80 Agent Orange caused many cases of cancer in Vietnam, as well as the birth of 150,000 children afflicted with severe birth defects and serious illnesses.81 Many American soldiers also suffered from it.
Declassified documents have revealed that the two main manufacturers, Monsanto and Dow Chemicals, had deliberately covered up the data from their own research, so as not to lose a very profitable market, which at the time gave rise to the signing of the largest contract ever entered into by the American army.82 In 1983, Raymond Suskind, of the University of Cincinnati, published a study, ordered by Monsanto, concluding that the dioxins emanating from 2,4,5-trichlorophenol, the main substance in Agent Orange, had no harmful effects on health.83 His study would be cited often to reassure the public when the American army used Agent Orange in Vietnam. During a suit against Monsanto, it turned out, too late for the victims, that Suskind had manipulated the data with the aim of demonstrating the harmlessness of a highly carcinogenic product.84
After a file compiled by Greenpeace and a report on Monsanto’s frauds written by Cate Jenkins and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—which Monsanto tried by every means possible to silence85—and finally after the decisive intervention of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, former commander of the American fleet in Vietnam whose son had died after being exposed to Agent Orange, Congress ended up asking the National Academy of Sciences to draw up a list of illnesses attributable to dioxin exposure.86 This list, delivered sixteen years later, included thirteen serious pathologies, which permitted the Dept. of Veterans Affairs to compensate and cover the medical charges of the thousands of veterans who served during the Vietnam War.87 Nothing, however, was provided for the Vietnamese children.
Roundup was Monsanto’s miracle weed killer, possessing every virtue, no harmful effect for humans, and, what’s more, certified biodegradable, hence respectful of the environment. “Roundup can be used where kids and pets’ll play and breaks down into natural material,”88 Monsanto boasted. The company was later condemned in several countries for deceptive advertising.
In Argentina, where Roundup is currently sprayed by plane on vast soy plantations, many cases of poisoning, some of them fatal, have been recorded. In the United States, declassified documents have shown that laboratories working under the aegis of Monsanto had covered up reports establishing the toxicity of glyphosate-4 (the chemical component of Roundup) on animals.89 Since then, several studies have linked its usage to an increase of certain cancers in the United States, Canada and Sweden.90
In 1972, Paul Berg, a geneticist at Stanford, managed to recombine two DNA strands from different species in a single hybrid molecule; Stanley Cohen, another Stanford geneticist, managed to introduce a gene taken from a toad’s chromosome into the DNA of a bacterium.91
That same year, Monsanto asked the geneticist Ernest Jaworski, assisted by a group of thirty researchers, to try to manipulate the genetic makeup of plants to make them resistant to herbicides. After many tries, the Monsanto researchers, as well as those from two other laboratories, announced they had managed to introduce an antibiotic resistance gene into tobacco and petunia, by using as vector a bacterium that often infects those two plants.
The three laboratories in question, including Monsanto, registered patents. This was the beginning of the “patenting of life,” with the Supreme Court ruling that “Anything under the sun that is made by man can be patented.” The European Patent Office in Munich followed their lead and granted patents for microorganisms, then for plants (1985), animals (1988), and finally human embryos (2000).92 Today, the Patent Office in Washington grants about 15,000 patents concerning living organisms every year.
The Monsanto researchers then began a frantic race to develop plants that would be resistant to their star herbicide, Roundup. The project was as follows: farmers would plant Roundup-resistant soy, then would spray enough herbicide to kill all the weeds and any other form of vegetation. Only the resistant soy would be spared, and would grow alone in the midst of a biological desert.93
The Monsanto researchers finally succeeded at inserting into the cells of soy a Roundup-resistant gene, found among microorganisms in decontamination pools at a glyphosate factory. In 1993, Monsanto launched Roundup Ready soy. As the Japanese biologist Masaharu Kawata of Nagoya University remarked about the combination of foreign genes inserted into the soy, “The ‘Roundup tolerant soybean gene cassette’ is a completely artificial one that never existed in natural life and could not have evolved naturally.”94
In 1994, Monsanto filed a request to market its Roundup Ready (RR) soy, the first industrially manufactured GMO. The American regulatory institution, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), decreed that “food… derived from plant varieties developed by the new methods of genetic modification are regulated within the existing framework, utilizing an approach identical to that applied to foods developed by traditional plant breeding.”95
Claiming that GMOs are “quasi-identical” to their natural homologues (which is called the “principle of substantial equivalence,” a concept without any scientific foundation) comes down to likening them to normal food products, and allows biotechnology companies to evade the toxicological tests ordained by law for food additives and other synthetic products, as well as to avoid labeling their products in the United States.96
Monsanto realized that, in order to maximize its profits, it also had to own the seeds. So the firm acquired a large number of seed companies, and its stocks went up.
“Improving agriculture, improving life” is the motto on Monsanto’s website, which describes itself today as a “relatively new company” whose main goal is to help farmers all over the world. It’s as if Monsanto’s weighty chemical past, going back to 1901, had never existed.
In the late 1990s, the company changed its tactics and concentrated on agriculture, spurred on by a new president, Robert B. Shapiro, nicknamed the “guru of Monsanto.” Under the heading “Food, Health and Hope,” it promises the moon—factories that manufacture biodegradable plastics, corn producing antibodies against cancer, canola oil that protects against heart disease, and more.
In the United States, over 90% of corn, soy and cotton is grown from genetically modified seeds, for which Monsanto holds the majority of patents, and GMO-derived products appear in about 70% of manufactured foodstuffs.
Monsanto controls its seeds with an iron fist, and institutes countless legal proceedings against farmers and small businesses. Usually, investigators from Monsanto introduce themselves to the farmer and tell him he has violated technological conventions (Monsanto requires new seeds to be bought from it every year).97 According to Bill Freese, analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington, the investigators say, “Monsanto knows that you are saving Roundup Ready seeds, and if you don’t sign these information-release forms, Monsanto is going to come after you and take your farm or take you for all you’re worth.” Most farmers give in and pay the damages. The ones that resist have to face the legal wrath of Monsanto. The heaviest sentence passed on a farmer was as high as $3 million, and the average penalty is $380,000, enough to ruin a farmer. But these sentences are only the tip of the iceberg. The number of cases settled out of court is twenty to forty times higher than the number of cases that go to trial.
To top it all off, if you own a farm situated next to another farm on which seeds from Monsanto are used, and if by misfortune some of the other farm’s seeds migrate to your land, carried by the wind or by birds, Monsanto can sue you, claim damages, and sometimes ruin you.
“As an agricultural and technology company committed to human rights, we have a unique opportunity to protect and advance human rights.” Those are the words of the current president of Monsanto, Hugh Grant, who prudently adds, “We have a responsibility to consider not only how our business can benefit consumers, farmers, and food processors, but how it can protect the human rights of both Monsanto’s employees and our business partners’ employees.” As Auguste Detoeuf, a graduate of the École Polytechnique and a humorist, wrote, “The worker just sells his body; the technician just sells his brain; the businessman sells his soul.”98
In 1998, African scientists strongly opposed Monsanto’s GMO promotional campaign, which featured starving African children with the caption, “Let the Harvest Begin!” These scientists, who represented most of the countries affected by poverty and hunger, stated that the genetic technologies would undermine the ability of the various nations to feed themselves by destroying biodiversity, local technologies, and sustainable agricultural methods.99
That is what has already happened in South America. As Walter Pengue, an agricultural engineer at the University of Buenos Aires, told Marie-Monique Robin, “Roundup Ready soybeans spread through Argentina at an absolutely unprecedented speed in the history of agriculture: an average of over two million acres a year. We now have a veritable green desert devouring one of the world’s breadbaskets.”100 Before the arrival of GMOs, Argentina grew a large number of grains (corn, wheat, sorghum), oleaginous plants (sunflower, peanut, soy), and vegetables and fruits, and the production of milk was so far developed it was described as the “milk basin.” Some regions of Argentina, like the province of Santiago del Estero, have one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. Forests of rich biodiversity are giving way to monocultures of soy. Local labor is losing its source of employment and income. Large companies often evict farmers from their land by force.
Over the short term, intensive culture of GMO soy has bailed out of bankruptcy the Argentine government, for which agricultural levies represent 30% of the national budget. But the long-term damages are of such great magnitude they are barely conceivable. The intensive use of Roundup tends to make the earth sterile, since it kills everything except GMO soy. The thousands of species of microorganisms that give life to the earth are disappearing. In the area of health, local doctors have observed a significant increase of fertility anomalies, like miscarriages or stillbirths, and many other problems in the villages that are most often under massive aerial spraying of insecticide.101
India is staggering beneath the high price of transgenic cotton seeds from Monsanto (a variety known by the initials Bt) and the fertilizer that has to go with them, plunging farmers into debt. And when the sale price of their harvests goes down, many heads of families are pushed to suicide, often by swallowing an insecticide or fertilizer, the same poison that caused their ruin. “They lied to us,” a village leader said to Marie-Monique Robin. “They had said that these magic seeds would help us make money, but we’re all in debt and the harvest is nonexistent!” “What will become of us? Tell the world that Bt cotton is a disaster!” another farmer exclaimed.102 The Hindu Times reports 270,940 suicides of Indian farmers since 1995. Monsanto denies any link between these suicides and the introduction of Bt cotton, but Indian farmers and NGOs on site don’t seem to agree.
Vandana Shiva, recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (the “alternative Nobel Prize”) in 2003 and named by The Guardian one of the 100 most remarkable women in the world, fights against the practices that are at the root of so many acts of despair in India. She explains that the region of India that has the highest suicide rate of farmers is Vidharbha, in Maharashtra (10 suicides per day). That is also the region that comprises the largest acreage of Monsanto GMO Bt cotton.
Monsanto GMO seeds have turned the seed market upside-down. The cotton seeds that reproduced naturally ad infinitum cost 7 rupees a kilo. Bt cotton seeds, however, cost up to 17,000 rupees a kilo.103 In August 2012, the state of Maharashtra banned the sale of Monsanto transgenic cotton seeds, commercialized by its Indian branch Mahyco Monsanto Biotech because of the inferior quality of the seeds, sold at exorbitant prices.104
In 1987, Navdanya, Vandana Shiva’s foundation, launched a campaign called “Seeds of Hope,” in counterpoint to the title of the book that Shiva would later publish, Seeds of Suicide.105 It called for a transition that would include a return to organic, renewable seeds and to open-pollination varieties of seeds that farmers can keep and share. A transition began then from chemical agriculture to organic agriculture, and from iniquitous trade based on artificial prices to fair trade, based on real prices. According to her experience in the field, she thinks that farmers who have adopted this change earn ten times more than farmers growing Bt cotton.
To those who call her a naïve idealist and claim that organic agriculture will never be able to respond to the food needs of the planet, Vandana Shiva replies that the power of agro-industry will lead to a domination of genetically homogeneous seeds, catastrophically harming biodiversity, which will end up forcing farmers to use increasing quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and water. Farmers in developing countries will not receive fair economic benefits from their harvests, which will go to a handful of multinationals that will hold all the power and the future of food safety.
For the consumer who shops in a supermarket, the only way to know if a product contains GMOs, or has come from them, is the label. Legislations are different, however, in Europe and the United States. Europe is more protected than the United States against the abuse of firms like Monsanto. European law stipulates that labeling is obligatory for any product containing more than 0.9% ingredients of transgenic origin. In the United States, however, no rule like this has to this date been imposed for all the states. California was still fighting in November 2012 for food containing GMOs to be labeled and transgenic ingredients mentioned. If this new Californian law proposal, called “Proposition 37,” passes, that fight would constitute a precedent in a country where 88% of corn and 94% of soy come from genetically modified seeds.106
The French government pleaded in October 2012 for “an overhaul of the European system of evaluation, authorization and control of GMOs and pesticides.” It stated it was mobilizing to support independent, scientific studies on the long-term effects of consumption of GMO foods linked to pesticides. A new report of the National Federation of Friends of the Earth reveals that the growing of GMO plants continues to decrease in Europe, and that the surface cultivated with GMOs is also diminishing.107
In 2012, Germany, along with five other European countries, suspended the growing of genetically modified corn; this decision was made against the advice of the European Commission.
Greenpeace continues to alert the public to the potential dangers of agriculture based on genetically modified seeds and on manipulations by the agro-food industry.
To remedy hunger throughout the world and to feed 9 billion people by 2050, it is wiser to invest in green agriculture, and not in the use of costly genetic manipulations that threaten biodiversity and leave farmers at the mercy of the greed of multinationals. We must also stop the practice of “patenting of life.” Governments have shown too much indulgence toward the opaque manipulations of these multinationals that use globalization as a mere tool to turn out profit by basically exploiting poorer populations, while an enlightened globalization, based on solidarity and the understanding of the interdependence of sentient beings and their ecosystem, could on the contrary be a source of cooperation for the good of all.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, has urged that the needs for smallholder farmers should be at the center of food security strategies, and has urged nations to reinvest in their agricultural sectors rather than rely on imports from volatile world markets. He has also been critical of large-scale land acquisitions and biofuel production in food-insecure countries, and is encouraging agro-ecology to provide solutions to our planet’s food crisis.
In his report, “AgroEcology and the Right to Food,”108 which he presented before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, De Schutter explores how governments can and must achieve a reorientation of their agricultural systems toward modes of production that are highly productive, highly sustainable, and that contribute to the progressive realization of the human right to adequate food.
Drawing on an extensive review of the published scientific literature, the Special Reporter identifies agro-ecology as a mode of agricultural development that not only shows strong conceptual connections with the right to food, but has proven results for quick progress in the concretization of this human right for many vulnerable groups in various countries and environments. He concludes that “the scaling up of these experiences is the main challenge today.” The report demonstrates that agro-ecology, if sufficiently supported, can double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty.
In conclusion, institutionalized selfishness, a few examples of which we have presented, might lead us to think that altruism is not a fundamental component of human nature, and might discourage those who try to cultivate it and promote solidarity with society. But all the facts presented in this book should not lead us to call into question either the existence or the importance of altruism in our lives. What this chapter shows above all is the power a minority of determined and unscrupulous egotists have to throw the proper functioning of society off-kilter and divert everything for the sake of their profit. So it is up to civil society to denounce the machinations of those who practice institutionalized selfishness, and upon government organizations to neutralize them.