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In 2014, Monsanto's genetically modified seeds were approved in Vietnam. A few months later, Monsanto held a rally to celebrate the first harvest of Roundup resistant GM corn in Vietnam's history. But this is just another victory in Monsanto's grand plan to expand its seed empire into the developing world. In 2015, when Monsanto's corn sprouted from Vietnam's fields, the U.S. government was still grappling with the old history of Agent Orange contamination, spending millions of U.S. taxpayers' money on expensive projects to clean up priority areas that were contaminated with Agent Orange 40 years ago.
During the Vietnam War, the use of Agent Orange devastated millions of acres of dense tropical forests in Vietnam and caused serious health problems in communities across the country. Monsanto is the largest producer of Agent Orange. Few Americans know that this work continues to this day. What is less known is that Monsanto did not spend a penny on these remediation activities, despite the efforts of the Vietnamese people to try to hold the company accountable for the environmental pollution.
*The article is excerpted from "The Seed Empire: Monsanto's Past and the Future of Human Food" (Barto M. Written by J. Elmore, translated by Huang Zexuan, Joint Publishing 2024-4)
Agent Orange clean-up site at Da Nang Airport in Vietnam, 2017. During the Vietnam War, the airfield was a U.S. military base, where U.S. troops stored and sprayed large quantities of Agent Orange. Here, USAID and Vietnam's Department of Defense dug up about 90,000 cubic meters of soil contaminated with dioxins. The remediation work, which began in 2012 and was completed in 2018, ultimately cost $116 million, most of which was electricity, as cleaning up the soil required "cooking" the soil in 1,250 heated wells in concrete containers.
"So you see, I'm ready to defend either side"
Text | Barto S. J. Elmore
The whirring of the propellers of the C-123 "Supplier" transport aircraft was drowned out by the battlefield chaos less than 150 feet down. If it had performed the same mission, as most of the time at the time, the pilot should have kept the twin-propeller aircraft at a standard throwing altitude when approaching a military target in Vietnam's dense clover jungle. But that was in 1962, and what the C-123 carried out was the U.S. military chemical spraying operation that came to be known as the "Ranch Hands." The operation was originally called "Operation Hell", a name that may have been more figurative, as these pilots were about to turn the tropical forest into a living hell. Their weapon, the violet, is a chemical defoliant made from a mixture of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. It is called purple agent because of the purple streaks on the container where it is stored.
President John F. Kennedy approved the use of this herbicide because the situation in Vietnam at this time made him very depressed. Since the 50s of the 20th century, American military advisers have been working locally in Vietnam to repel the communist movement. In 1954, Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh led Vietnam to victory in the War of Resistance against France, expelling French colonists from North Vietnam. In the Geneva Accords signed in the same year, Vietnam was divided into north and south along the 17th parallel. Over the next eight years, Ho Chi Minh became apparently closer to China and the Soviet Union. He was determined to unite Vietnam under the banner of a sickle and a hammer. For Uncle Hu, the defeat of the foreign-backed government of Ngo Dinh Diem was the final chapter in the long war to drive out the foreigners. And for a Cold Warrior like President Kennedy, Ho Chi Minh's actions pose an intolerable and obvious threat to U.S. national security. The camp has been decided, and the big war is imminent.
But for Wu, President Kennedy has become an uncomfortable partner. Known for its dictatorship and brutal repression of Buddhist political opponents, the government of Ngo Dinh Diem was hopelessly corrupt, and Kennedy was well aware of this. However, the young U.S. president, like his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower, felt he had to do everything he could to prevent North Vietnam and their guerrilla ally, the Southern National Liberation Front, from taking control of the southern border. The stakes couldn't be higher in this game. If Vietnam is lost, Laos, Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries may spiral out of control like dominoes, as Eisenhower once said.
The problem was that Kennedy did not want to send a large number of ground troops to Vietnam. In early 1962, just after the first year of his first presidential term, Kennedy was embroiled in a Cold War standoff with Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev. He wants to build political capital, and to do so, he needs to find a way to maximize America's military advantage in Vietnam without putting too many American soldiers at risk.
Purple and later Agent Orange (which largely replaced Purple in 1965 and consisted of equal amounts of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D) seemed to be an easy solution to this problem. Ngo Dinh Diem's army, with the help of U.S. military advisers, struggled with the guerrillas of the north who roamed the dense forests surrounding villages and towns. The U.S. military's powerful herbicides were able to eliminate the Viet Cong's vital natural ally, allowing U.S.-backed Viet Cong forces to deliver targeted air strikes against guerrilla insurgents. That's the kind of convenient war the White House wants. The Pentagon signed an agreement with chemical companies to increase the production of herbicides.
Monsanto played a key role in Operation Ranch Hands. Although six chemical companies, including Dow, Diamond Clover, and Hercules, produced Agent Orange for the U.S. military, Monsanto was the largest supplier of them all, delivering 29.5 percent of the total amount of Agent Orange needed by the U.S. military in the '60s.
It seems like a win-win. Monsanto made a lot of money selling chemicals to the U.S. military; And the Kennedy administration had a new and powerful weapon to help it destroy the enemy in the jungles of Vietnam. The only problem is that every barrel of Agent Orange destined for the U.S. Air Force base contains a dangerous chemical contaminant, the same one that disfigured James Ray Boggs a decade ago.
In 1901, John Francis Quinney, in his early 40s, founded the Monsanto Chemical Plant in St. Louis, Missouri. This family photo features John Queenie and his wife, Olga Monsanto, as well as her son, Edgar, and daughter, Olgitta. According to one source, John Queeney named his company after Olga, in part because he was still working for Meyer Brothers Pharmaceuticals at the time, hoping to avoid the risk of conflict when he ran another chemical company that bears his last name during his tenure at the company. Kennedy did have to worry about the environmental costs and human health costs of Operation Ranch Hands. This was the beginning of the age of ecology. In September 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson's best-selling book "Silent Spring" serialized in The New Yorker shocked the entire chemical industry by exposing the huge damage to the environment and human health caused by pesticides such as DDT and herbicides such as 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. Monsanto tried to discredit Carson by publishing a counter-op-ed in the company's magazine, which was later reprinted by major national newspapers, claiming that a world without pesticides would be a world ravaged by worms, flies and fungi. In this apocalyptic apocalypse of Monsanto, "insects and weeds compete for strawberry fields, vegetable gardens, and wheat fields." A world free of chemicals is bound to be a "desolate" world.
However, the chemical industry was unable to quell Carson's outcry. President Kennedy invited the 55-year-old scientist, who later died of cancer, to Washington. It's a bizarre scenario – just as Kennedy approved the spraying of purple in Vietnam, he himself was allied with an anti-pesticide writer. Carson's book has been dubbed by some as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by the growing anti-pesticide movement. In the summer of 1962, Kennedy convened a scientific advisory group to make recommendations on how to regulate and regulate pesticide use in the United States. In May of the following year, the Scientific Advisory Panel concluded that the USDA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare all need to reassess the potential threat to the environment and human health posed by synthetic herbicides and pesticides.
Rachel Carson and Silent Spring
Spurred on by Silent Spring and the presidential report, Senator Abraham Ribikoff of Connecticut convened a hearing to discuss changes to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1947. The Act authorizes the USDA to register new pesticides and approve appropriate labeling to ensure that chemicals are safe to use. But for years, the USDA focused primarily on the efficacy of pesticides — testing whether they actually kill insects and weeds — and conducted only limited human health and ecological analysis. In 1954, the Department of Agriculture began to transfer more pesticide oversight responsibilities to the Food and Drug Administration, as amendments to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act authorized the Food and Drug Administration to set acceptable tolerance levels for pesticide residues in food. However, when Ribikauf's hearing was held in 1963, it became clear that neither the FDA nor the Department of Agriculture had sufficient funds or infrastructure to conduct the necessary in-depth analysis to ensure that the pesticides used in the United States were safe. As a result, in 1964, Congress amended the Federal Insecticides, Fungicides, and Rodenticides Act, increasing the USDA's pesticide management budget and expanding the agency's authority to refuse new chemical registrations.
However, none of this prevented the use of 2,4,5-T at home and abroad. By 1965, millions of gallons of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D mixtures were raindropping on the fields and forests of Vietnam and the United States.
Agent Orange used overseas is not an ordinary herbicide. An extremely large amount of 2,4,5-T was added to the military mixture. The New Yorker reporter Thomas Whiteside estimated that the "average concentration of 2,4,5-T in Agent Orange is 13 times higher than the recommended concentration in the United States." In this matter, the US military left no leeway. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military sprayed other weaponized herbicides, including Agent Blue (a mixture of carcoyl acid and sodium cacodylate) and White (a mixture of 2,4-D and chlorpyridine), but Agent Orange was sprayed in far greater quantities than all other herbicides used during the conflict.
Estimates vary as to exactly how much 2,4,5-T ended up spraying in Vietnam, but the most authoritative studies suggest that the total amount of Agent Orange is more than 12 million gallons. The scope of its targets included not only the jungles where the southern guerrillas were hiding, but also the farmland suspected of feeding the Viet Cong army. Pilots have completed more than 19,900 sorties of "weeding missions", flying as far as Cambodia and Laos. From 1962 to 1971, U.S.-led aerial herbicide operations covered more than 10,000 square miles, an area equivalent to the size of Massachusetts and about 8 percent of Vietnam. Most of these herbicides contain 2,4,5-T.
During the war, the United States sprayed a large amount of "Agent Orange" in Vietnam
Nguyen Thi Hong has a deep memory of the scene. At the age of 16, she joined her family in what she called the "resistance movement" against U.S. troops in Dong Nai province, South Vietnam. In 1964, when Nguyen Thi Hong and her comrades were deep in the jungle, they noticed a "fog" surrounding them. Soon, as she recalled, the plants around them began to die. "It seems that there is not a single leaf left, the tree is bare, and all the leaves have fallen off. That's the way it is. Later, she found out that the so-called "fog" was actually a herbicide sprayed by the U.S. military, but she had never heard of Agent Orange at that time. "I remember that the animals have lost their habitat" and the forests have "disappeared," Nguyen Thi Hong said. Decades have passed, and everything is still vivid.
As Nguyen Thi Hong's memories clearly demonstrate, where the chemical rain transits, there is no grass growing in nature, and the ecological degradation is extremely serious. In the summer of 1971, Stanford Law School graduate and writer John Levalen described the ecological world of the Vietnam War by documenting what he saw and heard while working for the Vietnam International Volunteer Organization. Levalen believes that most Americans simply do not understand the magnificent ecology of Vietnam. He cites a 1967 study by the Midwest Institute for the U.S. State Department, which calculated that "South Vietnam's vegetation biomass (the weight of organisms in an ecosystem) is 600,000 pounds/ha," a figure that dwarfs the average woodland plant biomass of only a few thousand pounds per hectare in the United Kingdom and the United States. Vietnam is a land of ancient evergreen forests that stretch into the mountainous highlands of the west and north. To the south, these forests border the mangrove biodiversity wetland ecosystem on the tropical Mekong Delta, which stretches all the way to the South China Sea.
The use of Agent Orange has destroyed millions of acres of dense tropical forests in Vietnam
Agent Orange has been particularly damaging to South Vietnam's coastal ecosystems. In 1970, a study completed by a team at Harvard University called the Herbicide Evaluation Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science estimated that "50 percent of the coastal mangrove forests in southern Vietnam were sprayed with herbicides." A scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that in one affected area, a single spray killed about 90 percent of mangrove forests. Because it took centuries for the swamp ecosystem to form such a complex structure, he believes that the consequences of such destruction will not be eliminated for decades to come.
This prediction turned out to be correct. In 1983, Arthur Westin, a pioneering scholar in the field of war and nature at the Stockholm Institute of International Studies, examined mangrove ecosystems in southern Vietnam and reported that the effects were systemic, with about 40 percent of the delta being "completely destroyed". "Continued destruction of mangrove habitats" has led to "soil erosion and loss of nutrients from soil solutions, widespread land degradation, massive deaths of terrestrial wildlife due to habitat destruction, loss of freshwater fish due to reduced food species, and potentially the decline of inshore fisheries".
The lack of foresight on the part of the government is partly responsible for this consequence. The fact that the U.S. State Department did not commission a study on the environmental impact of herbicide use during the Vietnam War until 1967 is telling. It took five years to launch a herbicide attack on another country before the government began to raise important questions, such as the consequences that Operation Hands on Pasture might have on Vietnam's natural environment. The 1967 report revealed that little is known about the potential ecological degradation caused by the massive spread of 2,4,5-T: "To the best of our knowledge, there are no articles or books that combine studies of flora and fauna, pastures, forests, other non-agricultural lands, waterways, lakes and reservoirs to explore the long-term ecological effects of herbicides." The researchers concluded that they "face a severe lack of knowledge." But at the same time, the spraying of Agent Orange has not stopped.
The U.S. military also has limited knowledge of how Operation Ranch Hands will affect soldiers and citizens exposed to chemical spray. In 1965, senior officials of the U.S. Public Health Service rejected a request from two scientists for just over $16,000 to study 2,4,5-T toxicity, citing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the appropriate agency to conduct such research. However, it wasn't until the 80s of the 20th century, 20 years after the end of the Vietnam War, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded major research on the subject. The National Cancer Institute funded a study in 1966 by Biomimetics Research Laboratories, a private research company in Bethesda, Maryland. The study found clear evidence of birth defects in mice exposed to 2,4,5-T, but senior officials at the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Agriculture were not aware of the study until 1969.
All along, Monsan, the information gatekeeper, knew he had a problem. In 1965, Dow convened a secret meeting of herbicide manufacturers to discuss "toxic impurities" in 2,4,5-T formulations. According to Dow Chemical, dioxin concentrations as low as one part per million can cause serious health problems. After the meeting, the vice president of Dow Chemical reportedly said, "If the government knows about this, the entire industry will be affected." The company sent a memo to the absent Monsanto, saying that the dioxin concentration in a batch of 2,4,5-T at Monsanto had exceeded 40 parts per million. In the letter, Dow described dioxins as "the most toxic compound they have ever seen." However, despite these findings, there is no evidence that either Dow or Monsanto shared this information with any federal officials in 1965.
In 1966, about 5,000 scientists, including some Nobel laureates, wrote to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, urging him to stop aerial herbicide operations in Vietnam. At the same time, UN member states introduced a resolution condemning the U.S. herbicide operation, saying it violated the 1925 Geneva Convention, which prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons. By this time, Vietnam's vegetation area sprayed with Agent Orange and other herbicides by the U.S. government had exceeded 741,000 acres per year.
The protests continued into 1967 and 1968 but had little impact on US military policy. In fact, the use of Agent Orange has increased rather than decreased. In 1969, the U.S. military sprayed about 3.25 million gallons of dioxin-containing herbicides in Vietnam, up from about 333,000 gallons in 1965. As they sprayed, American pilots shouted through loudspeakers in helicopters to the people below that the chemicals that fell on them were safe and harmless.
But that's not the case. In 1969, the findings of the National Cancer Institute-funded biomimetic research laboratory were finally in the hands of White House official Lee Dubridge, chairman of President Richard Nixon's newly created Commission on Environmental Quality. Studies have shown a clear link between exposure to dioxins and severe birth defects. Taking into account the details of the study, Dubridge urged the president to convene a high-level meeting to discuss the further use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. After that meeting, the Ministry of Defense, citing the findings of the Biomimicry Research Laboratory, said it would ban further military deployments of Agent Orange in 1970. By this time, more and more members of the public had joined the protests as journalists across the country began reporting on the matter. In response, Congress convened hearings on the use of 2,4,5-T in the United States. At hearings in 1970, the Surgeon General of the United States announced a ban on the continued use of 2,4,5-T domestically, on most food crops. But to the disappointment of many activists, the government allowed the herbicide to continue to be used in pastures, rice paddies, forests, highways, and railway land for the foreseeable future. It wasn't until 1985, 35 years after Monsanto's James Ray Boggs contracted chloracne, that the federal government finally banned the use of 2,4,5-T in all settings.
Photograph of Monsanto's chemical plant in Netero, West Virginia, in the 70s of the 20th century. The company produces 2,4,5-T here, which is used in the manufacture of Agent Orange.
By the time of the anti-Agent Orange protests in 1966, Monsanto had grown to become the third-largest chemical company in the United States, with annual sales of more than $1.6 billion and about 56,000 employees. Today, the company's empire extends beyond the borders of the United States, with its European headquarters in Brussels in 1963 and expanding to Brazil, Argentina and other parts of Latin America. By the mid-60s of the 20th century, Monsanto had 43 factories in the United States and operations in 21 countries. Many of these factories produced plastics and synthetic fibers, which accounted for more than 54 percent of the company's total sales in 1964. They also produce other products in large quantities, from detergents to flame-retardant liquids, from silicon in computer semiconductors to phosphoric acid in soda. In 1964, the company changed its name from "Monsanto Chemical Company" to "Monsanto Corporation" in light of its expanding and diversified product line, saying it believed that "the word 'chemical' was no longer sufficient to describe the scope of the company's business." Considering that Carson's book has turned "chemistry" into a dirty word, the name change makes sense.
Monsanto made a fortune from its herbicide Roundup and eventually moved into biotechnology to create a patented Roundup resistant seed system. But within 20 years, the seed system began to crumble and disintegrate. In response, Monsanto said they had found a solution, which was an upgraded version of the Roundup resistant seed in the picture.
At that time, Edgar Quinny was in his 60s and his life was nearing its end. In 1960, he stepped down from the chairmanship and gave the position to Charles Thomas, who subsequently served as chairman of the finance committee for five years. During that time, his health has been poor. In November 1960, he told the president of DuPont, "I have ulcers, I have to eat tasteless food, and worst of all, I have to stop drinking." Later, he had another problem with his prostate. In 1962, he confessed to a friend: "Some quacks have played me in the palm of my hand, saying that I need some minor surgery on my prostate. "Just a few months after he was discharged from the hospital, he went back again. In 1963, he was diagnosed with a serious heart condition. Queenie's deteriorating health has witnessed the development of the modern environmental movement. It's been a fun time for a man who has always loved the outdoors while running one of the world's largest chemical companies – a company that is profoundly reinventing the ecosystem he loves.
Sometimes, Queenie can't reconcile his passion for wilderness conservation with his commercial interests in chemicals. In 1963, after the publication of Silent Spring, Queenie said, "Rachel Carson's book is wonderful, but it tells only part of the story. He added: "I think the impact of pesticides on wildlife is unquestionable. My farm in Arkansas used to have a lot of quail, but now it's gone. "When he said that, he was a conservationist, an idealist. But there's another side to the story: "When we planted quail-fed rice, it used to yield 45 bushels of rice per acre; Now we've increased our yield to 90 bushels per acre. So you see, I'm ready to defend either side. ”
After 1963, Queenie's outdoor trips were interrupted by more frequent medical trips. He hates the constant demand for reduced alcohol intake in doctors' prescriptions. "You won't be able to track me from one place to another with empty bottles!" After a medical check-up, he joked with a friend. "I was allowed to drink up to three glasses of 'whisky with lots of water'. I tried to convince me that the 'quack' was supposed to be water mixed with a lot of whiskey, but the poor guy had neither a sense of humor nor a sense of justice. ”
Although he was still joking, he was soon bedridden with heart failure and died on July 7, 1968.
Edgar Quinny (1897–1968). He succeeded his father as president in 1928, acquired several chemical companies, and radically diversified Monsanto's products, making Monsanto the fifth-largest chemical company in the United States by the end of World War II. Edgar Queenie likes to wear formal clothes and has appeared on the list of "America's Most Dressed Men" with Fred Astaire and Henry Ford's son Edsel.
The reins of Monsanto were in the hands of St. Louis native Charles Summer. The expressionless, gray-haired 57-year-old chemist joined the company as a sales agent in 1934 and worked until 1960, when he succeeded Charles Thomas as president. Immediately after taking office, he took aggressive action to restructure the company. Recognizing the growth potential of chemicals such as 2,4,5-T, he spearheaded the creation of the company's agricultural division. As a supporter of international expansion, he also personally oversaw the establishment of the company's office in Brussels and several other overseas branches.
In the late '60s, Summerer became at the helm of Monsanto's passage through the dangerous regulatory strait. Years ago, John Queenie actively sought government regulation in the hope that federal regulation imposed by the Pure Food and Drug Act would justify the chemical industry, which had been questioned by many people. Now, what new environmental regulations offer could be the end of the chemical industry. To adapt to the new era, Summerer created a new division, Monsanto Environmental Chemistry Systems, to focus on developing pollution remediation technologies. But he is increasingly concerned about increased government censorship. The new requirements set out in the Federal Insecticides, Fungicides and Rodenticides Act are just the forerunner of a series of new regulatory initiatives that are about to surface. By the end of the 20th century, Summer's response to what he saw as a cumbersome government process that spread like weeds was a wild leaf. He said the paperwork of dealing with regulation "is itself a source of pollution, putting relentless upward pressure on corporate costs" and adding fuel to the "fire of inflation."
Summer's knowledge of Monsanto's great move. The company sells hundreds of chemicals, many of which are undergoing rigorous re-evaluation by federal agencies. Agent Orange is just one of many serious historical debts that Monsanto has been saddled with. At the Crumridge factory in Monsanto, a small village in Illinois, on the other side of the Mississippi River, another liquid is bubbling through a pipeline.
The Seed Empire: Monsanto's Past and the Future of Human Food[US]Bartow M. J. Elmore by Huang Zexuan Translated Life, Reading, and New Knowledge Joint Bookstore 2024-4ISBN: 9787108077615 Price: 79.00 yuan
Monsanto Company is an American multinational agricultural company that started as a saccharin and caffeine producer in the early 20th century, then entered agriculture as a major manufacturer of herbicides, and grew to become the world's largest producer of genetically modified seeds in the 21st century. The future of human food is very much tied to the history of this company. What does all this mean for us?
Through global fieldwork, interviews with farmers, chemists, entrepreneurs, workers, patients, lawyers, and judges, as well as undisclosed corporate archives and government records, historian Elmore traces the shocking history of Monsanto's business expansion, revealing how its chemicals and genetically modified technologies have infiltrated nearly every crevice of the world's food supply.
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Triptych News|March 2024