>From this week's St. Louis Riverfront Times, which can
be accessed at http://www.rftstl.com . They don't archive
their articles, so if you're interested in reading the
whole story, you need to check it out before next Tuesday.
Jeff Downing
Peter and the Wolf: Why Missouri Botanical Garden's Peter Raven, world-renowned environmentalist, courts Monsanto's favor, boosts its biotech and takes its money
by Jeannette Batz
The Missouri Botanical Garden auditorium is strung
with enough cords and cables to truss a yeti.
Stepping carefully, Ira Flatow, host of National
Public Radio's Science Friday, walks onstage to
prepare for today's hot topic: "bioprospecting,"
the hunt for commercially viable medicines and
other plant extracts amid the developing world's
fast-vanishing green gold.
To his right sits a panel of experts. Two of them,
the Garden's applied-research director and a
Shaman Pharmaceuticals vice president, stare
fixedly ahead, trying to ignore the audience in
front of them. As one clears his throat and adjusts
his tie, the other scoots his chair up, nervously
tapping the microphone.
The third guest, renowned botanist and Garden
director Peter Raven, is utterly relaxed. Cracking
jokes at his stone-faced colleagues, he leans
forward to ask bright-kid-on-a-field-trip questions
about NPR's soundboard.
At a gesture from Flatow, silence falls and Raven
turns solemn. He makes a dignified, eloquent plea
on behalf of vanishing species and describing the
Garden as "a kind of diffuse Noah's ark for
plants." After the broadcast, a producer
compliments him: "We'd like to do one with you
alone. We'll be in touch."
Riding a wave of praise, Raven makes his way
toward the reception. Before he's even reached the
baby quiches, a soft-voiced woman has him
buttonholed. "Um ... I have a question about
Monsanto's relationship with the Danforth Center."
Raven smiles encouragingly. She takes a deep
breath. "How can it really be independent? Won't
a lot of it be genetic-engineering research?"
"Well, a lot of it will be plant-molecular-biology
research," he revises, explaining that St. Louis'
new Donald Danforth Plant Science Center stands
independent of its founders -- Monsanto, the
Garden and four universities. Granted, those
institutions' leaders make up half the board, but,
Raven says, "it will own all its own
intellectual-property rights. And of course it is
free to make whatever contracts it wants with
anybody, including those founding members."
She blinks. "Are you concerned about the
patenting of genes by corporations?"
"It's something we
have to do very carefully,"
he replies, as blandly
confident as he was on the
air.
"The rest of us are trusting
people like you," the woman
reminds him, reaching out
impulsively to touch his tie.
"Thank you for doing the right thing."
He beams at her, turns toward two elderly ladies in
suitably floral print and then moves off, skimming the
surface of the reception like a dragonfly.
Raven taped Science Friday at the end of August,
when he was brainstorming a biological-research
center on the fragile rainforested island of Dominica,
planning a trip to Ecuador, chatting with a Department
of the Interior official who wanted him to give a talk
in South Africa on invasive species, and
contemplating his next advice to Pope John Paul II in
the 80-member Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Science Friday was a nanosecond. Yet everything
was there in microcosm: The world-class reputation
for botanical brilliance. The dire environmental
statistics, recited with passionate urgency. The agile
mind and social finesse. The vague corporate
optimism.
And the confusion of environmentalists who can't
decide whether one of their heroes has been bought.
The pioneer of agricultural biotech, Monsanto's been
anything but cautious in unleashing its commercial
products on the world. A recent $8 billion buying
spree made it the world's second-largest seed
company. Its first genetically modified (GM) crops
only hit the market four years ago, and they already
cover more than 52 million acres in the U.S. alone.
Antitrust lawsuits have been filed in 30 countries,
accusing Monsanto and the other giants of using
biotech to control world agriculture. Europeans are
furious because Monsanto has resisted demands for
long-term testing and labeling. Back home, a coalition
of nonprofits -- including the Council for Responsible
Genetics and the Center for Food Safety -- is so angry
they're buying full-page ads in the New York Times.
Scientists around the world are warning that
large-scale GM crops are unpredictable and unstable
(GM klebsiella, soil bacteria, have the unexpected
effect of killing wheat); that they threaten lacewings,
ladybugs and monarch butterflies; that randomly
inserted genes do spread, on their own, to nearby
weeds; that we may see increases in toxicity and
untoward effects -- such as antibiotic resistance -- on
the human immune system.
Meanwhile, the developing world is protesting the
bioprospecting they call biopiracy and the patents that
let high-tech corporations own life itself. They say
Monsanto's one-time-use seeds encourage
monocropping instead of environmentally healthier
crop rotation, and small, poor nations are finding
themselves dependent on multinationals for food they
used to grow themselves.
Raven's not bothered by any of this. He admits that
positioning biotech as the only way to feed the world's
hungry (Monsanto's favorite strategy) is "a bit crude,"
but he's convinced that sustainable agriculture will
require biotech. He's also convinced that biotech can
reduce use of traditional pesticides and stanch the
hemorrhage of the world's biodiversity. To him, these
are such acute, life-threatening emergencies that any
peripheral damage -- a few monarch butterflies killed,
a couple million more gallons of Roundup sprayed
right on top of the crops -- pales by comparison.
Peter Raven's been trying to save the world, in a big
way, since grad school. But in tiny species-rich
countries whose people are starving,
environmentalists don't make much headway talking
about long-term sustainability. And if years of juggling
government grants and courting government agencies
have taught Raven anything, it's that government does
what is politically expedient.
So he's placed his faith in the speed, flexibility and
efficiency of multinational corporations. Especially
Monsanto.
In 1995, after 27 years and two children, Raven
divorced his second wife, politely saying their
interests had diverged. In 1996 he married Kate Fish,
an environmentalist who went to work for Monsanto
the same year and is now their director of public
policy. The two met on an advisory committee
charged with helping Monsanto clean up its
environmental act. Today, both navigate the
mainstream in trusting partnership with Monsanto --
and they're infuriated by any hint that Fish's job might
influence Raven's attitudes. "It ought to almost be a
moral question whether people start labeling people
because they are married," explodes Raven. "I have
been a very well-regarded scientist for all my career
and achieved everything I wanted to achieve, more
than most, and I didn't do that because I was married.
Kate, if anything, is more of an environmentalist than I
am. She works with public acceptance, listening and
bringing people together and trying to find ways
Monsanto can operate effectively and well with
public approval. Her job is not selling or convincing
people of anything."
Fish, who spends much of her time in Europe setting
up "stakeholder dialogue" with biotech's critics,
answers more calmly: "The reality," she says, "is that
corporations have the biggest influence on these kinds
of issues." Government's role is shrinking;
nation-states plod too slowly to react to global
change. Besides, she firmly believes that if
corporations ignore environmental problems, "it will
ultimately erode their profitability. So at some level
there is -- there should be -- a convergence between
corporate interests and sustainability."
Her husband agrees. "One of the bottom lines is, it's
not in the interest of any company to do harm," he
says. "Why would a company want to do that?"
Er ... why did Monsanto produce Agent Orange?
"Well, nobody knew, did they?" he fires back. "The
government said, "We want Agent Orange.' Unless you
adopt the extreme point of view that you are not going
to cooperate because there might be some bad
environmental impact later....
"Major companies will be, are, a major factor if we
are going to win world sustainability," he concludes.
"There is nothing I'm condemning Monsanto for."
The Garden received $3 million from Monsanto in
their last fundraising campaign (almost one-third of
the total contributions from Civic Progress
companies). Monsanto also contributed land and a
large chunk of the $146 million startup money for the
Danforth Plant Science Center. Monsanto matches its
employees' contributions to the Garden ($225,000 last
year) and contributes to the operating fund ($25,000
last year). Trustees give privately, too, and in past
years the Garden has had Monsanto CEO Robert
Shapiro, Monsanto vice president Tom K. Smith and
Monsanto research-and- development director
Howard Schneiderman on its governing board. Now
the Garden is collaborating with Monsanto's nutrition
sector on a food library, collecting samples of all
plants used worldwide as foods and medicines. (The
World Resources Institute lists Monsanto as a
bioprospector since 1989 and lists its collector, as of
1993, as the Missouri Botanical Garden.)
When Confluence, an environmental quarterly,
criticized Monsanto, the Garden's PR woman pulled it
from their literature table.
When we asked
Raven whether he's ever
criticized Monsanto, he says,
"Hmm. I can't really
remember. I may have. I
think I probably have. But I
can't really remember."
Environmentalists make
cracks about Raven's
blinding ego and
corporate-sponsored sex
life. But underneath, they're
genuinely puzzled. He's still,
after all, a member of the
Sierra Club -- and this August, Sierra Club executive
director Carl Pope wrote President Bill Clinton to
demand labeling of GM foods; extensive research into
long-term effects; and removal of antibiotic resistance
genes from all GM food crops. Ken Midkiff, director
of the Missouri Sierra Club, says that
environmentally, "Raven's done many good things --
but this is one of the things where he's not so good. As
a scientist he should view (biotech) with great
skepticism. But there are a lot of scientists who
normally would be calling for more studies, and in
this case it appears they've decided to let money
dictate where their mouth is." (As for biotech feeding
the world, Midkiff notes that the Green Revolution
had the same rationale -- and India's still starving. "By
importing our brand of culture and food to indigenous
communities, we have destroyed agricultural systems
that sustained them for millennia.")
The rest can be found at http://www.rftstl.com