DAVID VERSUS GOLIATH - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 154

entists still do not fully understand why. Numerous studies have also proven that rBGH (Posilac) causes
lower birth rates and birth weights of calves and physical ailments such as mastitis and hoof and leg prob-
lems, cystic ovaries, and other diseases. Today the European Union, Japan, Australia, and Canada have all
banned the use of rBGH due to animal and human health concerns.
The hormone has remained controversial, and it is no surprise that Monsanto decided to divest its artifi-
cial hormone business. In August 2008 the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly announced that it was acquiring
Monsanto's rBGH operations for $300 million. Posilac became part of Eli Lilly's Elanco division, which
was already the exclusive international seller of Posilac in the decade preceding the acquisition. As a maker
of veterinary antibiotics, Eli Lilly can benefit on both ends—selling the hormone as well as the antibiotics
that are needed to treat the painful and debilitating mastitis that cows injected with Posilac suffer. Sadly,
Eli Lilly is focusing its sales on the developing world, where there is a push to increase industrialized an-
imal production.
In the end, here in the United States opponents of the artificial hormone have been successful in dramat-
ically reducing rBGH's use. Because of public interest advocacy campaigns, large national retailers and
food companies such as Kroger and Starbucks refuse to use milk produced with the hormone. Dean Foods,
the largest milk distributor in the United States, has stated that virtually all of its milk is free of artificial
hormones. Yoplait and Dannon announced they are dropping rBGH from their products, and even Wal-
mart's private-label milk is “rBGH free.”
While the struggle over bovine growth hormone raged in Washington, D.C., a new fight over seeds and
crops had emerged as a new battle in the food wars. Washington faced tremendous pressure from Monsanto
and other seed companies that were consolidating. Pressure was building on the Clinton administration and
members of Congress to take action on behalf of the industry. In 1994 the United States ratified the Interna-
tional Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, a Machiavellian move that extended plant
patents to twenty years for most crops and prohibited farmers from selling saved patented seeds without
the patent owner's permission.
Jeremy Rifkin recognized early on the danger of the giant corporate seed merchants controlling seeds.
In The Biotech Century , he baptized the biotech industries' release of engineered life-forms into the natur-
al environment “a laboratory-conceived second Genesis.” Rifkin hired Andrew Kimbrell, who had formed
the Center for Food Safety (CFS) in 1997, after working on biotech issues at the FOET; CFS has filed sev-
eral lawsuits against the biotech industry.
One of the many early battles that CFS was involved in was over the creation of seeds that were ge-
netically engineered to be sterile—called Terminators, after the Arnold Schwarzenegger film character.
Monsanto was again in the eye of the storm, following its efforts to acquire Delta & Pine Land, a seed
company that had worked with the USDA to create and patent the sterile seed. In the late 1990s a massive
public outcry took place about the biotech industry's development of a seed that could not be saved and
that has the potential to cause starvation in places where farmers rely on seed saving.
Monsanto became the target for criticism because it announced that it intended to purchase Delta in
1998. And CEO Robert B. Shapiro was especially embarrassed, because he had predicted that biotech
seeds would be a key tool to combat global hunger and poverty. He was so embarrassed that in October
1999 he wrote a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation, whose president had criticized the Terminator tech-
nology. Although he confirmed that Monsanto was tabling the technology for now, he left the door open
for the future: “The need for companies to protect and gain a return on their investments in agricultural
innovation is real. Without this return, we would no longer be able to continue developing new products
growers have said they want. . . . We are not currently investing resources to develop these technologies,
but we do not rule out their future development and use for gene protection or their possible agronomic
benefits.” 16