Take a look at the Monsanto corporate web site and you might be excused for mistaking Monsanto for a caring company with only our best interests at heart. In 'The Monsanto Pledge' (which includes the slogan 'We pledge to be part of the solution', the company lays down seven principles that describe the company's apparent vision for a sustainable environment. They pledge to:

• Reduce all toxic and hazardous releases and emissions, working toward an ultimate goal of zero effect;
• Ensure no Monsanto operation poses any undue risk to our employees and our communities;
• Work to achieve sustainable agriculture through new technology and practices;
• Ensure groundwater safety;
• Keep our plants open to our communities and involve the community in plant operations;
• Manage all corporate real estate, including plant sites, to benefit nature; and
• Search worldwide for technology to reduce and eliminate waste from our operations, with the top priority being not making it in the first place.

The propaganda continues with Bob Shapiro, the CEO of Monsanto, declaring;
"We take our responsibilities to our customers, employees, shareowners and people of the world very seriously."
"..we're working very hard to make sure our products and manufacturing facilities are safe for the people who use them and for the environment we live in. "
"..we're trying to improve people's lives all over the world."
"What is important and valuable to you is important and valuable to us."

It all sounds very nobel but words are just words, and their record tells a different story...

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Monsanto, a major manufacturer of phenoxy herbicides, sponsored studies on workers that the company had exposed to dioxin, and these studies revealed no increased cancer deaths among these exposed workers. However, the studies have since been criticized by a report from the National Research Council, which says Monsanto's studies were "plagued with errors in classification of exposed and unexposed groups, according to some reports, and hence have been biased toward a finding of no effect." A 1990 analysis of Monsanto workers, conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, reported a statistically-significant increase in soft tissue arcomas.

As part of its multi-year scientific reassessment of dioxin, the American Environmental Protection Agency recently published a draft review of all scientific data linking dioxin to cancer and other health effects in humans. The EPA's draft document concludes that four separate studies of workers exposed to dioxin have revealed an "overall increased mortality from all malignancies combined." EPA speculates that dioxin's ability to mimic hormones gives dioxin the capacity to cause cancer in many different organs and bodily systems in humans.

There seems to be little room left for doubt: As the EPA's "scientific reassessment team" told then-chief of EPA, William Reilly, January 27, 1992: "Dioxin does cause cancer in humans."

Monsanto was sued on behalf of plaintiffs who say they were harmed when a Norfolk and Western railroad tank car derailed, spilling 19,000 gallons of a Monsanto chemical called "ocp-crude" into the community of Sturgeon, Missouri the night of January 10, 1979.

Monsanto's plant in Sauget, Illinois has over a dozen chemical dumps on it, according to the WALL STREET JOURNAL, several of them containing substantial quantities of cancer-causing PCBs, at concentrations as high as 74,000 parts per million (ppm), or 7.4 percent. For years, Monsanto's Sauget plant was the nation's largest single manufacturer of PCBs. Monsanto officials insist that the PCBs on their property do not necessarily belong to them. Anyone could have dumped PCBs there, they say. All told, there are more than one million tons of chemical wastes on Monsanto's property--chlorinated pesticides, PCBs and other chemicals that Monsanto manufactured on the site for decades. Monsanto insists the wastes did not necessarily come from their plant, located half a mile north of the dumps. It is company policy to destroy waste records after 4 years. Meanwhile the state of Illinois has spent 12 years and $1.3 million trying to get the Monsanto site listed on the federal Superfund. An estimated 13 tons of chemical wastes leach off the Monsanto site into the Mississippi River each year.

Monsanto has tried to intimidate farmers and retailers in the USA who label their milk products as rBGH-free (see below). The corporation has actually brought lawsuits against such farmers and, through a related organization, has sued the state of Vermont over its permissive attitude toward BGH labeling. This seems an obvious encroachement on the Americas' First Amendment and is no doubt outrageous, but the Department of Justice appears to do nothing to stop it.

Monsanto is part of the Chemical industry.

Irresponsible marketing