Aruna Rodrigues
15 October 09
1969: Produces Lasso herbicide, better known as Agent Orange, which was used as a defoliant by the U.S. Government during the Vietnam War. "[Lasso's] success turns around the struggling Agriculture Division," Monsanto's web page reads.
1976: RoundUp is commercialized, becoming the world's top-selling herbicide.
1976: Monsanto produces Cycle-Safe, the world's first plastic soft-drink bottle. The bottle, suspected of posing a cancer risk, is banned the following year by the Food and Drug Administration.
 1981: G.D. Searle gets FDA approval for NutraSweet (Monsanto completes its acquisition of Searle in 1985, manufacturers of Aspartame).
 1986: Monsanto found guilty of negligently exposing a worker to benzene at its Chocolate Bayou Plant in Texas. It is forced to pay $100 million to the family of Wilbur Jack Skeen, a worker who died of leukaemia after repeated exposures.
1986: At a 1986 congressional hearing, medical specialists denounce a National Cancer Institute study disputing that formaldehyde causes cancer. Monsanto and DuPont scientists helped with the study, whose author provided results to the Formaldehyde Institute industry representatives nearly six months before releasing the study to the EPA, labor unions and the public.
1986: Monsanto spends $50,000 against California's anti-toxics initiative, Proposition 65. The initiative prohibits the discharge of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects into drinking water supplies.
 1987: --Monsanto is one of the companies named in an $180 million settlement for Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange.
 1988: A federal jury finds Monsanto Co.'s subsidiary, G.D. Searle & Co., negligent in testing and marketing of its Copper 7 intrauterine birth control device (IUD). The verdict followed the unsealing of internal documents regarding safety concerns about the IUD, which was used by nearly 10 million women between 1974 and 1986.
 1990: EPA chemists allege fraud in Monsanto's 1979 dioxin study, which found exposure to the chemical doesn't increase cancer risks.
 1990: Monsanto spends more than $405,000 to defeat California's pesticide regulation Proposition 128, known as the "Big Green" initiative. The initiative is aimed at phasing out the use of pesticides, including Monsanto's product alachlor, linked to cancer and global warming.
 1991: Monsanto is fined $1.2 million for trying to conceal discharge of contaminated waste water into the Mystic River in Connecticut.
 1993: The Food and Drug Administration approves controversial Posilac bovine somatropin (BST) which was subsequently banned outside the US
 1995: Monsanto is sued after allegedly supplying radioactive material for a controversial study which involved feeding radioactive iron to 829 pregnant women.
1995: Monsanto ordered to pay $41.1 million to a waste management company in Texas due to concerns over hazardous waste dumping.
 1995: The Safe Shoppers Bible says that Monsanto's Ortho Weed-B-Gon Lawn Weed Killer contains a known carcinogen, 2,4 D. Company officials argue that numerous studies have found no link to cancer.
 1997: The Seattle Times reports that Monsanto sold 6,000 tons of contaminated waste to Idaho fertilizer companies, which contained the carcinogenic heavy metal cadmium, believed to cause cancer, kidney disease, neurological dysfunction and birth defects.
Monsanto said Agent Orange and PCBs were safe, that Aspartame was safe. Aspartame causes cancers and formaldehyde poisoning listed amongst 92 acknowledged health hazards on FDA files (produced in a court of law) and which is now the subject of a multi-million dollar law suit in the US. Monsanto is now the agri-business giant, (Roundup Ready -RR) and brand leader in GM Crops (Bt and RR -- herbicide tolerant crops). It owns Terminator technology in partnership with the US government, fudges, bribes and falsifies data to show its GMOs are safe.
 According to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, Monsanto bribed at least 140 Indonesian officials or their families to get Bt cotton approved without an environmental impact assessment (EIA). In 2005, Monsanto paid $1.5 million in fines to the US Justice Department for these bribes.
 Six Government scientists including Dr. Margaret Haydon told the Canadian Senate Committee of Monsantos offer of a bribe of between $1-2 million to the scientists from Health Canada if they approved the companys GM bovine growth hormone (rbGH) (banned in many countries outside the US), without further study and how notes and files critical of scientific data provided by Monsanto were stolen from a locked filing cabinet in her office. One FDA scientist arbitrarily increased the allowable levels of antibiotics in milk 100-fold in order to facilitate the approval of rbGH. She had just arrived at the FDA from Monsanto.
 The US Patent and Trademark Office rejected four key Monsanto patents related to GM crops that the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) challenged because the agricultural giant is using them to harass, intimidate, sue - and in some cases bankrupt - American farmers. Monsanto devotes more than $10 million per year to such anti-farmer activities, over alleged improper use of its patented seeds.
 The Alabama Court Judgement in February 2002 best describes the sort of business that Monsanto is in. In 1966, court documents in a case concerning Anniston residents in the US showed that Monsanto managers discovered that fish dunked in a local creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as dropped into boiling water. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB level. But they never told their neighbours and concluded that there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges We cant afford to lose one dollar of business. In fact court documents revealed that the company withheld evidence about the safety of their PCBs to the residents of the town that were being poisoned by their factory to keep their profitable dollars. On February 22nd 2002, a court found Monsanto guilty on six counts of NEGLIGENCE, WANTONESS AND SUPRESSION OF THE TRUTH, NUISANCE, TRESPASS AND OUTRAGE. Outrage
according to Alabama law is conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."
 Monsanto omitted incriminating data altogether from its 1996 published study on GM soybeans. When the data was recovered later by an investigator, it showed that GM soy contained significantly lower levels of protein and other nutrients and toasted GM soy meal contained nearly twice the amount of a lectin (protein) that may block the bodys ability to assimilate other nutrients. Furthermore, the toasted GM soy contained as much as seven times the amount ot trypsin inhibitor, a major soy allergen. Monsanto named their study: The composition of glyphosate-tolerant soybean seeds is equivalent to that of conventional soybeans
 Monsanto hides evidence of the toxic effects of its GM products. In Europe it refused to reveal the results of its own secret animal feeding studies, which revealed serious abnormalities to rats fed GM corn, citing CBI (Confidential Business Information) until forced to do so by a German Court. One of its Bt corn products (the only GM crop grown in the EU) was subsequently banned for planting in France and other EU countries based on the appraisal by Seralini of Monsantos own dossier.
 The India Story of Bt brinjal is virtually identical. It has taken two years for these safety studies to be put in the public domain. The Regulator is complicit in having supported Monsanto in its attempts to keep the studies secret by claiming them as confidential business information, until forced to change their stance by the Supreme Court Order. They complied in Aug 08. Its Safety Dossier was appraised by 4 independent and internationally acclaimed scientists (including Seralini). Their appraisals provide evidence of toxicity, badly designed studies, fuzzy data masked by too many controls; no p values, a most serious omission; paucity of raw data; no peer review; gaps, major omissions and sample sizes which make sheer mockery of good biosafety testing. In short, the studies are a smokescreen. The study defects are long and would fill a dossier on their own demerits. It is difficult to avoid the serious conclusion of intent to mislead, even cover-up and fraud.
Monsanto's history of lies and toxicity
i've been watching this documentary about food business in USA. i am kind of surprise at things i am hearing. specially this Monsanto issue is unbelieveable. please enlighten me. how could they exist legally? how did it happen? anyone observed the process? and who are these people that run Monsanto? are they known by public? 
