Monsanto was hit by a negative media frenzy in the UK when it became synonymous with developing genetic engineering

 

Monsanto was hit by a negative media frenzy in the UK when it became synonymous with developing genetic engineering

Whether through bad luck or its own doing, Monsanto became the public face of genetic engineering in Europe in the late-1990s. Although other companies were developing genetically modified crops at the time, including several European ones, the St Louis-based group bore the brunt of the backlash from the media, NGOs and the public.

Looking back, it is clear that the company flew into a “perfect storm” – a combination of conditions that would have hindered any company. But Monsanto also made mistakes it could have avoided.

A pioneer of GM technology since the early 1980s, Monsanto expanded into Europe after acquiring Unilever’s GM business in 1998. The same year, the EU approved a type of GM corn, which is still in use in small quantities in Spain and Portugal.

However, the scale of public opposition soon put the company on the defensive, particularly in the UK. By the end of 1998, the company faced a highly vocal campaign from the British press, notably from the Daily Express, the Guardian and the Daily Mail (which coined the term “Frankenstein foods”).

The Prince of Wales accused Monsanto of “playing God” with the food supply, while environmental groups talked up unsupportive science, such as research that showed rats had been harmed from eating GM potatoes. With the public clearly against GM science, supermarket chain Iceland took the unilateral step of banning GM goods from its shelves – a move that other supermarkets followed in time.

With GM products shut out of UK stores, and no prospect of new approvals at EU level, Monsanto effectively closed its European GM business in 2003, citing the need to cut costs. The controversy had weighed heavily on its share price, and it was keen to focus on other markets.

Today, the company has only 50 employees in the UK, all of whom work on non-GM products. In the late 1990s, it had more than 200. The EU recently approved a non-food GM potato developed by BASF – the first successful GM application since the late 1990s. But the prospects for more remain uncertain. Most of the GM industry is now outside Europe: in the US, South America, India and China.

A former Monsanto employee, who was based in the UK from 1998 until 2002, says there were a number of factors that contributed to the opposition to the company.

Weird science

First, the science of genetic modification was frightening to the uninitiated. Second, most people were (and are) unfamiliar with farming and food production. Third, food is emotive and cultural. Fourth, E coli and BSE outbreaks had made Europeans wary about food quality, and mistrustful of official science. Fifth, the UK had an experienced “activist industry”. Sixth, the UK had one of the most competitive and aggressive media markets in the world. And seventh, Monsanto fitted into certain stereotypes of an irresponsible American multinational.

Not all of Monsanto’s difficulties were structural, though. The former employee says it was also slow to get its message out once the negative coverage started. And the company’s communications strategy did not prove effective at countering the allegations that began flying around.

The London-St Louis six hour time difference meant that communication was delayed. And Monsanto was unprepared for the British press. As well as being more aggressive than their American counterparts, UK newspapers tend to have a greater national reach than US ones, which are mainly regional. Monsanto was surprised at how quickly stories would “go national” across the UK, and even be picked up in other European countries.

“It all happened so fast. I think the company was surprised by the way it was being treated by the UK media. Only when they realised they were getting beaten up, and weren’t going to get their point across in the press, did they realise they needed to do something more proactive,” the former employee says.

One tack taken by Monsanto was a major advertising blitz in late 1998. The campaign, designed by the agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, included full page ads in several newspapers.

The ads had the bold heading: “Food biotechnology is a matter of opinions. Monsanto believes you should hear all of them.”

And then the company went through its side of the story. Monsanto talked about the need to share the planet, and that biotechnology could be a useful ally for agriculture, promising advances. “Healthier, more abundant food. Less expensive crops. Reduced reliance on pesticides and fossil fuels. A cleaner environment.” The conclusion: with GM we all can prosper but without it the struggle will go on.

Monsanto’s aim was to put the best case for GM, while framing the controversy as something about which reasonable people could disagree. But, if the campaign did change minds, it also led to another round of bad publicity. In February 1999, the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the campaign had misled the public by implying that GM foods had been fully tested in the UK and found safe.

One of Monsanto’s major problems was that its products at the time lacked direct consumer benefits. They were designed, the company said, so that farmers could reduce use of pesticides, and thus cut costs. “Today crops can be modified to increase their nutritional content, for example. Had that sort of thing been available then, that might have made a difference to people’s understanding,” the former Monsanto employee says.

However, Peter (Lord) Melchett, executive director of Greenpeace from 1989 to 2000, says the reason Monsanto struggled was less to do with the unpreparedness of its PR operation, or the claimed benefits of its product. People simply rejected GM.

“The reason we won the campaign was not because of who said what, or Monsanto’s advertising campaign, but because we were right about GM. Our scientific arguments were proved correct,” he says.

UK unease

Melchett, who was famously arrested though never charged after a field of GM crops was destroyed in 1999, plays down the impact of the BSE crisis. He argues that unease in Britain over industrial food production had been building for a decade. The BSE explanation is “extraordinarily Anglo-centric”, he says, as opposition to GM was also evident in places where BSE had not been an issue – including Japan.

He argues that Monsanto became identified with GM “because it suited the pro-GM lobby to blame the failure of GM on heavy-handed Americans.” On this point, the former Monsanto employee agrees.

Melchett says Greenpeace never specifically targeted Monsanto. “The battleground was really with the retailers, not the GM companies. They were used by the media, and some extent by other campaigners to characterise GM. But Greenpeace never had a campaign against the company.”

Nigel Hawkes, science editor at the Times in the late-1990s, says he had been writing stories about the environmental impact of GM for years, but until 1998 no one had paid much notice. “Suddenly these stories that I’d barely been able to get in the paper were recycled and were front-page leads,” he says.

As the controversy grew, editors started to become more interested – but sometimes at the expense of fairness and accuracy. Hawkes says the problem was that as the story grew it stopped being specialist science reporters who wrote about it, but rather environmental writers. “The news editors get hold of the story. They want people who aren’t going to say ‘this isn’t a story’. They don’t like naysayers,” Hawkes says.

He was sympathetic to Monsanto over the beating it was getting from parts of the UK media. He says: “My advice to Monsanto was that you can’t replace bad stories with good stories. All you can do is to hope that journalists stop writing about it.”

Make it boring

Hawkes advises that the only way to do this is to make the subject boring. “You’ve got to keep sending in reports until their eyes start to glaze over. The opposite of bad publicity isn’t good publicity, it’s no publicity.”

The UK scientific community was slow to support Monsanto, Hawkes says, even though many felt privately that GM should have a chance to prove itself. “You’ve got to get the counter-arguments in quickly. When things get out of hand, you have to do something quite radical to try and turn the tide,” he says. But by the time the scientific community tried, it was too late.

Mark Buckingham, Monsanto’s current UK spokesman, says one lesson learned from the 1998-2003 period is the need to build coalitions. “In 1999, we were trying to deal with all these different stakeholders on our own,” he says. A solution would have been for the company to have had partners in place, including farmers and scientists, in order to make their case, he argues.

The recent EU approval of BASF’s GM potato could be a sign of a change in the weather on GM, although Buckingham is not betting on it. Monsanto, like other firms, has several applications held up with the authorities. Still, he argues that issues such as climate change may have altered public perceptions since the late 1990s. “People are more aware of the risks of ignoring science,” he says.

Whether Europeans are more suggestible on GM is debatable. But it is hard to imagine the special atmosphere of 1998 and 1999 being repeated. If the GM issue does emerge again, it is likely to be a different sort of controversy, and scientists will probably play a bigger role.

Hawkes says: “I think it would be different now because the scientific community is more organised. If you look at how the stem cell issue was handled, they were more involved and it went much better.”

Monsanto and GM timeline

1901 Monsanto founded by John Queeny. Named after his wife, Olga Monsanto Queeny.

1982 US researcher Steven Lindow requests government permission to test GM bacteria to mitigate frost damage in strawberries and potatoes.

1985 First GM crop trials in the UK, and elsewhere.

1986 US authorities approve virus-resistant GM tobacco plant.

1987 Monsanto subsidiary Calgene wins US patent for GM tomato technology. In UK, scientists add genes to potato plants to produce greater protein and increase nutritional value.

1993 US FDA allows companies to sell GM seed.

1994 US approves first GM food, the Flavr Savr tomato.

1996 Monsanto introduces first biotech crop – Roundup Ready soybeans. Tomato paste made with GM crops appears on UK supermarket shelves, leading to protests from campaigners.

1998 Monsanto introduces Roundup Ready corn in the US.

1999 The UK holds first field trials of herbicide-resistant GM crops.

2000-2002 Monsanto merges with Pharmacia & Upjohn, separating agricultural and chemicals businesses. Now Monsanto an exclusively agricultural company.

2003 UK approves GM herbicide-resistant corn used for cattle feed, the first such biotech food approval in eight years.

2004 GM maize is approved for planting in Britain. First GM crops approved for planting in Germany.

2007 Government backs industry call to bring GM to Britain.

2008 US launches probe into whether Monsanto holds an anti-competitive position in the American seed market.

2010 BASF wins EU approval for its GM potato plant, to be used for industrial starch production.

This is the first in a new series on classic corporate responsibility stories. Over the coming issues we will be examining companies that got caught out and made mistakes, what was learned as a result and how corporate behaviour has changed.