NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF FASHION TECHNOLOGY

HYDERABAD

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY









SUBMITTED BY: GREESHMA V.
MASTER OF FASHION MANAGEMENT-III

SUBMITTED TO: MS. RAJYA LAKSHMI
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF FASHION MANAGEMENT STUDIES




Monsanto Company is a publicly traded American multinational agrochemical
and agricultural biotechnology corporation headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri.
It is a leading producer of genetically engineered (GE) seed and of the herbicide
glyphosate, which it markets under the Roundup brand.
Founded in 1901 by John Francis Queeny, by the 1940s Monsanto was a major
producer of plastics, including polystyrene and synthetic fibres. Notable
achievements by Monsanto and its scientists as a chemical company included
breakthrough research on catalytic asymmetric hydrogenation and being the first
company to mass-produce light emitting diodes (LEDs). The company also
formerly manufactured controversial products such as the insecticide DDT,
PCBs, Agent Orange, and recombinant bovine somatotropin (a.k.a. bovine
growth hormone).

THE CORPORATION MOVIE:
FOX News unintentionally broke the story about how Monsanto is poisoning
their milk and dairy products. Monsanto sells 'posilac' to farmers, farmers inject
posilac into milk producing cows under the premise that the cows will produce
more milk, the cows get sick and develop acne-like sores. The farmers inject
antibiotics to keep the sick cows from dying.
Children in American Schools are drinking milk from sick cows that still contains
Monsanto's Posilac, the antibiotics, and pus that drips from open sores on their
infected udders into the milk buckets.
By all accounts, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson are tough, bulldog reporters-the sort
of journalists one expect to make some enemies along the way.
Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, two investigative reporters fired by Fox News after
they refused to water down a story on rBGH, a controversial synthetic hormone
widely used in the United States (but banned in Europe and Canada) to rev up
cows' metabolism and boost their milk production. Because of the increased
production, the cows suffer from mastitis, a painful infection of the udders.
Antibiotics must then be injected, which find their way into the milk, and
ultimately reduce people's resistance to disease.
Fox demanded that they rewrite the story, and ultimately fired Akre and Wilson.
Jane Akre and her news crew for Tampa, Florida television station WTVT
recount the battle they had with Fox Broadcasting Company and Monsanto in the
late 1990s. She and her fellow reporters planned on airing an investigative report
on the negative effects on Posilac. Before the story aired corporate lawyers for
Monsanto threatened to sue Fox News if the story went on.
The Fox Broadcasting Company owned 23 separate stations at the time and did
not want a loss in advertising dollars, so they agreed to cooperate with Monsanto's
lawyers. After over 83 rewrites were made to the story it still wasn't aired and the
reporters were eventually fired. They sued and won $425,000 in damages but the
decision was overturned on appeal after Monsanto lawyers found a way to
remove the "whistle-blower status of the news team. Their status was removed
because falsifying news is not technically against the law.
Today, some of the US milk supply still comes from cows that have been
modified with posilac to produce more milk. Akre and Wilson subsequently sued
Fox under Florida's whistle-blower statute. They proved to a jury that the version
of the story Fox would have had them put on the air was false, distorted or slanted.
Akre was awarded $425,000. Then Fox appealed, the verdict was overturned on
a technicality, and Akre lost her award.
Jane Akre and her news crew for Tampa, Florida television station WTVT
recount the battle they had with Fox Broadcasting Company and Monsanto in the
late 1990s. She and her fellow reporters planned on airing an investigative report
on the negative effects on Posilac. Before the story aired corporate lawyers for
Monsanto threatened to sue Fox News if the story went on. The Fox Broadcasting
Company owned 23 separate stations at the time and did not want a loss in
advertising dollars, so they agreed to cooperate with Monsanto's lawyers. After
over 83 rewrites were made to the story it still wasn't aired and the reporters were
eventually fired.
They sued and won $425,000 in damages but the decision was overturned on
appeal after Monsanto lawyers found a way to remove the "whistle-blower status
of the news team. Their status was removed because falsifying news is not
technically against the law.


DARK HISTORY OF MONSANTO
Chemists began formulating synthetic chemicals to combat things like disease
and insect infestation. Some of these chemicals like DDT have been found over
the course of many years to cause cancer and birth defects. Epstein makes a point
about there being little difference between creating and allowing products that
kill people over time and killing them with a gun.
Much like DDT, contact with PCBs is known to cause major health problems
including liver cancer. Again babies exposed while in the womb are at risk of
changing sex or developing into neither male nor female, a condition termed
intersex. Before the United States Congress banned domestic production in 1979,
Monsanto produced 99% of all PCBs used by U.S. industry.
Monsantos most notorious past product must be the herbicide widely known as
Agent Orange. During the 1960s and 1970s Monsanto was one of the most
important producers of Agent Orange for the U.S. Armed Forces during the
Vietnam War (1961-1971). Vietnamese authorities estimate 400,000 people were
killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth defects as a result of the
use of the chemical. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to 1 million
people are disabled or have health problems due to Agent Orange.
Monsanto was granted regulatory approval for its First biotech product, a dairy
cow hormone. Monsanto developed a recombinant version of BST, brand-named
Posilac bovine somatropin (rBST/rBGH), which is produced through a
genetically engineered GMO E. coli bacteria. Synthetic Bovine Growth
Hormone (rBGH), approved by the FDA for commercial sale in 1994, despite
strong concerns about its safety.
The harm to animals is also accounted for, such as habitat destruction, factory
farming, experimentation, and rBGH/rBST Posilac. Epstein recounts the
deceitfulness of the Monsanto Corporation when trying to cover up the harmful
effects of Posilac on cows and humans. Jeremy Rifkin points out the uselessness
of Posilac stemming from the fact that the world overproduces milk and the
demand for increased output is idiotic. A Monsanto promotional video is then
shown instructing farmers to "inject every available cow" because the more cows
you inject the more milk you produce, and the more milk you produce results in
higher revenues.
Monsanto sold its chemical business in 1997 to build a presence in biotechnology,
developing non-organic GMO soybeans and corn (classified as a pesticide and
banned in the EU) to resist the poisonous effects of its Roundup herbicide.
Monsanto's key business areas are now agrochemicals, seeds and traits (including
GMO crops), Monsanto also produced nutrasweet, a GMO sugar substitute.
Monsanto recently sold its GMO bovine growth hormones monopoly to Eli Lilly,
and sold its aspartame business to Pfizer.

MONSANTOS CSR INITIATIVES


Monsantos latest sustainability report is titled United in Growth.
The report documents the contribution Monsanto has made, not just in
2010 but over recent years, to the enrichment of farmers and the
simultaneous increase in the global food supply. Monsanto drives the
point home with human-interest stories and photos of people smiling
and being productive. The message is writ large on page one: If there
were one word to explain what Monsanto is about, it would have to be
farmers.

The report has four parts. First, a section on sustainable agriculture tells
of Monsantos achievements in developing technologies that enable
farmers to produce more while conserving more of the natural
resources that are essential to their success.

Then the subject of stakeholder engagement is addressed in a manner
that appears to be unique to the company. Monsanto describes its
philanthropic efforts and partnership programs as engagement
activities. The discourse covers efforts such as the free distribution of
hybrid seeds in India, training Brazilian farmers in forestry and
biodiversity protection, and giving financial support to young people
enrolled in the organization Future Farmers of America.

Monsantos discussion of corporate governance also takes a singular
turn. In the company vernacular, it means eagerness to learn from the
experiences of others and encourage new ideas in corporate social
responsibility." The topic has no sharp boundaries. Monsanto explains
how its licensing approach gives farmers more choices; how the
company rewards employees for their stewardship achievements; and
measures taken to prepare employees to handle ethical dilemmas.

The final section deals with operations. It contains routine types of data
on resource and energy consumption, and occupational safety.
Virtually all the quantitative information presented in the report
appears in this section along with more success stories, including the
program begun in 2006 to eliminate the widespread use of child labour
in Indias cotton seed-production industry.

POINT OF VIEW
Over the past decade, Monsanto has become a pop cultural bogeyman, the face
of corporate evil. "Over the years, Monsanto has managed to push through
government policies for its own good. The company and its genetically modified
organism (GMO) seeds have been the subject of muckraking documentaries
(Forks Over Knives and GMO OMG), global protests, and assaults by
everybody from environmental activists to The Colbert Report.
Monsanto provides a complex example of a company destroyed by its
failure to anticipate conflicts over possible privatesocial cost
differences associated with the use of its products. Monsanto invested
billions of dollars genetically modifying crops to make them more
productive and require less use of insecticides, thus rendering the
growing process less environmentally harmful. Their avowed aim was
to make agriculture sustainable while improving crop yields in poor
countries.

With this aim and with proprietary technologies to implement it,
Monsanto should have been a poster child for CSR, while instead they
were destroyed by opposition from environmental groups. Consumer
opposition to genetically modified crops led to their being abandoned
by farmers, financially weakening Monsanto, which was then taken
over. Monsantos problem was that it focused on one privatesocial
cost gap that associated with the use of insecticides on growing crops
but in the process missed another more serious one, that associated
with peoples fears of genetically.

Monsanto is bad for humanity for several reasons:

1. They use genetically modified seeds with something called terminator
technology. When a harvest happens, the seeds produced by the new crops are
rendered useless. Although in 1999, Monsanto agreed to not commercialize
terminator technology. This means farmers have to repeatedly purchase these
seeds.

2. Most crops Monsanto grows are heavily fertilized. In essence one eating
pesticides, fertilizer, antibiotics etc.

3. They have uprooted countless agricultural traditions in places like India,
Mongolia, and Vietnam. For example in India sesame seed oil was once the way
people made their money and cooked their food cheaper. Monsanto lobbied the
Indian government to use soy bean oil (soy is their main product). This destroyed
the economic stability of India's subsistence farmers. It is awful for their
economy, but also for their health. Immediate heavy intakes of soy can be
extremely harmful for the body.They also illegitimately charge huge royalty from
Indian seed companies which keeps seeds prices high in the country.

4. Monsanto because of its recent growth by buying out its competitors is
imposing a monopoly on the world grain trade...this largest agricultural market
in the world. The grain trade feeds cows, pigs, chickens, us, everything we eat
comes from grain food. Monsanto by having a monopoly kills smaller businesses,
makes us unhealthy, uproots local agriculture etc.

I think it just has given only a strategic makeover to the company by talking about
sustainability and farmers, but this company is only evil and even its csr is done
just to build up an image. The company is a threat to human race, and future.





REFERENCE

1. http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/monsanto-in-india-
a-success-coexisting-with-controversies-112081200033_1.html

2. http://www.thestreet.com/story/12101202/1/monsanto-grows-
controversy-on-genetically-modified-food.html

3. http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/01/monsanto-csr-2010/

4. http://bestmeal.info/monsanto/company-history.shtml

5. http://www.monsanto.com/whoweare/pages/corporate-sustainability-
report.aspx