Monsanto Corporation

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Not very long ago, social responsibility on industry's part meant promoting civic involvement, making donations to local charities, providing good jobs and having a worker-safety program.

These were priorities for Monsanto Company when it was founded in 1901, and they remain so. However, just as our businesses have grown, so too has our sense of responsibility to the local and global communities on which we depend. Companies like Monsanto are now challenging themselves to apply their financial and technical strengths to social ills and concerns that extend well beyond narrow definitions of business activity. We consider this an exciting and important challenge, and we're developing some strategies to address it.

The issue of sustainable development is central to our challenge. Monsanto – in fact, all organizations and peoples – face a whole new set of social, ecological, and technological forces that we have never had to face before. How we plan and develop our communities has to be dramatically different from how we've done so in the past.

The realities of limited resources, population growth, and urbanization coupled with deteriorating urban infrastructure, unmanaged growth, poverty, crime and violence require a common call to action. Our commitment to creating sustainable communities is necessary for the long-term viability of our businesses.

We believe that any development plan for sustainable cities must have the following characteristics: Places a high value on quality of life, Respects the natural environment, Applies a systems approach to solving problems, Values diversity, Preserves heritage, Supports cyclical processes, and Optimizes key human, economic and natural resources.

We think it is critically important to apply the framework of sustainable development in cities where we operate and beyond them. The economic benefits that flow from the 28,000 skilled jobs we provide globally are certainly part of the picture. But we believe this should only constitute the starting point for activities.

Another key element is the financial support of numerous, vital civic organizations provided by our philanthophic arm, the Monsanto Fund.

Through it, we annually contribute, in the United States, some $20 million to non-profit organizations large and small in the areas of improving education, advancing public health, providing housing for the needy and food for the hungry. We use other mechanisms to contribute to similar programs in other parts of the world.

The desire to make things better where they live and work is typical of many of our people globally. They are helping to implement sustainability at a grass-roots level. To cite a few examples:

In the poor 1,400 person village of Jikolo, South Africa, our employees sought to improve many aspects of life. Through their efforts, new school classrooms were built, and a nutritionist was hired to improve childrens' diets. Adult education created new job skills such as brickmaking and the production of household linens. Agricultural education increased yields of locally produced maize, potatoes, beans and other crops. Construction of a windmill and reservoir brought clean water to the village.

At our St. Louis, Missouri, headquarters a volunteer clearinghouse matches dozens of our people with local agencies needing help. Also in St. Louis, Monsanto actively participates in a local, grass-roots effort to engage the whole metropolitan area in defining and implementing a sustainable future. The organization leading this effort – one of the few now in the United States – is called Sustainable St. Louis.

In Zarate, Argentina a model emergency-response and environmental-awareness program initiated by our local plant has been made even better by involving more than 20 other local industries.

In Evreux, France, our people provide regular assistance to four local social welfare agencies. These agencies provide shelter for the homeless, career counseling and job training for teenagers, temporary jobs for the unemployed, and psychological counseling and employment for troubled youths. The local Monsanto facility is working to involve other companies in these programs. We think the path of sustainable development for cities needs to be collaborative. Our people work outside our plants to help make it happen; and we ask non-employee neighbors and residents into our facilities to help us make our own operations more sustainable, with a special emphasis on the safety of our operations. Consistent with the "Responsible Care" program of the global chemical industry, 20 of our manufacturing sites have Community Advisory Panels, consisting of a cross section of citizenry who meet regularly with us to learn about our issues, voice their concerns and recommendations and help in our decision-making.

In other programs, Monsanto employees now are examining ways we may participate in an innovative lending program that assists extremely poor people, including those in inner-cities. Known as micro-credit lending, the program provides small self-employment loans. Monsanto plans to take part in the Micro-Credit Summit next year in Washington, D.C.

To spur greater innovation in sustainable development and to recognize achievement, in 1995 we established the John Franz Sustainability Award. The annual award provides $100,000 to an individual or group who has the best project, which can be duplicated in other areas, to move the world in a sustainable direction. The award is named for the Monsanto scientist who discovered Roundup herbicide – a widely used product, whose environmental attributes make it popular for restoring native plant habitats.

Clean air and water and healthy land also are essential elements of sustainable cities and Monsanto is striving to manage our operations to contribute to these goals. The Monsanto Pledge (now six years old) prescribes our conduct in this area. Briefly this Pledge says we will work "toward an ultimate goal of zero effect" upon the environment.

Among our Pledge initiatives have been programs that:

reduced by 90% our global air emissions of hazardous chemicals during 1987 through 1992,

reduced accidental spills and releases of hazardous materials from production facilities worldwide by more than 50% since 1991,

commited us to continuing reductions of waste products to all media–air, water and land,

achieved certification for many of our sites as managed to encourage biodiversity, including healthy wildlife populations.

A portion of our research dollars is devoted to developing needed, innovative environmental technologies. One notable example is a new waste site clean-up process called Lasagna. This process employs low power electrical current to treat solvent-contaminated soil in place versus the much more costly method of digging up and hauling away the soil for incineration or treatment. In addition, Monsanto has sponsored two worldwide "One Million Dollar Challenges" to bring forth from the scientific community break-through technologies for waste recovery and improved waste treatment at our manufacturing sites.

Nothing is more fundamental to sustainability in cities or the countryside than sufficient supplies of healthful food. Challenging this situation is a world population expected to double in the next 40 years and an increasing scarcity of tillable land. Our agricultural biotechnology programs will be particularly important to meeting this challenge. Here, innovations are moving from the laboratory to the field.

Among genetically improved crops now available for commercial use are potato and cotton plants that employ naturally occurring insecticides to combat destructive pests. In addition, new Roundup tolerant properties for canola and soybean plants will result in better weed control while reducing the amount of herbicide needed. All of these programs – pollution reductions, innovative waste treatment, and food supply improvements through biotechnology – helped make Monsanto one of only two large, manufacturing firms that this year won the U.S. President's Award for Sustainable Development.

We are now defining a vision and programs for sustainable development that are much broader than simply "unpolluting the planet". This effort stems from a 1994 conference among a cross-section of our employees and external environmental and economic experts. The vision that emerged from this conference was for us "to use our human, technical and financial resources to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world". Among the primary beneficiaries of this transition will, of course, be cities worldwide.

More than 100 employees from around the world are now serving on various teams to translate our sustainability vision into action. These teams are concentrating on the following issues:

EcoEfficiency team is examining throughput – how to get the most use out of every input, reducing waste, and looking for ways to cycle used products back into the process.

Full Cost Accounting team is examining how to account for the full costs – including the ecological and social costs – of running our businesses to be able to make better informed decisions using a fuller array of information.

Index team is working to develop indicators which will tell us whether or not we're making progress toward becoming more sustainable.

Water team is looking at global water needs, the critical role of water to Monsanto's agricultural businesses, and the technologies we have or might develop to help address the problem.

New Products/Business team is examining what kind of products will be valued in a marketplace that increasingly selects for sustainable attributes.

Global Hunger team is looking at how to apply our technologies to allow developing populations to be better fed, more self-sufficient, and eventually, customers for Monsanto products.

Education/Communication team is working to develop a common understanding about the initiative, its importance and the opportunities it presents.

We expect to learn much about how to improve global sustainable development through this process. What we do learn, we intend to share with other interested persons. But however successful our efforts, we know they will provide only some threads in the much broader fabric of knowledge that will require collaboration by many people with many different perspectives and skills to arrive at new, more sustainable ways of living. More so than ever, greater cooperation among all segments of society – citizen groups, academics, industry and government – is needed to arrive at best practices, amenable to global application.

Monsanto's stance in this regard was articulated by our chairman Bob Shapiro in the company's 1995 environmental annual review. He said, "There have been times in Monsanto's 94-year history when we, like others, weren't as aware of the environmental consequences of our actions as we should have been. Those days have been over for a long time. Our environmental Pledge, the programs and initiatives that have flowed from it, and our commitment to environmental sustainability reflect where we are today. We expect to work constructively with the many people and groups who share our concerns about the well-being of our world. We expect to make a difference."

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