The book is both an informative account of the biotechnology revolution in farming and a provocative challenge to the notion that these developments represent progress. Offered as a panacea, genetic engineering in agriculture has promised to provide crops with nutritional enhancements and increased growth efficiencies in less than optimal environments. The answer to that question is largely corporate profit. Shrewd agricultural chemical firms have been purchasing seed companies or entering into joint-venture relationships with them to produce engineered crop seed. Superficially, they will be easier and less costly to grow.
Weed control is high on the list of factors that improve yield and therefore profit.
Before Roundup-Ready technology, two or more different herbicides might be needed to kill most of the weeds in a bean field. Now, farmers can simply plant their fields with beans that have been engineered to survive Roundup, let them grow, and then spray the fields with Monsanto's herbicide, killing the weeds but not the soybeans. In this production model, the farmers use more Roundup in order to save fuel and labor. Monsanto benefits manyfold. First, sales of Roundup necessarily increase with this kind of farming.