Business Ethics Case Study Monsanto

I believe it’s safe to say Monsanto has not adhered to any basic moral standard when it comes to the safety of their products and the people consuming them. Since its inception in 1901, the company has had a penchant for substituting real food for artificial substitutes, which were often cheaper to manufacture. Their degradation of human society didn’t stop there, of course. By the 1920s, Monsanto was partnering with other large chemical companies around the world, producing industrial chemicals like PCBs, a chlorine compound used as a coolant. Unfortunately, there is a substantial health risk to handling PCBs, not to mention the damage it has already caused to the environment. Many major countries have had what we would consider pretty significant
This company represents everything that is broken within the regulatory mechanism of this nation. Monsanto and companies like it are just the result of the root problem. Our federal government has very little man power when it comes to keeping these companies in check, not to mention the fact that policies allow them to put products on the market without proving definitively that the product being sold is safe. Changes have been proposed over the last few years, but as we all know, lobbyists backing these large manufacturers having a great deal of influence in Washington, and as much as everyone would like to believe policies are decided on in an ethical fashion, that usually does not end up being the case. We almost achieved the seemingly impossible in the early 1990s when the U.S. Senate proposed a bill that would have shifted the power struggle to the
The intent was to put pressure on pharmaceutical and major supplement manufacturers to take responsibility for the products they put on the market, but instead these companies banned together to put out television advertisements pleading with people to write to congress unless they wanted to lose access to their vitamins. The government was, of course, not going after people’s vitamins, but the scare tactic worked. More people ended up writing the congress about this bill than the total number of written protests about the Vietnam War. The absurdity of that fact needs no further