Monsanto House of Lords, stated that all information relating to the matter would be "kept secret". During the 24 months prior to the 1997 British election Monsanto representatives had 22 meetings at the departments of Agriculture and the Environment. Stanley Greenberg, an election advisor to Tony Blair, later worked as a Monsanto consultant. Former Labour spokesperson David Hill, became Monsanto's media adviser at the lobbying firm Bell Pottinger. The Labour government was challenged in Parliament about "trips, facilities, gifts and other offerings of financial value provided by Monsanto to civil servants", but only acknowledged that Department of Trade and Industry had
Monsanto in the Texas City Disaster. In 1949, Monsanto acquired American Viscose from Courtaulds. In 1954, Monsanto partnered with German chemical giant Bayer to form Mobay and market polyurethanes in the United States. Monsanto began manufacturing DDT in 1944, along with some 15 other companies. This insecticide was critical to the fight against malaria-transmitting mosquitoes. Due to DDT's toxicity, it was banned in the United States in 1972. In 1977, Monsanto stopped producing PCBs; Congress banned PCB production two years later. In the mid‑1960s, William Standish Knowles and his team invented a way to selectively synthesize enantiomers via asymmetric hydrogenation. This