In the land of the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s, the Irish protesters of 1998 sabotaged fields of the American company genetically re-creating the potato.

In the red soils of India, farmers worried about that same company gaining control over their lives. And despite a plague of pests, they distrusted its promises to deliver magical seeds that give relief. Last month, in a spectacle of fury called "Operation Cremation Monsanto," they torched Monsanto Co. test plots of genetically engineered cotton.

These events half a world apart were acts in a global drama this year that has featured St. Louis-based Monsanto, the leader in the drive to bring genetic engineering to crops and food around the world.

The year began with hopes by Monsanto of breakthroughs in global acceptance of gene-splicing technologies. These revolutionary techniques transfer genes from one plant to another to give "transgenic" plants new characteristics, such as resistance to insects.

The year ends with the realization that a chasm remains between the attitudes of Americans and people elsewhere.

Led by Monsanto and with almost no one outside of agriculture paying attention, American farmers this year planted more than 50 million acres of gene-altered soybeans, corn, cotton and potatoes. Four years ago, that acreage was zero.

Years from now, people may recall the genetic revolution in food and farming as an epochal change as far-reaching as the computer revolution. Yet a historic moment may be passing with few Americans noticing.

The same can't be said of the rest of the world. In some nations,Monsanto is a household name. Newspapers spill over and broadcasts crackle with news of communities' struggles to come to grips with a technology banging at the door. People assemble in noisy forums to debate the morality of altering the building blocks of life.

Across the Atlantic, what a Monsanto executive calls the "European Wars" threatens not only Monsanto's plans but also the exports by Midwestern farmers of DNA-modified grains. In Britain, Monsanto's own pollster wrote this bleak assessment in October:

"The latest survey shows an ongoing collapse of public support for biotechnology and genetically modified foods." The author was Stan Greenberg, who was the White House's pollster in this administration.

Foreign opposition to Monsanto baffles many Americans.

• Why do people elsewhere feel so differently about an issue of elemental importance - the food supply?
• Why are farmers and protesters sabotaging croplands?
• What is Monsanto doing about it?
• How are people making up their minds about this powerful technology emanating from St. Louis?

These questions and the likelihood of 1998 being a pivotal year for Monsanto took a Post-Dispatch reporter on a journey to 10 countries.

Some of the findings were surprising - among them the involvement of the National Security Council in the international debate. Some findings - like the sabotage - were disturbing.

The search also yielded provocative glimpses of how people in other lands view Americans. That was the case in Skibbereen, Ireland, near a mass grave of 8,000 people buried during Ireland's farm disaster of the last century.

At her cottage, Mairie Cregan, 37, a farmer and the mother of six, observed that Ireland's long-ago famine lives on in people's minds. She worried aloud that genetic tinkering might threaten a food supply that has grown bountiful. And she asked if Americans talk about Monsanto at their post offices and in their church groups the way they do in her part of southern Ireland.

"This is about our food and what people eat. Americans know that, don't they?" she wondered.

"Maybe," she mused, "America has just gotten too big for people to talk to each other."

Discoveries

In conversations elsewhere, the fears of an unproved technology are pitted against the hopes that genetic engineering can be a powerful tool for good.

A potent and even violent opposition to genetic engineering has sprouted in many places. Often, Monsanto stands alone in these firestorms. Others have invested heavily in genetic engineering and farming: Novartis, the Swiss company, and the German company AgrEvo, to name two.

But around the world, Monsanto is the acknowledged ringmaster of the genetic change in food:

• In Europe, many people fear experimentation that crosses genes between species. In the literary birthplace of Frankenstein, a segment of the population does not look fondly on scientists and their discoveries. Europeans use a loaded term seldom heard in the United States: GMOs, for genetically modified organisms.
• In Latin American nations, many indigenous people resent "bioprospectors" mining and patenting their genetic resources as raw materials for drugs and new farm products.
• In India, farmers fear the power of multinational corporations and the loss of self-sufficiency.
• Skeptics in many nations worry about the loss in diversity of crops that they see resulting from fewer companies offering fewer varieties of genetically altered seeds. Monsanto counters that there always will be plenty of choices.

Everywhere, people see an American company stepping in to promote - indeed force - changes in how their food is grown. It's as though the Cardinals or Yankees had swaggered across the world's soccer fields and declared: "We'll be playing baseball now."

There is acceptance, too.

• In Europe, amid fierce debate and thanks to U.S. government intervention, Monsanto gained ground for its crops. Many European politicians are eager to fix their biotechnology regulatory system, a 15-country maze of kinks and hoops. You can find European farmers - a minority - who don't share the qualms of consumers and environmental advocates.
• In China, 600,000 cotton farmers sowed Monsanto's gene-altered seeds thisyear, the first time they could do so.
• In Brazil, Monsanto planted genetically modified soybeans for the first time after winning a partial court victory in that farming and economic powerhouse.
• Deep in Amazon outposts, some tribes are willing to cooperate with scientists' search for genetic materials, both as a way to help humankind and to make money.

Amid the global turmoil, genetically engineered plants are taking root. This year, the acreage outside the United States more than doubled to nearly 23 million - still less than half what is grown in the United States.

This year, Monsanto raced between tense showdowns that commanded news nearly everywhere but in the United States. Fighting country-by-country for approvals has enmeshed Monsanto in public policy around the world.

Often, the company frames its campaign in the rhetoric of a crusade, trumpeting the potential to protect the environment and feed the hungry. "Doing well by doing good," is a company catch phrase. Yet laudable motives in themselves don't inspire trust.

Regulatory roots

Europeans ask why there is so little debate in the United States on genetic change. There are two main answers:

1. The public doesn't demand it.
2. Even if people did, there are almost no points of entry for Americans into a regulatory system that took shape long ago.

In 1986, Monsanto and allies persuaded President Ronald Reagan's administration to adopt a framework that would operate with no new legislation. This strategy assured that genetic engineering would, for the most part, remain out of the domain of the Congress and therefore away from the forum where people sound their concerns.

Americans debated human cloning. And this year, organic growers led a revolt against the Agriculture Department's allowing modified foods to be labeled organic. Until then, the only issue of genetics and food to percolate to the surface in the United States was the Food and Drug Administration's approval four years ago of a Monsanto-engineered hormone that induces dairy cattle to produce more milk.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been America's most aggressive regulator, using existing powers to govern pesticide traits engineered into plants. That is why Monsanto and farm groups are pressuring the EPA to reject proposals for larger protective "refuges" around fields of varieties of modified crops.

The FDA exercises limited authority because genetic traits are not considered food additives. Unlike Europe, which has passed a continentwide labeling regulation, the FDA has made no move to require labeling in the United States.

(In Europe, Monsanto supports this labeling; in the United States, the company says it doesn't support labeling because it is not an issue.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture operates in the dual role as regulator and ardent booster of biotechnology. For most field trials in the United States - like those bringing fears in Europe - companies simply notify the department.

But the Agriculture Department couldn't have foreseen that one of its laboratory successes would create such problems for Monsanto. That success is a genetic technology known as the "Terminator" because it renders the seeds of crops sterile so that they can't be collected and saved. It was patented in March by the Agriculture Department and a Mississippi seed company, Delta and Pine Land - which Monsanto is acquiring - as a means to help companies protect their investments in genetically modified crops.

Since then, from Ireland to India, Monsanto has been skewered by critics and mainstream scientists alike who see Terminator as a blunt weapon to hasten genetic change.

Irish cooking

Genetic engineering is about more than farming. In Europe, the debate touches the environment, economics, religion and the relationship between science and society. Jean-Marie Pelt, director of the European Institute of Ecology, said in Brussels that, "Scientifically, we are able to do things. But from an ethical point of view, we don't have to do them."

The European backlash against Monsanto has a lot to do with a deteriorating faith in science. In Europe, an outbreak of a mysterious brain malady called bovine spongiform encephalopthy - better known as "Mad Cow Disease" - brought human deaths, the slaughter of 11 million cattle and a scar on the European psyche. In hearings this month in Britain, people continue to ask what went wrong in science and government regulation.

Europe's skepticism also is connected to attitudes toward food - even though no dangers from eating modified foods have been proved.

Europeans typically worry more than Americans about food: where it comes from, how it is presented on the table, how it tastes. Those sensibilities were on display at Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland's County Cork, where Darina Allen was testing the flakiness of a student's salmon-filled pastry.

Allen made headlines this year when she denounced Monsanto's plan to conduct tests in Ireland on genetically engineered sugar beets. One plot was adjacent to her 100-acre farm with its gardens, boxwoods and organically grown produce.

Irish people listen to Allen. She is their foremost chef, a public personality with her own television program; she is the author of best-selling cookbooks; and she sits on Ireland's Food Safety Authority. She's the Irish Julia Child, with more spice.

Students who pay upward of $ 3,000 for courses can get gardening and "lifestyle" tutoring from Allen, as well as lessons in sumptuous cooking. She takes them to the slaughterhouse to teach them about meat. They get to know the farmers who bring around the vegetables, and they meet the salmon fishermen from nearby Ballycotton Harbor. On her cooking show she tells viewers that the most important thing they do each week is grocery shop for their families.

In the cooking school dining room, Allen, dressed in her white apron, said she can't fathom why scientists would want to be "fiddling around with the genes" of foods. Nor, Allen said, can she understand why Americans would abide a system in which genetically engineered foods are not so labeled. "It's a basic human right to be told what's in your food," she said.

Her views resemble those of another prominent United Kingdom citizen standing in the way of the transgenic march. Britain's Prince Charles drew a line in the sands of European public opinion in June by writing: "I personally have no wish to eat anything produced by genetic manipulation, nor do I knowingly offer this sort of produce to my family or guests."

Back in County Cork, Ireland, farmer Richard Fitzgerald was more concerned about his fields than about the famous. Fitzgerald consented this year to turning over a swath of land to Monsanto to test genetically modified sugar beets, a softball-size vegetable that provides one-third of the world's sugar. Gliding along the Irish seacoast in his black BMW, Fitzgerald seemed nervous about his decision. He had reason to fret.

Late on a foggy night, an Irish group called the Gaelic Earth Liberation Front descended on a Monsanto test plot of genetically engineered sugar beets in County Carnow where, in the words of one saboteur, we "ripped out, slashed and beheaded" plants.

Fitzgerald, a stocky, florid-faced man who had given up his beloved Guinness for Lent, gazed toward the Irish Sea and said: "Who is going to feed the burgeoning population? It's not going to be the environmentalists growing a few potatoes organically."

Fitzgerald's farm was spared in 1998 - though a second Monsanto test plot was destroyed.

You lose some, you win others: After a fight, Ireland's High Court last summer upheld Monsanto's planting permits. That means the Irish might expect modified cotton and other transgenic crops in their soils - perhaps even the potatoes that loom large in Ireland's history and that Monsanto is stacking in the United States with new genetic traits.

The outcome of the Irish case was a cautionary lesson for genetic engineering's critics. Clare Watson, the Dubliner who forced the court test, was socked with court costs of more than $ 400,000.

Watson, 36, described what the episode means for her in real-life terms. For the foreseeable future, she will be allowed only a living wage for food and housing. She can't own property or accumulate wealth because it would be taken from her. "I have my moments when I scream and feel like hitting my head against the wall," she said.

National security

Monsanto prepares for uprisings. Last fall, when the Irish debate was brewing, the company flew a group of Irish journalists to the United States for a tour of its labs. In Washington, the journalists received a surprise: They were taken to the White House for a visit to the Oval Office.

"Our little heads peeked around that historic room," said Vivion Kilferther, a reporter from the Examiner in Cork, describing what few White House visitors see.

How did Monsanto orchestrate that? It helps if you've hired the president's director of intergovernmental affairs, which Monsanto did in putting Marcia Hale on the company payroll.

Monsanto has often displayed its connections while fighting this year for approval for its products. When Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern arrived in the United States for a St. Patrick's Day visit, he was greeted by Sandy Berger, director of the National Security Council.

The primary topic of their discussion at a lunch in the Capitol wasn't the Irish peace talks or any of the world flare-ups that send the rumpled Berger scrambling in front of CNN's cameras. The issue was Ireland's pivotal vote on a pending European decision on Monsanto's corn engineered for insect-resistance - common in the United States but banned, like most engineered crops, in Europe.

The 15-member European Community is vital to Monsanto for reasons beyond its thriving market of 350 million people. Europe is the gateway for modified foods; life-science companies want a European imprimatur on products they hope to sell to former European colonies around the world.

But Europe also is the center of opposition to a barely understood technology studded with red-hot buttons getting pushed. Germany, with its robust Green Party and its lingering memories of Nazi-era experiments, is strongly opposed. Austria and Luxembourg want nothing to do with modified crops. Britain and France, among others, have doubts.

This is divergent not just from American public opinion but also from American policy, which explains scurrying at the top of the U.S. government.

"In this post-Cold War era, America's national interests have changed, and crises aren't always military crises," a National Security Council official said.

Berger's wasn't the only voice Ahern heard. Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., and several members of Congress collared Ireland's prime minister, as did others in President Bill Clinton's administration. Toby Moffett, Monsanto's Washington-based international business head and a former Democratic congressman from Connecticut, later marveled at the smothering of Ireland's prime minister.

"Everywhere he went, before people said 'Happy St. Patrick's Day,' they asked him, 'What about that corn vote?' " Moffett said. "I'm 54 years old and I've been in a lot of coalitions in my life, but this is one of the most breathtaking I've seen."

Successful, too. The next day, the European governing body said yes to plantings of gene-crossed corn by Monsanto and two crops of rivals. The decision also meant that American farmers staking their futures on exporting modified crops could rest easier.

Now all eyes turned to the French, who would have the last word for Monsanto's hopes and for the future of U.S. farm exports. But American farmers also have something to fear. In Switzerland, authorities in March seized grain barges from the United States laden with a corn product containing what authorities called "suspicious DNA." The term "suspicious DNA" is not something you would hear in the United States, because Americans don't often view science with suspicion. Especially farmers.

If there's a gene that promotes trust in technology, American farmers have it. The drive to do what it takes for better yield - more fertilizers, more pesticides, more machinery - sets American farmers apart from counterparts in Europe, where farmers depends more heavily on subsidies and quotas.

And many U.S. farmers are reporting savings from genetically modified seeds - as much as 50 cents for each bushel of soybeans, said the Agriculture Department's Arnold Foudin.

One technology American farmers lack is the mechanism to separate genetically altered grain before exporting. Those bins on the edges of Midwestern towns hold the harvests from farmers nearby. In Illinois, about 40 percent of soybeans and 25 percent of corn in those repositories - modified and unmodified mixed together - will head by truck or rail to the Mississippi River to begin their voyage to foreign lands.

The U.S. farm establishment doesn't want the complications of a separate system. Nor do farmers want to acknowledge that what they're growing is any different from what always has sprouted - even though sensors can detect wisps of "suspicious DNA." But until other nations sort out their concerns, growing modified crops for international markets could be risky.

In Auburn, Ill., Tim Seifert planted 1,300 acres of black, central Illinois soil with genetically modified soybeans and corn. He had been hearing plenty about people in other countries concerned about the modified grains that Americans send them, and it troubled him. When a Japanese group visited him this year, Seifert demanded that they explain their country's qualms.

"We weren't afraid to try your technology," Seifert said, lecturing his visitors.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, several dozen cotton farmers had their own worries about genetic engineering: They demanded damages from Monsanto this year after their 1997 crop of genetically altered cotton faltered.

Some of them farm near the intersection of Routes 61 and 49 where, blues aficionados will tell you, guitar legend Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in return for success. Farmers making their case against Monsanto sounded as though they were repenting a Faustian bargain with Monsanto.

The Mississippi Seed Arbitration Council sided with these farmers, and many took home handsome settlements from Monsanto. (The company insists that weather was the culprit.) One farmer, Randy Talley, of Bobo, Miss., offered a lesson in the allure of technology. After swearing that engineered crops had failed him in 1997, he planted 750 acres of a gene-spliced cotton seed this year.

But back in Europe, more sabotage had destroyed hopes for a breakthrough year in genetic farming.

French connection

By June, the critical approval that Monsanto thought it had won in Europe for its corn looked shaky. What's more, a plan for an American shipment of $ 200 million of genetically altered grain to Spain and Portugal was in jeopardy. In each case, the problem was the French, who were refusing to sign what the European Community had agreed to in March.

Farmer Rene Riesel was part of the reason. Riesel, a grain and sheep farmer from the south of France, led the raid earlier this year that destroyed a cache of modified seeds and all but wrecked France's first commercial planting of modified corn. This time, the victim was Novartis.

The diminutive and tightly wound Riesel, 48, smoked non-filters from a pack he carried in his rust-colored flannel shirt. Speaking English at the Concorde Cafe near the French National Assembly, he recalled the procession of trucks and autos, carrying 120 farmers, that snaked its way to the center of a small town near Toulouse. Asked to describe what they had done, Riesel pulled out his knife and slashed at the air. Then they sprayed the seed with fire extinguishers, he recounted. Others said that the farmers had urinated on the mess.

While eating French fries and spiced, raw ground beef, Riesel spoke defiantly of French farmers' commitment to block genetic engineering and to "take out" the fields of those who abet the technology. Riesel was fined $ 80,000 for the raid but avoided jail. "It will be quite possible for we French to farm without transgenics," he said confidently.

Later, in the town of Le Genest Saint Isle in western France, farmers said they worried that the consolidation of seed companies by Monsanto and rivals around the world ultimately will diminish farmer choices and even force them to use modified seed s against their will. But one farmer shook his head and admonished fellow growers that they need to keep an open mind. "First, there must be a debate, and then we will see," said this farmer, Denis Boulanger.

Leave it to France to stage a debate like the country had never seen before.

Democracy gets tested

At the same time France was host to - and winning - the World Cup soccer championship, its Parliament decided to convene a citizens conference to guide the nation's policies on genetically modified foods. Soccer won the battle for attention, but the conference held as many surprises.

For the French gathering, 14 people were chosen randomly from a population of 60 million and brought secretly to the National Assembly in Paris for the proceedings. What happened in Paris during a public, three-day gathering was stunning for its tone and its conclusions.

The initial reaction to Monsanto from people from all walks of life - housewives, an insurance inspector, a bank clerk and a librarian - was uniformly negative.

"They're sorcerer's apprentices," declared Francine Maeght, 50, a mild-mannered bank employee.

Three days later, after an all-night argument, the French citizens presented recommendations with champagne and caviar. They offered no glowing endorsement. But they declined to endorse a freeze on genetic testing, the blunt instrument European critics seek.

The French offered another lesson in the persuasiveness of this technology. The citizens' thinking softened as they heard scientists tell them how, in its next generation, genetic engineering might put more nutritious vegetables - even disease-fighting foods - on dinner plates.

Claire Falhon, 28, an administrator in a suburban Paris medical clinic, had begun the gathering by lecturing Monsanto for barging into her country. Her response was reminiscent of the coca-colonization chants in Paris streets in the 1950s protesting the introduction of Coca-Cola. The French, like many skeptics of genetic engineering, see Monsanto influencing their culture, not just their farming.

Falhon confided afterward that she had fought against the freeze. She also warned that her country must have a "great debate" and a new regimen of rules before saying yes to Monsanto.

But Monsanto wanted that "yes" right now. And once more, the company turned to its most powerful ally - the U.S. government.

Tapping connections

In late spring, U.S. trade officials complained to the French government about the refusal to sign the piece of paper approving Monsanto's genetically engineered corn. Only then could $ 200 million worth of corn head down the Mississippi River toward European ports.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright approached the French, as did U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky. Both leveraged their appeals with ultimatums: If the French didn't relent, President Clinton would have something to say about it when France's new prime minister, Lionel Jospin, visited the United States in June. The French didn't budge, and Jospin got an earful, administration sources said.

Monsanto had rallied the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the national security adviser, America's trade representative and U.S. senators. That left only Vice President Al Gore, who didn't stay on the sidelines for long.

In July, Gore telephoned the French prime minister. On July 30, on the eve of the announcement of plans for the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Monsanto received the good news: the French had said yes. That meant that Monsanto's modified corn can be planted in France next spring and that there will be no prohibition against 15 European countries importing similar corn.

A $ 7.5 billion company with 25,000 employees needs to be well-connected, and Monsanto works to keep it that way. The company plies political parties equally and recruits people with deep ties in Washington. By virtue of a friendly relationship between Monsanto chief operating officer Robert B. Shapiro and Clinton, Monsanto is identified in Washington as "a Democratic company."

Monsanto and its employees spread the political contributions. In the last two years, donations to Democrats totaled about $ 100,000; Republicans received $ 140,000. The company invests much more in bringing aboard influential people.

Among them:

• Monsanto board member Mickey Kantor is a former U.S. trade representative and chairman of Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.
• Marcia Hale, Monsanto's international regulatory director, was a top Clinton assistant.
• Linda Fisher, Monsanto's vice president for federal government affairs, mapped pesticide policy in the Bush administration EPA.
• Michael R. Taylor, former deputy FDA commissioner, was hired recently to look at long-range matters.
• Jack Watson, who was chief of staff in Jimmy Carter's presidency, is a Monsanto staff lawyer in Washington.

In wielding its clout abroad, Monsanto has been adroit, lucky - or both. At this juncture, the interests of Monsanto, the U.S. government and American farmers are much the same: seeing to it that the world drops its barriers to an American-hatched technology.

Government officials feel the heat sizzling around Monsanto. At a World Food Summit in Rome, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman was pelted by seeds thrown by naked protesters. "My mother worried when she saw me on CNN," Glickman joked recently.

Pressing foreign leaders on these matters "is at the top of my agenda," Glickman said. "I am not a shill for any company. Though we're all generally going in the same direction, we're not riding in the same car."

U.S. Special Ambassador Peter Scher, the specialist for agriculture and biotechnology, visited France several times this year on biotechnology's behalf and leads a brand-new U.S.-European council trying to head off more trouble.

"I would define this not only as a trade issue, but as a domestic economic issue, an environmental issue and, frankly, a food security issue," he said.

Fires in India

In India, Monsanto is moving aggressively - and meeting aggressive resistance.

Three decades ago, India was the testing ground of a farm revolution that promised more food - and delivered. There, in the 1960s, science and modern farming introduced the "Green Revolution," which fought starvation with high-yield grains and chemical fertilizer. Now, India is debating whether to play host to the Gene Revolution. In many places, the fear rivals the need.

In the central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, an extraordinary drama is unfolding: 500 Indian farmers have killed themselves in a year's time. All told, 700 farmers in the country committed suicide since last year. Nothing like this has happened before in India.

The farmers' preferred way of death is swallowing insecticides and then dying in fields that failed them. The real reason, victims' relatives said, was the volatile combination of debt and farm chemicals that no longer worked to kill pests.

"He could not bear the burden," said Ileakomru Shanker, whose son, Damera, 28, had swallowed a fatal concoction in February.

Monsanto's insect-resistant seeds - engineered to produce their own insecticide - might help. The company's first field trials in India with engineered cotton also showed a 20 percent increase in yield. But even amid such despair, Monsanto is viewed with hostility.

In India, opposition to those seeds is fueled not by concerns about the environment, as in Europe, but by a strain of dedicated nationalism. Farmers and intellectuals preaching the mantra of self-sufficiency inveigh that foreign companies must not gain a foothold on India's farming and food.

The Terminator - the genetic technique to forestall seed-saving - is not yet owned by Monsanto and may not be in fields for years. Yet Monsanto's detractors hold it up as the symbol of the drive by multinationals to take control.

A few months ago, Monsanto's strategists saw India as their next battleground after Europe. What loomed recently in the smoke wafting from torched fields in southern India was the likelihood of fighting on two fronts at once.

In what they described ominously as Operation Cremation Monsanto, 200 farmers of the 10-million member Karnataka Farmers Association in southern India uprooted and burned cotton plants in two Monsanto test plots. "We want Monsanto out of our country," said N. Nanjundaswamy, the leader of the uprising.

Conclusions

Wherever Monsanto seeks to sow, the U.S. government clears the ground. In Japan last month, Agriculture Secretary Glickman and Trade Representative Barshefsky each told their government hosts that labeling modified foods wouldn't suit Uncle Sam.

This month, U.S. Commerce Secretary William Daley trumpeted biotechnology at his four-nation trade mission to Africa to promote U.S. industries. A Monsanto executive was on the plane.

"We made the case that they (Africans) ought to take a serious look" at gene-altered crops, said Daley, speaking by phone from Ivory Coast. "We strongly encouraged them to make sure that any decision they make is based on science and not on this hysterical political reaction."

From the White House and the National Security Council on down, the apparatus of the U.S. government worked this year on behalf of biotechnology. For Monsanto, at this moment, it is like having an Olympic basketball team with several Michael Jordans. But Monsanto's clout notwithstanding, U.S. leaders are unlikely to be rushing to the court once corn and soybean issues get resolved.

At year's end, saboteurs in India vow more attacks on Monsanto's fields. In Britain, authorities are preparing to prosecute Monsanto for a safety violation that happened when a border around a test plot was accidentally destroyed. The company's hard-won French approval for corn is in jeopardy. France's highest judicial authority has suspended planting permission for rival Novartis at least until 2000, and now Monsanto is being challenged on the same grounds by Greenpeace.

Meanwhile, Europeans and Japanese are pushing for a segregated, genetically pure crop, which neither the U.S. government nor American farmers want.

Still, amid the turmoil, Monsanto gained ground in 1998, observed Philip Angell, Monsanto's Washington-based corporate communications chief. He is a former political consultant and waste industry strategist.

"What you have is slow and steady, ongoing development and product introduction," Angell said. "Approval by regulatory agencies. People listening to people better and trying to understand these concerns."

Monsanto's Moffett, the former congressman who operates internationally for the company, said that 1998 will be recalled as the watershed year.

"We discovered how big our learning curve is about the world and, to some extent, we discovered it because of crises that maybe we should have seen coming," he said.

It may also be true that even Monsanto's best persuasive tactics and many friends in high places can't change attitudes abroad until consumers see benefits in this technology for themselves, not just for big companies and farmers. For now, rightly or wrongly, Monsanto remains bedeviled worldwide by the Terminator, a public relations problem that was on the agenda of a meeting in St. Louis this month between Shapiro and company executives.

In Illinois, genetic farming stalwart Tim Seifert said things are tight this year because of low prices for corn and soybeans. He wondered if farmers are, as he put it, backing themselves into a corner by producing so much. But, said Seifert, his faith in modified crops hadn't been shaken one iota. "I'm not looking back," he said.

Seifert's words reaffirmed basic differences between Americans and people elsewhere. These differences have a lot to do with attitudes toward science and government, but they also speak to outlook on life.

In many nations, a prime issue in this debate is choice: the right of consumers to know the nature of their food and the right of farmers to have plenty of choices in what they grow. In the United States, people are willing to trust others to make those choices for us.

Few Americans draw a distinction between genetic changes in food and the biomedical research that is yielding insulin and products for our health. With soybeans in 75 percent of processed foods, most Americans have eaten altered food recently whether they know it or not.

In the United States, consumers' groups are pressing the call for labeling these foods. They're working for the first time with environmental groups, organic food growers and farmers' advocates to generate an American debate. So far, Americans have been willing to trust science to direct the course of evolution. That is the difference between us and many of our neighbors abroad.

M.S. Swaminathan, one of India's most prominent scientists, observed recently: "Any technology, you can use it for good or bad. If I have a knife, I can cut you or I can cut your food."

As the world sees it, biotechnology at this moment is a knife unsheathed, able to cut either way.