Over the last year and a half, my LinkedIn pieces have provoked no shortage of comments – most of them supportive, but some… not so much.

It may surprise you, though, that I’m grateful not only for the enthusiastic comments, but also for those from people who disagree. They help me learn what bothers people about Monsanto, and also afford me the opportunity to respond. In other words, they make a real dialogue possible.

So from time to time in this space, I want to respond to some of the critics. I don’t necessarily expect to convert them – fiercely held views are hard to shake. But I do hope those whose minds are open will consider what I have to say.

I’m going to start with a comment from a person who seems to think that Dante needs to update The Inferno. This person suggests that I and other executives at Monsanto are headed for perdition for having bribed politicians to destroy the world’s food supply.

Dear Person Who Thinks Perdition Awaits Me:

Because there’s not enough space here, and because reams of independent scientific studies already confirm that far from destroying the food supply, we are actually increasing and enhancing it, I’m not going to cover your second accusation here. I can tell you that both as one of the scientists who pioneered GMOs decades ago and as a father, I care deeply about the safety of our food supply and remain committed to working to develop solutions to improve it.

I do want to respond in depth, however, to your first comment, because our company has spent much less time addressing this charge. In reviewing your comment, I take it you refer to all the elected officials and government regulators who play a role in approving the cultivation of our GM seeds in the United States and the dozens of other countries where they’re approved to grow or approved for import. I think that’s a fair assumption on my part, because they’d all have to be working together to accomplish the conspiracy you allege, and we see that broader accusation all the time.

In fact, it’s a popular meme: From the Supreme Court and maybe even the President of the United States on down, Monsanto has infiltrated or bought off the world’s governments. Along these lines, references are common to a handful of our employees who have changed careers and moved into the public sector. The references are generally offered as evidence that the views of the science establishment – have somehow been compromised. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I am proud of the fact that our employees are thought of so highly that a few are offered government positions. I think it's terrific that such regulators have real-world business experience.

Vandana Shiva, the widely quoted Indian critic of genetic modification has further claimed we “control the entire scientific literature of the world.” Even such widely admired publications as Nature, Science, and Scientific American “have just become extensions of their propaganda. There is no independent science left in the world.”

Let’s break this down. In the United States alone, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are all involved in GM regulation. That means that over the 20 years GM products have been sold, thousands of people from these agencies have been involved in their oversight. Meanwhile, thousands, maybe tens of thousands, more have been involved in the approvals and regulation abroad in more than 70 countries who either cultivate or import GMO crops (including China and the EU). And then there is the entire international scientific community, or at least the great bulk of it. Many thousands more there.

So now let’s add it all up. Here is the accusation: Over 20 years, thousands and thousands of people, spanning the globe and representing the public, non-profit and private sectors have compromised their honesty and independence at our behest “to ensure the destruction of our food supply.”

Is this even remotely plausible?

Just this past January, a paper by an English physicist sought to answer this question with statistical rigor. The paper, On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs, considered conspiracy theories such as “the moon landings were faked,” “climate-change is a hoax,” and “vaccination is dangerous” – exactly the sort of food-destruction conspiracy under discussion here. It then analyzed the likelihood that such conspiracies could be maintained over time without being exposed through “intrinsic failure” – i.e., from within, by a deliberate or unintentional leak. The probabilities for such intrinsic failure were based on an analysis of cases in which actual secrets have been exposed from within, such as the exposure of National Security Agency eavesdropping by Edward Snowden. But the probabilities for external discovery, such as by journalists or law enforcement authorities, were not even considered. So the paper’s analysis was conservative.

The conclusion: “Simulations of these claims predict that intrinsic failure would be imminent even with the most generous estimates for the secret-keeping ability of active participants—the results of this model suggest that large conspiracies (≥1000 agents) quickly become untenable and prone to failure.”

So the notion that for decades, many thousands of people across the world have successfully conspired to destroy the food supply is not credible – or, to quote the late Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock, "most illogical."

Now, full disclosure: In 2001, our Indonesian affiliate did engage in what are politely called “financial irregularities.” But after launching our own internal investigation, we voluntarily notified U.S. authorities. We ended up paying $1.5 million in fines. We also fired the responsible employees and accepted full blame for their actions. In addition, we resolved to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again, and put into place a beefed up company-wide integrity/business conduct program to make sure it wouldn’t. It hasn’t.

I wish this incident weren’t part of our record. But I think it also serves to show how ridiculous the broad conspiracy accusation is. When a payoff actually did occur, it was isolated, we found it, and we reported it publicly. And the same would happen again if there were another such incident.

But there hasn’t been. The notion that it could happen on a grand global or even domestic scale is absurd.

This is how the real world works. A lot less dramatic and exciting than some of the conspiracy theorists would like, a lot more complicated – and a lot better.