AP Discovers Evidence of Monsanto Trying to Corner Seed Market, Provoking an Unconvincing Reply

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

An article published by the Associated Press this past Sunday revealed documents showing Monsanto Co.'s manipulation of the seed business. The piece examines some of the contracts the company draws up for seed distributors, concluding that Monsanto's lack of competition in the market could lead to dramatically higher food prices.

Monsanto's powerful public relations machine cranked out a press release attacking the article on Saturday, seemingly before the AP even officially published it.

Monsanto's lengthy reply to this scathing piece was multifaceted. In addition to attacking quotes from the sources used by the AP as "absolutely false" and insisting they "don’t reflect reality," the company also insists that there is no lack of competition in the seed market.

Monsanto notes that there are "multiple" megacorporations from which farmers and seed distributors can choose to get their genetically-modified seeds, the names of which they spell out in a blog entry linked to the release:

Today, farmers can pick the technologies they want from developers such as Bayer Crop Science, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont’ s Pioneer Hi-Bred, Monsanto and/or Syngenta.

Plus they can choose from an ever-growing variety of seeds:

In 1998, there were 2,580 corn hybrids available to the American farmer. In 2008, there were 4,692. This represents an 82 percent increase in choice of hybrids available, including both biotech and non-biotech hybrids.

Gee, that makes me feel a lot better. Farmers have a whole slate of genetically-modified seeds to choose from!

Though Monsanto says there are also "non-biotech hybrids" available, I could find no mention of how many, or of the approximate proportion of seeds in the marketplace are non-GMO. But why would they want to make mention of such availability? After all, that's not their business.

Maybe you don't really care about competition in the seed business. You probably don't know anyone sitting in a lab splicing plants (or genes for that matter) for the betterment of crop yields. While it seems any number of companies can be started up in one's basement or garage, innovations in seed technology aren't bound to happen in such places. Why not let these big companies do this costly and difficult R&D?

First of all, it's important to note that it hasn't always been this way. After thousands of years of humans selecting the traits in crops that worked for specific communities and specific climates, the modification of plants through grafting and other developmental techniques slowly moved from the realm of Gregor Mendel to your local university.

Academic labs have been working on seed technology in earnest for decades. Now, as illuminated in the AP article, Monsanto is preventing them from doing so (emphasis mine):

Back in the 1970s, public universities developed new traits for corn and soybean seeds that made them grow hardy and resist pests. Small seed companies got the traits cheaply and could blend them to breed superior crops without restriction. But the agreements give Monsanto control over mixing multiple biotech traits into crops.

The restrictions even apply to taxpayer-funded researchers.

Roger Boerma, a research professor at the University of Georgia, is developing specialized strains of soybeans that grow well in southeastern states, but his current research is tangled up in such restrictions from Monsanto and its competitors.

"It's made one level of our life incredibly challenging and difficult," Boerma said.

The rules also can restrict research. Boerma halted research on a line of new soybean plants that contain a trait from a Monsanto competitor when he learned that the trait was ineffective unless it could be mixed with Monsanto's Roundup Ready gene.

Boerma said he hasn't considered asking Monsanto's permission to mix its traits with the competitor's trait.

"I think the co-mingling of their trait technology with another company's trait technology would likely be a serious problem for them," he said.

The real story here is not just the idea that Monsanto and its "multiple" competitors are stifling research efforts. With the privatization of seed research comes a loss of vital safeguards.

As anyone who has ever tried to do a research project in an academic environment can surely tell you, there are a good number of hoops to jump through to limit liability. Unfortunately, when profits -- and not the advancement of knowledge -- are one's main motive, such concerns over the unintended consequences or even morality of immediately implementing experimental data are often absent.

Monsanto's retort to the AP article also falsely frames the situation as a matter of choice:

Our licenses enable the use of our traits; they do not require the use of our traits.  Seed companies and farmers are free to move completely away from Monsanto traits at any time. It’s a choice they make every single season.

What the press release leaves out is that fact that farmers (and ultimately, consumers at the grocery store) may someday have no chance to choose non-GMO food. While we've been warned for nearly a decade about the cross-contamination of non-GMO crops with genetically-modified traits, we're now being shown that nightmare scenarios are coming true.

In the first decision of some 1,200 cases filed against the chemical company for the same type of infraction, Bayer Crop Science AG was recently ordered to pay $2 million in damages sustained by farmers in Missouri when its experimental strains of genetically-modified rice contaminated non-GMO fields nearby.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this case is the fact that Bayer's lawyer insisted that it did everything in its power to stop such a thing from occurring, but to no avail. This suggests that the company does not have the ability to contain genetically-modified crops, that such containment is impossible, or both.

This brings me back to the problem of taking genetic development out of the relative safety of academia, where varieties were created in more of an "open source" manner. Now, not only are these chemical companies each rushing to bring an untested product to market faster than their respective competitors, but they are competing to be the first to have a patent on a basic element of human life in the food we consume.

So while Monsanto is right that farmers and seed distributors have the choice between GMOs from Monsanto and GMOs from Bayer or Dow or DuPont, allow me to point out the obvious: That is not much of a choice at all.

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS