When we lived in Omaha we’d drive through the countryside up to Sioux City past endless fields of corn. Along the roadside were signs with the name of the seed company who supplied their seed, mostly ‘Pioneer’ or ‘DeKalb.’ The seed company salesmen were local guys who had gone to school with the farmers and were known and trusted. They’d buy you a cup of coffee and a piece of pie and arrange to take you on a fishing trip to Canada. So in1996 when Monsanto paid a fortune for the DeKalb seed company it bought all that intergenerational love and trust. In 1997 Monsanto bought Holden’s Foundation Seeds, who produced the parent seed that most of America’s corn is bred from. At Iowa State University, Professor Neil Harl took a look at the prices Monsanto was paying and calculated that they were paying 2 to 3 times market value on the basis of sales and profits. His conclusion? Monsanto’s strategy was to gain monopoly control of the seed supply in order to increase their prices and profits. Monsanto’s patent on Roundup ran out in 2000, so they needed to lock farmers into using it before cheaper alternatives flooded the market.
Sure enough, by 2000 US farmers had no choice – their favourite seed varieties were now only available Roundup Ready and could only be grown with Roundup. Monsanto had America’s farmers by the short and curlies.
Once they had America under their thumb they went to work on Argentina, where they grow their seed corn to sell in the US, as well as soybeans. This year in Argentina 30,000 doctors called for Roundup to be banned because of the horrific epidemic of disease it had triggered in farming regions. More recently the WHO rated Roundup as a ‘probable carcinogen.’ Within days not a garden centre in Holland or France stocked Roundup.
In their latest financial statement, Monsanto reveals that it is losing $5 million a day. You don’t need a degree in Economics to know that’s not sustainable for very long. Their world seems to be falling apart rather quickly.
In the US, for all the crap about ‘feeding the world’ things are going pear-shaped. 40% of America’s GMO corn gets converted to ethanol to be compulsorily mixed with gasoline, feeding Fords instead of people. The oil industry hates ethanol – they are being squeezed enough by the Saudis without having to compete with subsidised bio-fuel. But without ethanol, half of America’s farms would go bust. Corn prices are currently 50¢ a bushel below break even. Farmers can’t afford to pay inflated prices for Monsanto’s GMO corn and Roundup, so sales are dropping. Roundup-resistant ‘superweeds’ are now infesting half of America’s farms, refusing to die despite a huge increase in herbicide applications and the bringing out of retirement of pesticides like 2,4-D that had been removed from the market because they cause cancer. What an unholy mess.
Monsanto recently ambitiously tried to take over Syngenta, their main competitor, but that deal fell apart – both companies face the awful reality that their R&D isn’t coming up with new products that work – like drug companies they depend on patented medicines to protect inflated profit margins.
In September the New York Times revealed that Monsanto bribes scientists to make claims for GMOs that are unsupported by evidence. Nobody will believe a man in a white coat again who touts the benefits of GMOs without wanting to check his bank account.
In 1999 Patrick Holden and I had a meeting with Hugh Grant (Monsanto’s CEO) and other Monsanto executives under the guidance of the Environment Council, who sought to reconcile our views on GMOs. My notes of the meeting show Patrick and I actually had to explain what organic farming meant. Monsanto had no idea of organic principles and asked us to repeat this as they felt they needed to understand it properly. They knew we opposed GMOs but just thought we were stupid Luddites.
Monsanto is running out of road: hired liars in white coats can’t fool anyone any more; tobacco-style Roundup poisoning lawsuits beckon; farmers can’t afford to pay high prices for seed and chemicals that don’t work; resistant weeds and insects refuse to die; country after country worldwide is declaring itself GM-Free; the demand for labelling of GMOs in the US is reaching a climax and now Wall Street is losing interest in phoney biotech claims.
Genetic engineering was the great hope for industrial agriculture – it would solve all the problems that pesticides and chemical fertilisers had caused. It didn’t happen. Instead, smart companies like Rijk Zwaan in Holland are using genomics to naturally breed stronger, healthier plants than anything from Monsanto or Syngenta.
E F Schumacher wrote: “Modern man…talks of the battle with Nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle he would find himself on the losing side.” Nature’s allies have fought for 20 years against the GMO takeover attempt – let’s hope that we are finally on the winning side.
