THE
MONSANTO MACHINE Is Monsanto sowing the seeds of change or destruction?
ILLUSTRATION: PETER TILL
October 1, 1998Dear Mr . . .
You may have heard about recent investigations in your area concerning farmers, or others helping farmers, illegally save and replant patented biotech seed such as Roundup Ready® soybeans. Saving and replanting seed with these patented biotech traits is seed piracy.
Throughout the 1998 growing season, many growers, retailers, seed conditioners and others have communicated their interest in learning what Monsanto is doing regarding seed piracy prevention.
Following a recent seed piracy investigation, David Chaney of Reed, Ky., admitted to illegally saving and replanting Roundup Ready soybeans. Chaney also acknowledged that in return for other goods, he illegally traded the pirated seed with neighbors and an area seed cleaner for the purpose of replanting. All of those involved were implicated when Monsanto made the discovery.
Chaney’s settlement agreement terms include a $35,000 royalty payment as well as full documentation confirming the disposal of his unlawful soybean crop. Chaney, as well as the others involved, will make available all of their soybean production records, including Farm Service Agency/ASCS records, for Monsanto’s inspection over the next five years.
Those involved will also provide full access to all of their property, both owned and leased, for inspections, collection and testing of soybean plants and seeds for the next five years.
Unfortunately, the Chaney case is not an isolated incident. To date, Monsanto has over 425 cases throughout the United States. These cases were generated from over 1,800 leads received from ag chem retailers, seed dealers, growers and others. Over 200 of these cases currently are under investigation. A sampling of some recently settled cases includes the following:
Respecting these patents is more than a matter of avoiding legal risks. It is also a matter of protecting the development of future technologies. Monsanto has invested many years and millions of dollars in biotechnology research to bring your customers new technologies sooner rather than later. When growers save and replant patented seed, there is less incentive for companies to invest in future technologies that will ultimately benefit farmers.
These technologies include seed that produce higher-yielding crops, drought-tolerant crops, crops that are protected against corn rootworm damage, and high-value soybeans that may ultimately be used to produce plastic.
We recognize that the vast majority of farmers, retailers and other agricultural professionals are honest businesspeople. However, in an effort to maintain a level playing field for everyone, Monsanto will continue to enforce its patents with those growers who choose to break the law and pirate seed. If you have any questions regarding seed piracy, simply call 1-800-ROUNDUP. We sincerely appreciate your continuing commitment to proper stewardship of these valuable biotechnology traits.
Yours very truly,
Scott Baucum
Manager, Intellectual Property Protection
Roundup Ready® is a registered trademark of Monsanto Company
THIS LETTER, SENT BY the agrochemical company Monsanto to 30,000 farmers to warn them that saving and replanting seeds from genetically engineered crops constitute “piracy”, appears to be the act of a company on the defensive. But, in truth, it’s a display of corporate sovereignty, Monsanto’s way of staking the flag of empire upon the land.
Thanks to advances in transgenics — inserting a gene from one species into an unrelated organism’s DNA — seeds are now considered “intellectual property”. According to the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), more than one third of the world’s commercial-seed sales are controlled by a handful of corporations. Among them, Monsanto — the world’s third-largest agochemical and second-largest seed company — is the most aggressive.
Monsanto, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in genomics R&D, insists that farmers who save and replant “self-reproducing” transgenic seeds are engaging in copyright infringement. The company requires US farmers to sign a contract forbidding them to save seed; any farmers subsequently caught will have to pay royalties and have their farms inspected for five years.
The planting methods associated with monoculture biotech crops tend to increase susceptibility to weeds and the need for herbicide, which not only threatens the environment but can have the unintended effect of killing the crop plants. Monsanto, however, has turned this drawback of the green revolution into a distinct advantage. After a twelve-year search, Monsanto found a bacterium containing a gene immune to the company’s herbicide Roundup. By introducing this gene into its seeds, Monsanto created crops immune to its own herbicide, ensuring demand for both products. Today, Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds account for at least a fifth of Monsanto’s $8.5 billion annual sales, and the market is growing: in 1996, only 1 million acres of Roundup Ready soy were planted; this year at least half of the US’s 70-million-acre soybean crop will be Roundup Ready. To the price of each bag of soy, Monsanto adds a $6.50 “technology fee”, which will earn the company almost $300 million in soy royalties next year — provided it keeps suing seed-saving farmers.
MONSANTO LIKES TO bill itself as the answer to farmers’ problems and the solution to the world’s food crisis. Although transgenic crop seeds can cost as much as $32 more per bag than old-fashioned varieties, US farmers have proved willing customers as long as the seeds result in higher yields or reduce the need for expensive pesticides and fertilizers. Monsanto’s Bollgard cotton, YieldGard corn and NewLeaf potatoes are engineered to be insect-resistant. And this is only the first wave. In 1997 alone, there were 10,500 patent applications for biotechnology traits.
Notable biologists worry that the lack of crop diversity associated with corporate farming combined with transgenic advances could result in a reprise of the Irish potato famine or the US corn blight of the 1970s. Monsanto calls such fears “fantasies”, but some of its crops have already faced significant problems. In 1996, the company had to recall 60,000 bags of canola seeds that contained an unapproved gene. In 1998, Monsanto had to settle with Mississippi farmers whose Roundup Ready cotton crop suffered from deformed bolls and bolls that fell off early.
A 1998 Nature study found that transgenic traits were twenty times more likely to “flow” to other plants by cross-pollination, which could result in the evolution of weeds that can resist herbicide. Similarly, bugs feeding on the insect-resistant corn, cotton and potatoes — which Monsanto created by splicing a gene from a pest-killing bacterium (Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, normally sprayed over crops) into seeds — could survive and breed progeny resistant to the pesticide, much like the multi-antibiotic-resistant bacteria that plague hospitals.
Just as Monsanto’s products lead to agricultural homogeneity, the company’s policies encourage farmers to act in lockstep — the so-called level playing field referred to in the letter. In 1996, when Monsanto hired five full-time inspectors to hunt down seed pirates, farmers and seed distributors lined up to turn in their competitors and former customers.
“Farmers are being turned into criminals and rural communities are becoming corporate police states,” noted Hope Shand of RAFI. “We call it bioserfdom.” Thus far, Monsanto has investigated at least 500 farmers but won’t disclose the amount of back royalties it has recovered, which it donates to agricultural college scholarship funds. Between 1996 and 1997, Monsanto’s sales of agricultural products increased twenty-two per cent, largely due to a boom in Roundup sales, especially in the US, Brazil and Argentina. Monsanto attributes this increase to several factors, only one of which is the advent of Roundup Ready seeds. Company studies show that Roundup Ready crops require less herbicide, because farmers can wait to see where weeds develop before spraying. But, given the magic bullet of herbicide-resistance, farmers might instead spray more liberally, eliminating weeds that they might otherwise tolerate for fear of damaging their crops. In any case, Roundup Ready seeds are critical to Monsanto’s long-term herbicide sales. The patents protecting glyphosate (Roundup’s active ingredient) expired in various countries in 1991 and will expire in the US in 2000. No patent? No problem! Monsanto requires farmers using Roundup Ready seeds and a glyphosate-based herbicide to sign a contract promising to use only Roundup.
Monsanto once manufactured virtually all the world’s PCBs — as well as Agent Orange. But, these days, “life sciences” are more profitable than chemical weapons, so, in 1997, Monsanto spun off its chemical division and has, since 1996, spent $6 billion acquiring seed companies like Cargill International Seed ($1.4 billion) and DeKalb Genetics ($2.3 billion).
Monsanto’s headquarters is in St. Louis, but the real locus of its power is in Washington, DC, where a revolving door exists between Monsanto’s forty-two lobbyists and us regulatory agencies. In 1992, when the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) wrote its policy on transgenic foods, it ruled that consumer labelling and safety testing were not needed unless the genetic modification altered the nutritional content or posed a known health risk. The policy was written by an FDA deputy commissioner who had worked for Monsanto for seven years, and who does so again. In 1994, when Monsanto introduced Bovine Growth Hormone, the FDA warned retailers not to label milk as being RBGH-free. Studies dispute whether there is a link between RBGH milk and cancer, but Dr. Samuel Epstein of the University of Illinois School of Public Health notes that “with the complicity of the FDA, the entire nation is currently being subjected to an experiment involving large-scale adulteration of an age-old dietary staple.”
Last year, Monsanto (whose board includes former us Trade Representative Mickey Kantor) pressured the US to threaten to cancel a trade agreement with New Zealand when the country said it would test and label transgenic food; direct pressure from Clinton, Gore and four cabinet members also persuaded France to import Monsanto’s corn. The US plans to petition the World Trade Organization if Europe introduces a compulsory labelling system, saying it constitutes a non-tariff trade barrier. Monsanto hired Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg and launched a $1.6 million advertising campaign entitled “Let the Harvest Begin” to convince Europeans that it will solve the world’s food crisis. A UN African delegation called the advertisements “totally distorting and misleading”, and The Ecologist devoted an issue to Monsanto. The magazine’s printer, however, shredded the print run, fearing that the notoriously litigious company would sue for libel.
As seed sales expand beyond US borders, it will be impossible for Monsanto to guard its patents by making spot inspections of fields. So it has found the ultimate protection by moving to acquire Delta & Pine Land, which, along with the USDA, holds the US patent on “Terminator Technology”, a genetic alteration that causes seeds to die after a single season. Biologists worry that were Terminator-type modifications to “flow”, non-transgenic varieties of corn, soy, wheat and rice could eventually become sterile, affording companies like Monsanto the ultimate monopoly.
A longer version of the above article was first published in Harper’s Magazine, April 1999.
Jennifer Kahn is a graduate journalism student at the University of California, Berkeley.
