Seed behemoth Monsanto stumbles into antitrust trouble | Grist

Seed behemoth Monsanto stumbles into antitrust trouble | Grist
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Even as it bombards the airwaves and magazine ad pages to tout its commitment to “sustainable agriculture,” GMO seed giant Monsanto has been having a rough go on the PR front of late.

First came a report (PDF) from the Organic Center showing that the company’s core Round Up Ready products have sparked a veritable monsoon of herbicide use. According to the report, since the introduction of “herbicide tolerant” corn, soy, and cotton in 1996, farmers have sprayed 382.6 million more pounds of herbicides than they otherwise would have—the overwhelming bulk of it Monsanto’s “Roundup” brand glyphosate.

And the gusher is only growing larger. As farmers have come to increasingly rely on Roundup applications, glyphosate-resistant superweeds are spreading—inspiring farmers to both spray more Roundup and add other toxic chemicals to create herbicide cocktails. “Herbicide use on [herbicide-tolerant] crops rose a remarkable 31.4% from 2007 to 2008,” the report states.

Now that’s sustainable agriculture!

Meanwhile, Monsanto’s dominance over the GMO seed market—and thus over U.S. corn, soy, and cotton production—has become so intense and obvious that “U.S. Department of Justice lawyers are seeking documents and interviewing company employees about its marketing practices,” AP reports.

The DOJ is also gearing up for a public workshop on competition in the seed industry, to be held in Iowa next March 10. The workshops, designed to hear farmer concerns over consolidation in the agriculture industry, will be co-directed by the Department of Agriculture. If U.S. authorities actually did crack down on companies that use their market power to squeeze farmers, it would would mark an epochal shift in antitrust policy, as Barry C. Lynn shows in this classic 2006 Harper’s essay.

Monsanto execs better hope that DOJ lawyers don’t get their paws on a devastating recent report (PDF) from the Farmer-to-Farmer Campaign of Genetic Engineering.

The report establishes two facts that would, under any reasonable criteria, force the DOJ to take antitrust action: 1) Monsanto utterly dominates the market for GM traits in corn, soy, and cotton; and 2) it is using its market power to raise prices to farmers and limit their access to non-GM seeds.

To make a long story short, Monsanto supplies proprietary traits to 85 percent of corn planted in the United States, and 92 percent of soy. Corn and soy are the lifeblood of the U.S. food system. If you eat a standard diet, you’re ingesting a Monsanto-originated product with just about every bite you take.

Nor is the company a benign monopolist, the report shows. GMO corn seeds have jumped from $110 per unit in 1999 to upwards of $190 by 2008; for soy, prices soared from less than $25 to more than $40. A huge portion of those jumps can be explained by the so-called “technology fee”—the price Monsanto charges for its proprietary traits. For Roundup Ready soy, the fee has tripled since 2000. As the report puts it:

This means a farmer who plants one bag of Roundup Ready soybeans per acre on 1,000 acres of soybeans has seen his production costs rise by $11,000 in five years due to the trait price increase alone.

Microsoft, in all of its ‘90s-era brazenness, never dreamt of such price hikes for operating system software ...