THE BAD SEED
Profiteers tamper with world food harvest
By John
Catalinotto
Delta and Pine Land, Monsanto and other agriculture
monopolies would like to make the gifts of nature a relic of
the past.
If this sounds like an exaggeration, a look at recent
developments within the agriculture-biochemical complex will
bear it out, while bringing into sharp contrast the growing
contradiction between agricultural technology and its private
appropriation--that is, capitalist agriculture.
Scientists working for Monsanto, to give but one example,
have developed what the company calls "genetically enhanced"
soybean and cotton seeds. According to the company, the
resultant plants yield higher crops, resist drought better,
resist damage from pests like rootworms, and may even improve
the component parts of the yield--for example, by modifying the
oil or bran of the crops.
But these beneficial changes also may bring a threat to
overall food production and to plant ecology. And they are
already having dire economic and social consequences.
Patented life forms
Monsanto has had problems with its new technology. For
example, rival monopolies can simply steal its new seeds. So it
has resorted to the usual capitalist solution. The supposedly
new seeds were simply patented like any other new gadget,
although in this case they were supposedly new life forms.
But the monopolies have another problem. Farmers might buy
their "genetically enhanced" seeds once, and then simply save
some of the seeds from the crop to plant again the next
year.
Ever since humanity developed agriculture, this is how
people have obtained seeds for the next year's planting.
But this tradition conflicts with profits. So the capitalist
monopolies are doing what they always do to alter the
traditional order. They get the laws adjusted in their favor,
redefine the tradition as a crime, and look to the capitalist
state to enforce the new morality.
In Monsanto's case it made farmers sign contracts forbidding
them from using the seeds they bought to produce next year's
seeds. Monsanto calls that "pirated" seed.
On Sept. 29, 1998, Monsanto published a news release
announcing its had won suits against, among others, David
Chaney of Reed, Ky., for $35,000, a Ringgold County, Iowa,
farmer for $16,000, a father and son in Edwards County, Ill.,
for $15,000 and a farmer from Christian County, Ill., for
$10,000.
Besides paying "royalties" to Monsanto, the farmers have to
provide "full access to all their property, both owned and
leased, for inspections, collection and testing of soybean
plants and seed for the next five years."
Monsanto said in the release that it had "more than 475 seed
piracy cases nationwide, generated from over 1,800 leads."
The company apparently wanted to publicize these cases to
discourage other farmers from doing what came naturally. Almost
anyone--except investors in corporate intellectual
property--would sympathize with the farmers, not with
Monsanto.
So how will the company enforce these contracts?
Monsanto needs to enforce these laws worldwide, operating as
it does in hundreds of countries.
One can just imagine the board of directors discussing the
practicality of sending Marines into central Brazil because the
peasants have been "pirating" seed from their own crops. What a
crime!
As likely as not, the patented seed was itself "pirated" by
Monsanto from Indigenous people, who have nurtured many food
plants for hundreds of generations. The monopoly's only
contribution was to give it a name and number for the patent
office.
Sterilizing seeds for profit
So in March 1998 the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the
Delta and Pine Land Co. announced they had jointly developed
and received a patent on a new technology. Delta and Pine,
located in Mississippi, is the largest cotton seed company in
the world.
The patent, titled "Control of Plant Gene Expression,"
allows its owners and licensees to create sterile seed by
programming a plant's DNA to kill its own embryos.
No more suits. No appeals to the sheriff. No need to call in
the Marines. The sterile seeds are self-enforcing.
A farmer in Iowa or a peasant in Brazil or Indonesia or
Central Africa who can't afford to buy next year's seeds from
Delta and Pine--which, by the way, applied for patents on this
same technology in 78 countries in 1998--is just out of luck.
Because if farmers do try to save this year's seed for next
year's planting, nothing at all will come up. They and their
families will go hungry.
Nine weeks after Delta and Pine announced its "terminator
technology," Monsanto purchased the Mississippi company and
wound up with an 85 percent share of the U.S. cotton seed
market. At that time Monsanto was also the dominant monopoly in
the corn market.
Monsanto itself was acquired in 1998 by the American Home
Products Corp. for $33.9 billion in stock. AHP is a collection
of companies that include American Cyanamid, Cyamid
Agricultural Products, Wyeth Ayerst and others. It is the
third-largest company in the U.S. in herbicides, insecticides
and fungicides. With Monsanto, the combined companies become
the largest agricultural-biochemical monopoly in the world.
As this mega-monopoly and its competitors push for profits,
genetically altered seeds--and sterile seeds--can be spread to
much of the world. This means accelerating the trend toward
large-scale agriculture and a dependence on the imperialist
monopolies for the world's food supply in even the poorest
nations. It threatens to wipe out small-farmer and Indigenous
economies.
Threat to the world's crops
Environmental scientists have described a possible threat to
the world's food and other cash crops that goes even beyond
destroying the cultures that live from small-farm planting.
As more vast areas of the world are planted with sterilized
designer seeds, it is likely that the natural means by which
plants are fertilized--through bees, butterflies, and so
on--will also spread the sterile seeds outside the planted
areas, spreading the scourge to plants in the entire
region.
The combination of monopolization of agriculture with the
use of only one or two varieties of seeds also threatens crop
failures of enormous scale once pests themselves evolve to
overcome the resistant plant. Shortages can be worldwide.
Many serious environmentalists are doing their best to
disseminate information about these new threats and to combat
them. They have decried the greed of transnational food
corporations like AHP and appealed to the good sense of other
scientists and the general public.
But the drive for capitalist profit does not yield to good
sense and warnings of future dangers. It is the private
ownership of food production itself that is the source of
danger.
Greed is a natural byproduct of capitalism, not an excess,
and it won't be removed by genetic manipulation any more than
by appeals to conscience.
Anyone wanting to end the danger to the environment from
agribusiness will have to direct their struggle at the
source--private ownership of food production and the capitalist
system itself.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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