November 29, 2009 in Nation/World

Monsanto draws antitrust scrutiny

Rival company says patented seeds stifle competition

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For plants designed in a lab a little more than a decade ago, they’ve come a long way: Today, the vast majority of the nation’s two primary crops grow from seeds genetically altered according to Monsanto company patents.

Ninety-three percent of soybeans. Eighty percent of corn.

The seeds represent “probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years,” said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.

But for farmers such as Lowe, prices of the Monsanto-patented seeds have steadily increased, roughly doubling during the past decade, to about $50 for a 50-pound bag of soybean seed, according to seed dealers.

The revolution, and Monsanto’s dominant role in the nation’s agriculture, has not unfolded without complaint. Farmers have decried the price increases, and competitors say the company has ruthlessly stifled competition.

Now Monsanto – like IBM and Google – has drawn scrutiny from U.S. antitrust investigators, who under the Obama administration have looked more skeptically at the actions of dominant firms.

During the Bush administration, the Justice Department did not file a single case under antimonopoly laws regulating a dominant firm. But that stretch seems unlikely to continue.

This year, the Obama Justice Department tossed out the antitrust guidelines of its predecessor because they advocated “extreme hesitancy in the face of potential abuses by monopoly firms.”

Of all the new scrutiny by Justice, the Monsanto investigation might have the highest stakes, dealing as it does with the food supply and one of the nation’s largest agricultural firms.

Monsanto says it has done nothing wrong.

“Farmers choose these products because of the value they deliver on farm,” Monsanto said in a statement.

Even with the growing cost, farmers have embraced the genetic modifications because they save work and enable them to cultivate more land. The modified plants can stand up to the powerful herbicide glyphosate, best known commercially as Roundup, allowing them to use the weed killer not just before planting but also after the crops have come up.

“Everybody wants it, and Monsanto is seeing what the market will bear,” said Lowe, 39. “People say that’s capitalism. The question is, where does capitalism meet corruption?”

Before it jumped into biotechnology, Monsanto was already one of the nation’s largest chemical companies and had patented glyphosate, bringing it to market as Roundup in the ’70s.

If there was a practical drawback with Roundup, it was that it couldn’t be used after planting: Applying Roundup at that point would kill the crops, too.

Scientists wondered: Could they develop plants that could withstand Roundup?

The answer emerged, partly by accident, out of Louisiana muck.

Monsanto was producing Roundup at a plant in Luling, La., and the water and sludge in the waste ponds around the plant were exposed to the chemical. It was the perfect place to find organisms that could withstand the chemical’s lethal effects.

After bacteria discovered in the pond sludge proved resistant to the chemical, scientists isolated the gene that gave the bacteria Roundup tolerance and placed that gene, known as CPS4, into soybeans, then corn.

The resulting plants, called “Roundup Ready,” represented a billion-dollar breakthrough.

Although farmers have grumbled about Monsanto’s regular price increases for Roundup Ready technology for seeds, it is DuPont, a Monsanto rival, that has pressed the antitrust case.

In court papers, DuPont argues that Monsanto has used the dominance of the Roundup Ready brand to prevent competitors from bringing innovations to market.

In its view, Roundup Ready is so popular that any new biotech innovations must be designed to work with Monsanto’s technology. But Monsanto effectively freezes out the competition, it says, by making it difficult for other companies to win a license to add their traits to Monsanto-patented seeds.

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  schleufer on November 29 at 4:45 a.m.

  the book omnivores dillema really does a great job explaining the problems from the farms to your plate. the modified seeds do produce alot more per acre so if you want to stay in business you have to buy these seeds, they keep raising the cost so the company sucks up the profits and then the farmers rely on tax payer farm subsidies to stay in business.

  if you read that book i doubt you will ever look at an ear of corn or T bone steak the same way again. just before processing the cows are sent to huge feed lots where they are fed corn to fatten them up, cows are grass eaters so the corn gasses them up to a point where they can die from it and it causes acid in the stomach they normally dont get from eating grass and the acid eats through the stomach lining and gets into the blood stream where by the time the cows are butchered the cows liver is full of tumors from the acid. even the fat in the steak is different from the modified corn than if it had fed naturally on grass.

  the manure in the lots are full of anti biotics, fertilizer and pesticides so when the rains come this all washes down stream and gets into the water supplies. blue baby alerts go out as this causes problems with blood carrying oxygen so kids turn blue. this is alot bigger problem than the price of seeds on the farm.

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