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TODAY Monday 28 April 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
newsroom
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TODAY Monday 28 April 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Mighty Monsanto
Monsanto, the St. Louis company listed under "chemical giant" in the journalist cliche book, is metamorphisizing into an agricultural giant. While the firm sells off its industrial-product divisions, it throws vast resources of money and research into all stages of food production. Under its own name or through corporations in which it has a controlling interest, Monsanto now runs farms, creates and sells new kinds of seeds, and creates and sells pesticides and herbicides for which the seeds were designed in the first place.
This integration is scaring competitors. Last month Pioneer Hi-Bred, the nation's largest seed producer, filed a breach-of-contract suit against Monsanto in a federal court in Wisconsin. The court papers revealed that, according to Pioneer, Monsanto tried to take it over a couple of years ago. The offer was informal but spurned, says Pioneer; right afterwards, the Monsanto-controlled DeKalb Genetics Corporation filed what became a series of biotechnology patent-infringement suits against Pioneer. Pioneer's decision to seek revenge in Wisconsin, says the Wall Street Journal, is probably related to Monsanto's public-relations problems in the Cheesehead State because of its marketing of artificial bovine growth hormones (more milk per cow, more antibiotics per cow, fewer farms).
It makes sense for Monsanto to want to expand its position in the seed business because then it finds a ready receptacle for the biotechnology traits developed in its laboratories. All farmers buy seeds, and more and more do farmers around the world buy the exact same kind of seeds. And if those seeds are designed to be used with certain kinds of ag chemicals (made by Monanto) ... well, you can appreciate the logic.
The Pioneer attempt to stem the Monsanto tide occurs at a boom time for big food producers, especially in export markets. The Economist's food price index is 20% higher now than it was at the beginning of the year. And while that's good news for a corn farmer in Illinois, it's now important news for the world's financial markets. Agriculture, once paradigmatically local in terms of ownership and sales, is now increasingly global in both. Yesterday's New York Times featured a full-page ad protesting the substandard wages paid to California strawberry pickers on farms owned by the company formerly known as chemical giant.
These centralizing tendencies are worrisome, of course, to those who value the local, the diverse, the idiosyncratic. If farms are now units of a vertically-integrated global enterprise, enthusiasts for those values have lost their traditional grounding and constituency. And politics and culture aside, there is also a fundamental ecological issue at stake: will the genetic variety of food plants be dramatically impoverished? What happens to local seed strains not so productive (in the short term, at least) as the new laboratory models? Are we endangering a complicated and resilient natural inheritence in favor of an attractive mutant with unsuspected frailities and susceptibilities? It may turn out that the danger of biotech was not its tendency to produce scary monsters but its tendency to rob nature and society of their margins for error.
TODAY ON THE SITE
It's Monday, which means we introduce some new features to the Newsroom section of the site. Into the archives (but still easily available) go Marty Strange and Bill McKibben. And into the limelight step Terry Tempest Williams and Hibernicus. She applies passion, intelligence, and eloquence to the question of what constitutes wildness, and why we need it. He talks political hardball and speculates on what lies ahead for Al Gore. We like both approaches and both writers, and we're delighted to have them.
4/16: Coca-Cola and the Merrit Parkway
4/17: Our White Guy Problem
4/18: Victims of Extremism
4/21: Toyota Steps Out
4/22: Doorman Ecology
4/23: The Day the Earth Day Stood Still
4/24: Refrigerator Wars