Monsanto U: Agribusiness's Takeover of Public Schools

By Nancy Scola, AlterNet. Posted February 15, 2008.

I've startled a bug scientist. "Yeah, now I'm nervous," said Mike Hoffmann, a Cornell University entomologist and crop specialist who spends his days with cucumber beetles and small wasps. But he's also in charge of keeping the research funding flowing at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. What have I done to alarm him? I've drawn his attention to the newly released FY 2009 Presidential Budget.

Like more than a hundred public institutions of higher learning, Cornell is what's known as a "land grant." Dotting the United States from Ithaca, N.Y., to Pullman, Wash., such schools were established by a Civil War-era act of Congress to provide universities centered around, "the agriculture and mechanic arts." Congress handed each U.S. state a chunk of federal land to be sold for start-up monies, and for the last 150 years, it has funded ground-breaking research on all things agriculture, from dirt to crops to cattle.

The land-grant system has been, in short, a high-yield investment. The scientific research that has come out of land-grant labs and fields have aided millions of farmers and fed millions of Americans. And the land-grant reach doesn't stop at ocean's edge. Oklahoma State, the Sooner State's land grant, says that the public funding of land-grant research "has benefited every man, woman and child in the United States and much of the world."

That was until America's land-grant system met George W. Bush. Tucked into the appendix of his latest national budget is a nearly one-third cut in the public funding for agriculture research at the land grants. The size of the cut is surprising, but not its existence -- it's part of a multiyear drive by the Bush administration to completely eliminate regular public research funding. In a press briefing last week, a USDA deputy secretary illuminated the Bush administration's rationale for the transition to competitive grant making: "That's how you get the most bang for the buck."

Wallace Huffman, an Iowa State agro-economist, is deeply unimpressed with Bush's "bang" approach to land-grant research. "There's a sense in the president's office that you invest in research like you invest in building cars," Huffman told me last week. Land-grant school officials are similarly skeptical. In a survey, Kansas State argued that the loss of regular funding would upend education. Minnesota complained that cuts would undermine ongoing research projects. North Dakota simply asked, "What is the future of ag research?"

Good question. A reasonable answer? The future of agricultural research at America's land-grant institutions belongs to biotech conglomerates like Monsanto. And it seems likely that it's a future of chemical-dependent, genetically modified, bio-engineered agriculture.

In stark contrast to how the federal government and many states are wallowing in red ink, the St. Louis-based Monsanto boasted more than $7 billion in annual sales in 2007 -- simply the latest in four years of record-smashing profits. And so when our president says that the time has come for public land-grant institutions to get cracking at "leveraging nonfederal resources," you can be sure that Monsanto's ears perk.

But, it doesn't take a presidential invitation to get Monsanto to sink its roots in the land-grant system. Those roots are already planted. Iowa State's campus boasts a Monsanto Auditorium and the school offers students Monsanto-funded graduate fellowships on seed policy with a special focus on "the protection of intellectual property rights." Kansas State has spun off Wildcat Genetics, a side company whose purpose is the selling of soybean seeds genetically engineered to survive the application of Roundup® -- the result of a decades long relationship with Monsanto, the pesticide's maker.

But don't get the wrong idea about Monsanto's land-grant activities. By that, I mean, don't think the company is the only multinational biotech conglomerate firmly rooted in American land-grant soil.

Head on down to Texas A&M. There you'll find the a chair for the "Dow Chemical Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering." Similar chairs exist at West Virginia State and Louisiana State. The agricultural college of the University of California at Davis is funded in part by DuPont and Calgene.

The University of California at Berkeley's Plant and Microbiology Department entered into a $25 million/five-year quasi-exclusive research agreement with the Swiss-based Novartis, which then became Syngenta, which now funds the land-grant research group on soybean fungi. In 2005, Purdue, Indiana's land-grant school, developed an application of the so-called Terminator gene pioneered by Delta Pine and Land Co.; school officials and researchers later took to the hustings when the public resisted the idea of self-sterilizing plants.

But the agricultural industry's relationship with the land-grant system is not an entirely new development. In 1973, former Texas agricultural commissioner and activist Jim Hightower lamented the situation in his landmark report, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: The Failure of America's Land Grant College Complex.

But the world of agriculture is today a far, far different place than when Hightower wrote.

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Nancy Scola is a Brooklyn-based writer who has in the past served as the chief blogger at Air America, an aide to former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, as he explored a run for the presidency, and a congressional staffer on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

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