8 Steps the Department of Justice Could Take to Reform Farming

On Friday in an unprecedented move with the USDA, the Department of Justice will launch an investigation into the farm business. The investigation begins a seven-state probe into Monsanto's treatment of our nation's farmers.

I recently had the honor of presenting for our nation’s top-producing farmers in Chicago at the Top Producer Seminar, sponsored by Cargill and Pioneer. I was scheduled to present with Monsanto’s VP of Sustainable Yield, but a few days before the presentation I was told he had moved to China and there was no one to take his place. I had the privilege of spending the afternoon in an incredibly insightful discussion with the farmers, many of them Monsanto’s customers, who are remarkable parents, grandparents and businesspeople.

As I entered the presentation room, I was greeted with "Welcome to the Lions' Den." As I found the courage to take the stage, I told the audience that according to the USDA, farm income was down 35 percent in 2009. I then shared that Monsanto is reporting, in forward-looking statements to Wall Street analysts based on projected sales they have asked for from the farmers, that Monsanto is expecting gross margins in Q2 2010 of 62 percent and that it is expecting to drive up the price mix of its products, corn and soy, by 8-10 percent. I also shared that according to these forward-looking statements, Monsanto expects to expand its glyphosate revenue to an estimated $1 billion in gross profit by 2012, further enabling Monsanto to drive R&D into seeds and to price those seeds at a premium -- further driving price increases on the farm.

And then I listened.

What I learned from these remarkable men and women is simply jaw-dropping.

Due to Monsanto’s contracts with seed companies, farmers are now bound by the threat of lawsuits if they speak out regarding farm practices. As third- and fourth-generation farmers, inheriting their grandparents' lands, their corn crops are no longer regulated by the FDA but by the EPA due to the insecticidal proteins they now contain, and they are subject to rising, unregulated costs never before seen in farming -- contractual fees, trait fees, licensing fees and royalty fees and germ plasm fees associated with technology that has been engineered into seeds designed to enhance Monsanto's bottom line.

As I listened to the farmers and learned about their trade practices, I could not help but think of AT&T and the Bell System, which for years functioned as a regulated monopoly until an antitrust investigation resulted in its break-up. The practices employed by Monsanto on the farms rival the fee structure the phone company once had in place.

As our dialogue grew, we learned that together, we could affect remarkable change.

In collaboration with our nation's leading farmers to address the patents, licenses and royalties fees now being engineered into our food supply designed to enhance the profitability of the world's largest agrichemical corporation, here are eight steps the USDA and the Department of Justice could take to address the financial impact these practices are having on the farm:

1. As was done with AT&T, re-establish Monsanto and its subsidiaries into separate companies; separating the germ plasm and technology divisions into independent entities.

2. Establish precedence that these newly established entities do not collect trait fees, royalty fees, licensing fees or other forms of income from each other, then they should not be allowed to collect these tech fees from the independent companies.

3. Have Monsanto refund the money collected from the independent seed companies as retribution for the fact that the same fees were not charged to their partners and subsidiaries.

4. Require that all companies (Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, etc.) supply genetically treated and untreated seeds and technology to the public in order to give the farmers a free market from which to choose how much the farmer wants to spend on a bag of corn or beans given that the current practice involves the blending of the best genetics into melting stock corns, so the companies can harvest more profit.

• 1
• 2
• Next page »

View as a single page