Farming's new feudalism: Percy Schmeiser and other casualties of industrial agriculture's drive to own it all.

• Author: Schubert, Robert

Like thousands of others in southern Germany in the late 19th century, Karl and Anna Schmeiser worked long, hard days farming a baron's vast tracts of land to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. The baron owned the land, the draft animals, the equipment, and most of the crop--more or less as barons before him had since the Middle Ages. Also like thousands, Karl and Anna dreamed of a better life, and in 1890 they scraped together every last pfennig and left Germany forever, taking ship to the United States. Seeking cheap land and independence, they eventually moved northward to the prairies of western Canada, settling in Saskatchewan in 1904.

A century later, the land is no longer so cheap. The independence Karl and Anna found is threatened too, as grandson Percy Schmeiser and his wife Louise discovered in 1998. That's when Monsanto Corporation sued them after their canola seed was found to contain the company's patented, herbicide-resistant genes.*

The case generated worldwide headlines, and an uncertain future for many farmers. Although the Schmeisers ultimately didn't have to pay Monsanto, the courts did find them guilty of patent infringement. The fact that a transnational corporation would persecute small farmers is troubling to many, and shows the depth and breadth of a decades-long transformation: the steady erosion of farmers' practice of developing and saving seeds. "Neither I nor my parents or grandparents ever envisioned farmers losing control of their seed," Schmeiser says.

Moreover, that's just the tip of the canola stalk. The privatization of seed is but one part of the steady consolidation of economic power throughout agriculture. Large agro-industrial and retail corporations have now secured toeholds in every phase of the farming cycle: they own seed and seed patents, they control processing facilities, they dominate the retail sector, and they have even moved into financing farmers' operations. It's as if the barons have arisen from the grave and brought the old feudal system back with them. The corporations that control poultry and hog farming have already reduced many livestock farmers to contract labor, and grain farmers like Percy Schmeiser seem headed for the same fate.

Patenting Profits

Until recently in its 10,000-year history, agriculture was more a way of life than an industry. Farmers were the seed producers and the guardians of societies' crop heritage. But by the early 1900s, the U.S. and Canadian governments began promoting the development of large export-oriented agriculture industries based on only a few crops and livestock species. To maximize uniformity and yields, seed breeding moved off the farm and into centralized public research centers, such as U.S. land grant universities. Variety development became commodity-oriented.

Scientific advances in the 1970s and '80s heralded a new era in agriculture. To boost flat sales, Monsanto and other agrichemical companies ventured into genetic engineering and transformed themselves into the biotechnology industry. They bought out traditional seed companies and engineered their herbicide-resistant genes into the newly acquired seed lines. Although the lower-cost, traditional seed lines simultaneously became less available, to maximize profits the industry needed farmers to buy new seed every year instead of saving it.

This was a new arrangement. In the past, the public institutions in North America that bred seed varieties enjoyed a measure of intellectual property protection under the U.S. Plant Variety Protection Act or Canada's Plant Breeders' Rights Act. The institutions licensed companies to sell the seed to farmers and usually claimed a royalty. Farmers were permitted to save successive generations of seed for planting on their own farms. Arguably, this was a fairer system, but hardly profitable for a multinational biotechnology industry busy absorbing seed companies.

Patents changed this relationship. When coupled with contracts that enforced the patent rights, they provided the means of legal control over seeds needed to increase profits. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office began issuing patents for genetically modified organisms, and later for seeds, in the 1980s and has granted more than 2,000 (for both genetically modified and conventional varieties) since 1985. Monsanto and the other companies' aim, according to Devlin Kuyek, a researcher with the NGO Genetic Resources Action International, was "proprietary control of seeds as a way to build new markets and secure their positions in a restructured global agri-food system." That transition could only be fully realized through commodifying seed, "the use of biological means, such as genetic engineering, and social means, such...