Who will control agriculture and knowledge?

• Author: Dorsey, Michael K.
• Position: Biodevastation 7

As the new millennium began, by the end of 2001, the top 10 agrochemical corporations controlled 84% of the $30 billion agrochemical market; the top 10 veterinary pharmaceutical companies controlled 60% of the $13.6 billion world market; and the top 10 pharmaceutical companies controlled an estimated 48% of the $317 billion world market. [1]

Only six corporations control 98% of the world's market in genetically modified crops. [2] The same six firms also control 70% of the world's pesticide market. And 94% of all genetically modified crops grown worldwide were from one company's germplasm: Monsanto's.

What is worrisome is that all six of the aforementioned "life science" firms--in alphabetical order: BASF, Bayer-Aventis, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto and Syngenta--are recidivistic corporate criminals.

Let us take a partial look at the proverbial police blotter ...

BASF. In 1999, the German firm pleaded guilty and paid a $225 million fine for its role in a worldwide antitrust conspiracy to raise and fix prices and allocate market shares for certain vitamins. [3]

Bayer-Aventis. In October 2002 a report listed H.C. Starck (a wholly owned subsidiary of Bayer AG) as the buyer of over 80% of the coltan originating in the Democratic Republic of Congo. [4] By purchasing coltan from one or another of the warring factions in the DRC, H.C. Starck has been fuelling the two-year conflict.

Dow has been surreptitiously involved in the manufacture and illegal dumping of dioxin-laden chemicals for nearly the past half century.

Dupont's subsidiary Pioneer HiBred is the largest seed company in the world. Recently the company and Monsanto decided to share proprietary agricultural biotechnologies. According to Hope Shand, Research Director at the ETC Group, the companies "are being allowed to create global technology cartels that run below the radar screens of anti-trust regulators"--clearly in violation of anti-trust laws. [5] Further, Dupont and other chemical companies have been accused of trying to suppress evidence regarding the severe toxicity of dioxins, hardly surprising given the quantities of these carcinogens they churn out every year.

Monsanto. In 2002 a jury in the State of Alabama found Monsanto Co. guilty of releasing tons of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the city of Anniston and covering up its actions for 40 years. The jury held Monsanto liable on all six criminal counts including outrage. Under Alabama law, the rare crime of "outrage" typically requires conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."

Syngenta. In June 2002, the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) asked the US Environmental Protection Agency to ban the use of atrazine, the most widely used weed-killer in the U.S. NRDC further requested that EPA and the Justice Department launch a criminal investigation of Syngenta, atrazine's principal manufacturer, for allegedly covering up the studies. The studies show that atrazine poses a significant threat to public health. Syngenta also attracted criticism for its continued manufacture and sale of the herbicide paraquat. Workers and farmers regularly exposed to paraquat experience serious ill health, even death.

The nature, extent and recurrence of these crimes underscore the fact that there is something fundamentally and systematically wrong with the "life science" industry as a whole. The fact that...