Seed Industry

The seed industry is dominated by a monopoly of multinational corporations that control the majority production and distribution of seed crops. The top 10 seed companies in the world in 2006 accounted for more than half of the commercial seed market worldwide. Many of these corporations also dominate the combined pesticide, food, pharmaceutical, and veterinary product industries, satisfying every aspect of the commodified agricultural industry. Such aggregate companies include the world's top three: Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta. Monsanto is the largest and most powerful of these corporations, proclaimed in 2007 to be the world's number one ranking agrochemical firm and the world's largest seed company, alone accounting for 20 percent of the world's commercial seed market. Vandana Shiva, physicist, ecologist, and activist, points out that this global corporate domination of the seed industry favors the rich while endangering the livelihoods of the poor. This monopoly also diminishes global food biodiversity and security—in 2002, 90 percent of the world's food supply was estimated to come from only 15 species of crop plants and 8 species of livestock among the estimated 10 million species of plants and animals in the world.

The history of the seed industry builds from seed existing in the public domain in the 19th century to the Green Revolution of the 1960s to increased commoditization and the implementation of global trade policies. In the 1800s, seed in the United States was sourced from a few seed catalogues or peddlers, through farmer seed saving and exchange, or through support of the government, which established research stations to develop and distribute quality seed to farmers. Influenced by the rediscovery of Mendel's work in 1900, farmers learnt to read “good” seeds by considering both their visible qualities and invisible hereditary composition. However, some groups believed government research was hindering the seed industry's advancement and lobbied for change. The development of hybrid seed in corn in the 1910s through the 1930s spawned the nascent seed industry. Since hybrid seed does not breed true, farmers had to purchase new seed every year. Future Vice President Henry Wallace founded Pioneer Hi-Bred in the 1920s and today it is the second largest hybrid seed producer, owned by Dupont. Hybrid seeds were quickly accepted —90 percent of corn planted in the United States by 1945 was hybrid. The green revolution emerged in the latter half on the 20th century based on the assumptions that technology was a superior substitute for nature and that by using a combination of high-yielding variety crops with high commodity potential inputs, such as artificial fertilizers and pesticides, [Page 389]soil could be reconditioned to grow the same crop in large quantities in different locations. This process favored high commodity inputs over low commodity potential, such as traditional agricultural practices that require increased chemical inputs, technologies, and financial investment. The transition from heirloom to hybrid seeds further commoditized agriculture, producing goods suitable for sale on the world market. Thus, the green revolution replaced local biodiversity with the large-scale production of monocrops.

Global trade policies, such as the World Trade Organization's Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, were introduced as a result of the argument that increased globalization of the economy without sufficient patent systems was acting as a barrier to trade. The concept of patents, a form of intellectual property, was originally introduced to encourage people to invest time, money, and energy in the innovation process while protecting them from theft. In exchange for this protection, creative work would be made public to benefit society. However, corporations concerned with securing patents to protect economic profits could be threatened by local companies producing cheap imitations. These patents thus restricted local innovation of plant breeding, and hence severely limited seed biodiversity. This change in patent protection was predicated on previous changes led by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity and Plant Breeders Rights, which were originally introduced to protect seed biodiversity. However, the Union for the Protection of Plant Varieties, which previously prohibited the production, reproduction, or offering of material from seed without authorization from the plant variety owner, was revised in 1991, changing the concept of “novelty” from physical novelty to commercial novelty. This new definition meant that a plant is novel only if it has not been previously marketed, making Plant Breeders Rights ineffectual in defending farmers’ rights to save the seed of their crops. The emergent result extended the corporations’ ability to lock countries into bilateral and pluri-lateral treaties requiring them either to patent plants and animals, to join Union for the Protection of Plant Varieties, or to provide legal protection for biotechnological inventions. These treaties favor corporations, who own the technologies to patent.

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