52 animal, vegetable, miraclebicide Roundup, so that chemicals can be sprayed over the crop. (The
crop stays alive, the weeds die.) If you guessed Monsanto controls sales
of both the resistant seed and the Roundup, give yourself a star. If you
think you’d never eat such stuff, you’re probably wrong. GM plants are
virtually everywhere in the U.S. food chain, but don’t have to be labeled,
and aren’t. Industry lobbyists intend to keep it that way.
Monsanto sells many package deals of codependent seeds and chemi-
cals, including so-called traitor technologies in which a crop’s disease re-
sistance relies on many engineered genes resting in its tissues—genes
that can only be turned on, as each disease arises, by the right chemical
purchased from Monsanto.
It’s hardly possible to exaggerate the cynicism of this industry. In inter-
nal reports, Monsanto notes “growers who save seed from one year to the
next” as significant competitors, and allocates a $10 million budget for
investigating and prosecuting seed savers. Agribusinesses can patent
plant varieties for the purpose of removing them from production (Semi-
nis dropped 25 percent of its total product line in one recent year, as a
“cost-cutting measure”), leaving farmers with fewer options each year.
The same is true for home gardeners, who rarely suspect when placing
seed orders from Johnny’s, Territorial, Nichols, Stokes, and dozens of
other catalogs that they’re likely buying from Monsanto. In its 2005 an-
nual report, Monsanto describes its creation of American Seeds Inc. as a
licensing channel that “allows us to marry our technology with the high-
touch, local face of regional seed companies.” The marriage got a whop-
ping dowry that year when Monsanto acquired Seminis, a company that
already controlled about 40 percent of the U.S. vegetable seed market.
Garden seed inventories show that while about 5,000 nonhybrid vegeta-
ble varieties were available from catalogs in 1981, the number in 1998
was down to 600.
Jack Harlan, a twentieth- century plant geneticist and author of the
classic Crops and Man, wrote about the loss of genetic diversity in no un-
certain terms: “These resources stand between us and catastrophic star-
vation on a scale we cannot imagine.... The line between abundance
and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner.”