Untitled Document
On an unseasonably cold afternoon in early May, Paul
Rasgorshek is making the rounds of his farm, some 3,000 acres perched in
the lava-rimmed country on the edge of the Snake River, near Nampa, Idaho.
Wet clouds scud out of the Owyhee Mountains, and from behind the wheel of
his pickup Rasgorshek juggles the two-way radio and the cell phone that he
uses to coordinate the farm’s 17 employees. Then he eases the truck
to a stop to take a close look at the future of farming. A field of new alfalfa plants poke up green and lush from the rough
ground, surrounded by what Rasgorshek, with the slightest trace of a
savoring grin, calls “the dead carcasses” of freshly killed
weeds. Farmers here can typically get about three good years out of their
alfalfa fields before weeds begin taking over — then they often use
an herbicide called Roundup to “take out” the alfalfa and clear
the field for another crop. Roundup is a potent plant killer, but the alfalfa in
Rasgorshek’s field has been genetically engineered to be immune to
the herbicide. That feat of agricultural alchemy allows farmers to spray
their fields without damaging the crop itself. “It’s just
amazing that you can spray something over the top of the alfalfa, and it
doesn’t kill it,” Rasgorshek says. Behind this revolution in farming is Monsanto, the
storied St. Louis-based chemical company. Monsanto not only manufactures
Roundup but has also genetically engineered a Roundup-resistant gene into
the alfalfa that Rasgorshek began growing three years ago. Today
“Roundup Ready” alfalfa is planted on some 220,000 acres
nationwide, and Rasgorshek is an unapologetic genetic-engineering loyalist.
“In today’s agriculture, if you just sit back you’re not
gonna survive,” he says. “If you don’t change with the
times, you’re gonna go down.”
Yet Rasgorshek is growing what is at least
temporarily an illegal substance. On May 3, a federal district judge banned
the sale or planting of Roundup Ready alfalfa until the U.S. Department of
Agriculture has issued a full environmental-impact statement on the crop.
It is the first time such a rigorous review has ever been required of a
genetically modified crop, and the ruling could have significant
implications for all such crops, which now cover the vast majority of the
nation’s farmland.
Over the past decade, genetic engineering has
profoundly transformed American agriculture. Monsanto stands at the
forefront of that endeavor. Today, roughly half of the U.S. corn crop,
three quarters of the cotton, and 85 percent of the soybeans are
genetically modified in some way. Alfalfa — the favored fare of dairy cows, beef
cattle, and health nuts — is an unlikely flashpoint for the
controversy over genetically modified crops, yet the legal fight over
Roundup Ready alfalfa attests to just how far Monsanto’s massive
foray into crop genetics has reached — and it is just one piece of a
pair of larger, interrelated controversies in which the company is now
entangled. One centers on the environmental impact of genetically
modified crops. Evidence is mounting that such crops, which were introduced
after undergoing only cursory review, have led to the appearance of
“superweeds” that have themselves mutated to survive Roundup
herbicide and threaten to impose new costs on farmers and the environment
— and, although the long-term human health implications of those
transformed crops are still not understood, there are reports that
Monsanto’s proprietary genes have contaminated traditional and
organic crops, transforming the very nature of the food we eat. But Monsanto is also embroiled in a second
controversy. The company has intervened not only in the genetic
architecture of the nation’s food and feed crops but in the very
business of American farming itself. Monsanto now faces mounting legal
challenges from its seed-growing competitors. It appears that the saga of
Roundup Ready crops is ultimately less about genetic manipulation than
about corporate power. Through a comprehensive scheme of takeovers,
acquisitions, and alleged strong-arming of competition, Monsanto is
building an empire. Along the way, it seems to be erasing the line between
what is genetically engineered and what is not.
The active ingredient in Roundup is a chemical called
glyphosate. First introduced in 1976, the herbicide is, unlike earlier
generations of pesticides, relatively safe because it targets a metabolic
pathway found in plants but not animals. Monsanto’s patent for the
chemical gave it de facto monopoly control over the glyphosate market, and
in 2000 half of Monsanto’s $5.5 billion in sales came from Roundup.
But the patent was about to expire, opening the door for other companies to
start manufacturing and selling glyphosate themselves. Four years earlier, however, Monsanto unveiled the
first in its stable of Roundup Ready crops, which promised the company a
way to maintain its lock on the glyphosate market. In fact, some of
Monsanto’s foes now argue, the entire Roundup Ready enterprise has
been as much about engineering the market as it was about engineering the
crops themselves.
The rough sketch of the story goes back to the 1980s,
when, during a routine survey of the waste piles at a Roundup-manufacturing
facility in Louisiana, Monsanto scientists discovered mutants: bacteria
that — thanks to the evolutionarily intense selective pressures of
the environment in which it lived — had become immune to Roundup. If it were possible to insert the Roundup-resistant
gene from the bacteria into crop plants so they could be doused with weed
killer without sustaining any damage themselves, the continued demand for
Roundup was practically guaranteed. Sensing a moneymaker, Monsanto
extracted that gene from the bacteria; eventually the company devised a way
to hitch the gene to another type of bacteria, which was then used to
shoehorn the gene into crop plants. Then, as Daniel Charles recounts in his 2001 book Lords of the Harvest, Monsanto
lifted a page from Microsoft’s book: “A seed was hardware, like
the electronic circuits of a computer; Monsanto’s gene was the
software that it could turn into a useful tool. Just as Microsoft licensed
its Windows operating system to computer makers, which in turn sold the
entire package to consumers, Monsanto could license its genes to a wide
variety of seed companies. Those companies would breed the gene into many
different varieties of plants and sell those seeds to farmers.”
After gaining quick regulatory approval from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Monsanto first licensed the Roundup-resistant
gene to a company called Asgrow and the seed giant Pioneer Hi-Bred, which
inserted them into soybeans and released them in 1996. Roundup Ready cotton
and canola followed in 1997, Roundup Ready corn in 1998. In the years since, Roundup Ready crops have been a
huge commercial success, and they have transformed Monsanto as well. The
company that made its name in chemicals now makes far more money from seeds
than from herbicides: Last year, 70 percent of Monsanto’s $3.5
billion profit came from seeds, according to documents filed with the
Securities and Exchange Commission. “I do a lot of thinking when I’m in a
tractor,” says Jerry Tlucek, who runs a dairy south of Nampa,
“and I like to be with God — you know, just the Lord and
me.” Tlucek was the first farmer in the country to grow Roundup Ready
alfalfa hay, and his fields are a sort of testament to the promise of
biotechnology: They stand emerald-green and surreally flawless amid the
sagebrush and cheatgrass here. “I won’t plant conventional
alfalfa again. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Tlucek
says. “[Roundup] will kill every weed in there, and it won’t
kill one blade of alfalfa.”
Alfalfa’s humble bearing belies its agricultural
importance. It is the fourth-largest crop in the nation, after corn,
soybeans, and wheat. (In Illinois, alfalfa was grown on about 440,000 acres
in 2006; farmers here produced about 1.8 million tons, or about 2.5 percent
of the nation’s total production, according to the USDA.) A dairy cow
can eat as much as six tons of alfalfa a year, and the plant is also an
important feed for beef cattle and horses. Seven percent of the alfalfa
produced in the United States is eaten directly by human beings in the form
of sprouts; smaller amounts go into pellets of the sort fed to pet rabbits;
and alfalfa is one of the main sources of nectar for honey production. Monsanto turned its attention to alfalfa in 1998. A
year later, it licensed the Roundup Ready gene to a company called Forage
Genetics International, which is owned by the Land O’ Lakes dairy
cooperative and based about 10 miles from Rasgorshek’s farm, in
Nampa. Monsanto then licensed 21 seed companies to sell the seed developed
and grown by Forage Genetics; those companies include Pioneer and Croplan
Genetics, the latter another Land O’Lakes subsidiary. (Monsanto and
Forage Genetics both declined requests for interviews for this story.) Under a federal law enacted in 2000, genetically
modified organisms are regulated as “plant pests” until the
U.S. Department of Agriculture is certain that they pose no danger to
crops, public health, or the environment. In 2004, Forage Genetics
submitted a request to the USDA to “deregulate” Roundup Ready
alfalfa so it could be grown commercially. The same year, the company
contracted with Rasgorshek and several other farmers in Idaho, Wyoming, and
Colorado to begin growing several thousand acres of Roundup Ready alfalfa
seed that would be bagged and sold to hay growers. A little more than 14
months after Forage Genetics and Monsanto asked the USDA to deregulate
Roundup Ready alfalfa, the department issued an 18-page environmental
assessment and, on June 27, 2005, cleared the crop for commercial planting.
Today, more than 3,000 farmers grow it on some 220,000 acres nationwide. But some critics worry that once the Roundup Ready
gene has been set loose in the world, it will be impossible to contain. In fact, evidence is accumulating that the older
Roundup Ready crops such as soybeans and cotton — and the increased
use of Roundup that has accompanied them — have subjected weeds to
such intense selective pressure that they, like the sludge-dwelling
bacteria from which Monsanto’s scientists first extracted the
Roundup-resistant gene, have become resistant to the herbicide.
Roundup-resistant horseweed has appeared in Delaware and Tennessee,
Roundup-resistant ragweed in Missouri, and Roundup-resistant ryegrass in
California. Farmers are increasingly being forced to turn to older, more
potent herbicides to control weeds — but even those chemicals
sometimes offer little relief. In some parts of Georgia, where Roundup
Ready cotton is widely grown, farmers have been reduced to pulling
Roundup-resistant Palmer amaranth — a weed so tough that it can
damage mechanized cotton harvesters — by hand. For some farmers, weed resistance is only one worry.
Some growers are also concerned about the agricultural equivalent of
secondhand smoke: genetic contamination when bees transfer pollen between
genetically modified and conventional varieties of the plant. Transgenic
contamination is of particular concern for organic farmers, who have
successfully argued that the national organic standards should exclude
genetically modified crops. In Idaho, Forage Genetics and seed growers agreed to
separate Roundup Ready seed fields from conventional ones by at least 900
feet to minimize the transmission of pollen by leafcutter bees. Yet alkali
bees can fly as far as one mile and honeybees as far as three; freak
weather such as thunderstorm downbursts can blow bees even farther afield.
There is already evidence that the 900-foot isolation distances
aren’t enough. In fact, at least one conventional seed company claims
that its seed became contaminated even before Roundup Ready alfalfa was
deregulated. Woodland, Calif.-based Cal/West Seeds says that it
discovered the Roundup Ready gene in conventional alfalfa seed that a
farmer in Wyoming was growing for the company in early 2005, after one of
Forage Genetics’ seed growers planted Roundup Ready alfalfa less than
200 feet away. The same year, Cal/West claims to have found contamination
in seed grown in California and Washington. Last year, another company,
Dairyland Seed, says that it found Roundup Ready contamination in
conventional seed that farmers were growing for it in Montana, Wyoming, and
Idaho. As a result, several seed companies now use a kit similar to a home
pregnancy test to test every lot of seed that they buy. “This business of [Forage Genetics], going right
into every major alfalfa-seed-producing area and getting some farmer to
grow [Roundup Ready alfalfa seed], they knew what they were doing: They
were just trying to quickly contaminate the whole countryside with
it,” says Phil Geertson, who runs a small seed business in Idaho.
“There are a lot of seed growers that are worried that it’s
going to destroy their business and that Forage Genetics will be the only
game in town.”
In February of last year, Geertson and the Washington,
D.C.-based Center for Food Safety fought back with a lawsuit against the
USDA. They claimed that Roundup Ready alfalfa could contaminate
conventional and organic alfalfa farmers’ fields and prevent them
from selling their crops; that it could create Roundup-resistant
“superweeds”; and that the Department of Agriculture had
violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not conducting a full
environmental-impact study before it deregulated the crop in 2005. This Feb. 13, U.S. District Court Judge Charles R.
Breyer reversed the USDA’s decision to approve Roundup Ready alfalfa
for commercial planting. Because of “the possibility that the
deregulation of Roundup Ready alfalfa will degrade the human environment by
eliminating a farmer’s choice to grow non-genetically engineered
alfalfa and a consumer’s choice to consume such food,” Breyer
ruled that the Department of Agriculture must complete a full
environmental-impact study before it can revisit the question of whether to
deregulate the crop. Never before has such a thorough evaluation been
required of a genetically modified crop. Breyer also put a temporary injunction on the sale of
Roundup Ready alfalfa seed, leaving pallets of the purple-dyed seed sitting
on dealers’ loading docks with stop-sale notices stuck to them. It
could take two years for the USDA to complete the environmental-impact
statement. What will happen in the meantime?
Late in April, the parties to the case again convened
before Judge Breyer in San Francisco. Monsanto had made it clear that much was at stake if
Breyer kept the injunction on planting Roundup Ready alfalfa in place while
the government completed its environmental-impact statement. The company
had anticipated the amount of acreage planted in Roundup Ready alfalfa to
grow from 220,000 acres to 570,000 this year, then to 1.1 million acres
next year. After Breyer’s initial ruling, Monsanto and
Forage Genetics had seized on the idea of “coexistence” of
genetically modified, conventional, and organic crops. The two companies
sent a letter to alfalfa growers asking them to write testimonials about
“the benefits of having Roundup Ready alfalfa as a choice for
farmers” and enclosed a response form with space for farmers to
describe “HOW I COEXIST.” In the hearing before Breyer, the
companies’ attorneys argued that if he allowed the USDA to impose a
set of six conditions on growers — including mandatory isolation
distances to minimize pollen flow, requirements that alfalfa be harvested
before more than a small percentage of it blooms, and orders that any
harvesting equipment that comes into contact with Roundup Ready alfalfa be
cleaned to keep the seed from conventional fields — farmers could
continue planting Roundup Ready alfalfa without contaminating their
conventional and organic neighbors.
But from his vantage point behind the bench, Breyer
was plainly dubious about the plea to allow farmers to plant more Roundup
Ready alfalfa while the case continued. Was there a single precedent, he
asked the two companies’ attorneys, in which a court had allowed
“an increase in the exposure or use of an item under
investigation?” The question, it quickly became clear, was
rhetorical. On May 3, Breyer ruled that the injunction on the sale and
planting of Roundup Ready alfalfa will remain in place until the USDA
completes its environmental-impact statement. Monsanto is considering whether to appeal the ruling.
Still, it is clear that the real world of farming is considerably messier
than one that the company’s attorneys described in Breyer’s
courtroom. The 3,000-odd farmers who, like Paul Rasgorshek, have already
planted Roundup Ready alfalfa can continue growing the crop. But if the
forthcoming environmental-impact statement does not justify the release of
Roundup Ready alfalfa, putting the genie back in the bottle will be
considerably harder than, say, recalling a defective automobile.
“The world’s not as clean and pristine as
they say it is,” says Vince Holtz, who grows conventional alfalfa
seed near Nampa and runs a small seed-cleaning plant where he processes
other growers’ seed. An alfalfa plant can produce as many as 10,000
seeds, seeds so small that, in bulk, they tend to behave more like a liquid
than a solid. They leak everywhere and are easily tracked from field to
field. “You could have a field full of basketballs,” Holtz
says, “and it’s pretty easy to find them, and it’s
contained, and you can remove it from the system, you know? But this stuff
— it’s making pollen, and the seeds are long-lived; they can
survive in the ground.”
There is, as well, the issue of “escapes”
— alfalfa plants that grow next to phone poles, or alongside
irrigation pipes, and lie just out of the reach of a farmer in a harvester.
When such feral alfalfa blooms, its pollen is spread by bees, and the plant
eventually drops its seeds and further multiplies its genes. And in
alfalfa-growing country, feral alfalfa is everywhere: Phil Geertson, who
lives in a duplex in the little town of Greenleaf, Idaho, has to go no
farther than the field next door to find it. There, on a patch of ground he
says hasn’t been irrigated for two years, the plants grow robust and
green. And there is no shortage of pathways along which the seed can
spread. Cattle can eat the seed and deposit it miles away, undigested and
biologically viable, in a fertilizer-rich patty. Birds can spread the seed.
Seed can fall out of trucks. “It’s amazing,” Geertson
says. “There’s just so many different ways it can be spread
around.”
Monsanto has wrapped its fight to keep Roundup Ready
alfalfa from being outlawed in the rhetoric of “choice.” After
Breyer’s initial ruling in February, Andrew Burchett, a spokesman for
Monsanto, told Farm Industry News: “We’re going to do everything we think is
appropriate to defend growers’ right to choose this technology. Our
goal is to restore that choice for farmers.”
It was a curious position to take, given that Monsanto
has spent the last decade all but forcing farmers to buy bundled packages
of its seeds and herbicides while, opponents claim, systematically
eliminating its competitors. In fact, the company now faces at least 20
antitrust lawsuits over its actions.
Monsanto has assiduously kept the details of its
empire-building out of the public eye. When its internal affairs are
scrutinized in court, the company routinely invokes trade-secrets
protections to keep its documents under seal. Taken together, however, the
publicly available portions of the lawsuits
pending against the company paint the outline of a top-to-bottom strategy
to control the seed and herbicide business. The most recent lawsuit, filed
by the American Corn Growers Association against Monsanto in February, lays
out the basic details. Beginning in 1996 — the same year it first
released a Roundup Ready crop — Monsanto went on a more than $9
billion buying spree of some of the nation’s biggest seed companies.
Two years ago, Monsanto paid $1.4 billion for the fruit-and-vegetable-seed
giant Seminis and became the biggest seed company in the world. (The
acquisition plan is ongoing: This May, Monsanto received approval from the
U.S. Department of Justice for its $1.5 billion acquisition of Delta and
Pine Land Co., the largest cottonseed company in the nation.) According to the Corn Growers lawsuit,
“Monsanto’s plan also included the suppression of
herbicide-tolerant trait technologies . . . that could compete with
Monsanto’s Roundup Ready technology.” Between 1996 and 1998,
for example, Monsanto acquired a controlling interest in Dekalb Genetics
Corp., then it quashed that company’s partnership with Bayer
CropScience to develop a line of crops resistant to a glyphosate competitor
known as glufosinate. In 1997, the lawsuit alleges, Monsanto bought a
company called Asgrow and killed a similar effort. “In addition to eliminating actual competition
through acquisitions,” the lawsuit goes on to allege, “Monsanto
also pursued a strategy of neutralizing potential competitors by entering
into restrictive licensing agreements with [the] independent seed
companies” that incorporated Monsanto’s Roundup Ready genes
into their own seed lines. Under that scheme, Monsanto waives royalty fees
and pays rebates to seed companies if crop lines containing
Monsanto’s genes make up at least 70 percent of each company’s
total sales. Monsanto is also accused of attempting to
“cartelize” the seed market and fix prices by entering into
agreements with independent seed companies. The company allegedly laid that
strategy out in 1996, in what it called the Maize Protection Business Plan.
The plan has remained under seal through several different lawsuits, but
the Corn Growers allege that it “became the blueprint for
Monsanto’s overall licensing strategy to restrict competition in
biotechnology seed traits and related markets.” A class-action effort
filed by several soybean farmers in the Midwest alleged that during the
late 1990s, as part of the plan, top Monsanto executives met with leaders
from Pioneer to fix prices for Roundup Ready seeds. Monsanto settled that
case out of court last year, but the allegations have been revived in the
recent Corn Growers’ lawsuit and several others. According to the lawsuits, cartelization not only
gave Monsanto and its partners a way to fix prices but — by entering
into agreements with independent seed companies through which Monsanto
aimed to gain control over 90 percent of the seed market — also
allowed the company to block competitors from entering that market. The
most dramatic example involves a company called Syngenta Seeds. Three years
ago, Syngenta, which manufactures a glyphosate herbicide called Touchdown,
bought the rights to a glyphosate-resistant gene from Bayer CropScience.
Syngenta then announced plans to introduce its own Touchdown-tolerant crop
line that would have competed with Roundup Ready crops. But Monsanto,
according to allegations in several lawsuits, prohibited its partner seed
companies from developing any crop lines with Syngenta’s gene —
locking Syngenta out of the game. Having controlled the supply side of the glyphosate
market, Monsanto also, according to the Corn Growers’ and other
lawsuits, imposed a series of restrictive agreements on herbicide dealers
and distributors. The company stipulated that dealers could only receive
rebates — which often constitute a substantial portion of a dealer’s profits — if their sales of Roundup
were at least 80 percent of their total sales of all brands of glyphosate.
Finally, farmers themselves have not escaped Monsanto’s near-total
embrace: When they buy Roundup Ready seeds, the Corn Growers lawsuit
states, Monsanto “requires [them] to sign a technology license . . .
that effectively mandates that they use only Roundup herbicides”
— and not competing brands or generics — on Roundup Ready
crops. Attorneys on both sides of the various antitrust cases
have been unwilling to comment publicly. In an e-mail, Andrew Burchett, the
Monsanto spokesman, wrote, “The claims presented by the [American
Corn Growers Association] and others appear to recycle old allegations
regarding Monsanto’s marketing and pricing of glyphosate —
complaints that DuPont has made previously in lawsuits and which were the
subject of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that was
closed in 2004. We believe the complaints are without merit.”
It seems likely that they will also take years to
resolve.
Biotechnology opponents have a certain fondness for
referring to genetically modified crops as “Frankenfoods,” but
it’s hard to see alfalfa in the role of monster — even
genetically engineered alfalfa. As Jerry Tlucek shows off his field of Roundup Ready
alfalfa hay, he pulls one plant, now two years old and 17 inches tall, from
the ground. For the rest of the morning it lies between the two of us on
the bench seat in Tlucek’s truck, next to a knotted plastic bag of
sweet-corn seed that another farmer has given him. At no point does the
alfalfa plant leap for my jugular or for Tlucek’s. In fact, as the
morning wears on, the plant begins to wilt.
Still, the dying plant suggests an unsettling
contradiction. Monsanto has zealously guarded the sanctity of its
intellectual property, yet the company’s prized gene, from the
bacterium fished out of the Roundup waste piles in Louisiana, now seems
well on its way to pervading our entire food system. And it may be doing even more than that. In his
February ruling, Judge Breyer wrote that “If the government’s
action could eliminate all alfalfa, there would be no dispute that such
action has a significant environmental impact, even though the primary
impact is the economic effect on alfalfa and livestock farmers. For those
farmers who choose to grow non-genetically engineered alfalfa, the
possibility that their crops will be infected with the engineered gene is
tantamount to the elimination of all alfalfa; they cannot grow their chosen
crop.”
In fact, transgenic “creep” is already
eliminating traditional crop varieties — and, with them, choice. In
2001, for instance, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley
discovered genetic contamination from another of Monsanto’s
genetically engineered corn lines in native varieties of corn in Oaxaca,
Mexico — the plant’s birthplace and the worldwide center of
corn genetic diversity. Phil Geertson believes that a similar genetic creep is
already under way in alfalfa. “The seeds of it are out there. The seeds are
planted,” he says. “I think what they’re going to have to
do is set some standard of how much contamination there can be in alfalfa
seed, because it’ll be impossible to get it out of the system.”
It is not hard to imagine the distinctions between
conventional and organic, between conventional and genetically engineered
— and ultimately between genetically engineered and organic —
dissolving, regardless of whether anyone wants such an outcome.
Matt Jenkins is a contributing editor of High Country News.
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2007.
