Pat Mooney predicts a second round of mergers among major multinationals.
After life sciences companies finish joining with each other, they will begin to merge with food and beverage companies, said the executive director of Rural Advancement Foundation International.
Farmers will become “bioserfs” of the multinationals, buying seed and inputs from the same company they sell it to, Mooney told audiences at recent conferences in Winnipeg.
“Farmers will be effectively renters of germplasm,” he said.
Mooney spoke at an organic agriculture conference on Feb. 27 and at GrainWorld on March 2 about how the life sciences industry is becoming more concentrated.
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The 10 largest seed companies control 32 percent of the global seed trade, the 10 largest chemical companies control 85 percent of the pesticide market and the top 10 pharmaceutical companies control 43 percent of their market, he said.
Several of the same companies are on each of Mooney’s top 10 lists.
By 2010, Mooney said 80 percent of the world’s farmland could be planted to crops that have a built-in technology protection system. Mooney’s organization coined the phrase “terminator gene” to describe this system, which uses a trigger to make seed sterile so selected plants cannot reproduce.
Mooney said his group has discovered 34 patents for this type of technology. Every major chemical company is working on one, he said. The first seeds using the technology are expected to be on the market in 2003, said Mooney.
The first patent for the technology involved an antibiotic seed treatment to activate the sterility sequence within the crop. But RAFI researchers have uncovered patents that rely on less expensive seed treatments.
“They (life sciences companies) have actually attached their chemicals to the suicide gene in the seed.”
He said the next wave of patents will involve “traitor technology.” Companies will weaken pest resistance in seeds to force farmers to use their chemicals, said Mooney.
The chemicals will, in turn, activate the sterility sequence in the seed. Or, companies will sell seed with traits desirable to processors which are only activated when their chemical is applied, said Mooney.
He thinks farmers in the future will have less choice as processors, demand new varieties of grain with certain traits protected by the technology.
“The cutting-edge work … will only be available in terminator seeds,” he said.
RAFI’s lobby efforts have gained the group an audience with United States agriculture secretary Dan Glickman. The secretary had to change his fax number because of the widespread negative response to the new patents, a response spearheaded by RAFI. Mooney traced the history of patents for his audiences. He said the notion of “seed piracy” only arose in the early 1980s.
At the organic agriculture conference, one speaker took heart in the term. Lynn Miller, publisher of Small Farmer’s Journal, said he likes the image of farmers as revolutionary pirates, boarding multinational corporations, “pitchforks in their teeth.”
