Jan. 10, 2010: Obama appoints Monsanto V.P. Michael Taylor as Food Safety Czar

[brentspeak]

25. When you're done embarrasing yourself

Both the paper and the article identified all that for you, already.

You're probably the only one here incapable of actually comprehending that the article and the paper both make a strong argument that Monsanto does indeed have monopoly/market power and has abused it.

So did DOJ make a reasonable decision in dropping its investigation of Monsanto and the broader seed market? It's impossible to say, given that it refuses to release any details.

But there is evidence of potential market power in the industry. For example, one sign of an uncompetitive industry is the ability to raise prices at will, unimpeded by price pressure from rivals. It's impossible to say, without more information, if the GMO giants have done that—but prices have risen briskly over the past decade. In her above-mentioned 2009 paper, the American Antitrust Institute's Moss points out that in truly competitive markets, "technologies that enjoy widespread and rapid adoption"—like GM seeds—"typically experience precipitous declines" in price. But between 2000 and 2008, Moss writes, "real seed costs [for farmers] increased by an average annual rate of five percent for corn, almost 11 percent for cotton, and seven percent for soybeans." And for most of those years, she adds, growth in the price farmers were receiving for their crops didn't match growth in the price they were paying for their seeds—suggesting a possible squeeze on farmers by the seed industry. Figures supplied me by the Center for Food Safety's Bill Freese (from USDA data) show that price increases have continued in the years since Moss' study.

There's also evidence that farmers lack access to lower-priced seeds. In 2010, University of Illinois researcher Michael Gray surveyed farmers in seven agriculture-intensive counties of Illinois. He asked them if they had access to high-quality corn seeds that weren't genetically modified to contain Monsanto's Bt insecticide trait. In all seven counties, at least 32 percent of farmers said "no." In one county, 46.6 percent of farmers reporting having no access to high-quality non-Bt seed. For them, apparently, they had little choice but to pay Monsanto's high prices for Bt seeds, whether they needed them or not.

Finally, a competitive market might be expected to be characterized by a high level of innovation—especially a market as high tech as GM seeds. But as the Center for Food Safety's Freese pointed out to me, the main GM traits we see in the field today are the same as those we saw in the 1990s, when GMOs were rolled out: herbicide resistance and Bt. The industry's much-heralded next big products—corn and soy engineered to withstand more toxic herbicides than Monsanto's Roundup—is really just more of the same, intensified: herbicide resistance on steroids. Monsanto did roll out a "drought-resistant" corn variety last December—but the USDA itself, citing Monsanto's own data, found it to be rather underwhelming.