The seed business is one of the most concentrated industries in American agriculture. Today, about 80% of corn and over 90% of soybeans grown in the U.S. feature Monsanto seed traits, either sold by Monsanto or by its licensees. In 2011, the top ten seed companies in the world totaled about $25 billion in sales, comprising 75% of the overall market. In 2020, the top four corporations, Bayer (formerly Monsanto), Corteva (formerly DuPont), Syngenta (part of ChemChina), and Limagrain together controlled 50% of the global seed market, with Bayer and Corteva alone claiming roughly 40%. And when it comes to genetic traits, this control is even more pronounced: Bayer controls 98% of trait markers for herbicide-resistant soybeans, and 79% of trait markers for herbicide-resistant corn.
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Dominant seed corporations have built their market power over producers in several ways. For instance, corporations have designed many of their seeds to terminate—or, to fail to germinate—after one harvest, forcing farmers to purchase new seeds from them each season. Seed and agrichemical conglomerates also push sales of their products by designing them to work together. Bayer (formerly Monsanto) created its now famous Roundup Ready seed line intentionally designed to grow most optimally when treated with Monsanto’s Roundup pesticide. Roundup Ready products push farmers into a “pesticide treadmill,” in which they are dependent on both Bayer’s seeds and chemical inputs for a healthy crop. Additionally, Bayer-Monsanto simply bought many of its smaller seed and genetics rivals to further its control over genetic traits. Monsanto has even sued small, independent farmers who attempted to save Monsanto seeds from season to season, or who unknowingly cultivated Monsanto seeds after they blew over from a neighboring farm, for patent infringement.
As such, concentration in the seed sector is deeply tied to concentration in the agrochemical sector. The same four multinational corporations (Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, BASF, and DowDuPont) control 75% of plant breeding research, 60% of the commercial seed market, and 76% of global agrochemical sales. Accumulating power across both chemical and seed sales help these companies sell more of all of their products. Because these corporations are so dominant, farmers have few options when seeking alternatives to corporate agro-industrial giants.
The seed and agrochemical sectors shrunk considerably after two recent mega-mergers. Dow and Dupont announced plans to merge in 2015, completing the tie-up in 2017. Then in June of 2018, Bayer acquired Monsanto, creating the world’s largest seed and agrochemical corporation. A survey found that 84% of farmers are “very concerned” about the Bayer-Monsanto merger.
Another aspect of the dominance of these few corporations is their growing usage of Big Data. Monsanto, for instance, increasingly brands itself as a technology company, and defends its avid gathering of farm-level data as a boon for farmers, who will supposedly be able to use that data to better understand their planting and harvest schedules. But critics worry that this data could also be used to increase Monsanto’s knowledge of the relative performance of different farmers, hence its ability to discriminate in the prices it charges different farmers for the same seeds and chemicals.
The concentration of power in the seed and chemical business appears also to harm the environment in a variety of ways. Monocropping—which is when farmers plant a single type of plant cross an entire region—strips soil of its nutrients and increases the need for more agricultural inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticides. Those fertilizers and pesticides, in turn, find their way into groundwater, linger on supermarket produce, appear to harm the health of farm-workers, and have been implicated in the collapse of pollinator bee populations around the world.
