Seed Deals Show Clout Monsanto Wields over U.S. Supply

St. Louis, Mo. -

'Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.'s business practices reveal how the seed giant is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Monsanto's patented genes are inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the United States.

The company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants and agriculture and legal experts.

Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price increases that ripple out to every family's dinner table. That's because the cornflakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you ate for dinner most likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto's patented genes.

Monsanto's methods are spelled out in a series of confidential licensing agreements obtained by the AP. The contracts include basic terms for the selling of engineered crops resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, along with supplementary agreements that address new Monsanto traits or other contract amendments.

The company has used the agreements to spread its technology - giving some 200 smaller companies the right to insert Monsanto's genes into their separate strains of corn and soybean plants. But, the AP found, access to Monsanto's genes comes at a cost and with plenty of strings attached.

For example, one contract provision bans independent companies from breeding plants that contain both Monsanto's genes and the genes of any of its competitors, unless Monsanto gives prior written permission.

That gives Monsanto the ability to effectively lock out competitors from inserting their patented traits into the vast share of U.S. crops that already contain Monsanto's genes.

The U.S. Department of Justice and at least two state attorneys general are trying to determine whether Monsanto's business strategies and licensing agreements violate U.S. antitrust laws. The practices also are at the heart of civil antitrust lawsuits filed against the suburban St. Louis company by its competitors.'

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