| Thank you very much, Kent. I'm really pleased to be here at Heritage Farm again. Ever since my campout experience in 1990 I've wanted to come back, because I think I can honestly
say that I've never felt more at home with a group of people than I did here. We all have the same concerns and we're all trying to save the world's crop genetic diversity. I want to tell
you how important Seed Savers Exchange and your work is to the rest of the world. Everybody that I work with throughout the world knows about the Seed Savers Exchange. Everybody has met, or at least heard legends
of, Kent Whealy. There are people in all parts of the world, whether it's Ethiopia or Chile or Mexico or Austria or the Philippines or Australia, who think of what happens in the loft of this barn at Heritage Farm
as the genesis of their own concerns and activities. Whether I'm talking with Bill Hankin at Heritage Seed Curators in Australia or Nancy Arrowsmith in Austria or Camila Montecinos in Chile,
everybody knows about the work being done here. Seed Savers may have 8,000 members in North America, but it has spawned perhaps 40 or 50 other national counterparts from the Philippines to Ethiopia. What Kent and
Diane started more than two decades ago has truly spread around the world, and you should be proud to know that the seeds you've planted here have spread and been saved among farmers and gardeners on every
continent. I remember when I spoke here in 1990 1 talked specifically about the incredible work being done by Camila Montecinos and the CLADES network in Latin America. I also talked then about the work of Rene
Salazar and the SEARICE network in Southeast Asia. And I spoke a lot about the work of Melaku Worede and the USC Seeds of Survival Programme in Ethiopia. It is a sign of the influence of Seed Savers Exchange that
Camila and Rene have both found their way to this farm and to Kent twice since the last time I was here. When Kent and I talked a few months ago in Tucson about making a presentation like
this, I said I'd like to do a sort of good news-bad news thing. At that rime there seemed to be a lot more good news, in fact, and I thought it would be nice to come back here and report on what had happened.
Because in 1990, we were leading up to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and many people were hopeful at that rime that the earth was finally coming to its senses and governments were finally going to behave
responsibly. And of course the world has changed, and now, six years after the Earth Summit, we see what has happened and what hasn't happened. And the bad news seems to dominate more. Kent talked
about seed saving being apolitical. Frankly, it is not. Perhaps it never was, but certainly today saving seed is one of the most political acts possible in agriculture. A year after I spoke here in 1990 the
International Plant Breeders Rights Convention in Geneva passed a new treaty which suddenly made it illegal for farmers to save or exchange seed under plant variety protection. Then in 1994, the World Trade
Organization created the new GATT agreement which obliges every signatory government to provide a system of intellectual property protection for plant vari-eries. Now, around the world, governments from Bulgaria
to South Africa are being forced to adopt this highly restrictive monopoly legislation. Then we have the movement of the corporations, of course, who say farmers shouldn't be allowed to save seed; that
saving seed is piracy or like photocopying someone's book to use over and over again the right of farmers to save seed is in attempt to reverse 12,000 years of Farmers Rights and threatens to wipe out agricultural
biodiversity. It is simply a fact that seed saving today is one of the most political acts in the world. Kent's work is unavoidably political. The work he has done to try to help prop up and keep going a global
system of genebanks is just being torn apart by civil wars and political infighting - especially in Germany - that have caused so much damage. Although Kent talks about trying to stay politically neutral in order
to maintain the diversity of views within SSE, what has come out of here is a political act. It's a quiet grassroots political act, perhaps, but it has had a massive impact around the world, and that impact is
going to keep on growing and growing. That's the good news. And now on to the bad part of the news. Kent just said that some folks are saying almost everything that has happened at Heritage Farm
this year could be blamed on E1 Nifio. I promise you that nothing I say will be blamed on E1 Nifio. I may have to say something, however, about E1 Monsanto and the other corporations that are wreaking destruction
on agricultural biodiversity. Back when Kent's work and our work started, there were about 7,000 sources of seed around the world, according to the United Nations. Actually, there were probably a lot more than
that. That would include companies and also the public sector. Today, the top ten seed companies account for one-third of world seed sales. In the last few months Monsanto has spent more than $4.3
billion buying agricultural biotechnology and seed companies. The value of all mergers in the seed industry in the last two years probably exceeds $10 billion. There is very little left to merge. In fact, the
world seed trade is holding its 75th anniversary conference in Cambridge, UK next year and by the time they get together they can probably all gather around a wienie roast in somebody's backyard.
Mergers in the seed industry, of course, are in keeping with mergers across all of industry. Halfway through this year the total value of mergers around the world was already one trillion dollars, which is equal
to the total value of all mergers in 1997 which in turn was ten times the value of mergers when I spoke at the campout in 1990. There's almost nothing left to merge. Actually we've become rather
cynical about these things; we've become kind of used to these mergers. But during the last two months, the mergers that have taken place have leftus completely in shock. As I said, since May of this year,
Monsanto has spent more that $4 billion buying seed companies! $4 billion! One company buying all and agricultural biotechnology companies as well. During the last two years, Monsanto has
spent almost $9 billion buying other seed companies. It is now the world's largest pesticide company, the world's second largest seed company, the world's seventh largest pharmaceutical company, and the world's
fourth largest veterinarian medicine company. Twenty years ago, Monsanto was a chemical company that sold rug backings and nylon and acrylic fibers and Roundup. It still sells Roundup. Makes you have to buy
Roundup now. The changes were really quite remarkable. What's going to happen during the next half of this year is going to have to be a reaction to Monsanto. These mergers are moving so rapidly,
literally every day. Even as we were driving down here in the car, I was frantically trying to find a newspaper and checking on the radio to find out if there had been another merger. In fact, on a daily basis we
expect to hear about other very very large mergers. For example, at the moment we're watching rumors that either DuPont or Archer-Daniels-Midland will buy the rest of Pioneer
Hi-Bred, the world's largest seed company. The3 want to finish buying out the world's largest independent traditional seed company. 20% of Pioneer was, bought last year by DuPont. Part of that agreement, was that
DuPont was not to buy more of it, but that has been overwritten and there are now some divisions. We believe that DuPont and now Archer- Daniels-Midland are both negotiating with Pioneer to buy all of it. At the
same time, we know that in Europe, where before we had Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz - two of the major companies involved in seeds, they already merged in 1996 to create a company calleo Novartis. And Novartis is already
now looking around to see who else they can buy to match this huge enterprise of Monsanto. In June of this year, Monsanto made another deal. They agreed to a merger with American Home Products,
which owns American Cyanimid, which is not a major player in agricultural terms, but it has a very wide range of other interests, including food processing. So for the first time we see the agricultural input side
of the industry merging with the agricultural output side of the industry. One of the largest companies that's involved in these kinds of mergers is Archer- Daniels-Midland, and especially its African interests
and we are seeing DuPont make similar mergers as well. So we're seeing both ends of the food system starting to come together in the biggest possible mergers. And now we're afraid that in the case of Novartis and
some of the major German companies, we'll sec mergers again which will be in the $20-$40 billion scale Mergers by themselves of that size. There has to be a response from Europe and from DuPont and Dow in this
part of the world to Monsanto's acquisitions, ant that will be playing out in the next few months. So watch to see what it looks like by the end of the year or very early next year at the latest. (ed. note-
that would be early 1999) One of the major concerns with this kind of concentration is, what does it mean for agricultural biodiversity? What does it mean for the long-term future of agriculture, and
for our society, when we see such enormously powerful enterprises come into being? (This is the first of our two part article on multinational corporations , the seed industry, and the
"Terminator" technology. Watch for the second installment to be posted in April, 1999.) Go to Top of Page |
