Michael Sykuta, associate professor at the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the University of Missouri at Columbia, wrote an opinion piece for the Modesto Bee asking Why are Feds Launching Ag Antitrust Probe? and it’s not a rhetorical question:
Why, one may wonder, is the Department of Justice launching an antitrust investigation against some of U.S. food system’s major players at a time when Americans are enjoying a widening array of food choices and spending less and less of their disposable income to do so?
Sykuta goes on to lay out his argument, which is basically, “Food is cheap because of consolidation. Get off Big Ag’s back!” But with a nine-digit Farm Bill bailing out the ag sector in 5-year intervals, crediting consolidation with cheap food is like crediting AIG and Morgan Stanley with a successful recovery last year. If food prices are cheap in this country, it’s because we tax ourselves heavilty in order to allow Tyson, Kraft, ADM and Big Beef to consolidate around cheap grains and feed.
It’s a fine strategy, if the goal is cheapness.
But that’s where Sykuta’s wrong. America’s chief goal and reason for being isn’t cheap goods; it’s fair competition in the marketplace. When domination of the marketplace actually impedes growth and job creation, that’s when the people need to step in via their government and chop down the big tree that’s shading out the rest of the apple orchard.
Yep. All eyes are on you, Monsanto.
I got thinking about this when a buddy of mine on Twitter, a student of genetic engineering in Iowa, actually said she hoped that Department of Justice would go after Monsanto. She and I don’t see eye to eye on everything (or, much), but suddenly, we were in happy agreement? Why was she in favor of breaking up Monsanto? Because it would mean more jobs in her sector and more opportunity for her after graduation. If a biotech student in Iowa sees hope in antitrust investigations, you better believe the feds see a potential economic uplift in biotech as a result, too.
And I’ll take a hesitant step toward embracing that idea — with the caveat that I can change my mind about this later. Here goes.
While a boom in the biotech field doesn’t make this Fair Food Fighter all warm and fuzzy inside, I will say that more biotech companies, with a wider array of competition, might mean greater accountability and, ironically, greater transparency. As is, we have one major company in the field and its influence over government “regulation” and approval of its product is unconscionably opaque. GMO traits have historically been approved on a fast track, and, with Monsanto’s stranglehold on licensing, those traits get disseminated widely and freely, because Monsanto has the deck so heavily stacked in its favor.
With more, smaller “baby Monsantos,” we’d have more eyes in the field, and more competitors watching each other. We might even have the opportunity for creating niche markets within the industry — GMO traits that are deemed “organic friendly,” so that a weird marriage of sustainable farming and genetic engineering might believeably take place. Monsanto’s reputation for secrecy and back-room influence makes the idea of “safe GMO traits,” and the public’s acceptance of them, virtually impossible right now.
So go get your axe, Barack. I think it’s choppin’ time.
Please don’t dream for an organic/gmo marriage, until it is possible to evaluate the gross effects of random and destructive GM techniques, or until (many decades from now), someone knows the roles and functions of all of the DNA under every circumstances, and knows how to tweak a change. There is no way to have any guarantee, now or for many years, that GM’ing plants is safe for humans, animals and environment.
No, I’m not dreaming and hoping for a marriage. And I don’t know how I could have explained my hesitancy about GMOs as tool of sustainability any better than I did.
My problem with GE technology is not that it’s “never safe” (I don’t think you can prove that negative). It’s that we rushed to the conclusion that it was safe, allowed industry to tamper with genetics freely and to regulate itself almost exlusively, and when nominal regulation was conducted in America, it’s been executed by GE industry leaders in governmental oversight positions. Consequently, if aspects of GE technology were safe we’d never know or have cause to believe it. As a betting man, all I can assume is that the base process of hijacking viral vectors for delivering code is inherently not safe, since industrial money trumps human health every time.