The GMO Seed Monopoly: Reducing Farmers’ Seed Options

Angelika Hilbeck, senior sci­en­tist at the Institute of Integrative Biology at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), and sev­eral other researchers ana­lyzed seed cat­a­logs in Spain, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. They found that in Spain—the largest European coun­try to adopt GM corn—farmers’ seed choices declined over­all and increas­ingly became a choice among GM varieties.

“Non-GM cul­ti­vars of maize were replaced with fewer GM cul­ti­vars,” Hilbeck said.

But, in three EU coun­tries that ban plant­i­ngs of GM corn—Germany, Austria, and Switzerland—farmers have either many more corn seed vari­eties avail­able to them now than in the 1990s (Germany and Austria) or at least the same num­ber (Switzerland).

Hilbeck pre­sented their find­ings at a con­fer­ence on GM crop cul­ti­va­tion in Bremen, Germany in June 2012.

Decreasing non-GMO seed choices in US

Hilbeck said that decreas­ing farmer seed choices in the United States because of GM tech­nol­ogy led her to see if there was a sim­i­lar trend in Europe. “We could not find any evi­dence to the con­trary, which is what devel­op­ers and pro­po­nents of GM tech­nol­ogy in agri­cul­ture claim: increased choice,” Hilbeck said. “All evi­dence points to a decline rather than an increase.”

Proponents of GM crops claim that demand for GM seeds is strong as evi­denced by the high adop­tion rates of GM corn and soy­beans by US farm­ers, but a big rea­son for this is that large seed com­pa­nies are phas­ing out non-GMO vari­eties. As a result, farm­ers have lit­tle choice but to buy GM seeds.

Research by Hilbeck and oth­ers found that the num­ber of non-GMO corn seed vari­eties in the US decreased 67% from 3,226 in 2005 to 1,062 in 2010, while the num­ber of GM corn seed vari­eties increased 6.7%.

“Farmers are fac­ing fewer choices and sig­nif­i­cantly higher prices in seed,” says Kristina Hubbard, author of the Farmer to Farmer Campaign report. “Seed options nar­row when a hand­ful of com­pa­nies dom­i­nate the marketplace.”

Iowa farmer George Naylor says he has trou­ble find­ing non-GMO soy­bean seeds: “Some seed com­pa­nies don’t offer any. One company’s soy­bean seed lineup is all Monsanto’s Roundup Ready2 (seeds).”

Todd Leake, a farmer in Grand Forks County, North Dakota, sees sim­i­lar prob­lems. “Most of the con­ven­tional, non-GMO soy­bean vari­eties that I can find are ten to twelve years old,” he said. “Their dis­ease resis­tance and yield have fallen well behind the Roundup Ready varieties.”

“In terms of non-GMO in gen­eral, there is less breed­ing,” said Jim Orf, pro­fes­sor of agron­omy and plant genet­ics at the University of Minnesota, who breeds non-GMO soy­beans for food use.

The prob­lem is sim­i­lar with corn. In 2009, University of Illinois ento­mol­o­gist Michael Gray sur­veyed farm­ers in five areas of the state to ask if they had access to high-yielding non-GMO corn seed. He found nearly 40% said “no,” while nearly half (46.6%) in Malta, IL said they did not have access to elite non-GMO corn hybrids.

Wendall Lutz, a farmer who grows non-GMO corn in Dewey, Illinois, said, “I don’t have the vari­ety of genet­ics to choose from that farm­ers who buy GM corn do.”

The sit­u­a­tion is even worse with sugar beets where there is no farmer choice. When GM Roundup Ready sugar beets were intro­duced in 2005, the sugar beet proces­sors decided to con­vert the entire US pro­duc­tion to GMO.

“This was a coor­di­nated effort to genet­i­cally mod­ify an entire sec­tor of the processed food indus­try simul­ta­ne­ously and with­out hold­outs that might oth­er­wise have pro­vided a source of con­ven­tional beet sugar to ful­fill non-GMO con­sumer demand,” said Frank Morton, owner of Wild Garden Seeds and a plain­tiff in a law­suit to stop pro­duc­tion of GM sugar beets in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Reduced seed options for organic farmers

GM tech­nol­ogy has also reduced seed choices for organic farm­ers. Several organic corn seed com­pa­nies have reported test­ing seed and find­ing low lev­els of GM pres­ence. Organic farm­ers have had their crops rejected by buy­ers and suf­fered eco­nomic losses when their crops tested pos­i­tive for GMOs. As a result, some US organic farm­ers have stopped grow­ing corn because of the GMO con­t­a­m­i­na­tion threat.

In Canada, organic farm­ers lost the mar­ket for organic canola due to GMO contamination.

“With the pro­lif­er­a­tion of GM canola, it is almost impos­si­ble to buy uncon­t­a­m­i­nated seed, let alone con­tend with con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from pollen drift,” said Arnold Taylor, an organic farmer and pres­i­dent of the Saskatchewan Organic Directorate, which filed a law­suit against biotech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies for the loss of the organic canola market.

GMOs are also affect­ing rare heir­loom corn seed vari­eties, says Jere Gettle, founder of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. “Over 50% of his­toric corn vari­eties are now con­t­a­m­i­nated with Monsanto’s GMO crops,” Gettle said, based on tests his com­pany has con­ducted on heir­loom seed.

Market con­trol in Brazil, South Africa, and India

Farmers are see­ing less seed choice in other coun­tries where GMOs have been intro­duced. In Brazil, it’s get­ting harder for farm­ers to obtain non-GMO soy­bean seeds, says Ricardo Tatesuzi de Sousa, exec­u­tive direc­tor of ABRANGE (the Brazilian Association for the Producers of Non-GM Grains).

Brazil’s acreage of non-GMO soy­beans has decreased steadily since the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of GM soy in 2005. Tatesuzi de Sousa esti­mates that about 20% of Brazil’s soy pro­duc­tion is non-GMO.

He says that large com­pa­nies such as Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred, BASF, and oth­ers dic­tate what seed grow­ers pro­duce and what seed dis­trib­u­tors sell to farmers.

“If the seed grow­ers want access to good (genetic) mate­r­ial, they have to sub­mit to what the com­pa­nies want,” Tatesuzi de Sousa said. “They can tell farm­ers not to plant non-GMO.”

Meanwhile, seed dis­trib­u­tors with­hold non-GMO soy­bean seeds from farm­ers. “They keep (non-GMO) seeds unavail­able and when farm­ers buy all the seed, they say ‘we had all this non-GMO seed avail­able.’ But they aren’t putting it into the mar­ket,” Tatesuzi de Sousa said.

He refers to a com­monly used term—the 85/15 rule, which means that dis­trib­u­tors will sell 85% GM seeds and just 15% non-GMO.

“This is con­trol of the mar­ket,” Tatesuzi de Sousa said.

A sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion is occur­ring in South Africa. Willem Visser, mar­ket­ing man­ager for Delta Seed, an inde­pen­dent seed com­pany, says it is “vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to get non-GMO soy seed in South Africa.”

There, the soy­bean mar­ket is essen­tially dom­i­nated by three com­pa­nies: Pioneer and a sub­sidiary, Pannar, and Link Seed. A glance at the com­pa­nies’ web­sites showed that all soy­bean seed vari­eties offered are Roundup Ready.

In India, genet­i­cally mod­i­fied Bt cot­ton accounts for 85% of the country’s cot­ton pro­duc­tion. Non-GMO cot­ton seed vari­eties are being phased out by pri­vate and pub­lic seed breeders.

“Farmers buy Bt seeds because they have lit­tle choice—it is very hard to find non-GM seeds any­more,” said Glenn Davis Stone, a pro­fes­sor of anthro­pol­ogy and envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, whose research has focused on India’s cot­ton production.

Resurgence of inter­est in non-GMO seeds

In response to increas­ing dom­i­nance of GM seed, non-GMO seed ini­tia­tives have been launched in sev­eral coun­tries. Some small US seed companies—such as eMerge Genetics for soy­beans and Spectrum Premium Genetics for corn—are breed­ing non-GMO seed vari­eties as farm­ers face increas­ing weed and insect resis­tance prob­lems with GM seeds.

In Brazil, the Soja Livre or “Soy Free” pro­gram was launched by Embrapa, Brazil’s lead­ing agri­cul­tural research orga­ni­za­tion, along with sev­eral other groups. The pro­gram aims to breed non-GMO soy­bean vari­eties and “pro­vide greater com­pet­i­tive­ness to the pro­duc­tion chain.”

Tatesuzi de Sousa says Soja Livre is suc­ceed­ing. “We now have 13 seed com­pa­nies sell­ing non-GMO seed when before there was only one.”

In India, the University of Agricultural Sciences Dharwad, bioRe India, Ltd., and Swiss-based Research Institute of Organic Agriculture launched a joint effort in 2011 “to re-establish the seed value chain for non-GM cotton.”

In South Africa, Visser also sees farm­ers return­ing to non-GMO seed because of insect resis­tance prob­lems. “There seems to be a spark of inter­est from more and more farm­ers about non-GMO corn and soy seed,” he said. “We’ve been yield­ing bet­ter in tri­als than most GMOs, and our prod­ucts are more con­sis­tent. Our pric­ing is also much bet­ter than the GMO hybrids.”

Ken Roseboro

Ken is edi­tor of The Organic & Non-GMO Report. He can be reached at ken@non-gmoreport.com.