16 I EUROPEAN SEED I EUROPEAN-SEED.COM international agricultural policies and practices. Between the First and Second World War, for example, General Electric sought to expand the market for its radi- ation technology by moving into plant breeding and inducing mutations through radiation. Their influence was sufficient to induce President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative in the 1950s, and the formation of the Joint International Atomic Energy Agency breeding pro- gram with FAO, which has bumbled on for more than 50 years wasting money and distorting plant breeding research and technology transfer programs through- out Africa, Asia and Latin America – long after General Electric gave up on the idea. Likewise, when Standard Oil of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil) following World War II sought synergies in the use of fossil carbon to make and market ferti- lizers and pesticides and, more as collat- eral damage than anything else, included seeds in their business model as well. The result was a distortion of the Green Revolution toward seeds that welcomed or required fertilizers and pesticides. Standard Oil got out of this pretty quickly but peasant agriculture has been paying its price ever since. Enthused by the same Green Revolution and Norman Borlaug’s Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, the world’s largest oil and chemical companies saw the potential for a global agricultural input market subsidized by governments and bought into both seeds and pesti- cides. For a brief time in the 1970s, Royal Dutch Shell was the world’s largest seed company. Occidental Petroleum, Atlantic Richfield and others also bought compa- nies. When the they bailed out a few years later, they had still contributed to the transformation of agricultural inputs by either buying out or wiping out hundreds of small family seed companies, strength- ening international property monopolies over plant varieties, and creating a (some- times hallucinogenic) “high-tech” image that convinced both small companies and the public sector that companies had to be big, have deep pockets, and a capacity for risk if they were to do plant breeding in the era of new Biosciences. GMO’S While we might all be tempted to get into a fight over GMOs right about now, I would argue that GM cotton, canola, soybeans and maize have done nothing for national or global food security. One of the least considered impacts of GM crops has been the decimation of public sector agricul- tural research and the reorientation of virtually all public and private research toward the GM platform to the exclusion of exciting alternatives. By and large, public sector has become “cheap labour” doing the work the private sector doesn’t want to risk or doesn’t need to pay for. This destruction of public goods is a burden that will haunt us all in the decades ahead as we struggle with climate change. History is important because whether the latest mergers are commer- cially successful or not, they will have established a policy precedent accepting this staggering scale of corporate control. The shareholders will move on but the stakeholders – those who grow food and those who eat it – will have to live (or not) with the consequences. SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH The financial media and some policymak- ers have expressed concern that the deals on the table could lead to a reduction in scientific research. After all, if competi- tion is reduced, why invest in expensive, high-risk R&D? Researchers like Jennifer Clapp at the University of Waterloo in Canada has noted the three deals are basically companies with lots of seeds and few chemicals wanting to buy companies with lots of chemicals and few seeds – and vice-versa. Most of the companies are talking about R&D synergies – the code word for cutting research. The biggest savings come with reducing research on pesticides. It costs roughly $256 million to bring a new pesticide to market but it only costs $136 million to introduce a new GM variety. It is both cheaper and less risky to adapt new plants to old chemicals than to develop new chemicals for plants. Many are concerned that the world will see a decline in agrochemical research. GENE-EDITING With a certain convoluted logic, some pro- ponents of the mergers have suggested that peasants – who don’t buy pesticides very much anyway – and environmental- ists – should be delighted if the pesticide industry tanks. Not so. The waning for- tunes of glyphosate have only encour- aged the reintroduction of even more toxic chemicals. It is cheapest of all for ChemGen companies to bring back dis- carded old toxins (perhaps reformulated to the nanoscale to placate regulators and promulgate patents) than it is to develop new ones. As crops succumb to the pests and diseases that have mutated beyond the reach of the current chemicals, gov- ernments will be forced to grant exemp- tions (which never go away) to protect farmers and people from crop failures. This, admittedly, is a risky proposition, but profitable. In the longer-term, the new merged entities are placing their bets on untested new technologies – the next generation of biotechnology including gene editing, gene drives, etc. The theory is that so-called “synthetic biology” will create more resilient plants that can resist pests and diseases and surmount climate change with fewer and fewer chemicals. There is not, as yet, any evidence that this new suite of technologies is either scientifically sound or environmentally safe so society is being asked to gamble our food security with some of the world’s least-trusted companies. With three (or, at the most, four) ChemGens dominating the market and controlling the research agenda, policymakers are not just put- ting all our eggs in one basket; they’re throwing in the chicken as well. This not only impacts food security, it impacts the health of the agricultural workers who will be obliged to handle the pesticides and the health of the peasants adjacent to commercial fields and, of course, the people who have to eat the crop sprayed with pesticides. So, the peasants who really feed the world – and don’t or rarely buy com- mercial seeds and pesticides – are still impacted by the mergers in many ways. Agribusiness CEOs have a lot more “face time” with agricultural ministers and prime ministers than local peasant organ- izations. Agribusiness business execu- tives have privileged access to bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations while peasants hear about it on the radio after the deal is set. Corporate breeders may not want to jail farmers for using their