Monsanto Bets $45 Billion on a Pesticide-Soaked Future

[GreatGazoo]

Monsanto is bidding $45 billion USD for Swiss-based #2 agri-chemical pesticide giant Syngenta. The bid lays bare Monsanto's strategy to profit from GMO + pesticide pairings that necessitate ever increasing amounts of pesticides to be used in food production.

The logic for the deal is simple: Syngenta is Monsanto's perfect complement. Monsanto ranks as the globe's largest purveyor of seeds (genetically modified and otherwise), alongside a relatively small chemical division (mainly devoted to the herbicide Roundup), which makes up just a third of its $15.8 billion in total sales. Syngenta, meanwhile, is the globe's largest pesticide purveyor, with a relatively small sideline in GMO seeds that accounts for a fifth of its $15.1 billion in total sales.
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In trying to swallow Syngenta, Monsanto is putting its money where its mouth isn't—that is, it's contradicting years of rhetoric about how its ultimate goal with biotech is to wean farmers off agrichemicals. The company has two major money-making GM products on the market: crops engineered to carry the insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, which is toxic to certain insects but not to humans; and crops engineered to withstand the herbicide glyphosate, an herbicide Monsanto sells under the brand name Roundup.
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(Monsanto said Bt corn and RR soy would mean 'less pesticides use') Both of these claims have withered as Monsanto's products have come to dominate US farm fields. Insects and weeds have evolved to resist them. Farmers have responded by unleashing a gusher of pesticides—both higher doses of Monsanto's Roundup, and other, more-toxic chemicals as Roundup has lost effectiveness.
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Syngenta is the main US supplier of the herbicide atrazine, which has come under heavy suspicion as an endocrine-disrupting chemical that messes with frogs' genitalia and seeps into people's drinking water. Syngenta is also one of two dominant purveyors of neonicotinoids—blockbuster insecticides (annual global sales: $2.6 billion) that have been substantially implicated in declining health of honeybees and other pollinators, birds, and water-borne animals. Both atrazine and neonics are currently banned in Europe, and widely, albeit controversially, used in the US.

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/05/monsanto-syngenta-merger-45-billion-pesticides

[GreatGazoo]

1. "Insects and weeds have evolved to resist them. "