The story begins simply enough, with a single chemical. Glyphosate, sold to farmers and gardeners as "Roundup", is the world's biggest-selling herbicide. Last year, it earned Monsanto nearly $1.5 billion. But the company's patent on Roundup runs out in the year 2000. Far from sowing corporate catastrophe, however, this event seems likely only to enhance Monsanto's market value. For the past 10 years it has cleverly been developing a range of new crops, genetically engineered to resist glyphosate. Spraying them with Roundup does them no harm, but destroys all the weeds that compete. New patent legislation in Europe and the US allows Monsanto to secure exclusive rights to their production. The first "Roundup-Ready" plant Monsanto released was a genetically engineered soya bean. Between 50 and 60 per cent of processed foods contain soya, so the potential market is enormous.

As the new beans were snapped up by growers in the US, Monsanto began an extraordinary round of acquisitions, buying shares in seed and biotechnology companies worth nearly $2 billion in the past 18 months alone. Among its purchases are companies which produce the famous "Flavr-savr" tomato, own the US patent on all genetic manipulations of cotton, and control around 35 per cent of the germlines of American maize. Monsanto is now experimenting with new rice, maize, potato, sugarbeet, rape and cotton varieties. It has suggested that within a few years all the major staple crops on Earth should be genetically engineered. The new products are so attractive to many farmers that the company has managed to get them to sign away their future rights to the seed they grow, and allow Monsanto to inspect their fields whenever it wants.

Monsanto's new crops could not have become commercially viable without major legislative change. ... Despite significant public opposition, in July Europabio managed to persuade the European Parliament to adopt a new directive, allowing companies to patent manipulated plants and animals. Last week, the European Commission announced that it would force Austria, Italy and Luxembourg to repeal their laws banning the import of genetically engineered maize.

In the United States a Monsanto vice-president is, according to the St Louis Post, a "top candidate" to become Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the food industry. Researchers and lawyers from Monsanto already occupy important posts in the FDA. The administration has approved some of the company's most controversial products, including the artificial sweetener aspartame and an injectable growth hormone for cattle. Only the New York Attorney General's office has taken the company to task, forcing it to withdraw adverts claiming that Roundup is biodegradable and environmentally friendly.

But Monsanto has been most successful when appealing to multilateral bodies. Last month, the World Trade Organisation confirmed its ruling that the European Union can no longer exclude meat and milk from cattle treated with bovine growth hormone, despite the protests of farmers, retailers and consumers. As Scientific American magazine claimed, Monsanto's clinical trials of the drug were incompletely analysed, obscuring the fact that it increases the number of infected udder cells in cows by about 20 per cent. Biotech firms are now trying to persuade the World Trade Organisation to forbid the labelling of genetically engineered foods. Any country whose retailers tell consumers what they are eating would be subject to punitive sanctions.

With astonishing rapidity, a tiny handful of companies is coming to govern the global development, production, processing and marketing of our most fundamental commodity: food. The power and strategic control they are amassing will make the oil industry look like a cornershop.

More successfully than any other lobby, they are inhibiting the two remaining means of public restraint on their activities: government regulation and genuine consumer choice. All this will be a big pill for the public to swallow, which is why we'll be seeing a lot more of Monsanto over the next few weeks. It has just engaged an advertising agency for a major new "consultative" campaign - aimed at us this time, not just the City. It deserves our full attention. This may be the first and the last chance we'll get to tell the biotechnology companies what we think about their re-engineering: of both the stuff of life itself and the means by which it reaches us

10/7/97