AgFax Blog

The Center For Food Safety (CFS) has issued a report arguing against the proposed merger of Delta & Pine Land and Monsanto. CFS, which has offices just down the street from the White House, describes itself as an "organization working to protect human health and the environment by curbing the use of harmful food production technologies and promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture."

The report was jointly issued by CFS and the International Center for Technology Assessment.

I happen to know about the report because, out of the blue, a writer with Wired News sent me a copy of it and asked for my response.

Click here to see the report.

I'm sharing this with my readers because I'm curious about their reaction, both to the report and my comments.

The following is my response:

I've only had a few minutes to skim the CFS statement. I didn't see anything new. It's pretty much just the same old rhetoric.

The simple fact is that the vast majority of U.S. cotton farmers favor biotech approaches, and as the market has shaken out, a large part of that is built around DPL varieties and Monsanto's technology. Farmers can compare performance every year, both in their own fields and in non-biased university trials. They buy what works best.

Off hand, I can't think of a single U.S. industry that hasn't gone through consolidations like this over the last 10 to 15 years. New technological developments tend to concentrate market share in the hands of companies that successfully invest time and money in research. They create products that their customers judge to be superior. At the moment, those companies in the cotton industry happen to be DPL and Monsanto.

CFS, for its part, would just as soon both DPL and Monsanto dropped dead tomorrow, so it’s a bit disingenuous for the organization to say it’s trying to preserve glyphosate. Glyphosate doesn’t fit into organic agriculture. CFS would give us a world with farms that are too small to be efficient and not productive enough to feed the world's growing population.

While the idea of Monsanto and DPL merging has certainly been unsettling to many farmers, they would choose the merger over letting CFS remake agriculture in its image.