Challenging Monsanto’s Monopoly

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Monsanto, the biotech giant, has elicited public protest across the world. In early May, however, a drawn-out battle against Monsanto’s entrenched corporate monopoly came to a head—not in the streets or the fields—but in an arcane technical hearing at the European Patent Office. ETC Group (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration), an international civil society organization, and the environmental group Greenpeace (supported by 19 other civil society organizations worldwide) won a 13-year legal battle against Monsanto over the soybean. 

Patents, exclusive legal monopolies granted by governments, are a favorite tool of big business to exercise power. Giant pharmaceutical firms have most notoriously used patents to price anti-HIV drugs out of the reach of poor people in the global South. Less familiar are biotech battles in the agricultural sector, where multinational seed companies are using patents to deny farmers—or entire nations—the right to use and sell seeds from patent-protected crops. 

Patents, we are told, are designed to promote innovation. Instead, they are allowing giant seed companies to secure exclusive monopolies that undermine the economic security of farming communities and jeopardize access to seeds. And whoever controls the seeds controls the food supply. 

Instead of fostering agricultural research, breathtakingly broad patents are shutting down competition and stifling research. Perhaps no patent symbolized the brokenness of the patent system more than Monsanto’s European patent on all genetically engineered soybean varieties and seeds—European Patent No. 301,749. Critics called it a “species-wide” patent because its claims extend to all biotech soybean seeds—irrespective of the genes used or the genetic engineering technique employed—and was unprecedented in its broad scope. 

The livelihoods of Argentina’s soybean farmers have been directly affected by this patent because Monsanto, the world’s largest seed corporation, used its exclusive monopoly to deny Argentine soybeans from entering European markets. Why? Because Monsanto alleges that Argentine farmers aren’t paying royalties to Monsanto for using the company’s patented soybean seeds. 

Over the course of a single decade, Monsanto devoured dozens of seed companies (and their patents) to become the largest seed corporation in the world and the only soybean seed superpower. In 1996, Monsanto’s name didn’t even appear on ETC Group’s list of the world’s top 10 seed companies. Today, Monsanto tops the list and accounts for one-fifth of the global proprietary seed market. 

According to industry sources, Monsanto’s soybean seeds and traits accounted for about 90 percent of the GM soybeans planted worldwide in 2005. What’s more, genetically engineered soybeans reportedly account for almost 60 percent of the global soybean area, an increasingly dominant share of one of the world’s most important food and commodity crops. 

Civil Society Fights Back 

On  May 3, 2007 at an appeals hearing at the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich, ETC Group and Greenpeace argued that Monsanto’s patent must be revoked because it is technically flawed and morally unacceptable. 

Monsanto’s legal defense of its patent may not be surprising, but it was hugely hypocritical. Before Monsanto acquired the patent in 1996, the company vigorously opposed the patent, which was then owned by U.S.-based biotech company Agracetus. In 1994 Monsanto submitted an exhaustive, 292-page opposition statement to the EPO that shredded the technical merits of Agracetus’s soybean patent. Mon- santo’s lawyers wrote that the soybean patent should be “revoked in its entirety,” is “not…novel,” “lacks an inventive step,” and  the “sufficient disclosure [of scientific method] is woefully lacking.” But after Monsanto acquired Agracetus in April 1996, Monsanto withdrew its challenge, reversed its position, and announced that it would defend its newly acquired patent. 

In 2003—more than nine years after the patent was first awarded and legally challenged—an EPO patent tribunal heard legal arguments against the notorious patent. Opponents were shocked when the EPO upheld Monsanto’s monopoly. Today, nearly two-thirds of the patent’s 20-year term has expired. On  May 3, 2007 EPO’s appeals tribunal finally revoked Monsanto’s monopoly on one of the world’s major food crops, a huge victory in the worldwide struggle for food sovereignty. 

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Hope Shand is a member of the ETC group, headquartered in Canada, which monitors the impact of new technologies on the environment.