After paying billions to settle Roundup cancer suits, Bayer launched a multi-pronged lobbying campaign to turn its legal defense into law. An appropriations rider passed Tuesday is the tip of the iceberg.
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The MAHA report says food and chemical corporations should be held accountable for making children sick but the actions of Congress and the Trump administration reveal different priorities.
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A USDA report reveals that a handful of monopolies control most the patents on top U.S. commodity crops, inhibiting critical seed research, diversification, and competition.
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A new report by the Open Markets Institute and Friends of the Earth argues that corporate-led soil carbon offset programs risk increasing greenhouse gas emissions while entrenching agribusiness market power.
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The FTC alleges that Syngenta and Corteva maintained pesticide monopolies by paying distributors not to carry generic products. Pesticide firms aren’t the only businesses using pay-to-block schemes.
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As Big Ag gets into the business of buying and selling carbon credits, they also get access to lots of farm-level data.
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A new antitrust suit against seed makers and sellers sheds light on how Big Ag controls the crop input market to preference their products.
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Agribusiness wants to dramatically change the way farmers value and pay for a bag of corn seed, to get a second bite at producer profits. Bayer, the world’s leading seed manufacturer, has been piloting an “outcome-based” pricing program that adjusts the cost of its seeds or agrichemicals based on how well its products perform. Farmers and antitrust scholars worry that goliaths such as Bayer will use this data-driven pricing program to further squeeze farmers and to lock more growers into the behemoths’ product bundles and digital agriculture platforms.
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Canada’s Competition Bureau is looking into an allegation that agribusiness giants Bayer, Corteva, BASF, Cargill, and others tried to crush an online ag retailing startup, the California-based Farmers Business Network (FBN), according to court filings reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
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If you care about reducing pesticide use, promoting agricultural biodiversity, and supporting small farmers, then you should also care about who’s amassing agricultural data. That’s the message of a new report from a group of sustainable food policy experts, out last week.
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Last week, after the Trump administration struck a deal with Canada and Mexico to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, the White House declared victory for US farmers, who gained greater access to Canadian dairy, egg, poultry, and wheat markets. Unfortunately, the new deal called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, also includes lesser-known provisions that could allow agribusiness corporations to patent Mexico’s native corn varieties and challenge the country’s ban on genetically modified (GM) corn cultivation.
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On Thursday, Bayer closed its $62.5 billion purchase of Monsanto. This comes roughly a week after the Department of Justice (DOJ) approved the merger, on the condition that the corporations sell off $9 billion worth of assets, including seed divisions, intellectual property, research projects, and more. Yet even after these divestitures, the combined entity will be the largest global seed and agrochemical corporation, and U.S. based field crop growers fear the power of the new combine.
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