THE CONCENTRATION OF SEED AND CHEMICAL SUPPLY

There has been a move amongst the multinational agro-chemical companies into seed production. Monsanto is the best known, but Zeneca and others have also taken over seed companies. An industry view of future income-generating products in 2010 sees chemicals as still accounting for the largest proportion of sales (approx. 85-90%) and seeds/biotechnology as the rest (approx. 10-20%). There appears to be a move towards interlinked markets for seeds and chemicals: an example being the herbicide-tolerant transgenics (crops which have had genes from other organisms inserted into their genetic makeup) and herbicide chemicals. If this is a growing trend then transgenics may be designed to be complementary to chemical products rather than alternatives. (An analogy might be the links between hardware and software in computing).