Nearly 325 organizations signed a letter pressing new U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to make sure the Justice Department does its job when it looks at a proposal for three potential mergers. The companies include Dow Chemical and DuPont, Monsanto and Bayer, and Syngenta and ChemChina. Tiffany Finck-Haynes, with Friends of the Earth, said her group and others want Congress to provide oversight, because President Donald Trump met with the CEOs of Monsanto just before he was inaugurated.
"It raised a lot of ethics questions for lawyers who are very well versed in anti-trust law, because they said that this is very uncommon," she said. "Presidents hardly ever – and really in history, have not – interfered in this way."
The letter said if all three deals were to close, the newly-created companies would control nearly 70 percent of the world's pesticide market, more than 60 percent of commercial seed sales, and 80 percent of the U.S. corn-seed market. President Trump said the mergers would create jobs and boost the U.S. economy.
Joe Maxwell, head of the Organization for Competitive Markets, said big mergers are bad for the environment, small farmers, rural communities and consumers. He cited climate change as one reason the nation needs more diversified and competitive development.
"There's little incentive for these companies to do further research and development on these seeds," Maxwell said. "We all worry about having too few strains or genes in those seeds. If we become too dependent, we'll look just like Ireland did in the potato famine."
Lisa Griffith, interim director of the National Family Farm Coalition, added that when these types of mergers happen, prices go up and seed varieties disappear.
“A lot of these varieties that are available from the agri-chemical corporations are GM varieties, genetically modified, which may not be what the farmer wants,” Griffith said.