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Monsanto U: Agribusiness's Takeover of Public Schools
http://www.alternet.org/environment/76804/
By Nancy Scola, AlterNet. Posted February 15, 2008.

Thanks to Bush's new cuts on public funding for land-grant schools,
agribusiness is gaining a huge foothold in the future of our food.

I've startled a bug scientist. "Yeah, now I'm nervous," said Mike Hoffmann,
a Cornell University entomologist and crop specialist who spends his days
with cucumber beetles and small wasps. But he's also in charge of keeping
the research funding flowing at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life
Sciences. What have I done to alarm him? I've drawn his attention to the
newly released FY 2009 Presidential Budget.

Like more than a hundred public institutions of higher learning, Cornell is
what's known as a "land grant." Dotting the United States from Ithaca,
N.Y., to Pullman, Wash., such schools were established by a Civil War-era
act of Congress to provide universities centered around, "the agriculture
and mechanic arts." Congress handed each U.S. state a chunk of federal land
to be sold for start-up monies, and for the last 150 years, it has funded
ground-breaking research on all things agriculture, from dirt to crops to
cattle.

The land-grant system has been, in short, a high-yield investment. The
scientific research that has come out of land-grant labs and fields have
aided millions of farmers and fed millions of Americans. And the land-grant
reach doesn't stop at ocean's edge. Oklahoma State, the Sooner State's land
grant, says that the public funding of land-grant research "has benefited
every man, woman and child in the United States and much of the world."

That was until America's land-grant system met George W. Bush. Tucked into
the appendix of his latest national budget is a nearly one-third cut in the
public funding for agriculture research at the land grants. The size of the
cut is surprising, but not its existence -- it's part of a multiyear drive
by the Bush administration to completely eliminate regular public research
funding. In a press briefing last week, a USDA deputy secretary illuminated
the Bush administration's rationale for the transition to competitive grant
making: "That's how you get the most bang for the buck."

Wallace Huffman, an Iowa State agro-economist, is deeply unimpressed with
Bush's "bang" approach to land-grant research. "There's a sense in the
president's office that you invest in research like you invest in building
cars," Huffman told me last week. Land-grant school officials are similarly
skeptical. In a survey, Kansas State argued that the loss of regular
funding would upend education. Minnesota complained that cuts would
undermine ongoing research projects. North Dakota simply asked, "What is
the future of ag research?"

Good question. A reasonable answer? The future of agricultural research at
America's land-grant institutions belongs to biotech conglomerates like
Monsanto. And it seems likely that it's a future of chemical-dependent,
genetically modified, bio-engineered agriculture.

In stark contrast to how the federal government and many states are
wallowing in red ink, the St. Louis-based Monsanto boasted more than $7
billion in annual sales in 2007 -- simply the latest in four years of
record-smashing profits. And so when our president says that the time has
come for public land-grant institutions to get cracking at "leveraging
nonfederal resources," you can be sure that Monsanto's ears perk.

But, it doesn't take a presidential invitation to get Monsanto to sink its
roots in the land-grant system. Those roots are already planted. Iowa
State's campus boasts a Monsanto Auditorium and the school offers students
Monsanto-funded graduate fellowships on seed policy with a special focus on
"the protection of intellectual property rights." Kansas State has spun off
Wildcat Genetics, a side company whose purpose is the selling of soybean
seeds genetically engineered to survive the application of Roundup® --
the result of a decades long relationship with Monsanto, the pesticide's
maker.

But don't get the wrong idea about Monsanto's land-grant activities. By
that, I mean, don't think the company is the only multinational biotech
conglomerate firmly rooted in American land-grant soil.

Head on down to Texas A&M. There you'll find the a chair for the "Dow
Chemical Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering." Similar
chairs exist at West Virginia State and Louisiana State. The agricultural
college of the University of California at Davis is funded in part by
DuPont and Calgene.

The University of California at Berkeley's Plant and Microbiology
Department entered into a $25 million/five-year quasi-exclusive research
agreement with the Swiss-based Novartis, which then became Syngenta, which
now funds the land-grant research group on soybean fungi. In 2005, Purdue,
Indiana's land-grant school, developed an application of the so-called
Terminator gene pioneered by Delta Pine and Land Co.; school officials and
researchers later took to the hustings when the public resisted the idea of
self-sterilizing plants.

But the agricultural industry's relationship with the land-grant system is
not an entirely new development. In 1973, former Texas agricultural
commissioner and activist Jim Hightower lamented the situation in his
landmark report, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: The Failure of America's Land
Grant College Complex.

But the world of agriculture is today a far, far different place than when
Hightower wrote.

For one thing, in the early 1970s Monsanto was still a decade away from
genetically modifying its very first plant cell. For another, back then the
federal government was still committed to providing steady research
funding.

And, importantly, it was neither possible nor profitable for our nation's
bastions of higher learning to be players in the global agribusiness. But
intervening tectonic shifts in American public policy help us to understand
why a public institution like Purdue would fight so darn hard to defend a
biotech advance like the Terminator gene: in a manner of speaking, they own
the thing.

Jump ahead to 1980, when the U.S. Supreme Court under Warren Burger decided
that, as long as they'd been tweaked from their natural state, living
organisms from seeds to microbes or Terminator genes could be patented just
as if they were a new cotton gin or tractor blade. And in that same year,
Congress gave universities a kick towards the marketplace by encouraging
institutions to file patent claims on the discoveries and inventions of
their faculty researchers -- no matter if their work was funded in whole or
in part by taxpayer dollars.

The summed effect was that, suddenly, a public institution like Purdue had
a great deal of motivation for working with Delta Pine and Land Co. to see
if they might make a buck off their biotech invention in the marketplace.
What's more, the policy shift made it so individual lab geeks themselves
stood to profit, eligible for a large slice of whatever windfall their
discovery generated.

As the biotech industry has since exploded, the impact on the land-grant
system is perhaps not unexpected. "Researchers want to be at both the
cutting edge of science and the cutting edge of the marketplace," says
Andrew Neighbour, until recently the director of UCLA's office on the
business applications of faculty research. (The entire University of
California system functions as that state's "land-grant institution.") And
so the advent of patentable and profitable plants (and animals, for that
matter) has meant a shift in research focus away new knowledge and towards
the creation of marketable products.

The land-grant institutions find themselves in a pickle. "On the one hand,"
says Paul Gepts, professor of agronomy and plant genetics at UC Davis,
schools pushed into the free market have developed the habit of patenting
research and found a taste for private business deals. But on the other
hand, "they have a public role where the information they produce should be
available to all."

As things stand, "public universities," says Dr. Gepts, "are a
contradiction."

This embrace of patents and profits means that land-grant agricultural
research centers today are not playgrounds of academic collaboration they
once were. "Things have changed enormously," says William Folk, a plant
geneticist at the University of Missouri. "When I started in the '70s," he
recalls fondly, "meetings were filled with people criticizing each other
and sharing ideas." But today, he says "if you have an idea that has any
potential commercial value, you're reluctant to share."

Not surprisingly, school administrators argue that a negative reading of
the cozy relationship between agricultural researchers and biotech
corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta is hogwash. When asked, Neal Van
Alfen, dean of the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental
Sciences, acknowledges that about 20 percent of the $165 million annual
research budget is contributed by industry. But Dean Van Alfen is quick to
add, "It forms just one part of who we work with." Research conducted in
conjunction with industry interests, he insists, is simply one chunk of "an
awfully large amount of work."

But numbers and percentages don't tell the whole story, because of the way
that industry engages in the land-grant system. In short, they skim. Here's
how it works: (a) federal and state governments hand over taxpayer money to
build and sustain the basic infrastructure, without which research can't
hope to take place, then (b) the biotech industry injects some smaller
amount of much-needed cash into the system, and then (c) agribusinesses
skim off and patent the most promising (and potentially profitable)
discoveries that rise to the top.

Still, administrators argue, scientific professionalism keeps industry in
check -- a researcher who fudges his or her findings to curry industry
favor is in for a short career. But that line of reasoning misses the real
concern. What's alarming isn't that global agribusiness conglomerates like
Monsanto, Dow Chemical and DuPont are getting the answers they want from
our land-grant entomologists, agronomists and plant geneticists.

It's that at public institutions, private interests are the ones asking the
questions.

What must be kept in mind is that land-grant researchers are generally
expected to bring to the table their own research funding, and the
situation can already be fairly dire. When UC Davis' Paul Gepts comments on
how his institution's support is limited to a base salary, I attempt a lame
joke: "They give you a desk too, right?" Yes, he responds, but a phone is
another matter.

Faculty researchers are so hungry for funding that, says Missouri's William
Folk, "if companies want to entice researchers to work on their projects,
all they have to do is wave a bit of money." "The availability of funds, he
says, "makes an enormous difference in what we can do."

"We're opportunists," Folk says, with compassion, of himself and his fellow
researchers, "we go after money where it might be."

When it comes to how industry-university relations shape academic research,
UCLA's Andrew Neighbour is the person to talk to. While an administrator at
Washington University in St. Louis, Neighbour managed the school's landmark
multiyear and multimillion-dollar relationship with Monsanto. (Note: WashU
is a private institution.) "There's no question that industry money comes
with strings," Neighbour admits. "It limits what you can do, when you can
do it, who it has to be approved by."

And so the issue at hand becomes one of the questions that are being asked
at public land-grant schools. While Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, et al., are
paying the bills, are agricultural researchers going to pursue such lines
of scientific inquiry as "How will this new corn variety impact the
independent New York farmer?" Or, "Will this new tomato make eaters
healthier?"

It seems far more likely that the questions that multinational biotech
conglomerates are willing to pay to have answered run along the lines of
"How can we keep growing our own bottom lines?"

I put it to Dr. Folk. "The companies are there to make money, no doubt," he
responds.

What suffers for falling outside the scope of industry interest? Organic
farming, for one. The Organic Farming Research Foundation was founded in
the 1980s after, Executive Director Bob Scowcroft tells me, farmers
interested in weaning themselves from chemical dependence approached their
local land-grant outreach agents for help for pest management. As Scowcroft
tells it, their advice was invariably in the spirit of, "Well, sure, I can
tell you what to spray."

OFRF began arming land-grant researchers with modest grants but found that
academics interested in conducting organic-related research faced obstacles
beyond funding.

"Coming out of the organic closet could be the beginning of the end of your
career," says Scowcroft. Looking outside biotech agriculture is, he says,
"like throwing 30 years of the Green Revolution in your boss's face."
Today, says John Reganold, an OFRF grantee and apple researcher at
Washington State University, academics interested in organic farming "just
don't have the money to do what we need to do."

Also the subject of minimal industry attention: so-called orphan crops,
like sorghum and cassava, which feed millions of people in the developing
world but aren't considered patentable or profitable. UC Davis' Paul Gepts
is working to breed a disease-resistant variety of the East African common
bean, an important protein source for AIDS sufferers. He's turned to an
English charitable group for funding, and all involved have agreed to
resist patenting the plant -- once a useful variety is developed, the
science will be left in the public domain.

While it's clear that funding cash is the carrot used by agribusiness to
entice researchers into asking the questions industry is most interested in
having answered, there is a stick involved: corporately held patents used
to block them from asking others.

That's certainly been Paul Gepts's experience, when he thought he might
tackle the question of gene transfer in Mexican maize varieties. The
question, though, is a sensitive one for Monsanto, as one of the arguments
against transgenic crops is the difficulty in containing their spread --
raising the specter of a threat to the world's biodiversity. As the maize
he was interested in was patented by Monsanto, Gepts asked the company for
some samples. Their response: no way.

When I asked Gepts for his take on Monsanto's motivation for the refusal, I
hadn't yet finished the question when he answered: "Avoiding scrutiny," he
said. Missouri's Folk seconds the contention that such private claims on
science impede research, saying, "Our ability to do science is constrained
by the patents held by agribusiness."

All this said, it's not fair to say that there hasn't been resistance
against public land-grant schools mutating into institutions of private
science. After Novartis had become involved in UC Berkeley's Department of
Plant and Microbiology, the school ordered an internal review by the
academic senate, which ultimately deemed the relationship "a mistake."
Lawrence Busch, a Berkeley faculty member who headed the review said at its
conclusion: "I think it is high time for serious discussions of what the
devil we want our universities to be."

When Mike Hoffmann -- the Cornell entomologist I startled by sharing Bush's
proposed budget cuts -- recovers from his shock, he offers his take on
"what the devil" our universities should be. The principle that should
guide Cornell, Berkeley, Missouri and our other land-grant institutions is
simple, he says: public funding for the public good. The mission of
America's centers of agricultural learning is, he concludes, "to produce
new knowledge for the public benefit. That's why we have the land-grant
system, and I think it's pretty important."
---------

Nancy Scola is a Brooklyn-based writer who has in the past served as the
chief blogger at Air America, an aide to former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner,
as he explored a run for the presidency, and a congressional staffer on the
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.