James Corbett – If you had told someone a few decades ago that by 2016 the company that brought aspirin to the world and the company that brought Agent Orange to Vietnam were going to team up to control a quarter of the world’s food supply, chances are you would have been labeled a loony.

Unless your name was Robert B. Shapiro. He was CEO of Monsanto from 1995 to 2000, and in 1999 he told Business Week that the company’s goal was to wed “three of the largest industries in the world–agriculture, food and health–that now operate as separate businesses. But there are a set of changes that will lead to their integration.”

With this week’s announcement that Bayer had finally succeeded in its quest to acquire Monsanto, it is hard to deny that Shapiro’s vision has been realized. Too bad for all of us that that vision is a nightmare.

The Bayer-Monsanto merger (as James Evan Pilato and I discussed on this week’s New World Next Week) is turning heads, and rightfully so. Clocking in at $66 billion, or $128 per share, it is the largest cash takeover bid in history. It also combines Bayer and Monsanto’s shares of the world seed market (3% and 26% respectively) and their share of the agrochemical market (15% and 8% respectively) with Bayer’s pharmaceutical division to create the single largest player in Shapiro’s quickly-materializing “agriculture/food/health” industry.

But Bayer and Monsanto are not the only ones playing this game. Major competitors DuPont and Dow are in the midst of a merger that is expected to create a $130 billion behemoth when the dust settles. China National Chemical Corp.’s $43 billion takeover bid for seed giant Syngenta AG was approved by US regulators last month. And just like that, the number of companies presiding over the global supply of (increasingly genetically modified) seeds and agrochemicals is about to be cut in half. Continue reading →