Visualizing Consolidation in the Global Seed Industry: 1996–2008
By P. Howard. 2009
265 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The commercial seed industry has undergone tremendous consolidation in the last 40 years as transnational corporations entered this agricultural sector, and acquired or merged with competing firms. This trend is associated with impacts that constrain the opportunities for renewable agriculture, such as reductions in seed lines and a declining prevalence of seed saving. To better characterize the current structure of the industry, ownership changes from 1996 to 2008 are represented visually with information graphics. Since the commercialization of transgenic crops in the mid-1990s, the sale of seeds has become dominated globally by Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. In addition, the largest firms are increasingly networked through agreements to cross-license transgenic seed traits.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dce72c281efc44e8b12b1fb49c0c8df814e05f9e
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Food as Commons or Commodity? Exploring the Links between Normative Valuations and Agency in Food Transition (2017, background): “As a commodity, international food trade, that only accounts for 23% of global food production [2016], is regulated by the WTO framework, an international institution not bound by the UN Charter, and dominated by few transnational companies [104, 106]: only three companies account for 40% of beverag”
- Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest (2014, background): “Seed saving and exchanges in these crops ended when they became available as GM cultivars and came under the control of patents in the 1990s (Heinemann 2007, Howard 2009).”
- A Sustainable Agricultural Future Relies on the Transition to Organic Agroecological Pest Management (2018, background): “In all, conventional agriculture has relied on purchased off-farm inputs [24] to mitigate pest problems.”
- Intellectual Property and Consolidation in the Seed Industry (2015, background): “As these agrochemical companies bought out hundreds of formerly independent biotechnology and seed companies, they also merged with each other, eventually reducing the number of global agrochemical firms to just six, consolidating the seed industry even further (Howard, 2009).”
- Tapping the economic and nutritional power of vegetables (2017, background): “However, the extensive consolidation that has taken place in the global vegetable seed industry and competitiveness within the industry for market share are indicative for its large economic value (Howard, 2009).”
- Ten Years of Sustainability (2009 to 2018): A Bibliometric Overview (2018, background): “14 Visualizing consolidation in the global seed industry: 1996-2008 [34] Howard, P.”