Your tax dollars are funding Corteva's quest to own the food chain

For most of human history, farming was pretty simple: you grew crops, saved the seeds, and planted them next year. It was a shared, decentralized system that worked for thousands of years. Now, a handful of mega-corporations have slapped patents on life itself.

The math is almost impressive in its audacity. Whenever the government hands out subsidies to help farmers survive a bad year, seed companies immediately jack up their prices. They’ve essentially figured out how to siphon that taxpayer money straight into their own pockets. Two companies now control over 70% of the corn and soybean market, and they’ve used legal muscle to stop anyone—even university researchers—from studying their seeds or breeding new, resilient varieties.

We are currently flying blind. Because these corporations treat their genetic data like state secrets and threaten anyone who tries to sequence it with lawsuits, we have no idea if our food supply is vulnerable to new diseases. The Department of Justice is finally hinting that this might be an antitrust nightmare, but for now, we're just paying more for the privilege of letting shareholders dictate our food security.

It is wild that we have turned the literal foundation of human survival into a subscription service for the corporate elite.

Source: The Conversation