For a man trying to feed the world, Monsanto Co.’s Hugh Grant has no shortage of people trying to disrupt his dinner plans, from activists fighting genetically modified crops to the U.S. Department of Justice probing his company’s sales practices.
Grant, a salesman who became chief executive officer in 2003, says Monsanto will be vindicated on all fronts because it has licensed genetics to hundreds of rivals since the dawn of the biotech seed industry in the mid-1980s.
That strategy, and billions of dollars of research, got the company’s genes into 93 percent of U.S. soybeans and 82 percent of corn last year.
“We have made the technology accessible to all comers,” Grant, 51, said in an interview. “The fact that we went for an open-architecture, broad licensing system at the very beginning rather than holding the technology ourselves, I feel very good about that approach.”
Grant’s argument will get a public hearing when the Justice Department and Department of Agriculture hold a workshop on seed-industry competition in Iowa this week.
The meeting will include more than two dozen panelists, including Justice Department antitrust chief Christine Varney and Monsanto Vice President Jim Tobin.
DuPont Co. has led the charge against Monsanto, arguing in a lawsuit in federal court in St. Louis that the company uses its dominance in modified seeds to stifle competition.
“Monsanto is not allowing the best seed to get to the market and is imposing unjustified pricing that hits American farmers and independent seed producers throughout the United States,” Paul Schickler, president of DuPont’s Pioneer seed unit, said in an interview.
David Kruse, president of commodities brokerage CommStock Investments Inc., said he’s planting Monsanto’s new Roundup Ready 2 Yield soybeans this year on his 640-acre farm near Royal, Iowa.
Still, he thinks Monsanto uses its genetic licenses to keep seed companies from offering competing varie- ties.
“It’s OK to have a good product, but it is not OK to control competitors’ access to the market,” Kruse said by telephone. “Monsanto has stepped over the line. If you can control what can come to market, that is anticompetitive.”
Monsanto, the world’s largest seedmaker, already has begun trying to counteract the criticism from farmers like Kruse and the movie “Food Inc.,” which argued that the St. Louis-based company bullies growers who save patented soybeans to replant the following year.
Grant said in January that he won’t block generic versions of Monsanto’s modified seeds as they come off pat- ent.
The company said it’s working to help double food production by 2050 as the planet’s population reaches 9 billion and portrays itself as a friend of farmers with its americasfarmers.com Web site.
The legal and public relations fights are the latest battles for the Scotland native who rose from demonstrating weed killer in barley fields to the company’s top executive in his 29 years with Monsanto.
Grant resolved intellectual property disputes early in his tenure as CEO, settling patent lawsuits with Bayer, Syngenta and Dow Chemical by agreeing to cross-license technologies. The United States abandoned an antitrust probe focused on its herbicide in 2004.
“Hugh is a very shrewd operator and a tough warrior,” said Michael Pragnell, who squared off against Grant as CEO of Syngenta from 2000 through 2007. “He’s also a realist. You don’t fight battles you are not going to win.”
