World Food Policy WFP Volume 4, No. 2, Spring 2018 | Page 26

World Food Policy
China’s purchase of Syngenta. More
modest sized sales include Monsanto’s
sale of its small BT cotton seed program
in China and Bayer Crop Science’s sale
of its maize and vegetable seed business
in India to a local company.
varieties their fields. They multiplied
the seed and sold it as an insect resis-
tant non-GE cotton variety before the
government found out it was Monsan-
to’s genetically engineered (GE) insect
resistant cotton. A similar case was the
Chinese company, Dabeinong. Some of
their employees were caught in corn-
fields in Iowa taking hybrid maize lines
from Pioneer and Monsanto. The lead-
er of Dabeinong’s U.S. seed subsidiary
is now serving a jail term of 5 years for
theft on intellectual property.
Indian and Chinese firms have
legally imported pesticides, tractors,
fertilizers, veterinary medicines and
some seeds and technology embodied
in them for decades. The biggest im-
ports of inputs by value are fertilizers
—particularly for India—although little
new technology is embodied in them.
In addition, there have been important
imports of the machinery and knowl-
edge to produce fertilizer, pesticides
and agricultural machinery. The second pathway is through
multinational investments in research
and technology transfer in India and
China. These investments can take
place in wholly owned subsidiaries or
joint ventures with local firms. MNCs
are making major investments in plant
breeding and in agricultural biotech in
India. In China in the late 1990s when it
appeared that the Chinese government
might approve GM rice and maize,
there was a burst of investments in bio-
tech by Pioneer, Monsanto, Syngenta
and others. Syngenta and Dow are in-
vesting in developing active ingredients
of pesticides in India. John Deere and
Kubota conduct agricultural machinery
research in China, while Deere has a
major research program in India.
The purchase of foreign tech-
nology and research by purchasing
high-tech companies has become im-
portant in the last decade. ChemChina
bought Makhteshim, the Israeli gener-
ic pesticide company for about $4 bil-
lion in 2011 and recently bought Syn-
genta for $43 billion. Chem-China is a
state-owned enterprise and the money
financing these purchases came from
government banks in China. India’s pri-
vate companies such as Mahindra and
Mahindra in the agricultural machinery
business and UPL, the generic pesticide
giant have also made a series of pur-
chases although none as large as Chem- Finally, there are spillovers of
knowledge and technology from MNC.
Spillovers take place to Indian and Chi-
nese company through patents which
reveal proprietary technology and how
they work. Spillovers also occur through
examining MNC products that are in
use by farmers and trying to improve
on them or complement them. Some
spillovers take place through the move-
ment of people. Scientists and tech-
nician move to other firms or develop
start-up companies. When Monsanto
dropped their rice biotech program in
Bangalore, several former Monsanto
scientists started the seed and biotech
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