Monsanto, DuPont team up on food production initiative
WASHINGTON — Monsanto and DuPont may be fierce competitors in the biotech trade, but they teamed up on Tuesday in a drive to dramatically increase the availability of food on the planet to meet the demands of a 50 percent increase in population by 2050.
Joining forces with agribusiness powerhouses Archer Daniels Midland Co. and John Deere, company chief executives outlined their new Global Harvest Initiative designed to bridge a looming productivity gap brought on by predictions of 3 billion more people on the planet in coming decades and dangerous complications from climate change.
"There’s no silver bullet," said Monsanto President and Chief Executive Hugh Grant. "The question, I think, is how do you do more with less? How do you produce a whole bunch more on a shrinking footprint?"
The new project began with a day-long symposium featuring experts on global agriculture and food security. The executives said they will be meeting in the coming months to discuss how to share technology and determine if they’re meeting their goals.
"Collective success will be limited," warned DuPont Chief Executive Ellen Kullman, "if we can’t find a way to track our progress."
The companies are vowing to collaborate even as they compete. For instance, Monsanto and DuPont are racing one another to engineer drought-resistant crops that could be valuable in sub-Saharan Africa and potentially critical in combating climate shifts predicted for a warming planet.
The two companies occasionally have been something far different than partners. DuPont acknowledged recently that it has supported the Organization for Competitive Markets, a nonprofit that has been a persistent critic of Monsanto’s dominance in the seed business.
"Relationships are hard to do when you love someone. Relationships in the business community, a disparate group, are much, much harder," Grant said.
He called the fledgling partnership a business opportunity that will require emotional investment as well as investment in the traditional sense.
"I’d like to get to the point where there are more people on the stage because everybody’s got a part to play if we’re going to figure it out," he said.
"The reality is that all of us have to define what we bring to the party and then get comfortable with one set of measurements and one set of commitments."
Corporate vows to feed the hungry renew a long-running debate about whether global hunger is rooted in food politics or food production.
Margaret Mellon, a microbiologist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said she wishes the new initiative well, but believes that food shortages often are rooted in distribution problems as well as shortcomings in farming.
"Simply increasing food production, even if they could do it, doesn’t mean that a lot of people won’t go to bed hungry," she said.
Filed under: marketing by TheDoor