Two giants of the farming and chemical industries agreed to merge
Wednesday in a $66 billion deal: the U.S.’s Monsanto and Germany’s
Bayer, the original maker of aspirin. It’s the year’s biggest deal and
will create the world’s largest supplier of seeds and farm chemicals,
with $26 billion in combined annual revenue from agriculture. If the
merger goes through, it will combine two companies with a long and
storied history that shaped what we eat, the drugs we take and how we
grow our food.
Two friends making dyes from coal-tar started Bayer in 1863, and it
developed into a chemical and drug company famous for introducing heroin
as a cough remedy in 1896, then aspirin in 1899. The company was a Nazi
contractor during World War II and used forced labor. Today, the firm
based in Leverkusen, Germany, makes drugs and has a crop science unit,
which makes weed and bug killers. Its goal is to dominate the chemical
and drug markets for people, plants and animals.
Monsanto, founded in 1901, originally made food additives like saccharin
before expanding into industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals and
agriculture products. It’s famous for making some controversial and
highly toxic chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls, now banned and
commonly known as PCBs, and the herbicide Agent Orange, which was used
by the U.S. military in Vietnam. It commercialized Roundup herbicide in
the 1970s and began developing genetically modified corn and soybean
seeds in the 1980s. In 2000, a new Monsanto emerged from a series of
corporate mergers.
Monsanto has recently tried to position itself as a one-stop seeds and
chemicals shop for farmers. The idea is to use information directly from
the fields to figure out exactly when, where and how farmers should
apply chemicals to crops to yield a bigger harvest. Monsanto’s not the
only company with this clever idea. Dow Chemical and DuPont said in
December they’d merge, then break into three entities, one of which will
offer a range of seeds and chemicals. A few months later, China
National Chemical Corp. said it was buying Syngenta in an even bigger
deal.
No comments:
Post a Comment