AgrEvo is set to take over from Monsanto as the principle cheer-leader for genetic engineering, and is pushing hard for transgenic crops to be grown on a large scale in Britain. As the only firm involved in the government’s farm-scale trials of GE crops, AgrEvo has made itself the main target for mass direct action protest, yet it seems to relish taking on the biotech leadership role.

AgrEvo’s strategy
AgrEvo’s strategy is roughly comparable with that of other transnational biotech companies – to encourage the widespread take-up of transgenic herbicide resistant crops, in order to guarantee future profitability by linking chemical sales with new patented seeds.

Or as the company’s vision statement puts it: “We want a healthy environment and food for all people. All over the world we support high-yield, sustainable agriculture based on intelligent solutions in crop protection and environmental health, as well as green gene technology. We help to optimise the usage of existing farmland and to protect Nature against further destruction.”

A City analysts’ report produced by HSBC in 1997 re-emphasises the point for the benefit of future investors. Under the heading ‘strategy’ it reads: “To build dominant strategic positions in global cash crops from seed production to agrochemicals by exploiting their gene bank and enabling technologies. To position Liberty as a global, non specific herbicide linked to crops in soybean, corn and canola.” The HSBC report mentions only one risk: “Environmental opposition to transgenic crops could delay roll out.”
Back-door commercialisation

The desire to position Liberty (chemical name glufosinate) as a global herbicide leader is key to understanding AgrEvo’s involvement with farm-scale trials. This year ‘LibertyLink’ crops of corn, sugar beet and oilseed rape (canola) were grown at seven sites across the UK. AgrEvo has taken a massive gamble – that by putting itself forward as the UK’s leading proponent for the commercialisation of GM crops, it can gain a head start over the competition when the GM floodgates open.

AgrEvo spokesperson Des D’Souza has confirmed openly that AgrEvo was chosen to conduct the trials “because our crops are closest to commercialisation”.

The gamble is going badly wrong. Three out of the seven farm-scale trials were destroyed this year – one in a mass rally at Watlington, another by Greenpeace in Norfolk and another near Swindon by the trustees of the farm it was growing on. Having failed to persuade the government to keep the locations of trials a state secret, AgrEvo has succeeded in pressuring ministers to announce a dramatic up-scaling of the testing programme.
This will mean three new winter trials (originally four, but the farmer from one pulled out), which were planted in September 1999, and up to 75 farm-scale trials in the year 2000 – covering an area the size of Southampton.

With this deluge of transgenic crops sweeping the British countryside, it is likely that AgrEvo hopes to achieve two aims. One is to defeat direct action with sheer numbers of trial sites. The second is to rush in the commercialisation of GM crops through the back door – by selling the produce from the trial sites, and keeping the government under pressure to allow wide-scale planting of LibertyLink crops before the testing programme is even complete.

Perhaps they also have a third, more sinister aim. Pollen from crops like oilseed rape and maize travels long distances by wind and on insects, and can cross-pollinate wild relatives. Could AgrEvo be aiming to achieve such massive contamination of the countryside that it becomes impossible to guarantee the genetic integrity of non-GM or organic crops?

What is AgrEvo?
At first sight AgrEvo appears to be a small company based deep in the East Anglian farming heartland of England (it has offices in Cambridge and Kings Lynn). In reality, however, it is a giant transnational operating in seventy countries. It employs 8,600 people, with a global turnover in 1998 of DM 4.2 billion (£1.4 billion). Like Monsanto, it has been rushing to buy up seed companies in other countries – acquiring three Brazilian companies this year alone and expanding aggressively into India.

In 1996 it bought Plant Genetics Systems, then Europe’s largest biotech company, in order to access its portfolio of 46 herbicide resistance patents.

AgrEvo is unusual in that it is not a publicly listed company. Established in 1994, it is a joint venture bringing together the crop protection activities of two huge German pharmaceutical companies – Hoescht (60% owner) and Schering (40%).

To complicate the picture still further, Hoescht is soon due to merge with Rhone-Poulenc to form the Aventis group. AgrEvo is expected to be renamed Aventis CropScience, and will be jointly owned by the three companies, reducing Schering’s holding to 24%.

AgrEvo’s lack of shareholders means that many traditional pressure points on the company are removed. It is insulated from the whims of the market and the continual pressure that the need to increase share price imposes on a company. With no significant consumer interface it has even less incentive to be responsive to the wishes of ordinary people – it exists primarily to please other large companies.

This is reflected in AgrEvo’s PR, which has been startlingly inept even by biotech industry standards. Usual spokesperson Des D'Souza’s mad-scientist manner and wild staring eyes have been as much a godsend to campaigners as was Monsanto’s greasy-American Dan Verakis.

And as for AgrEvo’s commitment to the truth, how about this neat statement from the 1998 Annual Report: “It is the farmer who decides which crops are to be sown and he is influenced by his customer’s clear demands. Our goal in AgrEvo will be to adopt the same mind-set, enabling us to be seen as his partner.”

On the markets too, AgrEvo is running into trouble. Schering’s first-six months Interim Report for 1999 notes that it received a “a reduced profit contribution from our crop protection joint venture, AgrEvo” resulting from the “unsatisfactory development of business in Europe and North America”, which it blames on the “poor economic situation” of farmers in Europe.

Aventis
The formation of Aventis is part of the mega-mergers trend sweeping the ‘life sciences’ industry. Already the top ten agrochemical companies account for 85% of global sales – and Aventis will top them all, even outstripping Novartis, Monsanto and AstraZeneca (itself the product of a recent merger). Headquartered in Strasbourg, France, it will bring together the ‘life sciences’ operations of Hoescht and Rhone-Poulenc, which both plan to spin off their loss-making industrial chemicals businesses at the same time.

Hoescht
Hoescht is a company with a big heart. Partly this is due to its top-selling angina drug, Cardizem. But also Hoescht has a strategy which aims to place it at the centre of global “sustainable development”.

“Having access to advances in biotechnology and genetic engineering means holding the key to future success in life sciences - for the benefit of a growing global population,” crows the 1998 Annual Report.

To any reasonably well-informed person this is clearly self-delusional. But as a corporate ideology it makes a lot of sense – serving both to manage external opinion and massage internal morale. “It will only be possible to realize the concept of sustainable development, which we actively support at Hoescht, through life science innovations,” reports Hoescht chair, Jurgen Dormann.

“[This] also motivates employees and management beyond their day-to-day work and commercial success: the life sciences help meet the basic needs of people like no other industry.” The real truth about feeding the world could be very dangerous to Hoescht.
The company had a bad 1998. Global sales declined 16% to a measly DM 43.7 billion (£16 billion) and the number of employees fell by 21,000 to 97,000 (1998 Annual Report).
The company publishes a top-ten list of its shareholders on www.hoeschst.com – at number one is Kuwait Petroleum Corporation with nearly a quarter of total shares.

Schering
Schering AG (no relation to the US-based Schering-Plough), based in Berlin, is another company with a big interest in maintaining a sanctimonious public image. This is particularly the case because a lot of the company’s products involve fertility treatment and the care of pregnant women – its portfolio includes X-ray, ultrasound, oral contraceptives, hormone replacement medication and drugs to combat disabling diseases. Its bestselling drugs in 1998 include Betaferon, a treatment for multiple sclerosis, and its magnetic resonance imaging preparation Magnevist.

Schering is very much the junior partner in AgrEvo. Its sales of £2.1 billion in 1998 were dwarfed by Hoescht’s. Over half of its shareholders are based in Germany, but the largest foreign-held proportion are actually in the UK. The largest single Schering investor (with 10% of equity) is the Allianz Group (insurance), also based in Germany - but with many branches (especially of its AGF subsidiary) in the UK.

Taking on AgrEvo
AgrEvo has put itself at the forefront of the corporate battle to usurp control of the world’s food supply using genetic technology. It will almost certainly become the focus for massive protests in the UK due to its sole involvement in farm-scale trials and its rush to spread biological pollution across thousands of acres of countryside.

Its extraordinary arrogance could could provoke the same scorn that has forced Monsanto to eat humble pie, and its parent companies can ill afford bad publicity. But AgrEvo is vulnerable for one very clear reason – in the UK at least it is now on its own.