GRAIN There is no mystery to big biotech’s love affair with agrofuels. More agrofuels translates into more soya and more hybrid maize production – meaning more sales of GM seeds and pesticides. Robert Fraley, the Vice-President of Monsanto and co-inventor of its Roundup Ready crops, gleefully told an audience at a recent agribusiness exhibition in Argentina that the growth of agrofuels was “unimaginable in terms of what it’s going to mean for corn and soybean surface”. [1] Not long ago Fraley’s main message was about how genetic modification would fill the bellies of the world’s poor; now it’s about how GM will fuel the world’s cars. It’s merely a question, it seems, of adapting the message to the latest fashionable concern. Anyway, as Fraley pointed out, Monsanto and Cargill are working on new maize varieties through their joint venture, Renessen, that Cargill can simultaneously process into both ethanol and animal feed, thereby resolving, at least for Cargill, the tension between its markets for fuel and food. Renessen’s maize breeding says a lot about how companies like Monsanto stand to benefit from the agrofuels push. Agrofuels open up new markets for GM crops, be they maize, soya or canola, that have so far been constrained in Europe, Japan and elsewhere by regulatory hurdles based on concern about the effects of GM on human health. But Renessen’s GM maize is directed at the two outlets – agrofuels and animal feed – that have the least amount of regulation. It is a perfect arrangement for both companies: Cargill sidesteps trade impediments and Monsanto secures its position within the empire of the world’s biggest grain trader. Similar arrangements are popping up elsewhere. In 2006, DuPont and Bunge announced that they were expanding the scope of their joint venture in soya research and development, known as Solae, to include agrofuels. [2] Big biotech’s interest in agrofuels, however, does not stop with the main GM crops. These companies are also at the centre of the search for alternative feedstocks and the elusive next generation of cellulosic ethanol, where similar scenarios of monopoly control are unfolding (see article on Jatropha). Monsanto is a leading player in R&D for both miscanthus and switchgrass, two of the most promising feedstocks for the future cellulosic ethanol market. In early 2007, Mendel Biotechhnology, which is partly owned by Monsanto, bought the German-based Tinplant Biotechnik company, acquiring its hybrid miscanthus cultivars and its entire miscanthus germplasm collection – the largest in the world, with over 1,000 accessions. Mendel also has miscanthus breeding operations in China (a centre of miscanthus diversity) and in the US, where it is working on high-yielding GM varieties, potentially in collaboration with BP’s new Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of Berkeley. [3] On 13 June 2007, BP announced that it was funding Mendel to conduct a five-year research programme on agrofuel feedstocks and that it had purchased shares in the company, giving it a seat beside Monsanto on Mendel’s Board. [4] Big oil, big tree plantations If cellulosic agrofuel systems eventually make it to market, eucalyptus and other tree plantations will be important sources of feedstock. Big oil is already moving to secure its place in this matrix. Chevron, for instance, has a partnership with Weyerhaeuser, one of the world’s largest forestry companies, with hundreds of thousands of hectares of eucalyptus plantations in Uruguay and Brazil. Shell Oil is developing cellulosic ethanol from wood chips in partnership with Iogen Corp and Choren Industries of Germany, even though, between 2000 and 2004, it put the brake on its biomass programme and sold off its forestry subsidiaries in Africa and South America. Monsanto’s involvement in switchgrass occurs through its partnership with another US biotechnology company, Ceres, which is also connected to BP’s Energy Biosciences Institute.5 Ceres claims to be “improving switchgrass as a crop via selection of improved types but, more importantly, is bringing its proprietary genes, tools and procedures to enhance the improvements more rapidly and provide the plant with attributes ideally suited to being farmed on large acreages to produce consistently higher yields”. Ceres claims to have the largest proprietary collection of fully sequenced plant genes, with patents on more than 75,000 genes. Table 4. Companies developing cellulosic agrofuel enzymes and their corporate partners Diversa/Celunol Syngenta, Dupont/Tate&Lyle, Khosla Ventures Iogen Shell, Goldman Sachs Genencor (Danisco) Tembec, Mascoma/Kohsla Ventures, Cargill, Dow, Royal Nedalco Novozymes DuPont, Broin, COFCO. China Resources Alcohol Corporation Dyadic Abengoa, Royal Nedalco Seed companies are also manoeuvring to ensure that the current agrofuel crops continue to serve as feedstocks as processing systems evolve. CanaVialis, the world’s largest sugar-cane breeding company, and sugar-cane biotech company Allelyx, which are both owned by the Brazilian conglomerate Votorantim, are working on new GM varieties of sugar cane for ethanol companies like Cosan, one of their corporate partners. So is Monsanto. In December 2006, a Monsanto official told the Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico that the company was conducting studies on new transgenic sugar-cane varieties for the Brazilian market in partnership with an unnamed company. [6] A few months later Monsanto revealed that this company was Votorantim and that they intended to commercialise GM Roundup Ready sugar-cane varieties in Brazil by 2009 (see box on the Ometto Conglomerate). [7] Syngenta, meanwhile, recently secured access to inedible sugar-cane varieties with ultra-high quantities of cellulose, developed by biotech firm Celunol when Celunol was bought by Diversa – an enzyme- and microbe-bioprospecting company controlled by Syngenta. For its part, DuPont, the world’s second largest seed company, is developing what it calls an “integrated corn-based biorefinery” with funding from the US Department of Energy and in co-operation with Diversa, Tate & Lyle, John Deere and leading US ethanol producer Broin. It will probably utilise high-starch maize varieties developed by DuPont, and a micro-organism that can convert corn stover into ethanol that Diversa isolated from the sugar sap of tropical agave plants. On the downstream side, DuPont’s biorefinery should feed into the biobutanol production and marketing joint venture it has with BP and British Sugars. Syngenta, which recently merged its North American seed business with DuPont’s, is also working with Diversa to develop maize for cellulosic agrofuel production. [8] In 2008 it expects to launch a GM maize variety that produces an enzyme developed by Diversa that converts starch into sugar for ethanol. The idea behind the GM variety is to bring down the costs of the liquid enzymes used for cellulosic ethanol production—the critical blockage point in making these next generation agrofuels economically viable. [9] It is precisely there, at the level of the enzymes, where corporate rivalry in the development of next-generation agrofuels is most intense. The research and development into these enzymes is in the hands of just a few biotechnology companies, each already part of larger corporate groupings or “teams” trying to develop fully integrated systems for cellulosic ethanol production. [10] References 1 Presentation at the Agro-Expo, Junin, Argentina, 15 March 2007. 2 http://tinyurl.com/2j4bth 3 James Zhang, “Feedstock improvement: A biotechnology business opportunity perspective”, 26 April 2007, http://tinyurl.com/2mm2dl Richard Brenneman, “Corporate academic web entangles UC–BP proposal”, Berkeley Daily Planet, 23 March 2007. http://tinyurl.com/2vgs6v 4 Company press release. http://tinyurl.com/36ff47 5 Emily Heaton and Frank Dohleman, “Practical experiences with miscanthus and switchgrass in Illinois”, 26 April 2007. http://tinyurl.com/39zj6r 6 “Monsanto studies entry into Brazil transgenic cane market”, Dow Jones, 7 December 2006. http://tinyurl.com/2pp6g8 7 MST, “Brasil: Votorantim e Monsanto produzirão cana transgênica”, Brasil, 30 May 2007. http://tinyurl.com/3845hd 8 In April 2006, Syngenta and DuPont announced the formation of a 50-50 joint venture, GreenLeaf Genetics. See Andrew Pollack, “DuPont and Syngenta join in modified seed venture”, New York Times, 11 April 2006. 9 The African Centre for Biosafety published a critical analysis of this maize variety, which contributed to the variety being rejected by South African regulators. See: http://tinyurl.com/2u2ehh 10 http://tinyurl.com/338mmo