I’m scared

It slowly is getting hot and hotter. There have already been public statements from the CEO of Bayer broadcast on German national news, that they are negotiating to acquire Monsanto. Now it seems, as if the deal is about to go down any day soon, according to trade papers. Bayer has considerably upped its offer to a staggering 127,50 $ per share (this equals 65 billion $) and German media reports, that the deal might well close next week.

Bayer has already set up a website titled advancingtogether.com, promoting its arguments in favour of one of the biggest business mergers in farming history.

To win the public over, they always bring one argument: how to feed three more billion people? To them, digital farming, precision farming and other, scientific terms shall be the answer.

To me personally, this sounds more like something to be really scared of. Ok, lets take the five or six types of crop per food type still available, genetically tampered, patented and owned by Monsanto and let’s sell it with all the chemicals Bayer has ever come up with to kill everything still trying to grow beside it. And while we are at it, let’s do this with farming software they then engineer and sell, that makes farming a complete digital and technical business that has nothing to do with nature anymore. Degrading farmers and their experience of how to live of and with their land running through generations to mere buyers of regulated seed and chemicals and handlers of computer driven machinery.

The next step surely will be the acquisition of as much farmland as possible by this or some other mega company. If this is not going on already, behind the scenes, unbeknownst to us.

Forget politics or religion-driven warfare. This is by far the most horrible scenario: the control over food production. Complete conrol. There is nothing worse to imagine. Tell me, am I overreacting? I don’t think so. Worse even, to know, that this new conglomerate will be owned and led by Germans. You know, the ones inventing the atomic bomb. Science geniuses, that always ousted any bad effects, the immoral use of their inventions might have on humanity. And let me tell you, in the world of business, morals are just not a category. Unless we consumers make it happen. But if you’re hungry, morals are not much of a category, either.

But I still do dream. Imagine, all that funding now changing hands in this mega deal between Bayer and Monsanto were to go toward giving people access to their own plot of land to farm and clean water to farm it with. To fund organisations that work hard to keep biodiversity alive by collecting and storing different types of seed. Enabling people to feed themselves rather than pushing them more and more into dependence.