SEEDS STUDY

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SOMMAIRE
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This study also reveals that the misleading figure of “7000 seed companies”, quoted by industrial
representatives, institutions and politicians to imply the market is not concentrated, applies not only
to breeders, but also to multipliers, processing/treating companies and traders, collectively labelled
the ‘European seed industry’.
It sheds light upon some of the markets for individual crops or groups of crops within the seed sector,
where different rates of concentration can be seen. For example, although the wheat market is
dominated to a lesser degree, in the extreme case of the UK, 45% of the market share belongs to a
single company; meanwhile 95% of the EU vegetable seed market is in the hands of just 5 companies.
As American scholar Philip H. Howard wrote in 2009 : “In the last 40 years, the commercial seed
industry has transformed dramatically. It has shifted from a competitive sector of agribusiness,
composed primarily of small, family-owned firms, to an industry dominated by a small number of
transnational pharmaceutical/chemical corporations. These corporations entered the industry by
acquiring numerous smaller seed companies, and merging with large competitors. This consolidation
is associated with a number of impacts that constrain the opportunities for renewable agriculture.
Some of these include declining rates of saving and replanting seeds, as firms successfully convince
a growing percentage of farmers to purchase their products year after year; a shift in both public
and private research toward the most profitable proprietary crops and varieties, but away from
the improvement of varieties that farmers can easily replant; and a reduction in seed diversity, as
remaining firms eliminate less profitable lines from newly acquired subsidiaries.10”
The question is therefore: is the EU seed market really as diversified as the European Commission
wants lawmakers and the general public to believe? Or is this market in fact transforming rapidly from
a seed sector with a large number of competing small firms and farmers into an oligopoly, increasingly
dominated by a small number of transnational agro-chemical-seed firms?
CONCENTRATION OF MARKET POWER IN THE EU SEED MARKET
10. P.H. Howard, 2009, Visualizing Consolidation in the Global Seed Industry: 1996-2008, Sustainability journal, 2009, 1, 1266-1287, Basel. p. 1266 and 1267,