Editor’s Note: Weird, wild things are happening to Monsanto these days. Read more here, here or on OCA’s Millions Against Monsanto Campaign page.

I
got caught up in a cyclone of travel, meetings, and speechifying the
last two weeks, so I’m a bit behind on the latest news in the food
world. But I did take note of Andrew Pollack’s Oct. 4
New York Times story on the recent plight of genetically modified (GM) seed giant
Monsanto, long-time Wall Street darling and
bête noire of the
sustainable food movement.

Pollack summed up Monsanto’s woes like this:

As recently as late December, Monsanto was named “company of the year” by Forbes magazine. Last week, the
company earned a different accolade from Jim Cramer, the television
stock market commentator. “This may be the worst stock of 2010,” he
proclaimed.     

On Tuesday, Forbes publicly lamented its
decision to deem Monsanto “company of the year.” The headline was
cutting: “Forbes was wrong about Monsanto. Really wrong.” How did
Monsanto go from Wall Street hero to Wall Street doormat?

According
to
The Times’ Pollack, Monsanto’s troubles are two-fold: 1) the patent
on Roundup, Monsanto’s market-dominating herbicide, has run out,
exposing the company to competition from cheap Chinese imports; and 2)
its target audience — large-scale commodity farmers in the south and
Midwest — are turning against its core offerings in genetically
modified corn, soy, and cotton seed traits.

I
agree with Pollack’s diagnosis, but I want to add a third and even more
fundamental problem to the mix: Monsanto’s once-celebrated product
pipeline is looking empty. As I’ll show below, its current whiz-bang seeds offer just
tarted-up versions of the same old traits it has been peddling for more
than a decade: herbicide tolerance and pest resistance. Meanwhile,
judging from the company’s recent report on its latest  quarterly earnings, the “blockbuster” traits it has been promising for years — drought
resistance and nitrogen-use efficiency — don’t seem to be coming along
very well.