It’s not looking too good for everyone’s favorite GMO seed giant. With sales figures crashing down, Monsanto has announced a plan to cut 2,600 jobs in an effort to cut costs — about 11.6% of the workforce.
And this isn’t the first time Monsanto has experienced a serious slump in sales. Back in February of this year, I told you about the ‘beginning of the serious decline’ for both Monsanto and McDonald’s. It’s a notion that would be considered absolutely absurd not too long ago, really. McDonald’s and Monsanto were the two ‘juggernauts’ that everyone loved to hate, but felt powerless against.
They were ‘too big to fail,’ we thought. And perhaps the corporate executives thought so, too. The truth is, however, that both of these companies had decades to actually improve their practices and regain public opinion. Why didn’t McDonald’s stop using cheap fillers and toxic compounds in favor of something that’s at least somewhat higher quality? Monsanto could have actually done something about the numerous reports by mainstream media organizations that detailed Indian farmer suicides as a result of the company’s terrible farming contracts.
Better yet, maybe Monsanto’s deep ties with the US government shouldn’t have threatened ‘trade wars’ with nations that would dare to oppose their GMOs. It’s all in The Guardian report about the 2007 WikiLeaks revelations surrounding Monsanto. The U.S. State Department was apparently even paying for Monsanto’s marketing material overseas.
But back to Monsanto shedding cash. Here’s what Reuters had to report:
“Monsanto Co, one of the world’s largest seed and agrichemical companies, said on Wednesday that it was slashing 2,600 jobs and restructuring operations to cut costs in a slumping commodity market.
Sales of corn seeds and traits, Monsanto’s key products, fell 5 percent to $598 million in the quarter. And sales at the company’s agricultural productivity unit, which includes Roundup herbicide, dropped 12 percent to $1.1 billion.”
Unless Monsanto magically decides to turn around and clean up its act, or manages to buy up Syngenta and enter an entire new world of genetic modification, I expect to see similar headlines in the future.
