Something anti-GMO activists never realized: Monsanto benefited tremendously from all the protests and rabble rousing.

Every time their protests made a government bureaucrat or politician nervous, Monsanto would just say “if it will make everyone more comfortable we will add some more tests, paperwork and years of field trials… it will costs us $10M per year and we’re willing to add 3 more years…

All they were doing was building a giant regulatory moat around them. Sure it cost $30M more but those rules applied to everyone. So all new entrants would have to pay $130M to get anything new through…

So Monsanto could go to young snappy startups and say “we see you won’t be able to get through regulations- what if you sold your company/tech to us…”

All the regulation forced mergers so that there were eventually only 6 seed companies and now only 4 and only one (corteva) is owned as a US company.