To ensure that no farmer grows its patented seed without permission, for instance, Monsanto hired the notorious Pinkerton Detective Agency and ‘pays its agents to comb the countryside looking for cheaters, and if necessary, it seeks out informants. The company set up a toll-free number where anyone can denounce his neighbor. It spends a lot of money to enforce its rule in the fields.’ With the help of its ‘gene police’, between 1998 and 2005 Monsanto exacted a total of $15 million from farmers accused of witting or unwitting gene piracy. ‘There’s a gene in there that’s the property of Monsanto, and it’s illegal for a farmer to take that gene and create it in a second crop’, explained the CEO of Monsanto: ‘It’s necessary from the point of view of return on investment, and it’s against the law.’
Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante, Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital