The Commercial Ecology of Scavenger Capitalism: Monsanto, Fossil Fuels, and the Remaking of a Chemical Giant

Bartow J. Elmore

Enterprise & Society, 2018, vol. 19, issue 1, 153-178

Abstract: Monsanto’s transformation from a chemical firm to a biotechnology business in the 1980s and 1990s reveals that an increasingly small corporate cartel gained dominion over petroleum refining byproducts and that this concentration of ownership had profound implications for the future solvency of Monsanto. As the price of petrochemical feedstocks rose, Monsanto, a company that made 80 percent of its products from fossil fuels, began to pursue an alternative path to profits. In short, concentrated corporate ownership of critical natural resources forced some companies in the chemical commodity production business to pursue radically new ways of generating cash flow. This was especially true for scavenger capitalists such as Monsanto, firms that had historically made their money by scavenging raw material stockpiles produced by booming commercial industries. For firms invested heavily in commodity production but lacking proprietary claims to critical natural resources, the key was finding new ways to make money without depending on fossil fuels. For Monsanto, biotechnology offered a way out.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:19:y:2018:i:01:p:153-178_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Enterprise & Society from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().