Mm. The problem is, Monsanto has conned their way into owning people's agricultural yields. Meaning these people are "allowed" to farm land which their families have worked for generations, and Monsanto claims a large chunk of the profits just "because".
Sound familiar? Kind of like Plantations? And slave owners?
That's kind of how capitalism works. You had a similar situation with coal miners in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Workers were intentionally underpaid, and paid in certificates that could only be redeemed at the company store. What's worse, the goods at the company store were marked up specifically so that the workers would go into debt to the company. Nowadays, corporations lobby hard to keep the minimum wage below subsistence, and instruct their workers in how to gain public assistance. But this is not farmers.
In particular, farmers are being dispossessed by means of gene patents. The patent entitles Monsanto to charge a "licensing fee" to anyone who raises seeds with the patented gene,
including plants that have been fertilized by wind-blown pollen. According to
Food Inc. they've also been putting seed washers out of business using the same methods; you can't use Monsanto seed that came from a plant you grew without paying the license fee again. Seed washers therefore violate the patent just by existing in a community where Monsanto has fields. Monsanto also writes contracts that keep farmers locked into Monsanto patronage.
It actually has more in common with the "debt slavery" of coal miners I mentioned above than racial chattel, but both are much more similar to chattel than they are to the warm and fuzzy "invisible hand" of competition that we've been raised to believe in.
