As antitrust authorities in global markets continue to deliberate on whether to allow the merger of US chemical giants Dow and DuPont or under which conditions – the two companies last week submitted a dossier on proposed concessions to the European Commission – in the US market the issue is seen by some as an issue of national food supply security, underscoring that US regulatory authorities might look at a new US heavyweight more benignly than their foreign counterparts.

Offering their views of the proposed deal in a blog on the conservative Washington-based market intelligence website Morning Consult, two former US Secretaries of Agriculture suggested recently that even though the merger promises to benefit investors at the expense of employees – an end tally for the number of planned job cuts has not yet been revealed – the creation of a new crop protection and genetically modified seeds giant might outweigh other concerns as it would give the US a stronger position in competition with foreign rivals.

Mike Johanns, agriculture secretary under former President George W. Bush and now on the board of farm equipment manufacturer John Deere, and Dan Glickman, a former US representative who headed the Agriculture Department under Bill Clinton, said that having a national champion would help the US deal with the challenges of a consolidating farm supply industry, as European and Chinese giants have bought up smaller US and foreign companies. Both former secretaries are from farm states.

"America’s farmers need what Dow and DuPont are proposing – a strong, focused American agriculture company that is American-owned, championing the interests of the American farmer in a marketplace that may soon be dominated by foreign-owned behemoths," the former officials said, adding: “As agriculture has become both more global and more competitive, fewer and fewer companies have the scale to afford the costly, end-to-end process from discovery through development and regulatory approval that is required to bring new products to farmers."

“With every minute of every day devoted to working in partnership with farmers and the full range of entities working to feed an ever-expanding need for sustainable food sources, the American farmers who grow our food lose out – and the people who eat it do, too,” Johanns and Glickman said. Given the need for a “faster, bigger and better stream of new products, techniques and tools,“ they want to seize business opportunities by putting food on tables, at home and abroad. This will mean hard work for America’s farmers, which they will do with humility and excellence, as they always have. They need a strong, American-owned agriculture company by their side.“