Monsanto Case Study Assignment Help Case study Assignment Help on the following paper:
1.Companies, like Monsanto, that offer technology to improve human lives are often said to have a moral obligation to society. How can Monsanto best fulfill this moral obligation while also protecting society and the environment from the potential negative consequences of its products?
2.What do you make of Monsanto’s “seed police?” Although patent protection is vital for every firm, do you believe that seeds, no matter how scientifically manipulated, should be considered technology, considering how essential they are to the basic necessities of agriculture and food markets. Does Monsanto have any sort of moral obligation to farmers and consumers to make its seeds available at prices affordable to even the poorest of farmers?
3.If you were Monsanto’s CEO, how would you best balance the conflicting needs of the variety of stakeholder groups that Monsanto must successfully engage? Keating, D. (2016). What the Bayer-Monsanto merger means for food, farmers and the environment, DW, http://www.dw.com/en/what-the-
Task 1- The kind of duty which is not enforceable by law but one party owes to another party is known as moral obligation. As Monsanto is a multinational company whose products are consumed by the food industry, it has to strictly emphasize on its moral obligations concerning the society where their products are being sold. Such moral obligation includes providing best quality of seeds to the consumers and betterment of farmer’s life (Stern, 2011).
For this purpose Monsanto ensures high yielding properties of their seeds and it would prevent against insects eating their precious crops. This would ease the farmers in keeping their crops safe and reduce their hassle to sprinkle pesticides for crop safety. On the contrary these genetically modified seeds reported in causing health related issues on consuming the food grown from them.
This impact can be reduced by the company by putting more efforts and investment in development and research to improve and eliminate the side effects of their products without much damaging the environment (Monsanto, 2018). Additionally Monsanto can employ a team to regularly check whether the negative effects are still being possessed by their products and if it so then the authorities can be alarmed about this and suitable actions can be taken against this issue.
Task 2- Monsanto does not allow farmers to save their seeds. Therefore seed police of Monsanto travels across the country and inspects farms in different areas to checks whether farmers have kept genetically modified seeds patented by Monsanto with them. Even if it was an accidental contamination the company sues the farmers for infringement of their patent. Even if the farmers did not purchased Monsanto’s seeds but the crops are discovered to be grown from genetic seeds then Monsanto surely visits such sites for inspection (John, et al,. 2016) .
Although seeds are considered to be a basic necessity in agriculture for growing the crops but the company has invested a lot of money on their research and development to produce these seeds which are genetically modified. Therefore is a formal right of the company to charge from people on the use of their seeds. Moreover it was declared by Supreme Court that these seeds are widgets and in this concern patent law was also extended to cover microorganism which is live and human made (Ferrell, at al, 2013).
Due to higher price of genetic seeds it is unaffordable to poor farmers. Therefore Monsanto should use effective pricing strategies to lower the cost of seeds so that poor farmers can also avail the advantages of these seeds. Task 3 The interest of different stakeholders can be balanced by identifying and analyzing the needs and their expectations from the company. Stakeholders of Monsanto include farmers, suppliers, consumers of food being grown by the genetic seeds, investors, shareholders, employees and the society. Shareholders and investors expect a larger profit and are ready to support policies which can bring more profit to the company.
On the other hand the farmers expect lower costs of the seeds so that their cost of production can be reduced. Moreover the end users are concerned with issues related to health with the use of these seeds (Carroll, et al., 2017). To address the expectations of each stakeholder a balanced approach on strategies is required to be adopted by the CEO of Monsanto.
The strategies will include improvement in the labeling of food products to communicate that these seeds does not cause any kind of health problems. Also by cutting the cost of operating activities Monsanto would be able to provide high profits to its shareholders and investors and offer lower prices to farmers. An increment in CSR budget would help the company in satisfying the needs of the society.
Further payment of good salary to the employees would satisfy their needs as well (Bourne, 2015). References Bourne, L (2015) Making Projects Work: Effective Stakeholder and Communication Management. USA: CRC Press Carroll, A. B., Brown, J. and Buchholtz, A. K. (2017) Business & Society: Ethics, Sustainability & Stakeholder Management. USA: Cengage Learning Ferrell, O. C. and Hartline, M. ( 2013) Marketing Strategy, Text and Cases. USA: Cengage Learning John, B. and Perason, Y. E. (2016) Crisis Communication and Crisis Management: An Ethical Approach. USA: SAGE Publications Monsanto (2018) Products. [Online]. Available at: https://monsanto.com/products/seeds/ (Accessed: 7 February, 2018). Stern, R. (2011) Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard. UK: Cambridge University Press Get 24×7 business case study assignment help from our experts.