Corn and soybeans don't need honeybees to pollinate. Archer-Daniels-Midland, a component of the S&P 500, based in Decatur, Illinois, is the largest and oldest company on this list, founded in 1898. They have revenues of over $37 billion in 2006. They process, sell, and ship many types of agricultural products. Ethanol is a small part of their overall business. ADM is the largest domestic play in ethanol.

Genetic seeds can replace real ones if the honeybees disappear. Monsanto's 2006 revenues were $7.3 billion. Monsanto is based in St. Louis, Missouri. They're the world leader in genetic seeds, but they have competition (See DuPont and Syngentabelow). Monsanto Company, together with its subsidiaries, provides agricultural products for farmers in the United States and internationally. It operates in two segments, Seeds and Genomics, and Agricultural Productivity. Seeds and Genomics segment produces soybean, corn, canola, and cotton seeds, as well as vegetable and fruit seeds, including tomato, pepper, eggplant, melon, cucumber, pumpkin, squash, beans, broccoli, onion, and lettuce. This segment also develops biotechnology traits that assist farmers in controlling insects and weeds, as well as provides genetic material and biotechnology traits to other seed companies for their seed brands.

IFF food chemists can recreate the smells that are lost when the oranges and peaches are gone. IFF was incorporated in New York in 1909 and is a creator and manufacturer of flavor and fragrance products used by other manufacturers to impart or improve flavor or fragrance in a wide variety of consumer products. Givaudan is a significant competitor to IFF.. Here's a company overview of Givaudan. Two of the Company's largest customers for flavor products are major producers of prepared foods and beverages in the United States. The Company's principal fragrance and flavor products consist of compounds of large numbers of ingredients blended under proprietary formulas created by its perfumers and flavorists. Most of these compounds contribute the total fragrance or flavor to the consumer products in which they are used. This fragrance or flavor characteristic is often a major factor in the public selection and acceptance of the consumer end product. The Company produces thousands of compounds, and new compounds are constantly being created in order to meet the many and changing characteristics of its customers' end products.

Gold is the classic investment if the Last Days come An ETF whose price is targeted to be 1/10 of the spot gold price. There's been an outflow of gold bullion from GLD, based on an etftrends.com article, May 22, 2007.

Sacramento-based Pacific Ethanol, Inc. produces and markets renewable fuels in the western United States. PEIX was founded in 2003. It produces and sells ethanol, and provides transportation, storage, and delivery services through third-party service providers in the western United States, primarily in California, Nevada, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, and Colorado. The company's co-products include wet distillers grain (WDG). It sells ethanol to gasoline refining and distribution companies, and WDG to dairy operators and animal feed distributors.

Through their Pioneer Hi-Bred division, Dupont is a competitor to Monsanto in the genetic seed business. However, it is in third place, behind Monsanto and Syngenta. DuPont is one of the components of the Dow Jones 30 Industrials. See what Jim Cramer thinks of DuPont's stock performance for 2007.

Swiss-based agribusiness company, with a significant seeds division, providing competition for MON and DD. Last week, Syngenta acquired a 49% stake in Chinese seed company Sanbei. In full year 2006 Syngenta's earnings per share were up 14 per cent to $8.73, crop protection sales were up 1 per cent at $6.4 billion and new product sales up 25 per cent to $985 million.

Another way to invest in gold. This is a Stockpickr portfolio which tracks BGEIX and its components. One alternative to GLD is American Century Global Gold (BGEIX), a closed end mutual fund managed by American Century Investments, which concentrates in Canadian and South African mining stocks.