Corteva, one of the world’s biggest agriculture companies, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Delaware last week, accusing the seed-gene-editing company Inari Agriculture of illicitly obtaining Corteva seeds from a U.S. depository and illegally shipping them to Europe, according to the Wall Street Journal. Corteva alleges that the startup made small changes to the plants’ genetics and now is seeking to patent the seeds in the U.S. “Theft of proprietary technology hurts not only our company but also, ultimately, our nation’s farmers,” Sam Eathington, Corteva’s chief technology officer, said in a statement. Inari declined to comment. Seeds are at the root of the global agriculture industry, generating tens of billions of dollars in sales. The world’s largest crop-seed developers — including Corteva, Bayer and Syngenta, along with a slew of startups — are investing in the potential of gene-editing technology in crops, which allows scientists to make precise changes to plants’ existing DNA.