Job opportunities for M.S. w/o further grad degrees

[coolhandluke]

In both talking to professors and reading various threads here, I've repeatedly heard that the private sector is reluctant to hire PhDs because of the high salary that the degree usually commands. At the same time, I've heard anecdotes of employees with Masters in the hard sciences struggling to advance to positions with a good salary and a fair amount of responsibility. If I do not plan on staying in academia, is it necessary to earn a PhD to be a competitive candidate for well-paid positions in the private sector? I'm not keen on being a lab technician for eternity, but I'm also not looking to complete a PhD only to see my job prospects shrink outside of continued university research.

 

I'm currently at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the M.S. Crop Sciences program. As a career, I'm open to working in several areas: 1) projects attempting to increase productivity in developing countries with organizations like the World Bank or UN FAO; 2) one of the mid-size seed/input companies on the West Coast, particularly with some of the cool stuff that's been coming out of the California-based companies recently. If a M.S. degree in Plant Biology is not considered sufficient for good career prospects: would a joint MBA open up more opportunities or do companies used to working with hard data view such degrees as superfluous?