" I heard it through the AgLine"

January 15, 2010

 

 

·        Feds step up antitrust probe into Monsanto

·        New FDA deputy to lead food-safety mandate

·        Hawaii vegetable growers used forced labor

·        Exploiting the pink gene for exotic tomatoes

·        Soy genome yields a wealth of information

 

 

Feds step up antitrust probe into Monsanto

 

(AP via DesMoinesRegister.com) St. Louis, Mo. — The Justice Department has intensified its antitrust investigation into Monsanto Co., demanding internal documents that outline marketing tactics of the world's biggest seed company.

 

The demand, disclosed Thursday by Monsanto, formalizes a months-long investigation into possible antitrust violations at the company, which has gained unprecedented power in the multibillion market for biotech seeds. It already has provided millions of pages of documents to the department and is cooperating with the agency's civil probe, spokesman Lee Quarles said Thursday.

 

The government asked this week for information on Monsanto's biotech soybean business, Quarles said. Monsanto's patented genes are inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the United States.

 

The government is examining whether farmers and seed companies will have access to Monsanto's popular Roundup Ready soybeans after the seeds' patent expires in 2014. The company is trying to shift customers to the next generation of patented soybeans, but said it will grant full access to the current variety even after the patent expires.

 

Justice Department spokeswoman Gina Talamona would not comment, but confirmed for the first time that the department is "investigating the possibility of anticompetitive practices in the seed industry."

 

Pioneer Hi-Bred in Johnston called Monsanto an "overwhelming monopoly" last week in comments to the justice and agriculture departments.

 

"Monsanto's license agreements prevent seed companies from combining different characteristics in a single seed (often referred to as 'stacking'), including both Monsanto and non-Monsanto technology," Pioneer's comments assert.

 

"These restrictions deny farmers the choice of the best seeds to suit their needs and force Monsanto customers to rely solely on Monsanto technology," said Pioneer.

 

Scott Partridge, Monsanto's deputy general counsel, said Thursday the company has done nothing wrong. "Monsanto continues to cooperate with the U.S. Department of Justice inquiries, just as we have over the last several months. We respect the thorough regulatory process. We believe our business practices are fair, pro-competitive and in compliance with the law."

 

Monsanto shares fell $1.22, or 1.5 percent, to $82.73 in afternoon trading Thursday.

 

Morgan Stanley analyst Vincent Andrews said antitrust troubles likely would fade with time and not have a significant impact on Monsanto's business. Because the department asked about access to Roundup Ready products after the patent expired, it likely is not interested in other issues involving Monsanto's practices, Andrews said in a report Thursday.

 

Monsanto, of St. Louis, introduced its first commercial strain of genetically engineered soybeans in 1996. The Roundup Ready plants were resistant to the herbicide, allowing farmers to spray Roundup whenever they wanted rather than waiting until soybeans had grown enough to withstand the chemical.

 

The company gained broad market reach over the last decade by letting competitors and independent seed companies sign licensing agreements allowing them to insert Monsanto's patented genes into their own strains of corn, soybeans and other crops.

 

Monsanto said in a Dec. 15 letter to the American Soybean Association that seed companies and farmers will have access to the Roundup Ready trait after its patent expires.

 

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New FDA deputy to lead food-safety mandate

 

(The Washington Post) – A year ago, Michael Taylor was sitting in his office at George Washington University, considering a basic mission of the federal government: making sure food is safe. He'd devoted his career to food safety, working in and out of government, and he was finally in academia where he could think deeply about what was wrong and how to fix it.

 

And then the call came.

 

The Obama administration wanted Taylor to implement the solutions he had been designing. A string of food poisoning outbreaks nationally had sickened thousands and killed dozens. Both parties in Congress were calling for tough new laws. The president promised the public that he would strengthen food safety.

 

In July, Taylor became an adviser to Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and this week he was named deputy commissioner for foods, a new position that elevates food in an agency long criticized for placing greater emphasis on drugs and medical devices.

 

Congress is moving ahead with legislation to grant vast new authority to the FDA to ensure food safety -- the House passed a bill last year and the Senate is expected to take up its version soon -- and Taylor will be responsible for implementing new laws aimed at preventing outbreaks instead of merely reacting after they occur.

 

"We are at an historic tipping point -- a moment when the forces have aligned like never before; the president, Congress, industry and the public have stepped up their support for our mission," Taylor told a gathering of FDA staff members last month.

 

Taylor is a familiar figure at the FDA. He began his career as a staff attorney at the agency in 1976. Then he worked for a decade at King & Spaulding, which represented Monsanto Corp., the agribusiness giant that developed genetically engineered corn, soybeans and bovine growth hormone.

 

He returned to the FDA in 1991 as deputy commissioner for policy and pushed through requirements that producers of seafood and juices adopt measures to prevent bacterial contamination. During the same period, the FDA approved Monsanto's bovine growth hormone, and Taylor was partly responsible for a controversial policy that said milk from BGH-treated cows did not have to be labeled as such.

 

In 1994, Taylor went to the U.S. Agriculture Department to run its food-safety program. He required meat and poultry producers to take measures to prevent bacterial contamination, despite strong opposition from those industries. Observers expect Taylor to impose those same kinds of preventive controls on all the foods regulated by the FDA.

 

After the USDA, Taylor went to work for Monsanto as a vice president for public policy. He moved on to a think tank and then a teaching stint at GWU.

 

"He is the quintessential revolving door," said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. Taylor's support for BGH and Monsanto's other genetically modified products at the FDA was "questionable," she said. "On the other hand, when he went to USDA, what he did there was absolutely heroic. He's been very strong on food safety."

 

It's one thing to recognize the weak spots and craft a strategy for change; it's another to make it happen and persuade 3,000 FDA employees who work on food issues to follow suit.

 

"This is really about building a new system," he said. "It's about rethinking how we do everything -- from inspections to rulemaking -- so that we're acting in real time in a way that is preventive."

 

To that end, Taylor has been bringing together divisions to make the agency more nimble. Food regulation is split among the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, where much of the scientific research takes place; the Center for Veterinary Medicine, which regulates the manufacture and sale of food additives and drugs for animals; and the Office of Regulatory Affairs, which handles inspections of domestic and imported products and works with state and local officials.

 

Traditionally, the three sections were managed separately. Any proposed policy change had to be approved by each division and then was sent for review by the general counsel in the commissioner's office. It took years to get anything done, Taylor said.

 

Now, Taylor has pulled together a senior leadership team that cuts across the three divisions and has created similar cross-sectional teams to work on core issues. "The idea is to get the best thinking on the table early," he said.

 

Taylor has already taken some steps that suggest a new, more muscular approach to regulation. The agency has been cracking down on nutrition claims on processed foods, saying that some food makers have overstated the health benefits of their products.

 

In the first real political test of the new leadership, Taylor tried to ban the sale of raw oysters harvested from the Gulf Coast between April and October unless they are treated to kill a potentially lethal bacterium. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and others vigorously protested the move. The FDA agreed to put off action to study the issue. Taylor said the agency is not backing down, just regrouping.

 

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Hawaii veggie growers used forced labor

 

(AP via Yahoo! News) HONOLULU – The owners of Hawaii's second-largest fruit and vegetable farm will plead guilty to charges of importing laborers from Thailand to force them to work, court records show.

 

Aloun Farms President Alec Souphone Sou and his brother, Aloun Farms Vice President Mike Mankone Sou, were expected to admit in court Wednesday to conspiring with Thai labor recruiters to bring 44 Thai nationals to Hawaii, according to their plea agreements.

 

An indictment also alleged the workers were enticed to come to Aloun Farms with false promises of lucrative jobs and kept working amid economic threats.

 

Many of the laborers were told not to leave the farm after work, and 11 were housed in mobile storage containers while working for Aloun, the federal government claimed.

 

"Aloun representatives instructed the Thai workers not to socialize with outsiders, particularly Laotians, and not to leave the compound after they returned from work," the plea deals said.

 

The laborers each borrowed $16,000 to pay "recruitment fees" to Thai businessmen for the Hawaii jobs, according to court records. Those debts were secured with family property and homes, which workers feared they would lose if they couldn't repay the debts.

 

Some workers received no net earnings for months because of payroll deductions and were told they'd be sent home to Thailand "if they were disobedient, failed to follow directions or if they tried to leave," the documents state.

 

The Sou brothers were indicted in August on charges of conspiracy to commit forced labor, visa fraud and document servitude from April 2003 to February 2005. Their plea agreements call for them to plead guilty to one count each of conspiracy to commit forced labor.

 

They originally faced maximum sentences of 15 years in prison, but it wasn't clear what their sentence would be under the plea deal.

 

"Both brothers are going to help the government go after the people in Thailand who made false promises to the workers," said Eric Seitz, Mike Sou's attorney. "Both brothers became caught up in a web of regulatory problems. We deny categorically that we did anything to abuse or harm anyone."

 

A message left for Howard Luke, an attorney for Alec Sou, was not immediately returned Tuesday.

 

Kapolei-based Aloun Farms is known for supplying a variety of Asian vegetables, melons and other produce to the state's largest wholesalers and grocers.

 

It employs as many as 200 workers and covers about 3,000 acres. Its annual gross sales are about $8 million.

 

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Exploiting the pink gene for exotic tomatoes

 

(Weizmann Institute) – What makes a particular variety of tomato pink? The gene responsible, discovered recently at the Weizmann Institute, may help researchers develop new exotic tomatoes.

 

Far Eastern diners are partial to a variety of sweet, pink-skinned tomato. Dr. Asaph Aharoni of the Weizmann Institute's Plant Sciences Department has now revealed the gene that's responsible for producing these pink tomatoes. Aharoni's research focuses on plants' thin, protective outer layers, called cuticles, which are mainly composed of fatty, wax-like substances. In the familiar red tomato, this layer also contains large amounts of antioxidants called flavonoids that are the tomatoes' first line of defense. Some of these flavonoids also give the tomato cuticles a bright yellow cast - the color component that is missing in the translucent pink skins of the mutants.

 

Using a lab system that's unique in Israel, and one of only a few in the world, Aharoni and his team are able to rapidly and efficiently identify hundreds of active plant substances called metabolites. A multidisciplinary approach developed over the past decade, known as metabolomics, enables them to create a comprehensive profile of all these substances in mutant plants and compare it with that of normal ones.

 

The research, carried out in Aharoni's lab by Dr. Avital Adato, Dr. Ilana Rogachev and research student Tali Mendel, showed that the differences between pink and red tomatoes go much deeper than skin color: The scientists identified about 400 genes whose activity levels are quite a bit higher or lower in the mutant tomatoes. The largest changes, appearing in both the plant cuticle and the fruit covering, were in the production of substances in the flavonoid family. The pink tomato also has less lycopene, a red pigment known to be a strong antioxidant that's been shown to be associated with reduced risk of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. In addition, alterations in the fatty composition of the pink tomato's outer layer caused its cuticle to be both thinner and less flexible that a regular tomato skin.

 

The researchers found that all of these changes can be traced to a mutation on a single gene known as SIMYB12. This gene acts as a 'master switch' that regulates the activities of a whole network of other genes, controlling the amounts of yellow pigments as well as a host of other substances in the tomato. Aharoni: 'Since identifying the gene, we found we could use it as a marker to predict the future color of the fruit in the very early stages of development, even before the plant has flowered. This ability could accelerate efforts to develop new, exotic tomato varieties, a process that can generally take over 10 years.'

 

Dr. Asaph Aharoni's research is supported by the De Benedetti Foundation-Cherasco 1547; and the Willner Family Foundation. Dr. Aharoni is the incumbent of the Adolpho and Evelyn Blum Career Development Chair of Cancer Research.

 

The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, is one of the world's top-ranking multidisciplinary research institutions. Noted for its wide-ranging exploration of the natural and exact sciences, the Institute is home to 2,600 scientists, students, technicians and supporting staff. Institute research efforts include the search for new ways of fighting disease and hunger, examining leading questions in mathematics and computer science, probing the physics of matter and the universe, creating novel materials and developing new strategies for protecting the environment.

 

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Soy genome yields a wealth of information

 

(USDA-ARS) – Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are part of a team that has sequenced the majority of the soybean genome, providing an unprecedented look into how this important legume crop converts four critical ingredients—sunlight, water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen—into protein and oil, the basic building blocks for many consumer products. The research team from 18 federal, state, public and private organizations published their research today in the journal Nature.

 

"Soybean and other legumes play a critical role in global food security and human health and are used in a wide range of products, from tofu, soy flour, meat substitutes and soy milk to soy oil-based printing ink and biodiesel," said Molly Jahn, USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics. "This new information about soybean's genetic makeup could lead to plants that produce more beans that contain more protein and oil, better adapt to adverse environmental conditions, or are more resistant to diseases."

 

This sequencing of the soy genome is the culmination of more than 15 years of collaborative research. The team used a so-called "whole-genome shotgun" (WGS) approach to sequence 85 percent of the 1.1 billion nucleotide base pairs that spell out soy's entire DNA code. The sequence also provides researchers with a critical reference to use in deciphering the genetics of some 20,000 other legume species.

 

Geneticists Randy Shoemaker, Perry Cregan, David Hyten, Steven Cannon and David Grant with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) contributed to the Nature paper. Their work involved the creation of genetic markers and the development of the soybean (Glycine max) genetic map that facilitated "anchoring" of the genome sequence to the 20 sets of soybean chromosomes. ARS is USDA's principal intramural scientific research agency.

 

The Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute; Purdue University at West Lafayette, Ind.; the University of Missouri at Columbia, and the University of Arizona at Tucson also participated in the soybean sequencing project, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Through federal funding, NIFA invests in science to solve critical issues impacting people's daily lives and the nation's future.

 

According to USDA's Shoemaker, who is with the ARS Corn Insects and Crop Genetics Research Unit in Ames, Iowa, integrating the new sequence with existing physical and genetic maps of soy will move researchers closer to linking observable physical traits of soy to their associated genes and alleles—alternate versions of genes. Ultimately, this will speed the development of new soybean cultivars offering higher seed yields, increased protein and oil contents, better adaptability and improved disease resistance, particularly to Asian soybean rust (ASR), which threatens America's $27 billion soy crop.

 

"Overlaying the sequence onto available maps will expedite identification and orientation of genetic markers such as single nucleotide polymorphisms, which are often located near genes that control agronomically important traits," Shoemaker said.

 

Using such markers, soy breeders can rapidly determine which offspring plants have inherited these traits without growing them to maturity, saving time, money and resources.

 

"We've mapped the locales for about 90 important traits affecting soybean growth and development, seed yield, seed protein and oil, and disease resistance, to name but a few," Shoemaker added. "With this high-quality sequence, we now have access to candidate genes that we've never had before, which will enable us to look at their patterns of expression, develop molecular markers to track them in breeding programs, and work with them to determine their function or modify them to improve their function."

 

Some key discoveries already gleaned from the whole-genome sequence include the first soybean gene conferring resistance to ASR, which can cause soy losses of 10 to 80 percent; a mutation that could make soybeans easier to digest by producing lower levels of a carbohydrate called stachyose; a mutation for higher levels of production of the enzyme phytase that could enable livestock to absorb more phosphorus from soybean feed so less gets excreted as a potential water contaminant; and 52 genes that orchestrate development of soy plant root nodules, where symbiotic bacteria transform atmospheric nitrogen into a form soy and other crops can use for their growth and development.

 

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