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March 12, 2010
· Rising food prices may start with seeds
· Seed patents may trump antitrust claims
· Global warming movement cooling a bit
· Latest atrazine lawsuit called frivolous
· Legal gun toters make café workers jittery
Rising food prices may start with seeds
(chicagotribune.com) – For 40 years, farmer Todd Leake and his family have battled bitter cold, hungry pests and a short growing season to coax soybeans out of their fields in eastern North Dakota.
The one thing they never had to fight for, though, was their seeds.
A decade ago, salesmen from as many as 50 seed companies would compete for their dollars. Each would promise healthier plants, richer yields or a better discount.
Today the Leakes have little choice: There are four seed companies in their area, and all sell seeds that include genetic traits patented and licensed by Monsanto Co., the world's largest seed firm.
"There's basically nothing else available," said Leake, 48. "You have to use their seeds and pay their prices."
The concerns of farmers such as Leake
will take center stage in
The meetings are intended to allow producers, competitors and activists to air their concerns about the grain, poultry, dairy and livestock industries. The government is also trying to ferret out reasons for the sometimes vast gaps between what farmers are paid for producing food and the prices shoppers pay at the grocery store.
Justice Department officials, who spoke on background because they said it was too early to comment about concerns raised at the meetings, said the workshops were a chance for the government to examine the changes the food sector had undergone in recent years.
The push to hold such events, the officials said, was driven in part by President Obama's concerns over how consolidation has affected industry competition.
Many experts believe that rising food prices start with seeds.
In recent years, the companies that develop seeds for farmers to sow in their fields have consolidated. Complaints about unfair competitive practices by the few giant firms left have soared. As a result, critics say, the effects of more costly seeds have rippled out to the nation's dining tables.
The farm community -- which produces more than $80 billion
annually in soybeans and corn -- has been pressuring lawmakers to investigate
why it's costing them so much more to grow their crops.
Yet over the last decade, the number of independent seed
companies in the
Today, four companies account for 50% of the world's proprietary seeds for major crops. The leader is Monsanto Co., whose marketing practices the Justice Department is investigating.
"There's a growing sentiment in this White House
administration that competition, and the lack of it, is getting to be a serious
problem in the food sector," said Neil E. Harl,
an
By anyone's standard, Monsanto is huge, as is its influence on consumers: Ninety-two percent of the U.S. soybean acres and 85% of the fields planted with corn are grown with seeds that use Monsanto technology, according to a 2009 report issued by Farmer to Farmer.
Crops grown with Monsanto's patented genes probably contributed to the pancakes served at breakfast, the hamburger eaten at lunch and the fruit punch poured at dinner.
The federal government has company in its scrutiny of
Monsanto. At least three state attorneys general have begun probes into whether
the
The company also is embroiled in a sweeping legal fight with rival DuPont Co. and its subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred International, which has claimed that Monsanto violated antitrust laws by using its gene licenses to quash competition.
Monsanto insists that it has done nothing wrong.
"Monsanto believes an objective review of the
agricultural sector will reveal that competition is alive and
flourishing," it said in a statement this week. A Monsanto executive is
expected to speak in
About 75% of processed food -- such as margarine and chicken soup -- on the country's grocery shelves contains engineered ingredients. These include soybeans that have been genetically modified to be more resistant to pests and weeds.
It was the lowly soybean that was the first staple crop to be successfully engineered and widely planted, thanks to Monsanto.
In an effort to bolster sales of its herbicide glyphosate, or Roundup, Monsanto turned to its laboratories to create crops that would tolerate the weed-killer. Instead of trying to alter soy's genes, they layered on new ones.
As a result, the Roundup Ready soybean seed and its patented traits were born and hit the market in 1996. Sales skyrocketed.
So did a new business model, in which farmers aren't buying a 50-pound bag of seeds but paying for a license of Monsanto's biotechnology patents and the right to use those patents for one production year. The price tag can also include additional costs, such as a technology fee.
Now, with the patent on the Roundup Ready soybean expiring in 2014, along with the company's ability to draw royalties, Monsanto is pushing farmers to switch to its second generation of Roundup Ready seeds.
Farmers such as Leake say they have little choice but to go along.
"I ran out of conventional seeds in 2004," Leake said. "I had to shift over to seeds with Monsanto's genes."
He said he's also paying more. In 2000, a bag with enough Roundup Ready soybean seeds to fill 1 acre of land would have cost him $17. Now, he said, he pays as much as $50.
He and his neighbors tried to figure out why the cost of seeds has jumped when they visited a Monsanto demonstration field last summer.
"Someone asked, 'Why are they priced so high?' " Leake recalled. "They told us, 'The price of soybeans has gone up and our company believes we are deserving of higher seed prices because of the extra traits we're giving the farmer.' "
"What can you do?" Leake asked. "There's really no alternative."
Seed patents may trump antitrust claims
(Bloomberg) -- Monsanto Co., facing antitrust probes into its genetically modified seeds, may benefit from previous court rulings in which intellectual property rights trumped competition concerns, antitrust lawyers say.
The Department of Justice and seven state attorneys general
are investigating whether the world’s largest seed company is using gene
licenses to keep competing technologies off the market. At issue is how the St.
Louis-based company sells and licenses its patented trait that allows farmers to
kill weeds with Roundup herbicide while leaving crops unharmed. The company’s
Roundup Ready gene was in 93 percent of
“Justice is clearly trying every way it can to see whether Monsanto is exceeding its rights under the patent,” said James Weiss, a Washington-based attorney at K&L Gates LLP who helped defend Microsoft Corp. against a federal antitrust probe. “At the end of the day, they may not be able to do much with it because of the scope of those patents. In almost all the cases, the courts come out on the side of intellectual property.”
Yet Monsanto’s seeds are so ubiquitous that they have become like AT&T’s telephone lines before the company’s 1984 breakup or Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system in the 1990s, said James P. Denvir, an attorney who represents rival seedmaker DuPont Co. and led the government’s AT&T case.
“Both cases involve what I think of as a classic platform monopoly,” Denvir said. “It’s a facility that competitors need access to, to compete against the monopolist.”
Monsanto and DuPont, which are suing each other over a biotech seed license, both hired former Justice Department lawyers who have handled high-profile cases.
‘Revolutionizing the Marketplace’
Monsanto’s attorney, Dan Webb, defended Microsoft in 2002
against government antitrust claims. A former U.S. Attorney in
Webb credits Monsanto with “revolutionizing the agriculture marketplace” and said antitrust claims such as those in DuPont’s suit aren’t an uncommon response to patent infringement cases such as Monsanto’s.
“The perception among farmers is that DuPont’s complaints
about exclusivity are without merit,” said Webb, a
Denvir, who represents DuPont, said farmers are among the victims.
“Clearly, we are too,” he said. “The bigger harm, the more important harm, is to farmers in denying them the best seeds they can get at the lowest possible prices.”
Legal Monopoly
While patents provide some protection from antitrust claims, giving a company a legal monopoly for a specified time, patent rights can be abused, DuPont lawyers and others said.
“The question becomes whether or not somebody in that position has engaged in some bad acts that either got it in that position or are designed to maintain that position or to extend that position to other markets,” said Charles “Rick” Rule, a lawyer at Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP who ran the Justice Department’s antitrust unit under President Ronald Reagan.
The Justice Department and Department of Agriculture will
hold a workshop on competition in agricultural markets, including biotech
seeds, today in
The department probably is looking at whether Monsanto’s licensing restrictions on seeds have a legitimate business justification, said Rule, who occasionally advises Monsanto and isn’t working with Webb on the antitrust case.
Potential for Abuse
“When you have that sort of monopoly power, it can lead to abuse, which is what we’ve been experiencing over the past several years,” said Thomas L. Sager, DuPont’s general counsel.
Wilmington, Delaware-based DuPont claims Monsanto protects its lead in biotech seeds, including the Roundup Ready seeds sold since 1996, by controlling whether competitors can add their own genetics.
Monsanto also has begun switching seedmakers and growers from Roundup Ready soybeans to the newer Roundup Ready 2 Yield version in advance of the original’s patent expiration in 2014. DuPont says Monsanto is using incentives and penalties to switch the industry to the new product in a way that unlawfully extends the Roundup Ready monopoly.
‘Level Playing Field’
“This is about trying to obtain a level playing field so innovators can introduce combinations of choices to the farmer that increase yield and of course feed the world,” Sager said.
At least seven states are investigating many of the same claims, as well as whether Monsanto illegally offered rebates to distributors who limit sales of competing seed, according to one person involved in the probe who asked not to be named because he isn’t authorized to discuss it.
3M Co.’s use of rebates to induce retailers to buy more transparent tape and curtail purchases from a smaller supplier was ruled anticompetitive by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2003.
Monsanto has amended its practices to address some criticisms. The company will help the introduction of generic Roundup Ready soybeans by maintaining foreign import approvals during the transition, a process that will be followed for off- patent biotech seeds in the future, Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant said in a January interview. Monsanto last year stopped giving rebates to dealers who limited competing seeds’ sales, said Kelli Powers, a spokeswoman.
AT&T, Microsoft Parallels
DuPont filed its federal antitrust case last year after Monsanto sued to block its rival from adding the Roundup Ready trait to seeds already modified to tolerate Roundup weed killer.
“Trait development has been stunted by the inability to get
access to the Roundup Ready platform,” Denvir, an
attorney with Boies Schiller & Flexner LLP, said
in an interview in his
While Monsanto has promised to allow generic versions of its products to emerge, Denvir said he is unconvinced that will happen without government intervention.
Monsanto got its lead in seed biotechnology because it invested in research long before DuPont and other competitors, said Webb, Monsanto’s counsel. The company spent $6 billion on seed research in the 10 years through 2008 and $1 billion a year since then, said Powers, the company spokeswoman.
Among the cases relevant to the claims against Monsanto is a 2004 Supreme Court decision that Verizon Communications Inc. and other phone companies didn’t break laws by doing too little to encourage competition, said Rule, the former antitrust division head.
Xerox Ruling
A Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in February 2000 that Xerox Corp. can’t be sued for using patents to establish or entrench a monopoly also may apply to the Monsanto disputes, he said.
The cases reflect how
Greg Neppl, with Foley & Lardner, agreed that intellectual property rights often trump antitrust concerns.
“The patent concerns are well protected in the law,” said Neppl. “Where the patent rights are clear, the antitrust issues are secondary. The antitrust concerns must respect the patent owner.”
Monsanto persuaded U.S. District Judge Richard Webber in September to separate the licensing case from DuPont’s antitrust counterclaim. The seedmaker won an additional incremental victory in January when Webber ruled that DuPont violated the companies’ licensing agreement by combining Monsanto’s Roundup- tolerance gene with a DuPont gene that does the same thing.
Counterclaim ‘Clutter’
Patent infringement is “a fair and proper case,” Webb said. “Monsanto will have its day in court and it will not be cluttered with the antitrust counterclaim.”
Monsanto shares climbed 50 cents to $71.61 yesterday, paring the decrease since DuPont filed its antitrust case in mid-June to 15 percent. DuPont has climbed 42 percent in the same period.
Justice Department probes typically move in tandem with related civil litigation because plaintiffs share information with the government, Neppl said.
“The antitrust division today is more willing to look at assertions” of anticompetitive behavior, Rule said. “This is something they have a right to look at. Once they get into an investigation, they are pretty good at making up their own mind.”
The case is Monsanto Co. v. E.I. DuPont de Nemours &
Co., 09cv686, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Missouri (
Global warming movement may be cooling
(USA
Today) – STATE COLLEGE,
Instead, it's the fact that his life's work — the effort to stop global warming — has been under siege since last fall. That's when Mann suddenly found himself in the middle of the "Climategate" scandal, in which more than 1,000 e-mails among top climate scientists — including Mann — were obtained illegally by hackers and published on the Internet.
The e-mails showed some of the scientists sharing doubts about just how fast the Earth's temperature is rising, questioning the work of other researchers and refusing to share data with the public. Critics, including Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., have seized on the e-mails as proof that Mann and his colleagues deliberately exaggerated the scientific case behind global warming.
In a rare extended interview, Mann acknowledges
"minor" errors but says he has been bewildered by the criticism —
including a deluge of correspondence sent to his
"I've developed a thick skin," Mann says. "Frankly, I'm more worried that these people are succeeding in creating doubt in the minds of the public, when there really shouldn't be any."
Indeed, the controversy has contributed to a fundamental shift in efforts to stop global warming, forcing environmentalists to scale down long-held ambitions and try to win back an increasingly skeptical American public. Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, says recent events may be causing "the death of the global warming movement as we know it."
Others don't go quite that far, but there have been setbacks:
•Citing doubts raised by the Climategate e-mails, state
governments in
•Senate Democrats including John Kerry of
•After more than a decade of fruitless efforts to negotiate
a binding global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, culminating in last
December's summit in
•The United Nations announced Wednesday that it will bring in an outside panel of scientists to help review an occasional study put together by a U.N. body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The study was regarded as the gold standard of climate science until several errors came to light this year.
It has been a dramatic reversal of fortune for a movement that, just a few years ago, thought it was "invincible," says Leighton Steward, a geologist and global warming skeptic. "We've all been kind of giggling as we watch this thing fall apart," he says.
An inconvenient error
In Mann's office at
Mann's research, which used tree rings, coral and other historical indicators to estimate how temperatures have risen in recent centuries, has been used by the IPCC in its reports.
Mann's work also was featured in Gore's 2006 book, An Inconvenient Truth, which accompanied the documentary film of the same name.
In retrospect, Mann says the movie contributed to a "premature elation" among some scientists that they had won the battle for public opinion on global warming. He also says his colleagues and policymakers were too eager to present certain scientific conclusions as "settled" — particularly with regard to possible consequences from climate change, which he says need further study.
In the most notorious error, the IPCC report said global
warming could cause glaciers in the
About a month after the summit concluded, the IPCC admitted the date was incorrect. It said the information was improperly taken from a report by an outside environmental group, the World Wildlife Fund, and not subjected to usual standards of vigorous scrutiny by other scientists.
Despite the mistakes, Mann says the core argument — that the Earth is warming, humans are at least partly responsible, and disaster may await unless action is taken — remains intact.
"I look at it like this: Let's say that you're in your car, you open up the owner's manual, and you discover a typo on page 225. Does that mean you stop driving the car? Of course not. Those are the kind of errors we're talking about here," Mann says. "Nothing has fundamentally changed."
Growing public skepticism
On that point, the Obama administration agrees with him. So do most governments around the world.
Carol Browner, the White House's director on climate and
energy policy, says there are "thousands and thousands" of scientists
whose work provides evidence of global warming. She told
"It's easy to misuse these isolated reports of problems to suggest that the science behind global warming is somehow wrong," Browner says.
However, even the White House has tried to respond to rising public doubts. During his State of the Union Address in January, Obama called for Congress to support climate change legislation for job-creation purposes "even if you doubt the evidence."
Several polls indicate that the setbacks have contributed to
a growing skepticism of climate science in the
Mead says the backlash has been especially strong because many politicians in the USA and elsewhere had said the content of the IPCC report was "unequivocal" and used it to support legislation that could dramatically alter the way the world produces and consumes energy.
"The fundamental problem is that these scientists are asking people to change the way the entire world's economy works based on what they're telling us. If you're going to do that, you had better come to the table with a certain amount of competence," Mead says.
Tim Wirth, a former U.S. senator who is now president of the United Nations Foundation, defends the IPCC, stating it has an annual budget of "only" about $3 million and relies almost entirely on volunteers to produce and fact-check its content.
Wirth says the organization would be aided by adding more
scientists to its full-time staff. He also criticizes what he called "
"It's not a fair fight," Wirth says. "The IPCC is just a tiny secretariat next to this giant denier machine."
Mann says the controversy will probably result in "closer scrutiny of what scientists do. As long as that's done in good faith, that's a positive."
Dispute among scientists
Others say the long-term damage to the movement will be more substantial.
Inhofe says public opinion is shifting so dramatically that even the scaled-down climate legislation proposed by Kerry and others will not pass Congress.
"People are waking up to how all these scandals have shot holes through the global warming propaganda," says Inhofe, one of Congress' most vocal critics of climate change science.
Inhofe's Senate website lists more than 700 scientists who disagree with the IPCC report. Many of them agree that the Earth is warming but argue that other factors, such as solar flares or ocean temperatures, play a bigger role than human activity.
Browner and Obama have said the EPA may try to regulate carbon emissions if legislation fails.
Yet Inhofe says energy companies and others may use the scientific controversies as a basis for legal action to try to stop such efforts.
Meanwhile, the stalemate has allowed countries such as
"They've passed us," Stern says. He notes that
more than 100 nations have signed the non-binding deal to cut emissions that
came out of
Browner says the White House will keep trying to marshal support for climate legislation because of its importance to job creation and national security. She says Obama's recent decision to provide more than $8 billion in federal loan guarantees for nuclear power plants was aimed partly at winning over moderate legislators in Congress.
Asked about politics, Mann shrugs.
He says he has been exasperated by the way some politicians, including Inhofe, have portrayed this winter's snowstorms on the East Coast as undermining the case for global warming, while largely ignoring a recent announcement from NASA that the previous decade was the warmest on record.
Citing climate data, Mann says, "there's a better than 50-50 chance" that 2010 will be the hottest year ever. That, more than any political statement, could refocus the debate, he says.
"If we don't act on this, it's not a failure of science," Mann says. "It's our failure as a civilization to deal with the problem."
Latest atrazine lawsuit termed frivolous
(Wire Services) – After plaintiffs' attorneys filed a
federal lawsuit Monday in the Southern District of Illinois, Kurtis B. Reeg, attorney for
defendant Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc., said another frivolous atrazine
lawsuit only harms
"In these tough economic times, one may wonder why anyone – other than class action lawyers – would seek to destroy what EPA estimates is a $2 billion annual economic benefit to the nation, and all of the jobs that go with it," Reeg said. "This lawsuit has no merit because we know from EPA-mandated testing that no water systems since 2005 have exceeded the annual average guidance for atrazine. We intend to defend ourselves vigorously."
Atrazine is a widely-used herbicide in the
"This suit is no surprise, as the same plaintiffs'
attorneys who have been trying a wasteful case in Madison County, Ill., have
been shopping this around for years," said Reeg. "Just last month, plaintiffs in
"Filing in federal court appears to be a mis-step, given the Iberville Parish,
"Everyone should bear in mind that if a 150-pound adult drank literally thousands of gallons of water with atrazine at three parts-per-billion every day for 70 years, she still would not reach the exposure level at which no adverse impact has been detected in the laboratory.
"We know these communities are strapped for cash, and suing companies to upgrade their decades-old water systems may seem like an easy way to raise money, but it only harms local farmers who rely on these safely-regulated crop protection tools for their livelihood and to help cost-effectively feed a quickly growing consumer public," Reeg said.
"The many statements by farmers and their associations attest to their support for atrazine and its safety in use. They have for half a century. EPA's atrazine regulation is a model of sound science carefully applied in its mission of protecting all Americans and our environment.
"As a hallmark of good stewardship, my client worked voluntarily with stakeholders for years and since then also with EPA to monitor the water systems where minute detections of atrazine may occasionally occur," said Reeg. "Since 2005, no water system has had an annual average atrazine level in its drinking water greater than the EPA standard, which itself carries a 1000-fold safety factor.
"The mere filing of this new lawsuit suggests additional forum shopping by out-of-town attorneys who turn neighbor against neighbor to seek profit for themselves."
Legal gun toters make café workers jittery
(SanteFeNewMexican.com) – State Rep. John Heaton cited safety as one reason he sponsored a law to allow New Mexicans with concealed-carry permits to bring guns into restaurants that sell beer and wine.
"It creates a zone of defenselessness when you have to leave your gun in the car," the Carlsbad Democrat said, citing testimony from victims of stalkers. Another justification for Heaton's bill, which Gov. Bill Richardson signed into law this week: Preventing the theft of guns from cars.
But some Santa Fe restaurant workers say the new law — which goes into effect July 1 — makes them feel less safe, not more.
"I think it's a horrible idea," said Nora Lopez, who along with her husband, Luis Ortega, owns restaurants in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Espańola — all called Mariscos La Playa — which serve beer and wine. "I don't think it's safe for us or our employees or our customers."
As a server, Lopez said, she has seen customers' behaviors change after one or two beers. "Sometimes they get very happy," she said, "Sometimes they get very angry."
Heaton pointed out that the law says people carrying concealed weapons aren't supposed to drink alcoholic beverages. In his experience, Heaton said, people who apply for permits to legally carry concealed weapons "police themselves very carefully."
"They cannot drink while they are carrying," Heaton said. "So they don't drink. I've never seen a group of people more respectful of a license."
Heaton said establishments that don't want patrons bringing weapons onto the premises can "simply post signs that guns are not allowed."
But Honey Yohalem, co-owner of Il Piatto restaurant in downtown
"You never know when people are going to go off the deep end," she said, "especially in today's economic climate when people are having a lot of financial issues."
Yohalem said she hasn't decided yet whether to post a sign prohibiting concealed weapons at Il Piatto. She said she doesn't feel her customers are inclined to carry guns, but she's not sure it would make much difference if they did.
"I can't pat them down when they come through the door," Yohalem said, adding that she couldn't imagine someone saying to themselves "Oh, they have a sign, I'll put it back in the car."
Some in the restaurant industry have speculated that more servers, who often carry large amounts of cash from tips, will apply for permits to carry weapons now that they can bring them to work.
"I don't like the idea," Lopez said. "Sometimes people who are fired from their work come back with a gun."
But not everyone The New Mexican interviewed felt the same way.
"I have no problems with it at all," said Dave Rusanowski, a manager at Saveur restaurant. "The way things are now you don't even know if someone is carrying anyway."
End Transmission