[A2k] Firms seek patents on 'climate ready' altered crops

[Soenke Zehle]

Subject: [BIO-IPR] Firms seek patents on 'climate ready' altered crops
Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 16:44:32 +0100 (BST)
From: bio-ipr@grain.org

BIO-IPR docserver | http://www.grain.org/bio-ipr
________________________________________________________

TITLE: Firms seek patents on 'climate ready' altered crops
AUTHOR: Rick Weiss
PUBLICATION: Washington Post
DATE: 13 May 2008
URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/12/AR200805120=
2919_pf.html
NOTE: ETC Group's report, including a table listing over 500 patent
applications and patents (55 patent families) on climate-related genes
and traits, is available here:
http://www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?pub_id=3D687
________________________________________________________

FIRMS SEEK PATENTS ON 'CLIMATE READY' ALTERED CROPS

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 13, 2008; A04

A handful of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies
are seeking hundreds of patents on gene-altered crops designed to
withstand drought and other environmental stresses, part of a race for
dominance in the potentially lucrative market for crops that can handle
global warming, according to a report being released today.

Three companies -- BASF of Germany, Syngenta of Switzerland and Monsanto
of St. Louis -- have filed applications to control nearly two-thirds of
the climate-related gene families submitted to patent offices worldwide,
according to the report by the Ottawa-based ETC Group, an activist
organization that advocates for subsistence farmers.

The applications say that the new "climate ready" genes will help crops
survive drought, flooding, saltwater incursions, high temperatures and
increased ultraviolet radiation -- all of which are predicted to
undermine food security in coming decades.

Company officials dismissed the report's contention that the
applications amount to an intellectual-property "grab," countering that
gene-altered plants will be crucial to solving world hunger but will
never be developed without patent protections.

The report highlights the economic opportunities facing the
biotechnology industry at a time of growing food insecurity, as well as
the risks to its public image.

Many of the world's poorest countries, destined to be hit hardest by
climate change, have rejected biotech crops, citing environmental and
economic concerns. Importantly, gene patents generally preclude the
age-old practice of saving seeds from a harvest for replanting,
requiring instead that farmers purchase the high-tech seeds each year.

The ETC report concludes that biotech giants are hoping to leverage
climate change as a way to get into resistant markets, and it warns that
the move could undermine public-sector plant-breeding institutions such
as those coordinated by the United Nations and the World Bank, which
have long made their improved varieties freely available.

"When a market is dominated by a handful of large multinational
companies, the research agenda gets biased toward proprietary products,"
said Hope Shand, ETC's research director. "Monopoly control of plant
genes is a bad idea under any circumstance. During a global food crisis,
it is unacceptable and has to be challenged."

Ranjana Smetacek, a spokeswoman for Monsanto, said companies deserve
praise for developing crop varieties that will survive climate change.

"I think everyone recognizes that the old traditional ways just aren't
able to address these new challenges. The problems in Africa are pretty
severe," she said, noting that Monsanto and BASF are participating in a
project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to develop
drought-resistant corn that would be made available to farmers in four
southern African countries royalty-free. "We aim to be at once generous
and also cognizant of our obligation to shareholders who have paid for
our research," Smetacek said.

Gene patents allow companies to limit others from marketing those genes.
The 35-page ETC report, "Patenting the 'Climate Genes' . . . and
Capturing the Climate Agenda," documents about 530 applications for
climate-related plant genes filed at patent offices in the past five
years. A few dozen patents have been issued; hundreds of others are pending=
.

Of the 55 major gene families at the heart of those applications, BASF
filed 21, the report says. Other major players include Syngenta, seven;
Monsanto, six; and Bayer of Germany, five.

Among the report's concerns is the breadth of many applications.
Protective genes are usually discovered in one variety of plant, and
after minimal testing they are presumed to be useful in others, Shand
said. In one typical case, a BASF patent claim for a gene to tolerate
"environmental stress" seeks to preclude competitors from using that
gene in "maize, wheat, rye, oat, triticale, rice, barley, soybean,
peanut, cotton, rapeseed, canola, manihot, pepper, sunflower, tagetes,
solanaceous plants, potato, tobacco, eggplant, tomato, Vicia species,
pea, alfalfa, coffee, cacao, tea, Salix species, oil palm, coconut,
perennial grass and a forage crop plant."

Publicly funded developers of freely accessible plant varieties could
succumb to biotech's market dominance, the report warns. One of the
biggest is the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research, which runs 15 research centers worldwide and is funded by
several international aid organizations. CGIAR has long emphasized
non-biotech breeding to develop varieties ideal for subsistence farmers
and their local conditions.

Facing big budget cuts from its traditional funders, CGIAR is now a
central player in the Gates-funded collaboration with Monsanto and BASF
-- a project that a CGIAR spokesman defended as a "global public good."

Other experts said that both sides have oversimplified the pros and cons
of biotech crop patents.

"I don't mind Monsanto developing these tools. I mind that we don't have
an economic ecology that lets other companies compete with them," said
Richard Jefferson, founder and chief executive of Cambia, a nonprofit
institute based in Australia that helps companies worldwide sort through
patent holdings so they can build on one another's work instead of
stymieing one another.

Under the current system for patenting genes, he said, "the little guys
shake out and the big guys end up in a place a lot like a cartel."

Jefferson characterized the ETC report as extreme in its anti-corporate
views but praised it for drawing attention to what he said is a real
problem of corporate consolidation in the seed industry. Happily, he
said, patent offices are "getting a lot better" about not allowing
overly broad gene patents.

Jonathan Bryant, managing director of BASF's U.S. division, said plants
have tens of thousands of genes, most of them unexplored. "I think
there's still plenty of opportunity for many companies and
institutions," he said. "We're all looking to bring our technology
together for a common good."

________________________________________________________

GOING FURTHER (compiled by GRAIN)

ETC Group, "Gene giants grab 'climate genes': Amid global food crisis,
biotech companies are exposed as climate change profiteers", news
release, Ottawa, 13 May 2008.
http://www.etcgroup.org/_page24?pub_id=3D688

ETC Group,"Patenting the climate genes...and capturing the climate
agenda", Communiqu=E9, Ottawa, May/June 2008.
http://www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?pub_id=3D687

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