Replies to post #78931 on Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

Monsanto, BASF discover corn gene conferring drought tolerance:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Monsanto-BASF-Scientists-prnews-15474706.html

The announcement comes at a time when recent studies, including one by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, are warning of declining crop yields and global food shortages as a result of climate change. According to a United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization report prepared for ministers of the G-8, the number and duration of dry spells, especially in already drought-prone areas, is expected to increase.

The companies said that the drought-tolerant corn contains the cspB gene, from Bacillus subtilis. CspB codes for an RNA chaperone, which are commonly occurring protein molecules that bind to RNAs and facilitate their function. The gene was first identified in bacteria subjected to cold stress conditions and further research has demonstrated that cspB helps plants cope with drought stress. Monsanto scientists have published those findings in a peer-reviewed paper in the journal, Plant Physiology.

[DewDiligence]

Monsanto Resurrects Biotech Program for Wheat

[As previously posted (#msg-38256058), I think MON is a cheap stock relative to its expected growth rate during the next 5-10 years, and it is worthy of being a core biotech holding. Moreover, the expected growth rate is based almost entirely on two crops: corn and soybeans; if GMO wheat finally becomes a reality, the growth rate could be substantially higher.]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124758781309939557.html

›JULY 15, 2009
By SCOTT KILMAN

Monsanto Co. is resurrecting its efforts to genetically engineer wheat five years after resistance from the food industry led it to drop its work on the world's most widely planted crop.

The move eventually could help slow or reverse the decline in the size of the wheat harvest on the Great Plains, where many farmers have abandoned their traditional crop to grow plants -- such as corn and soybeans -- genetically engineered to be easier to grow. But it also could reignite opposition to biotechnology among makers of bread, pasta and cake, particularly in foreign markets that are dependent on U.S. wheat.

Even though more than 85% of all of the corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the U.S. are already genetically modified to resist pests or tolerate weed killer, the St. Louis biotechnology company is starting from scratch with wheat, long a major crop in Plains states such as North Dakota, Montana and Kansas.

Monsanto plans to create wheat that can tolerate drought and consume less fertilizer, among other things. But any genetically modified seeds probably won't reach farmers for at least eight years, time that Monsanto executives hope they can use to smooth over any concerns within the wheat industry.

Monsanto's plan came to light Tuesday when it announced that it had definitively agreed to buy WestBred LLC, a small, closely held Montana wheat-breeding outfit, for $45 million. Monsanto will probably have to spend another $100 million on research and development to bring its first genetically modified wheat plant to market.

Monsanto's new GMO wheat push is much broader than its original effort in 2003, which involved a Northern Plains spring wheat variety that had been genetically modified to tolerate exposure to the company's Roundup herbicide. Now, Monsanto is interested in genetically modifying many varieties of wheat with several traits.

The U.S. wheat industry -- from farmers to exporters -- originally put up more resistance to biotechnology than other major crops, such as corn and cotton. The wheat industry feared that consumers would be more leery of tinkering with wheat because that crop is more easily recognized by shoppers since it is a known ingredient in staples such as breads, pastas and cakes.

Part of what has changed is that many wheat farmers have started growing genetically modified corn and soybeans in their fields, helping reduce wheat production to levels that concern buyers of wheat ingredients.

In October, for example, North American Millers' Association adopted the position that genetically modified wheat should be commercialized. In May, organizations representing wheat farmers in three of the biggest wheat-exporting nations -- U.S., Canada and Australia -- backed the simultaneous commercialization of genetically modified wheat.‹

[DewDiligence]

Less Water, More Biotech

[This article is almost a year old, but it’s germane to what Monsanto is seeking to accomplish in ag biotech during the next 5-10 years (see #msg-40779677). Disclosure: MON is one of the largest positions in the investment portfolio of the private foundation I advise.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/business/23drought.html

›October 23, 2008
By ANDREW POLLACK

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. — To satisfy the world’s growing demand for food, scientists are trying to pull off a genetic trick that nature itself has had trouble accomplishing in millions of years of evolution. They want to create varieties of corn, wheat and other crops that can thrive with little water.

As the world’s population expands and global warming alters weather patterns, water shortages are expected to hold back efforts to grow more food. People drink only a quart or two of water every day, but the food they eat in a typical day, including plants and meat, requires 2,000 to 3,000 quarts to produce. [This strikes me as a silly comparison, but I suppose it makes the article a punchier read.]

For companies that manage to get “more crop per drop,” the payoff could be huge, and scientists at many of the biggest agricultural companies are busy tweaking plant genes in search of the winning formula.

Monsanto, the biggest crop biotechnology company, says its first drought-tolerant corn will reach farmers in only four years and will provide a 10 percent increase in yields in states like Nebraska and Kansas that tend to get less rainfall than eastern parts of the Corn Belt.

At a recent farm show here called Husker Harvest Days, a few thousand farmers were guided past a small plot on which Monsanto had grown its drought-tolerant corn next to a similar variety without the “drought gene.” A transparent tent had shielded the plants from any rain through the hot Nebraska summer.

The results were, to be sure, less than miraculous. Both the drought-tolerant and the comparison plants were turning brown and shriveling, and they were about three feet shorter than the lush green irrigated corn growing nearby. But the drought-tolerant plants, which also contained a second gene to protect their roots from a pest, were a little greener and a few inches taller than the comparison plants, and their cobs were missing fewer kernels.

Monsanto said the improvement was significant. And the Nebraska and Kansas farmers who toured Monsanto’s plot, many of them facing water-use restrictions and soaring pumping costs for irrigation, said any improvement would be welcome.

“We pump water like there’s no end, and that’s not going to last forever,” said Tom Schuele, a farmer in Cedar Rapids, Neb. Monsanto’s competitors, including DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred unit and Syngenta, say they also plan to introduce water-efficient corn in a few years. And companies are working on plants that can stand up to heat, cold, salty soils and other tough environments.

A small California company called Arcadia Biosciences is trying to develop crops that need only half as much nitrogen fertilizer as a conventional plant. Fertilizer is crucial to modern food production, but the large quantities used today damage the environment. And because fertilizer is made from natural gas, its costs have soared along with other energy costs.

Public sector scientists are also on the hunt. Researchers at the University of California and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines are developing rice that can survive flooding, which causes major crop losses for poor farmers in the lowlands of India and other countries. While rice is typically grown in standing water, the plants will die if submerged for more than a few days.

Many of these advanced crops are being developed using genetic engineering [no kidding]. The technology, already used to make crops that can resist weeds and insects, has spurred worldwide controversy. But in an era in which people are marching in the streets of many countries to demand more food at lower prices, low-water crops might win over areas that now shun biotech crops, such as most of Africa.

“Drought tolerance to me is the most critical entry point,” said Calestous Juma, a professor of international development at Harvard who has advised African governments on biotechnology. “This is kind of reopening the window for genetic modification.”

Critics accuse the biotechnology industry and its backers of exploiting the recent global food crisis to push a technology that has been oversold and that could have unanticipated health and environmental effects.

Indeed, many past predictions of how biotechnology would create novel crops have not come to fruition. And some experts say Monsanto and its peers have not published enough information to prove they can make drought-tolerant crops.

“I want to see more, I guess, from the Monsanto work before I’d be convinced they’ve got it,” said John S. Boyer, an emeritus professor at the University of Delaware.

Safety questions must also be answered. Changing the water needs of a plant requires a more fundamental alteration of its metabolism than adding a gene to make the plant resistant to insects. “The potential for unintended side effects is greater, so the testing has to be greater,” said David A. Lightfoot, a professor of genetics and genomics at Southern Illinois University.

How much could be gained by use of these new crops is not yet clear. A report in 2007 by the International Water Management Institute, which is part of a network of agricultural research centers, concluded that genetic improvements would have only a “moderate” impact over the next 15 to 20 years in making crops more efficient in using water.

“Greater, easier and less contentious gains,” it said, could come from better managing water supplies, rather than trying to develop crops that can flourish with less water.

But many experts say the situation is grave enough that all approaches must be tried simultaneously.

Poor growing conditions can reduce crop yields by 70 percent or more below their potential. American farmers, for instance, average about 150 bushels of corn an acre. But David K. Hula of Charles City, Va., won a competition last year by achieving nearly 386 bushels an acre, a measure of what modern crop varieties can achieve under optimal conditions.

In many areas, lack of water is the biggest limiting factor, and supplies of water for irrigation could be reduced further in coming years in order to supply more water to growing cities and proliferating factories.

Global warming is also expected to lead to drier conditions and more frequent droughts in some parts of the world [assuming that global warming is real]. Scientists at Stanford, for instance, have projected that corn yields in southern Africa could drop 25 percent by 2030 because of warmer, drier weather.

Breeding water-efficient crops would seem to be straightforward: Just grow crops under dry conditions and choose the ones that do best for the next round of breeding.

It does not quite work that way, however. After several generations, the crops are indeed more resistant to drought. But there is a downside in that they often turn out to have lower yields when there is plenty of rain.

So scientists are harnessing the same genetic techniques that have yielded insights into human health to decipher how plants control water use and adapt to stress. “We’ve probably made more progress in the last 15 years than we have in the last 5,000 years,” said Ray A. Bressan, a professor at Purdue.

In particular, he said, studies have overturned the conventional wisdom that water use is so complex that no single gene could have a big impact on it. “Single genes are having effects in the field that we never thought would be possible,” he said.

That has opened the door for genetic engineering, which allows scientists to add a gene from another species to a plant, or even an extra copy of one of the plant’s own genes.

Critics say that biotech seeds, which are patented and tend to be costly, , might not be suitable for poor farmers in developing countries. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a group working for improved farm productivity on that continent, has said that for now it would avoid genetic engineering because greater gains for small farmers can be made at lower cost using conventional breeding.

Indeed, there has been progress developing drought-tolerant crops using conventional breeding, despite the obstacles.

Syngenta, a big Swiss seed and agricultural chemical company, says it will introduce drought-tolerant corn developed by conventional breeding in 2011, followed by a genetically engineered version in 2014.

The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, the institute that sparked the output improvements of the Green Revolution decades ago, has bred drought-tolerant corn that is already being grown in Africa. Marianne Bänziger, director of the global corn program for the center, said the yields are 20 to 50 percent higher than local varieties during droughts, with no loss of yield in wetter years.

Still, her institute, with financing from foundations, is working with Monsanto to develop genetically engineered corn that would be even more water-efficient.

Monsanto has said it would not charge royalties for using its technology in the African corn, to keep the seed affordable. It says that corn customized for Africa could be ready by 2017, only five years after it starts selling drought-tolerant corn to American farmers.

Various other approaches are being tried to make less thirsty crops.

Performance Plants, a Canadian company, adds a gene that causes the plant to start preserving its water more quickly as a drought begins. [Never heard of this company before.] In one field test, the yield of its genetically engineered canola barely fell when irrigation was cut in half. The yield of a comparison crop fell 14 percent.

Monsanto is going in the opposite direction — trying to keep the plant producing seed when a drought starts, even when its natural response would be to slow down in order to preserve water.

“You don’t want a cactus,” said Jacqueline Heard, who directs Monsanto’s program for drought-tolerant crops. “You want something that keeps a plant very active.”

Monsanto will not say exactly what genes it is using, or in which species they originated. But one approach involves transcription factors, which are like master regulators, able to turn on dozens of other genes to orchestrate a plant’s response to lack of water.

But with so many downstream genes activated, there could be other effects on the plants besides less need for water. At a recent biotechnology conference, a university researcher showed a photograph of a cotton plant with an inserted gene for a transcription factor. The plant was missing most of its leaves.

No single approach is likely to suffice for all types of dry conditions. “Probably no one has found the magic gene yet,” said Jian-Kang Zhu, a professor of plant biology at the University of California, Riverside. “Probably there is no magic gene.”‹

[DewDiligence]

Re: Ag biotech (MON)

This is a repost from the SI board for the 2010 charity contest
in reply to ‘Arthur Radley,’ who is evidently a skeptic vis-à-vis
the benefits of ag biotech.

http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=26231468

[AR]: I will stay out of the debate on Monsanto…

[Dew]: I don’t think there’s a bona fide debate going on. Unless cities are converted into farmland, there’s not going to be enough farm acreage to feed the world’s population without increased use of biotechnology.

Thus, if you are opposed to ag biotech, you may skip the intellectual arguments in support of your opposition and cut to the chase: simply tell us which people should be the ones to go hungry.

Feedback welcome.

[DewDiligence]

(MON) European Luddites May Be a Dying Breed

http://www.reuters.com/article/idAFLDE62111520100302

›EU clears 5 GMO crops, eyes proposal on cultivation

Tue, Mar 2, 2010

* EU clears Amflora potato for cultivation

* Approves 3 Monsanto maize types for food, feed

* Says may propose allowing states to decide on cultivation

* Environmental groups condemn approval

By Bate Felix and Charlie Dunmore

BRUSSELS, March 2 (Reuters) - The European Commission approved 5 genetically modified crops on Tuesday, and said it might let EU countries decide whether or not they grow GM crops on their soil.

The Commission's decision to approve the genetically modified potato and maize drew condemnation from environmental groups which accused the EU's executive arm of ignoring consumer concerns over the safety of GM products.

The Commission authorised a genetically modified potato, Amflora, developed by German chemical maker BASF, marking the bloc's first GM cultivation approval in 12 years.

"The decision provides for strict cultivation conditions to prevent the possibility that GM potatoes will remain in the fields after harvest and to ensure that Amflora's seed will not be inadvertently disseminated into the wider environment," the Commission said, in a bid to allay fears of cross-contamination.

The authorisation clears the cultivation of Amflora in the EU for industrial uses such as paper-making and animal feed.

BASF said the approval cleared the way for the commercial cultivation of Amflora this year. The crop will likely be grown on 250 hectares in Europe, 150 hectares of which is in the Czech Republic, it added.

The firm said it expected peak license fees of about 20-30 million euros ($27-40.6 million) per annum.

The EU executive also approved three genetically modified maize types, MON863xMON810, MON863xMON810xNK603 and MON863xNK603, made by U.S. biotech firm Monsanto for food and feed uses and import and processing in the European Union.

The decision was the first by a new line-up of EU commissioners. Environmental groups said it ignored risks posed by the crop to human and animal health, as well as to the environment.

"It is shocking that one of the Commission's first official acts is to authorise a GM crop that puts the environment and public health at risk," Greenpeace EU agriculture policy director Marco Contiero said in a statement.

"If this new potato is widely grown in the European Union, organic and conventional farmers and food processors will have to face even higher costs keeping food production chains free from GMOs", warned Bavo van den Idsert, Vice President of IFOAM which represents organic farmers in Europe.

Approval of genetically modified crops in the European Union has long been a subject of controversy, dividing EU member states with many openly hostile to what they call "Frankenstein foods".

The EU executive said it plans to announce proposals by summer that would, if approved, allow governments to decide whether genetically modified crops can be grown within their borders.‹

[genisi]

GM animals - transgenic salmon

Transgenic fish go large

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100914/full/467259a.html

Approval expected for genetically modified salmon.

By Emma Marris

A genetically modified animal is on the brink of making an appearance on US dinner tables for the first time. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to approve a genetically modified (GM) Atlantic salmon that grows twice as fast as wild Atlantics, reaching market weight in a year and a half instead of three. Approval could come as soon as next week.

The fish contains a single copy of a DNA sequence that includes code for a Chinook salmon growth hormone and regulatory sequences derived from Chinook salmon and the eel-like ocean pout. Whereas Atlantic salmon normally stop growing in the winter, the GM fish produces growth hormones throughout the year. Developer AquaBounty Technologies, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, has spent more than a decade shepherding the fish towards approval in a new regulatory landscape. In 2009, the FDA decided to classify GM traits in animals as veterinary drugs. Some have criticized this decision, as it allows companies to shield some details of their product from public view as proprietary information (see Nature doi:10.1038/news.2008.1120; 2010).

To appease critics, the FDA has posted all the information behind its decision on the salmon online, and has opened much of the deliberations of an advisory body — the Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee (VMAC) — to the public. Next week the VMAC will hold public sessions to hear about the science, safety, environmental impact and possible labelling of the fish. The FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, which will decide on approval after hearing from the VMAC, has already released a favourable report.

Some environmental groups are concerned that the fish might escape from their pens and mate with wild Atlantic salmon. "There is always going to be a possibility of escape," says Peter Bridson, aquaculture research manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. "We would oppose the approval of the current application."

AquaBounty's chief executive Ronald Stotish says those concerns are misplaced. More than 99% of his salmon are triploid, which renders them sterile, and the fish are farmed inland, in large tanks fitted with filters and baffles to imprison eggs, smolt and fish. "The possibility of an escape or an event with any possibility to interact with the wild population is infinitesimal," says Stotish.

According to Mark Abrahams, a biologist at Memorial University in St John's, Newfoundland, Canada, the transgenic fish's ramped-up metabolism is maladapted to life in the wild. "They are willing to incur huge risks to gain access to food," he says, allowing predators to pick off the fish easily.

The next GM animal on dinner plates may be the Enviropig, developed at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and submitted to the FDA for approval. The pig can better absorb phosphorus from its food, reducing the phosphorus content of its manure. High-phosphorus manure can induce algal blooms in waterways.

There are no requests for authorization of transgenic food animals pending in the European Union, and the European Food Safety Authority, based in Parma, Italy, is just beginning to draft regulatory guidelines. For now, AquaBounty plans to market its salmon only in the United States. "Other countries are interested but they are all looking to the United States for the regulatory imprimatur," says Stotish.

[DewDiligence]

Rising Food Prices Are Good for Ag-Biotech

[MON does not directly benefit from escalating crop prices because the prices of MON’s seeds are set at the beginning of each growing season and are not adjusted based on day to day price changes in the commodity markets. However, the worldwide escalation of food prices could benefit MON (and other ag-biotech companies) by persuading Luddites to drop their opposition to genetically-modfied seeds; this seems to be happening already, according to this article.]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2011-03-07/biotech-companies-see-food-prices-boosting-gm-crops-ft-says.html

›By Alan Purkiss - Mar 7, 2011

Rising food prices may result in greater acceptance of genetically modified seed in emerging markets, the Financial Times reported, citing leading seed companies.

Daniel Rahier, who heads biotechnology policy at DuPont Co., said there’s been a change of mood in countries such as Indonesia, where the government is encouraging companies to apply for approval of biotech seeds, and “it’s a similar story in Vietnam, Cambodia and Kenya,” the newspaper reported.

Stefan Marcinowski, in charge of plant science and crop protection at Germany’s BASF SE (BAS), told the FT rising food prices are “a wake-up call to use all available technologies.”

Hugh Grant, Monsanto Co. (MON)’s chief executive officer, said many agricultural areas of the world “have made significant policy shifts” in the past two years, the newspaper reported.‹