GMO corn falls prey to bugs it was supposed to thwart 
 
 CHICAGO — A voracious pest which has long plagued corn farmers is devouring a widely-used variety that was genetically modified to thwart the rootworms, raising fears of a new superbug. 
 
 So far, there is no evidence that a significant number of rootworms have developed a resistance to the corn's protective toxin. 
 
 However, experts warn that farmers may be forced to resume the heavy use of pesticides if resistant bugs become widespread. 
 
 They also caution that farmers may be using genetically modified crops in ways that hasten the development of resistant bugs. 
 
 "The western corn rootworm is one of the most significant insect pests of corn in the United States and has a potential to become a very significant insect in Europe," said Michael Gray, a crop scientist at the University of Illinois. 
 
 Farmers used to be able to manage the pests by rotating which crops they planted in their fields. 
 
 But rootworms started to lay their eggs on soybeans -- the most common substitute -- which meant farmers had to use pesticides to get rid of them. The hardy and adaptive bugs have also developed resistance to some pesticides, Gray said Monday. 
 
 Monsanto released the first seeds that were genetically-modified to protect themselves from rootworms in 2003. US farmers used this type of seed for 45% of the US crop in 2009. 
 
 Evidence of the first resistant rootworms was found in four Iowa fields that suffered extensive damage from the pests in 2009. 
 
 Gray is currently investigating whether rootworms which devoured genetically modified corn in Illinois this year have also developed a resistance. 
 
 Laboratory testing published last month confirmed that the bugs collected from the Iowa fields were able to pass a resistance to the crop's toxins on to their offspring. 
 
 "These results suggest that improvements in resistance management and a more integrated approach to the use of Bt crops may be necessary," wrote lead researcher Aaron Gassmann of Iowa State University. 
 
 The fields where the resistant rootworms were found had been planted with the genetically modified seeds for at least three consecutive years. 
 
 That could have helped the bugs develop a resistance, Gassmann wrote. 
 
 Another contributor could be the insufficient use of "refuges," he concluded. 
 
 Farmers are supposed to plant 20 percent of their fields with corn that doesn't have the genetic modification so that if resistant bugs develop they will end up breeding with non-resistant rootworms drawn to the unprotected plants and lessen the chance of passing resistance on to the next generation. 
 
 Monsanto is already working to make it easier for farmers to comply with these government-mandated "refuges" by selling bags that contain a mix of unprotected and protected seeds. 
 
 It also has several other products already on the market which could work as a substitute if significant resistance develops and has several new products in the pipeline, said spokesman Lee Quarles. 
 
 But while Monsanto is taking the study results "seriously" there is no reason for farmers to stop using the current seeds, he said. 
 
 "Today's products work," Quarles told AFP. "They continue to provide tremendous performance to farmers and we're seeing that performance on greater than 99% of all acres planted." 
 
 Copyright © 2013 AFP. All rights reserved. More » ||||| The second involved crop-eating insects. We've isolated the toxic gene of a commonly used bacterial pesticide called Bt, Monsanto announced, and spliced it directly into crops. Along with corn and soy, you will literally be growing the pesticide that protects them. Plant our seeds, and watch your crops thrive while their pests shrivel and die. 
 
 The first involved weeds. Leave the weed management to us, Monsanto insisted. We've engineered plants that can survive our very own herbicide. Just pay up for our patented, premium-priced seeds, spray your fields with our Roundup herbicide whenever the fancy strikes, and—voilà!—no more weeds. 
 
 Over the past decade and a half, as Monsanto built up its globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar genetically modified seed empire, it made two major pitches to farmers. 
 
 Monsanto focused its technology on three widely planted, highly subsidized crops: corn, soy, and cotton. Large-scale farmers of these commodities, always operating on razor-thin profit margins, lunged at the chance to streamline their operations by essentially outsourcing their pest management to Monsanto. And so Monsanto's high-tech crops essentially took over the corn/soy- and cotton-growing regions of the country. 
 
 But now the pitches are wearing thin. Dumping a single herbicide onto millions of acres of farmland has, predictably enough, given rise to weeds resistant to that herbicide. Such "superweeds" are now galloping through cotton and corn country, forcing farmers to resort to highly toxic herbicide cocktails and even hand-weeding. More than 11 million acres are infested with Roundup-resistant weeds, up from 2.4 million acres in 2007, reckons Penn State University weed expert David Mortensen. 
 
 And now insects are developing resistance to Monsanto's insecticide-infused crops, reports the Wall Street Journal. Fields planted in Monsanto's Bt corn in some areas of the Midwest are showing damage from the corn rootworm—the very species targeted by Monsanto's engineered trait. An Iowa State University scientist has conclusively identified Bt-resistant root worms in four Iowa fields, the Journal reports. 
 
 The findings are not likely isolated to those fields—just like spotting a cockroach on your kitchen floor probably signals an infestation, not that a lone cockroach randomly stumbled in for a visit. Sure enough, farmers in Illinois are also seeing severe rootworm damage in fields planted in Monsanto's Bt corn. And it's not just in the United States: In 2010, Monsanto itself acknowledged that in industrial-agriculture regions of India, where Monsanto's Bt cotton is a dominant crop, a cotton-attacking pest called the bollworm had developed resistance. 
 
 Just as Roundup-resistant superweeds rapidly bloomed into a major problem after first appearing in the mid-2000s, Bt-resistant superinsects may be just getting started. Colleen Scherer, managing editor of the industrial-ag trade magazine Ag Professional, put it like this: "There is no 'putting the genie back in the bottle,' and resistance in these areas is a problem that won't go away." 
 
 So what does all of this mean for Monsanto? If its main attraction for farmers—the promise of easy pest management—is turning to dust in a quite public way, should we expect the company be on the verge of getting crushed under the weight of its failures? 
 
 To get a glimpse of how the publicly traded company is faring, I looked at how its stock has been performing over the past year, compared to the broader stock market. Early Monday afternoon, Monsanto's shares were trading at about $71—a more than 25 percent gain over the past 12 months. Over the same period, the S&P 500—a broad gauge of US stocks—is up just over 10 percent. That means investors have high hopes for Monsanto going forward, despite the high-profile failures. Like weeds and bugs in farm fields, Monsanto shares have developed resistance to toxic tidings. 
 
 What gives? The Wall Street Journal article provides a clue: 
 
 The [Bt-resistance] finding adds fuel to the race among crop biotechnology rivals to locate the next generation of genes that can protect plants from insects. Scientists at Monsanto and Syngenta AG of Basel, Switzerland, are already researching how to use a medical breakthrough called RNA interference to, among other things, make crops deadly for insects to eat. If this works, a bug munching on such a plant could ingest genetic code that turns off one of its essential genes. 
 
 In other words, Monsanto claims it has the answer to the trouble it's cooking up on corn, soy, and cotton fields: more patent-protected GM technology. It has managed to shove US farmers on a kind of accelerating treadmill: the need to apply ever more, and ever more novel, high-tech responses to keep up with ever-evolving pests. And while farmers run ever faster to stay in place, Monsanto just keeps coming up with highly profitable "solutions" to the problems it has generated. 
 
 Investors have embraced Monsanto's pitch. Large-scale farmers, battered and desperate for relief, probably will too. But the broader citizenry, in the form of the regulatory agencies that ostensibly guard the public interest, should start asking hard questions. ||||| Farmer's Fight With Monsanto Reaches The Supreme Court 
 
 toggle caption Dan Charles/NPR 
 
 This week, the Supreme Court will take up a classic David-and-Goliath case. On one side, there's a 75-year-old farmer in Indiana named Vernon Hugh Bowman; on the other, the agribusiness giant Monsanto. 
 
 The farmer is fighting the long reach of Monsanto's patents on seeds — but he's up against more than just Monsanto. The biotech and computer software industries are taking Monsanto's side. 
 
 Bowman also is battling a historic shift that's transformed the nation's seed business over the past 20 years. 
 
 Despite all that, Bowman seems remarkably cheerful about his situation. "Confrontation does not take a toll on me!" he says. "You and me can argue about the Bible; we can argue about religion. I'll pound my fist and we can argue all day, and I won't lose a bit of sleep at night!" 
 
 Bowman is leaning back in an easy chair, where he says he also sleeps at night. He lives alone in a modest white frame house outside the small town of Sandborn, in southwestern Indiana. 
 
 Out back, there's an array of old farm equipment collected during decades of growing corn and soybeans. 
 
 Bowman is wearing a Monsanto hat. It's probably an ironic gesture, but in fact, he's been a pleased and loyal customer of the company's seeds. He thinks the genes that Monsanto inserted into soybeans are just great. They let soybeans survive the country's most popular weedkiller: glyphosate, also known as Roundup. He can spray that one chemical to get rid of the weeds without harming his crop. 
 
 "It made things so much simpler and better. No question about that," he says. 
 
 Bowman uses these "Roundup Ready" soybeans for his main crop, which he plants in the spring, and he signs a standard agreement not to save any of his harvest and replant it the next year. Monsanto demands exclusive rights to supply that seed. 
 
 toggle caption Dan Charles/NPR 
 
 But here's where Bowman got into trouble: He also likes to plant a second crop of soybeans, later in the year, in fields where he just harvested wheat. 
 
 Those late-season soybeans are risky. The yield is smaller. Bowman decided that for this crop, he didn't want to pay top dollar for Monsanto's seed. "What I wanted was a cheap source of seed," he says. 
 
 Starting in 1999, he bought some ordinary soybeans from a small grain elevator where local farmers drop off their harvest. "They made sure they didn't sell it as seed. Their ticket said, 'Outbound grain," says Bowman. 
 
 He knew that these beans probably had Monsanto's Roundup Ready gene in them, because that's mainly what farmers plant these days. But Bowman didn't think Monsanto controlled these soybeans anymore, and in any case, he was getting a motley collection of different varieties, hardly a threat to Monsanto's seed business. "I couldn't imagine that they'd give a rat's behind," he snorts. 
 
 Bowman told his neighbors what he was doing. It turned out that Monsanto did, in fact, care. 
 
 "He wanted to use our technology without paying for it," says David Snively, Monsanto's general counsel. 
 
 Monsanto took Bowman to court, and Bowman was ordered to pay Monsanto $84,000 for infringing the company's patent. 
 
 Bowman appealed. To the surprise of many, the highest court in the land agreed to hear his case. "I'm not a-gonna give in! Because I think I've done nothing wrong!" says Bowman. 
 
 His lawyers, who are representing him for free, have come up with a legal argument for why he did nothing wrong. If they succeed in persuading the court, it could pull the rug out from under Monsanto, and some other industries, too. 
 
 Bowman's lawyer, Mark Walters from the firm of Frommer Lawrence and Haug, says there's a very old principle in patent law: If you buy something that's covered by a patent — let's say it's a cell phone — you own it, outright. "You're allowed to put it on Craigslist and sell it, you're allowed to use it for your 'ordinary pursuits of life' is the quote from some of the old cases that we're relying on." 
 
 It's a valuable principle, Walters says. "Imagine how commerce would work if patents owners could come out of nowhere and surprise purchasers and tell them, 'Oh, you need to pay me a royalty, because I own a patent on this thing that you just bought.'" 
 
 So according to this principle of "patent exhaustion," Bowman bought that seed and can do with it what he wants. Patent holders have no right to stop him. 
 
 Monsanto's David Snively, for his part, says this argument completely misses the point. Yes, we can buy an iPhone and do whatever we want with it, "but we're not going to go out and make copies of the iPhone and put Apple out of business," he says. 
 
 That's what Bowman did, says Snively. When he planted this patented seed, he made copies of it. 
 
 In fact, he says, if farmers were allowed to do this with patented seeds, the patents would be worthless. 
 
 A number of industry organizations have come to Monsanto's defense, including the Biotechnology Industry Organization. 
 
 Hans Sauer, deputy general counsel at BIO, says many biotech products are a lot like seeds. "They are easily replicated. They are difficult to make, but once created they are relatively easy to reproduce." The same is true of computer software. 
 
 toggle caption Dan Charles/NPR 
 
 But these are new technologies. Farmers' seeds are old; they're the original self-replicating technology, and for centuries, nobody tried to claim them as intellectual property. 
 
 That's one reason why Monsanto's patents and lawsuits against farmers have stirred up so much anger and received so much attention. 
 
 What's less well known, however, is that the practice of patenting seeds has moved far beyond Monsanto and other biotech companies. 
 
 It's standard practice now even among small companies like Great Heart Seed, in Paris, Ill. 
 
 Great Heart Seed's warehouse is filled to the rafters with white bags of soybean seed. The company sells 45 different varieties in all. Some grow better in the south, others in the north. Most have Monsanto's Roundup resistance genes, while others do not. 
 
 Yet all of these varieties are patented. "Nearly everything out there has a patent on it now," says Nels Kasey, one of the Great Heart's owners. 
 
 Twenty years ago, that wasn't the case. Many seed dealers sold "public" varieties that came from breeders at universities like Iowa State or Purdue. 
 
 Today, most new varieties come from private companies, and even universities acquire patents on most of the varieties that they do release. 
 
 Farmers aren't supposed to save and replant those seeds, either. 
 
 Kasey says, the new system gives soybean breeders and seed companies more profits, and a stronger incentive to create and sell even better plant varieties. "I'm really proud of the varieties that we have today. When I started in this company, you had a handful of varieties. Today, there's more money in it, more profit in it, so I can support 45 lines," he says. 
 
 Those seeds, though, are also more expensive. Soybean seeds have tripled in price over the past 20 years. And a farmer like Bowman who just wants some cheap, generic seeds can't easily find them. 
 
 Bowman can see towering bins filled with soybeans all around southwestern Indiana, but according to the seed companies, he can't plant any of them. 
 
 In fact, after Monsanto took Bowman to court, his search for unrestricted seeds took him all the way to Ohio, one of the very few places in the country where the state still distributes non-patented soybean varieties. 
 
 Bowman acquired some of that seed — a variety called Dennison — and grew it last year. He saved part of his harvest. Those soybeans are now sitting in an old combine in a shed behind his house. 
 
 If the Supreme Court rules against him, Bowman can still use those beans for seed this year.
– Farmers in Iowa who planted corn seeds genetically modified to fend off the dreaded corn rootworm are seeing a troubling sign: The rootworm is apparently developing a resistance to the Monsanto seeds and gobbling up cornfields again, say Iowa University researchers. It's still just a small percentage of rootworms that have adapted, reports AFP, but the development is renewing fears that biotech crops will create superbugs. "These are isolated cases, and it isn't clear how widespread the problem will become," an Iowa State entomologist tells the Wall Street Journal. "But it is an early warning that management practices need to change." At Mother Jones, blogger Tom Philpott thinks Monsanto has put farmers on a "treadmill" of sorts: "the need to apply ever more, and ever more novel, high-tech responses to keep up with ever-evolving pests."