High-stakes fight over soybeans at high court

MARK SHERMAN

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Ver­non Hugh Bow­man seems com­fort­able with the old way of doing things, right down to the rotary-dial tele­phone he said he was using in a con­fer­ence call with reporters.

But the 75-year-old Indi­ana farmer fig­ured out a way to ben­e­fit from a high-technology prod­uct, soy­beans that are resis­tant to weed-killers, with­out always pay­ing the high price that such genet­i­cally engi­neered seeds typ­i­cally bring. In so doing, he ignited a legal fight with seed-giant Mon­santo Co. that has now come before the Supreme Court, with argu­ment tak­ing place Tuesday.

The court case poses the ques­tion of whether Bowman’s actions vio­lated the patent rights held by Mon­santo, which devel­oped soy­bean and other seeds that sur­vive when farm­ers spray their fields with the company’s Roundup brand weed-killer. The seeds dom­i­nate Amer­i­can agri­cul­ture, includ­ing in Indi­ana where more than 90 per­cent of soy­beans are Roundup Ready.

Mon­santo has attracted a bushel of researchers, uni­ver­si­ties and other agribusi­ness con­cerns to its side because they fear a deci­sion in favor of Bow­man would leave their own tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions open to poach­ing. The company’s allies even include a com­pany that is embroiled in a sep­a­rate legal bat­tle with Mon­santo over one of the patents at issue in the Bow­man case.

The Obama admin­is­tra­tion also backs Mon­santo, hav­ing ear­lier urged the court to stay out of the case because of the poten­tial for far-reaching impli­ca­tions for patents involv­ing DNA mol­e­cules, nan­otech­nolo­gies and other self-replicating technologies.

Monsanto’s oppo­nents argue that the com­pany has tried to use patent law to con­trol the sup­ply of seeds for soy­beans, corn, cot­ton, canola, sugar beets and alfalfa. The result has been a dra­matic rise in seed prices and reduced options for farm­ers, accord­ing to the Cen­ter for Food Safety. The group opposes the spread of genet­i­cally engi­neered crops and says their ben­e­fits have been grossly overstated.

“It has become extremely dif­fi­cult for farm­ers to find high-quality con­ven­tional seeds,” said Bill Freese, the center’s sci­ence pol­icy analyst.

Con­sumer groups and organic food pro­duc­ers have fought Mon­santo over genet­i­cally engi­neered farm and food issues in sev­eral set­tings. They lost a cam­paign in Cal­i­for­nia last year to require labels on most genet­i­cally engi­neered processed foods and pro­duce. Mon­santo and other food and chem­i­cal com­pa­nies spent more than $40 mil­lion to defeat the bal­lot measure.

Mon­santo says the suc­cess of its seeds are proof of their value. By and large, “farm­ers appre­ci­ate what we do,” David Snively, Monsanto’s top lawyer, said in an inter­view with The Asso­ci­ated Press.

Herbicide-resistant soy­bean seeds first hit the mar­ket in 1996. To pro­tect its invest­ment in their devel­op­ment, Mon­santo has a pol­icy that pro­hibits farm­ers from sav­ing or reusing the seeds once the crop is grown. Farm­ers must buy new seeds every year.

Like almost every other farmer in Indi­ana. Bow­man used the patented seeds for his main crop. But for a risky, late sea­son crop on his 300 acres in Sand­born, about 100 miles south­west of Indi­anapo­lis, Bow­man said, “I wanted a cheap source of seed.”

He couldn’t reuse his own beans or buy seeds from other farm­ers who had sim­i­lar agree­ments with Mon­santo and other com­pa­nies licensed to sell genet­i­cally engi­neered seeds. And deal­ers he used to buy cheap seed from no longer carry the unmod­i­fied seeds.

So Bow­man found what looked like a loop­hole and went to a grain ele­va­tor that held soy­beans it typ­i­cally sells for feed, milling and other uses, but not as seed.

Bow­man rea­soned that most of those soy­beans also would be resis­tant to weed killers, as they ini­tially came from herbicide-resistant seeds, too. He was right, and he repeated the prac­tice over eight years.

He didn’t try to keep it a secret from Mon­santo and in Octo­ber 2007, the com­pany sued him for vio­lat­ing its patent. Bowman’s is one of 146 law­suits Mon­santo has filed since 1996 claim­ing unau­tho­rized use of its Roundup Ready seeds, Snively said.

A fed­eral court in Indi­ana sided with Mon­santo and awarded the com­pany $84,456 for Bowman’s unli­censed use of Monsanto’s tech­nol­ogy. The fed­eral appeals court in Wash­ing­ton that han­dles all appeals in patent cases, upheld the award. The appeals court said that farm­ers may never replant Roundup Ready seeds with­out run­ning afoul of Monsanto’s patents.

The Supreme Court will grap­ple with the limit of Monsanto’s patent rights, whether they stop with the sale of the first crop of beans, or extend to each new crop soy­bean farm­ers grow that has the gene mod­i­fi­ca­tion that allows it to with­stand the appli­ca­tion of weed-killer.

The com­pany sees Bowman’s actions as a threat both to its Roundup Ready line of seeds and to other inno­va­tions that could be eas­ily and cheaply repro­duced if they were not protected.

“This case really is about 21st cen­tury tech­nolo­gies,” Snively said.

Bow­man and his allies say Monsanto’s legal claims amount to an effort to bully farmers.

The Cen­ter for Food Safety’s Freese points out that Monsanto’s biggest mon­ey­maker is corn seed, which can­not be replanted. “So seed-saving would have no impact on the major­ity of Monsanto’s seed rev­enue,” he said.

The case is Bow­man v. Mon­santo Co., 11–796.

Posted by AP News on Feb 18 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.