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Texas Agriculture Archive
April 21, 2006
DuPont/Syngenta form joint venture
DuPont and Syngenta have announced the formation of a joint venture and licensing agreements that will bring expanded choice to North American farmers through broader access to the companies' proprietary corn and soybean genetics and biotechnology traits.
Syngenta Seeds, Inc. and DuPont subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc. will form the seed industry's first 50/50 joint venture to out-license genetics to U.S. and Canadian seed companies, with potential to expand worldwide.
The two companies also agreed to cross-license certain corn and soybean traits that each company will market independently under their own seed brands. The agreement includes rights for Syngenta to market the new Optimum™ GAT™ herbicide tolerant trait developed by DuPont. DuPont receives a global license to Syngenta's insect resistance technology for European corn borer, corn rootworm and broad lepidopteran control as it develops the next generation of insect traits.
The joint venture, GreenLeaf Genetics LLC, will offer corn and soybean breeding material from both DuPont and Syngenta. It will also facilitate the licensing of biotech traits by both companies. While Syngenta originally launched GreenLeaf Genetics as a traits and genetics licensing business in 2004, DuPont will, for the first time, provide other seed companies targeted access to the world's largest plant genetics library at Pioneer.
This is the second business agreement announced this year between Syngenta and DuPont agriculture businesses.
In February, the two companies announced an agreement to broaden each company's crop protection product offer. Syngenta acquired an exclusive worldwide license to develop DuPont's new insecticide Rynax-ypyr™ in mixtures with its own leading insect control products. DuPont Crop Protection acquired worldwide rights to Syngenta's strobilurin fungicide picoxystrobin, sold as Acanto®, including access to companion products used in mixtures.
Scare report focus on chicken
Many Americans will say all the negative and contradictory reports about how different foods are unhealthy or healthy has them extremely confused.
The most recent attack on our nation's food supply is against chicken meat, and it came this week from a private activist group based in Minnesota—the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. A report compiled by the group says people should be concerned about cancer from eating too much chicken because some meat could contain arsenic, even though the group's scientific search did not find arsenic at levels exceeding Food and Drug Administration tolerances.
For decades in many poultry operations, low levels of arsenic have been used in feeds for parasite control and chicken health, and, thus, it could show up at non-health threatening levels in chicken meat, mostly in the skin. But activists say there is no reason chicken feed should include small levels of arsenic, especially since food giant Tyson has discontinued disease-prevention levels in feed.
"We are not aware of any study that shows implications of any possibility of harm to human health as the result of the use of these (arsenic-containing) products at the levels directed," said Richard Lobb, a spokesperson for the National Chicken Council. Arsenic is found throughout our environment, not all of it manmade and hardly ever at levels that should concern the public, according to a great majority of health officials.
EWG sounds off
A report issued by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) suggests that Gulf fisheries could be restored by reforming the farm subsidy program to require farmers to write fertilizer management plans as a condition of receiving payments.
Farm Bureau supports a broad scientific review that explores the role of phosphorous and nitrogen, changes in hydrology and loss of coastal wetlands in the formation of midsummer hypoxia in the northern Gulf.
Funds available for conservation easements
The Agriculture Department on April 10 announced the availability of more than $70 million to protect agricultural land in 50 states and Puerto Rico in fiscal year 2006, through the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program (FRLPP).
USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service is seeking proposals from state and local governments, federally recognized tribal governments and non-governmental organizations with an interest in working together to acquire conservation easements on farms and ranches. Proposals must be sent to NRCS state offices by May 11.
Final project selections will be announced in June.
Since the program's inception in 1996, more than 277,811 acres of farm and ranch land have been protected in 43 states.
FRLPP protects productive agricultural land by purchasing conservation easements to limit conversion of farm and ranch lands to non-agricultural uses.
USDA provides up to 50 percent of the appraised fair market value of the conservation easement in this voluntary program.
State and local entities can match that amount, including the use of landowner donations.
For more information: http://www.usda.gov/2006/04/0122.xml.
Notable Quotables
"Would American consumers rather buy lettuce that's been produced in the United States and picked here or picked across our border by the very same worker?"
—American Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman on the April 10 CBS Evening News, regarding the potential impacts to U.S. agricultural production in the absence of a comprehensive and fair guest worker program.
