Seeds, Food Prices, Monsanto, Anti-Trust, Seed Banks

Rising food prices may start with seeds Los Angeles Times — For 40 years, farmer Todd Leake and his family have battled bitter cold, hungry pests and a short growing season to coax soybeans out of their fields in eastern North Dakota. The one thing they never had to fight for, though, was their seeds. click to read complete article

Monsanto’s Seed Patents May Trump Antitrust Claims, Lawyers Say Business Week — Monsanto Co., facing antitrust probes into its genetically modified seeds, may benefit from previous court rulings in which intellectual property rights trumped competition concerns, antitrust lawyers say. The Department of Justice and seven state attorneys general are investigating whether the world’s largest seed company is using gene licenses to keep competing technologies off the market. At issue is how the St. Louis-based company sells and licenses its patented trait that allows farmers to kill weeds with Roundup herbicide while leaving crops unharmed. The company’s Roundup Ready gene was in 93 percent of U.S. soybeans last year. click to read complete article

Arctic Seed Vault largest in the world Norway Post — Just days after celebrating its second anniversary, the Svalbard “Doomsday” Global Seed Vault has this week received thousands of new seeds that will push its collection to more than half a million unique samples. This makes the Svalbard Seed Vault the most diverse assemblage of crop diversity ever amassed anywhere in the world, according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust. click to read complete article