Firms Seek Patents on 'Climate Ready' Altered Crops

Among the report's concerns is the breadth of many applications. Protective genes are usually discovered in one variety of plant, and after minimal testing they are presumed to be useful in others, Shand said. In one typical case, a BASF patent claim for a gene to tolerate "environmental stress" seeks to preclude competitors from using that gene in "maize, wheat, rye, oat, triticale, rice, barley, soybean, peanut, cotton, rapeseed, canola, manihot, pepper, sunflower, tagetes, solanaceous plants, potato, tobacco, eggplant, tomato, Vicia species, pea, alfalfa, coffee, cacao, tea, Salix species, oil palm, coconut, perennial grass and a forage crop plant."

Publicly funded developers of freely accessible plant varieties could succumb to biotech's market dominance, the report warns. One of the biggest is the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which runs 15 research centers worldwide and is funded by several international aid organizations. CGIAR has long emphasized non-biotech breeding to develop varieties ideal for subsistence farmers and their local conditions.

Facing big budget cuts from its traditional funders, CGIAR is now a central player in the Gates-funded collaboration with Monsanto and BASF -- a project that a CGIAR spokesman defended as a "global public good."

Other experts said that both sides have oversimplified the pros and cons of biotech crop patents.

"I don't mind Monsanto developing these tools. I mind that we don't have an economic ecology that lets other companies compete with them," said Richard Jefferson, founder and chief executive of Cambia, a nonprofit institute based in Australia that helps companies worldwide sort through patent holdings so they can build on one another's work instead of stymieing one another.

Under the current system for patenting genes, he said, "the little guys shake out and the big guys end up in a place a lot like a cartel."

Jefferson characterized the ETC report as extreme in its anti-corporate views but praised it for drawing attention to what he said is a real problem of corporate consolidation in the seed industry. Happily, he said, patent offices are "getting a lot better" about not allowing overly broad gene patents.

Jonathan Bryant, managing director of BASF's U.S. division, said plants have tens of thousands of genes, most of them unexplored. "I think there's still plenty of opportunity for many companies and institutions," he said. "We're all looking to bring our technology together for a common good."