HONG KONG

A proposed patent by agro-giant Monsanto on genetic blueprints of high-yield soybeans has caused alarm in China, where the crop has been grown for thousands of years.

The argument over the patent - though the application was made in the United States - reflects a growing awareness of intellectual property issues in China and their bearing on the country's fate as it opens its markets and moves into the World Trade Organization.

In China, as elsewhere in the developing world, fears have grown that multinational corporations and Western researchers might use so-called "patents on life" to seize control of potentially lucrative biological resources.

Such patents were established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 and reaffirmed this month by the same tribunal. "This could affect genetic research throughout the world. It's not good news for anyone," said Chang Ruzhen, chairman of the China Soybean Society and an expert on soybean varieties.

If history is any indication, Monsanto will wield significant commercial power if its U.S. patent application on high-yield, fast-growing soy DNA is granted.

Monsanto already receives royalities on about 60 percent of the U.S. soy market with its patents on genetically engineered plants resistant to herbicide, says biotechnology author Dan Charles. If it gets the high-yield soy patent, its grip on the market could improve.

What's more, Monsanto could probably seek to splice the high-yield gene into other crops as well, requiring additional royalties from seed companies wanting to use the technology.

"Farmers around the world are upset with patents," said anti-biotechnology advocate Jeremy Rifkin. He is suing Monsanto along with several U.S. and French farmers, accusing the company of antitrust violations by forcing farmers to purchase genetically engineered seeds every year - prohibiting them from saving seeds for future crops without paying for them.

Soy was first cultivated in north China's Yellow River valley more than 4,000 years ago. It was not grown widely in the United States until the 1930s. Since then, soy has invaded diets worldwide, becoming a multibillion dollar business.

If Chinese farmers were to unwittingly ignore a Monstanto patent, that "might make it impossible to export some Chinese soy products and could even result in international trade sanctions," the state-run newspaper Southern Weekend said in a recent front-page story.

Monsanto, based in St. Louis, Missouri, contends that the technology it developed to identify a genetic marker - or group of chromosomes - linked to high-yield in soybeans will enable researchers in China and elsewhere to improve commercial crops.

"Through research like this, scientists can unlock more of plants' natural genetic potential in ways that can help farmers," Monsanto said in a written statement. "China has the most to gain from applications of this technology."

Monsanto is the biggest developer of genetically engineered crops and aggressively prosecutes its patents related to crops and their genes - of which it owns dozens in the United States and abroad.

The uproar over the high-yield soy patent application surfaced after the environmental group Greenpeace launched a campaign against the patent at a U.N. conference on biodiversity held in October in Germany.

Greenpeace accused Monsanto of "biopiracy" - taking genetic materials without providing a fair return to the people they are taken from.

The proposed soy patent "would prevent our competitors from using the DNA segment containing the (high) yield gene in their own commercial products in the United States without a license," Monsanto said in a written reply to questions from The Associated Press after company executives in China declined to comment. "Since neither the methods nor the specific information will be patented in China, researchers in China can use this technology without restriction."

But research is one thing and patented seeds are another, critics say.

"The whole idea of a patent is to get an exclusive right to that property," said Greenpeace genetic engineering campaigner Lo Sze-ping. "Why should someone be entitled to transfer a resource from the public domain to the private domain?"

Monsanto is already well known in China, where commercial use of its Bollgard brand cotton seeds, genetically implanted with a bacterium that is toxic to boll worms, began in 1997. Those seeds have been widely pirated in north China.

Chinese researchers and state media reports have raised questions about the source of the wild variety of soy used in Monsanto's research.

Monsanto says it came from a publicly accessible U.S. Department of Agriculture germ plasm bank and that the plant is not cultivated anywhere in the world.

Chang of the China Soybean Society isn't so sure.

"What proof do they have that this genetic marker doesn't exist in any other species? There's no way they could have fully determined that. They can't even access all the varieties," he said.

Chang said he believes exchanges crucial for U.S. research could be hurt by Monsanto's behavior.

Though the United States is the world's leading soy producer, accounting for almost half of global output compared with China's one-tenth, U.S. gene banks hold less than a quarter of all known soybean germplasms.

China's own biotech research has been propelled both by the need to devise ways to feed its 1.3 billion people and by an awareness that intellectual property rights may limit its researchers' access to cutting-edge work done in the West.

"We think that for the development of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries this information must be generated not only from abroad but also from within China," Chen Zhu, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told a recent seminar in Hong Kong.

** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed for research and educational purposes only. **