PM — IP rights could threaten food security

Happy almost-THURSDAY, friends. It’s not the weekend yet, but this Wednesday afternoon is calm enough to start the slide into the end of the workweek.

THE BIG STORY TODAY

We have the dates for the long-awaited economic conference: The Madbouly government’s economic conference is scheduled for 23-25 ​​October, during which the business community and economic experts will be able to discuss Egypt’s economic situation with the government, according to a cabinet statement. Cabinet will release a detailed agenda and launch a website to receive proposals and opinions from the public next week, according to the statement. No details were provided on the planned location of the conference.

THE BIG STORY ABROAD

Still topping the front pages in the international business press: The GBP’s continued decline, despite emergency measures from the Bank of England to try and cool markets by offering to buy up government debt. The bank warned of a “material risk to UK financial stability” following chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts and borrowing plan, while raising prospects of a further “tightening of financing conditions and a reduction of the flow of credit to the real economy.” The GBP fell 1.5% against the USD following the news, and is now trading at USD 1.055. (Financial Times | Reuters | CNBC | The Guardian)

MEANWHILE- Sabotage suspicions deepen with the Nord Stream leak: Two seismic shakings resembling blasts were recorded on Monday, the same day gas leaks from the Russian-owned pipelines were discovered in Swedish and Danish waters, Reuters reports, citing data from Denmark's Geological Survey. Swedish prosecutors say they are reviewing material from a police investigation into the damage to decide on further actions, the newswire reports.

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** CATCH UP QUICK on the top stories from today’s EnterpriseAM:

• IMF program by the end of this month? EGP to 24? A mood of “cautious optimism”? These are some of the suggestions in a new report from Goldman Sachs, which recently sent a team to Egypt to talk to figures from the private- and public-sectors.
• El Sisi wants import woes fixed within two months: Import challenges facing manufacturers will be solved within two months, President Abdel Fattah El Sisi said yesterday.
• Wataniya, Safi to hit the EGX by year-end: The Sovereign Fund of Egypt plans to take military-owned filling station Wataniya and bottled water company Safi public on the EGX before the end of 2022.

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Kuwaiti investors are visiting next week: A delegation of Kuwaiti investors headed by the President of the Kuwait Chamber of Commerce, Mohammed Jassim Al Saqer, is landing in Egypt on Saturday, Egypt's ambassador to Kuwait Osama Shaltout told reporters yesterday, Masrawy reported. The delegation will include 48 investors interested in investing in several sectors of the Egyptian economy including real estate and telecoms.

Check out our full calendar on the web for a comprehensive listing of upcoming news events, national holidays and news triggers.

☀️ TOMORROW’S WEATHER- Temperatures in Cairo will hit 38°C tomorrow during the day before falling to 24°C at night, our favorite weather app tells us.

Will Taiwanese chipmakers expand to Europe? Some Taiwanese chip companies are in talks with European countries about potentially setting up shop in Europe, Taiwan’s Deputy Economy told reporters, according to Reuters. The EU has had its sights on bringing Taiwan’s chip manufacturers to its shores under the European Chips Act, which is meant to address chronic supply shortages. The EU held-high level trade talks with Taiwan in June, but shortly thereafter the world's largest contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) said that it had no solid plans for a factory in Europe. Last year, TSMC said it was assessing a potential expansion into Germany but no substantial moves have since materialized.

A few big companies like Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway could pay the bulk of the new 15% corporate minimum tax that US President Joe Biden signed into law last month, the Wall Street Journal reports. A University of North Carolina Tax Center study found that had the levy been imposed last year, just six companies including Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway would have paid half of the estimated USD 32 bn in revenue the tax would have generated, and fewer than 80 publicly listed US companies would have paid any tax at all. The new tax is directed at big corporations that, despite reporting profits to shareholders, do not pay a lot of taxes, relatively. The tax would also increase taxes on some of the wealthiest shareholders in the US, including Warren Buffett at Berkshire and Jeff Bezos at Amazon.

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An Alzheimer’s breakthrough — albeit not without drawbacks: Japan’s Eisai Co. and US-based partner Biogen Inc. said their med Lecanemab significantly slowed the progress of Alzheimer’s disease by 27% in a large-scale trial. A study involving 1.8k patients over the course of 18 months yielded hopes for slowing the disease, but did not restore mental capacity or totally stop memory loss. The benefits also came with side effects including brain swelling and bleeding in 21.3% of participants, though severe symptomatic cases only accounted for 2.8% of patients, Bloomberg reports

A fast-tracked approval process is underway: The med is currently being reviewed by US regulators for approval under a special accelerated path, with the companies hoping to apply for full US clearance by March 2023 while filing for approvals in Europe and Japan.

AirPods can double as hearing aids in a pinch, making them a cost-effective solution for those with mild to moderate hearing loss, the Washington Post’s Help Desk writes. Apple devices allow you to adjust sound levels using an audiogram, or hearing test, administered by an app to estimate your levels of hearing loss. By loading the results into your health app, you can then use “custom audio setup” within your phone settings to set the amplification, transparency, tone, ambient noise reduction and conversation boost levels on AirPods.

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Blonde, Netflix’s fictionalized narrative of Marilyn Monroe’s life opened to polarizing reviews, but one thing is for certain: The bleak biopic is difficult to watch. Written and directed by Andrew Dominik, Blonde is based on Joyce Carol Oates’ book of the same name. The film, which stars Ana de Armas as the troubled star, is the first Netflix original to be rated NC-17. Some critics slam the movie for portraying Monroe as a perpetual victim with little to no agency, while others sing its praises for its portrayal of stardom. One thing that critics seem to agree on however, is that Ana de Armas gives the best performance of her career, with her uncanny portrayal of the late star. The film, which captures the actress’ haunting despair as it examines her public and private personas, explores her tough childhood, struggle with addiction, and her frequent abuse and exploitation by men, including her ex-spouses and one former US president, with Cannavale playing Joe DiMaggio and Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller.

⚽ No football today, folks.

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The Wannabe Comedians are performing at Ox’s comedy night in Heliopolis at 8:30pm tonight, with a lineup of comedians featuring: Laila Khaled, Youssef Gallad, Mohamed Halawa, Mark Fanous and Ahmad Hassan.

Canadian rock band The Last Supper is coming to Egypt, performing at Cairo Jazz Club at 9pm followed by a performance by BubbleGum Kollectiv.

The Austrian Cultural Forum is hosting a talk by Austrian animation artist Kathrin Steinbacher, whose film, In Her Boots, was recently nominated for a BAFTA Film Award. The London-based artist will discuss why and how animation can convey emotions, thoughts and feelings that would otherwise be too tricky to communicate.

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Lords of Finance is an economic history of the lead-up to the Great Depression told through the policy errors made by four central bankers, that author Liaquat Ahamed demonstrates were unable to resolve the world’s financial problems, despite being in constant communication with one another, ultimately resulting in a liquidity crisis. The four “lords of finance” at the center of this book are the heads of the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the German Reichsbank, and Banque de France — a group sometimes referred to as “the most exclusive club in the world.” Written in 2019, the book serves as a warning call and raises the question of whether these men’s modern day counterparts are more aware of nuances of an economy than their predecessors, who were largely flying blind. “As the world teeters on the brink of another great financial cliff, we can only hope that the modern-day Lords of Finance will cooperate to better effect,” the Financial Times says in a review of the book.

The EGX30 fell 1.2% at today’s close on turnover of EGP 449.09 mn (52.6% below the 90-day average). Foreign investors were net sellers. The index is down 18.8% YTD.

In the green: Ibnsina Pharma (+1.7%), GB Auto (+1.5%) and CIRA (+1.2%).

In the red: e-Finance (-3.6%), Qalaa Holdings (-2.7%) and Madinet Nasr Housing (-2.5%).

Food patents are everywhere but as more of our food comes out of labs, they could soon dominate everything we consume: Intellectual property rights have for many years guided the production of a sizable portion of the foods we consume every day. Unsurprisingly, control over agricultural production has largely rested in the hands of a few major corporations. With tech-enhanced foods like lab-grown meats or plant based meat alternatives set to grow in popularity over the coming years, the rush to declare intellectual property over food could reach a higher tempo.

Intellectual property in food is nothing new: About three decades ago when genetically modified foods first entered mainstream foodsystems, corporations like Monsanto, Bayer, Dow Dupont (whose agriculture division has become Corteva Agriscience) and Syngenta started snapping up patents for large swaths of high-yielding crop varieties and eventually came to control most of the world’s seeds. What that ultimately meant was that companies who supposedly owned these seed varieties (genetically modified or not) were given the right to restrict how farmers use their seeds and could bar them from trading or replanting them in the future in the absence of a formal agreement.

It sounds a little shady, but it’s all legit: World Trade Organization (WTO) member states are often required to enforce some level of intellectual property protection on certain plant varieties. Many of them are doing so by becoming signatories to the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) which is designed to regulate seed production and exchange. There are currently some 13.3k patented plant species worldwide, up from just 120 in 1990, according to European initiative No-Patents-On-Seeds.

There are countless examples of large corporations going after farmers who’ve allegedly violated these IP rules: PepsiCo in 2019 infamously sued a number of Indian farmers for growing a potato variety the company claimed had infringed upon its patent for a specifically designed crop used by its subsidiary, Lays. Though the company eventually settled the case, they had initially sought out some USD 143k for the alleged infringement. Closer to home, a court in Beni Suef earlier this year ruled against an 11-acre farm for unlawfully growing a variety of Israeli-bred and Cypriot-owned grapes called Early Sweet and ordered the removal of the some 9k trees growing the fruit. Other farmers in Alexandria, Cairo, and Tanta were also recently handed down court verdicts ruling against them growing an IP-protected type of grape known commercially as Sugrathirteen.

Proponents of tighter IP protections in food production claim that it helps drive innovation: Corporations like Monsanto often argue that these patents are crucial for funding new innovations in agriculture, which can sometimes run up to “mns of USD every day in research and development,” the company told DW in a statement in 2019. “For every USD 10 a farmer spends on seeds, Monsanto re-invests USD 1 in research and development,” it said. These are the kinds of innovations that offer higher yield or heat resistant crops.

But there are some serious risks with intellectual property restrictions applied to this industry: One of the biggest problems with these patents is that biodiversity in agriculture becomes dangerously restricted. Farmers planting a diverse mix of crops are usually better positioned to overcome threats like disease and changing weather patterns than those with entirely uniform crops, according to a UN report (pdf).

There’s also the issue of increasingly concentrated power and how it threatens food security: There’s a serious food security problem presented by "the oligopolistic structure of the input providers," who increasingly hold power over food prices, the UN report says. Currently some 50% of the global seed market is in the hands of Bayer-Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta and the size of this sector is anticipated to reach USD 90 bn by 2024.

These same fears are present in the next generation of tech-enabled food production: Food companies like Singaporean Eat Just or the Bill Gates-backed Memphis Meats are part of a new generation of meat producers that rarely ever have to set foot in a field. These are producers who have set out to make low-carbon animal protein using stem cells from actual animal tissue with the promise of a more sustainable future for food production — which would be a welcome step for driving down global food emissions. But underlying most of these initiatives, is a mad dash to secure patents that could provide them a huge competitive advantage in future food systems.

The problem here is that once the world bites, new titans of industry will be born: If (or when) the world adopts lab-grown meat on a much wider scale we could find ourselves at the whims of a few companies who’ve patented their technologies for our food needs, with few legal alternatives to turn to. This could end up becoming a scenario that mirrors what has been unfolding with major agricultural producers over the last three decades. And if the world develops an appetite for lab-grown meats we could be looking at even fewer hands controlling our global food supply.