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Consumers are shunning carbonated soft drinks in favor of bottled water, even in the face of recent price increases, Nestle Waters North America's top executive said. "It's convenience we are talking about," said Kim Jeffery, president and chief executive of Nestle Waters North America, at the Reuters Food and Agriculture Summit in Chicago on Monday. Nestle Waters in early 2011 raised prices about 10 percent -- the first price increase in a decade for the company, which sells a billion cases of water a year.

A group of plant scientists is warning federal regulators that action is needed to mitigate a growing problem with biotech corn that is losing its resistance to plant-damaging pests. The stakes are high - corn production is critical for food, animal feed and ethanol production, and farmers have increasingly been relying on corn that has been genetically modified to be toxic to corn rootworm pests.

A federal judge has ruled in favor of global seed giant Monsanto Co, dismissing a lawsuit brought by a consortium of U.S. organic farmers and seed dealers who said their industry is at risk from Monsanto's growing market strength. U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Buchwald, for the Southern District of New York, threw out the case brought by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) and dozens of other plaintiff growers and organizations, criticizing the groups for a "transparent effort to create a controversy where none exists."

Monsanto Co said on Friday that it had settled a long-running legal battle with residents of West Virginia who claimed they suffered environmental and health problems tied to pollution from a former Monsanto chemical plant. St. Louis-based Monsanto, which has shifted from a concentration in the chemical business to agricultural seeds, said it would commit to more than $90 million in clean-up, remediation and medical monitoring to resolve a series of class action lawsuits involving a plant once located in Nitro, West Virginia.

China's leader-in-waiting, Xi Jinping, gathered with U.S. agricultural officials in America's grainbelt on Thursday and stressed their shared interests in fostering increased trade in farm goods. Extending his visit to the top U.S. soybean- and corn-growing state of Iowa, Xi and Chinese Minister of Agriculture Han Changfu met with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in Des Moines to kick off what was billed as the first-ever U.S.-China Agricultural Symposium.

China's leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping received a warm welcome in the U.S. heartland on Wednesday, moving from Washington and talks on contentious international issues to Iowa, where the Chinese vice president was hailed as an old friend and a boost for billions of dollars in agricultural trade. Before leaving Washington, Xi offered deeper cooperation with the United States on trade and security, citing Iran and North Korea, but called on Washington to heed Beijing's demands on contentious "core interests" such as Tibet. Xi is almost sure to become China's next president in just over a year.

A Chinese trade delegation signed agreements with U.S. grain companies on Wednesday to buy 8.62 million tonnes of soybeans from the United States and will ink more deals on Thursday for a record-setting purchase topping 12 million tonnes. Chinese powerhouses like COFCO Co Ltd, the country's largest state-owned grain trading house, and Sinograin, which manages state grain reserves, signed deals in Des Moines, Iowa, with Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge Ltd, and Cargill Inc, among others.

China is half a world away from the 2,300-acre family farm in east-central Iowa where John Weber and his son plant corn and soybeans. But 62-year-old Weber is among a number of Iowa farmers who are benefiting as rising incomes in China lead to demand for billions of dollars of American farm goods.

Farmers in developing nations will sow more biotech crops than those in the industrialized world for the first time this year, with Brazil leading the charge, according to a report issued on Tuesday that showed steady growth in the use of genetically modified seeds. Globally, the area planted with biotech crops rose 8 percent last year to a record 160 million hectares, or 395 million acres, slowing slightly from a 10 percent rise in 2010, said the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA) in its annual report on biotech seed use.

The United States remained the primary backer of biotech crop technology in 2011, but adoption spread internationally as the total global planted area of genetically modified seeds grew 8 percent from a year ago, according to a report issued Tuesday. Roughly 160 million hectares, or 395.2 million acres, were planted with biotech crops in 2011, up 8 percent from 2010, said the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA) in its annual report on biotech seed use.