welcome to business asia monica jones good to have you with us i was starting with by a the german pharmaceuticals and chemicals giant has lost another lawsuit related to the weed killer roundup made by recently acquired monsanto now this will cost by a $2000000000.00 and there are many more lawsuits in the pipeline. and alberta pilly odds say roundup caused their cancer so they sued even though a lot of people believed they wouldn't stand a chance against buyer in court. we've been finding cancer for. 9 years now holland in the. book to do and we really resent monsanto for that and their lawyer told the jury and turn on documents prove to monsanto wasn't interested in determining how dangerous its product is now by a has been hit with 2 $1000000000.00 in compensation an astronomical sum even by american

litigation standards and things could well get much worse for the chemicals giant. this is not the end of this litigation this is the beginning there are tens of thousands of people out there probably 203040000 people and i have continuously told bayer and monsanto are coming after them investors seem to have come to the conclusion that buyers woes won't end anytime soon since its takeover of monsanto back in june of 2018 virus years have plummeted by more than 40 percent the company says that it will appeal the decision and continues to deny that roundup causes cancer but increasingly it appears by a might have seriously underestimated the long term cost of its monsanto takeover. of a more i'm joined now by john rountree managing partner at no sector a consulting firm specializing in pharmaceutical and medical products companies that have you with us it looks more and more that it was

a big mistake to buy monsanto was it yes i believe we can look now with hindsight and so it was a mistake and we can say that at the time it was a mistake the agricultural and pharmaceutical business is a very different if they had been a soley agricultural chemical business you could have argued for what we could celebration at the time because the industry was consolidating they needed scale if it were just an agricultural chemical you could have argued that at the time but it wasn't it was america and company and it was a distraction at the time and i think with hindsight this is causing a lot of problems for byron it was not the right thing to do they may have been better off spinning it out at the time when consolidation was hot like that it was the best road in 2015 of course now they are faced with the situation they're faced with now and right now there are many many not one also it's in the pipeline how many will such cases and fines can buy

a ford. i think these cases will probably be settled at less than the amounts that are headline when they announce them but even so there's many more to come as the lawyers are saying the lawyers of smell blood and this one will run and run i think you look at a company the size of bio which is in the top 100 companies that we track it's a big company it can survive such things you know these things these settlements will come in as i said lower but it's going to cause damage and i need to weather the storm now now you said earlier mixing pharma business and aqua chemical that was the big mistake if i came to you now for it wise advice would you tell them. ok i 1st of all just full disclosure i'm not advising buyer now and have not in the past so i think the question for them now is it's not a good time to start splitting up the business now the agricultural chemical part

of it is is highly toxic in a way and so trying to sell it now or get rid of it would really not destroy even more value so they really have to weather the storm now i think they have to focus their management teams in the pharma business and the consumer business which are remaining strong and really get those guys to develop those businesses without the destruction of the agricultural business to keep the agricultural crops science business very well clearly separated within the buyer structure keep the profitability coming and weather the storm and keep working on the legal side of things which is i'm sure what they are likely already doing right john rountree managing partner at now a sector there speaking to us from london the thank you so much thank you. air pollution is a growing problem in many cities around the world from delhi to beijing all the way to berlin now following the infamous diesel scandal germany has been trying out all

sorts of things to clear the air the latest a giant vacuum cleaner that's meant to eliminate all the nasty stuff from the air we breathe. a new filter for a new type of vacuum cleaner this one doesn't collect crumbs off the carpet it takes particular matter of nitrogen dioxide out of the year one set cost $21000.00 euros 17 of them are mounted it stood guard snecker gate the pollution hotspot. in your thought the technology is much like an outsized vacuum cleaner it's an industrial filter assembly which uses around a 1000 watts per unit that's roughly how much a normal vacuum cleaner uses but this is a 100 times more effective we can suck about 10000 cubic meters of earth through the filter. this is a mobile open air vacuum cleaner a research project. the filter removes the same amount of particulates matter from

the air that the vehicle produces. it may look cumbersome but it could be mounted beneath a delivery van or truck the manufacturer expects the largest market to filter technology to be in asia. we developing a core technology here in germany of course but we're focusing on markets like china india korea japan and singapore the exponential industrialization there has put a heavy burden on people and you know this is your portal this is probably not effective to position it all over a city's infrastructure where a lot of people come close to high traffic volumes and interact with them we can simply help to reduce the pollution levels in the last 2 or 3 dimensional talk to now here in germany there appears to be a growing appetite for fair trade products figures just out show a rise in the amount consumers are spending on ethically sourced items in 2018

german shoppers spent a total of $1600000000.00 euros on fair trade certified products that's an increase of over 20 percent compared to the year before and those with a sweet tooth seem to be doing their bit fairly traded cocoa now makes up 10 percent of the german chocolate market when it comes to coffee with a conscience it's not quite so good to just 4 and a half percent of coffee being sold in germany this way and if you think fair trade is but not us well you to be right to discount chain a little has become the 1st supermarket in the country to commit to selling only fair trade bananas in the future my colleague said be making the head off fair trade to germany how much difference a decision like the one taken by leader actually makes. it's an enormous step for producers who want to move further towards fair trade because the volumes involved are very big that can have a big impact locally we work together with companies to look at supply chains.

impact. we sort of buy all the processes as well as the importers and export. import export to what does this. kind of thing doesn't happen overnight if you take a year or 2 of preparation especially when you're dealing with a hard ball of good. film. from german a fair trade now to india which produces a lot of the products that we buy here in europe john a chief executive officer of the fair trade india project is with us now thank you for joining us how fair is trade in india these days. yeah thank you for having me. so in the indian context as the author i suspect it is growing slowly better standards are being adopted in the country but we still face major challenges and are speaking in the context of very great on the agricultural sector agriculture is

still violent are by far the largest employer in the country and there are major challenges if you know in the context of farmers which sites since 9095 over 300000 farmers have committed suicide primarily due to the economic reasons to bring them down that's almost one family committing suicide every 40 minutes. and as we want or we're 22 years and beyond that despite the best measures being taken by the government to have the laws in place for no one expected practices they have minimum support prices they also have more recently introduced a national 100 guidelines for better social environmental practices we still have a lot of exploitation in mining trees like sugar. and tea all right so what the judge had what if i just made a right there because you said there is still exploitation there what can consumers

in india but also elsewhere as well as businesses what can they do in order to make trade more fair well i think it's important that we start looking at the dream last all the implications all of which is decisions whether we're going to be in minute about all the social costs so we need to certainly see and birches as consumers in germany are doing it worse estate a lot of it and certainly the fair trade market is growing in india as well with consumers using all kinds of products will be in and based products and other such agricultural into national products in india so that i think we need to be asking questions about how the products are being made and we are. just very very briefly is the concept of fair trade a luxury concept no actually it is catching on to the mainstream we recently launched last year

a product by radical people which has been just well received peanut brittle. so this is something which is accessible even to the middle class she writes i had a brand which is using products from the me sorry so the question you get in sarah question is on set a fair trade is possible for every pocket johnny there see our fair trade india thank you so much and that's business asian to tell you.

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but the big. plane. made. thanks. w n. do you know that 77 percent. are younger than 65. that's me. and. came to know a lot of time in all voices. in the 77 percent who talk about the stuff. from politics to classes from housing boom boom boom times this is what.

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this is the w. news live from berlin the deadly virus. that's a demonstration of. protesters accused president obama. also on the program. trying to impose a curfew for a 2nd night following muslim violence.