Sender: owner-biodiv-conv@igc.apc.org
Subject: Monsanto and the Terminator Technology
Status: R

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 08:08:34 +0800
From: bunny 
To: ENVIRONMENT IN LATIN AMERICA NETWORK 

SEED GERMINATION OR TERMINATION - New Scientist, March 28, 1998

New Scientist, 28 March 1998

They call it "terminator technology", a "breakthrough" in genetic
engineering.  It is the seed that doesn't germinate.  If adopted, it
means that the tradition of saving seeds from one crop for the next
season's planting will disappear.

In early March 1998, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and a
Mississippi seed company, the Delta and Pine Land Company, were granted
a patent for a tenchnique that can sterilize the seeds produced by most
agriculture crops.

They expect the technology to be adopted by all the major seed companies
which for many years have been looking for ways to prevent farmers from
recycling seeds from their crops.

Willard Phelps, a spokesman for the USDA, predicts the new technique
will soon be so widely adopted that farmers will only be able to buy
seeds that cannot be regerminated.

------------------------------

SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
IN MONSANTO CONSPIRACY
Reported by George Monbiot in The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 September
1997

Monsanto, that company that health and freedom activists love to hate,
has embarked on one of the most extraordinary and ambitious corporate
strategies ever launched.  The story begins with a single chemical,
glyphosate.  Sold to farmers and gardeners as "Roundup", it is the
world's biggest selling herbicide, earning more than $2 billion last
year alone.  The company's patent on Roundup runs out in 2000, but far
from sowing corporate catastrophe, this event seems likely to enhance
Monsanto's market value.

For the past 10 years it has cleverly been developing a range of new
crops, genetically engineered to resist glyphosate.  Spraying with
Roundup does not harm these crops, but destroys all the weeds that
compete.  New patent legislation in Europe and the U.S. allows Monsanto
to secure exclusive rights to their production.

The first Roundup ready plant Monsanto released was a genetically
engineered soybean.  Between 50 and 60% of processed foods contain soy,
so the potential market is enormous.

Alarmed at possible increases in the use of herbicides, as well as the
health effects of genetically engineered crops in general,
environmentalists and consumer groups in Europe started calling for
products containing the new beans to be clearly labeled.  But in the
U.S., Monsanto insisted that would be impossible to keep Roundup ready
soybeans apart ordinary ones.

As the new beans were snapped up by growers in the U.S., Monsanto began
and extraordinary round of acquisitions, buying shares in seed and
biotechnology companies worth nearly $2 billion in the past 18 months
alone.  Among its purchases are companies which produce the famous
Flavr-savr tomato, own the U.S. patent on all genetic manipulations of
cotton, and control around 35% of the germlines of American corn.

Monsanto is now experimenting with new rice, corn, potato, sugarbeet,
rape and cotton varieties.  It has been suggested that within a few
years all the major staple food crops will be genetically engineered.
The new products are so attractive to many farmers that Monsanto has
managed to sign away their future rights to the seed they grow, and
allow the company to inspect their fields whenever it wants.

Monsanto's new crops could not have become commercially viable without
major legislative change.  As members of the trade lobby Europabio,
Monsanto and the other big biotech companies have mastered the legal
climate in which they operate.  Despite significant public opposition,
in July, Europabio managed to persuade the European Parliament to adopt
a new directive, allowing companies to patent manipulated plants and
animals.

Researchers and lawyers from Monsanto already occupy important posts in
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration which regulates the food
industry.  Only the New York Attorney General's office has taken the
company to task, forcing it to withdraw ads claiming that Roundup is
biodegradable and environmentally friendly.

But Monsanto has been most successful when appealing to multilateral
bodies.  Last month, the World Trade Organization (WTO) confirmed its
ruling that the European Union can no longer exclude meat and milk from
cattle treated with Monsanto's bovine growth hormone, despite protests
from farmers, retailers and consumers.

Biotech firms are now trying to persuade the WTO to forbid the labeling
of genetically engineered foods.  Any country whose retailers tell
consumers what they are eating would be subject to punitive sanctions.

With astonishing rapidity, a handful of companies is coming to govern
the global development, production, processing and marketing of our most
fundamental commodity: food.  The power and strategic control they are
amassing will make the oil industry look a corner shop.

More successfully than any other lobby, they are inhibiting the two
remaining means of public restraint on their activities: government
regulation and genuine consumer choice.

This may be the first and last chance we will get to tell the
biotechnology companies what we think about their re-engineering, of
both the stuff of life itself and the means by which it reaches us.