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: bunnyTo: 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.