The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party

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Help Stop the Terminator's Return

Four years after the moratorium on Terminator technology was reaffirmed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), proposals to develop and commercialize ‘genetic-use restriction technologies’ (GURTs) are back on the agenda for policymakers and the biotechnology industry. Terminator is a threat to food sovereignty and agrobiodiversity: ending the moratorium on Terminator will increase control of seed by transnational corporations (TNCs) and restrictions on farmers’ rights to save and plant harvested seed. Additionally, pollen from genetically-modified (GM) crops with Terminator will contaminate non-GM and organic crops, and native plant species.

GURTs (herein referred to as ‘Terminator’) are genetic engineering technologies that seek to control plant fertility. First-generation Terminator (also called ‘suicide seed’) was developedjointly by the US Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land Company in the 1990s to protect the intellectual property of US agricultural biotechnology TNCs. GM crops produce sterile seeds to prevent farmers from replanting harvested seed with patented DNA. Due to international public outcry from farmers and civil society worldwide, Terminator has never been commercialized anywhere, and Brazil and India have national moratoriums prohibiting it. In 2000, the CBD recommended a de facto moratorium on field-testing and commercial sale of Terminator seeds. In 2006, pressure from La Via Campesina and its allies helped to strengthen this moratorium in Curitiba, Brazil.

That year, US-based TNC Monsanto Company, the largest seed company in the world, acquired Delta and Pine Land, along with the intellectual property rights to Terminator. Since then industry, the US and European governments and ultra-rich philanthro-capitalists have ramped up rhetoric on the need for Terminator and other biotechnologies to adapt to the climate, energy and food crises. Various false solutions are being proposed to sell the lie that techno-fixes allow rich countries to continue consuming resources and emitting carbon dioxide, unabated: GM crops for cellulosic and second-generation agrofuels; geoengineering ‘climate ready’ GM crops and trees with increased albedo (reflectivity) and resistance to drought, heat and salt; monoculture plantation forests of GM trees to industrially produce biochar for carbon sequestration; and GM algae and marine microbes for carbon dioxide sequestration. Monsanto is proposing that monoculture plantations of its Roundup Ready soybeans qualify for carbon credits under so-called “no-till” agriculture. All of these false solutions create new markets for agricultural biotechnology and ‘extreme genetic engineering’.

With financing by the US government and British Petroleum (BP), in May, Synthetic Genomics, the company founded J. Craig Venter (which helped to sequence the human genome)announced that it had created the first-ever synthetic, self-reproducing microbe with synthetic biology. Venter’s team claims that the microbe can be used to produce clean, green algal biofuels; however, what will happen if this microbe escapes into the wild and contaminates non-synthetic algae with its DNA? Similarly, what will happen when a GM maize variety engineered to have a high amount of stover (the stalks, husks, etc. of maize) for cellulosic agrofuels contaminates food maize varieties? The implications are frightening. Industry is now claiming that Terminator is needed to contain genetic contamination (transgene flow) of food crops and other natural life forms from genetically-engineered DNA in non-food crops; in essence, as a precautionary, environmental necessity. Venter recently told the New York Times that Terminator should be employed to contain transgenic contamination...

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@'La Via Campensina'