Posted
December 1, 2005

Terminator Seed Technology - It's Back!

Terminator seeds are back. Despite passionate protests from every corner of the globe, biotech corporations are introducing sterile seeds that cannot be saved for next year's crop.

It is not widely known or appreciated, but the leading companies in biotechnology are pioneering new corporate strategies to win exclusive monopoly control that go beyond intellectual property. The ETC Group calls these strategies “New Enclosures.”

In the field of agriculture, the best-known example of a New Enclosure is the controversial genetic use restriction technologies (GURTs), better known as Terminator seeds. Terminator seeds have not yet been commercialized or field-tested but greenhouse trials are currently being conducted. Unfortunately, Terminator isn’t yesterday’s news – the biotech industry has recently renewed efforts to win approval for GURTs.

Terminator refers to plants that are genetically modified to kill their own seeds. Seeds harvested from Terminator crops will not germinate if re-planted the following season. The goal of this technology is crystal clear: Terminator aims to maximize seed industry profits by preventing farmers from re-using seed from their harvest, forcing them to return to the commercial seed market every year.

Over the past 25 years, the Gene Giants have used patents as a legal mechanism to stop farmers from saving and re-planting proprietary seed – but patents are controversial, expensive and difficult to enforce. (It’s also lousy public relations to sue your customers for patent infringement.) If commercialized, Terminator seeds would give the Gene Giants a biological mechanism to eliminate the age-old practice of farmer seed-saving.

For corporate Gene Giants, genetic seed sterilization offers a stronger and more far-reaching monopoly than intellectual property because, unlike patents, Terminator technology would not be time-limited, it would offer no exemption for researchers, no provision for compulsory licensing and no need for lawyers.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Mississippi-based Delta & Pine Land – one of the world’s largest seed companies – jointly hold three U.S. patents on Terminator. Other Gene Giants (Syngenta, Monsanto and Dupont) have also won patents on genetic seed sterilization.

When it first came to public light back in 1998, Terminator technology was widely condemned as an immoral, anti-farmer technology that undermines farmers’ rights and food sovereignty. After all, 1.4 billion people, primarily in the global South, depend on farm-saved seeds as their primary seed source. In the U.S., citizens were outraged that taxpayer dollars were being used to promote corporate monopoly. In response to public opposition, Monsanto and AstraZeneca (now Syngenta), two of the world’s largest seed and agrochemical companies, publicly vowed not to commercialize Terminator seeds. The world’s largest network of public plant breeding institutes, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research passed a resolution prohibiting the use of Terminator in its programs, and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a de facto moratorium on the field testing and commercialization of Terminator in 2000.

Terminator is Back: The goal of genetic seed sterilization is simply too profitable for industry to abandon. I was in Bangkok last February attending a United Nations meeting where Terminator was on the agenda. We were shocked to discover (via a leaked document) that the Canadian government was planning to dismantle the de facto moratorium and pave the way for the field-testing and commercialization of Terminator seeds.

Thanks to protests from Canadian citizens back home, and the interventions of other governments in Bangkok, the fragile moratorium was upheld. But industry is chomping at the bit to commercialize Terminator.

Last month, Delta & Pine Land and the US Department of Agriculture won new patents on Terminator at the European Patent Office and in Canada. Delta & Pine vows to commercialize Terminator and recently released a new, glossy brochure on its “Technology Protection System.” Go here to read the company’s viewpoint.

In its renewed push to promote Terminator, the seed industry argues that we need genetic seed sterilization to prevent the escape of genes from engineered crops to related plants and wild relatives. They argue that engineered sterility offers a built-in safety feature, because if genes from a Terminator crop escape, the seed produced from unwanted pollination will not germinate – they’ll be sterile.

Promoting Terminator as a biosafety tool is biotech industry greenwashing. It’s also revisionist history – the technology was not developed for biosafety – it was developed to maximize seed industry profits. Some scientists point out that Terminator won’t work as a biocontainment tool and will itself pose risks to biodiversity.

The biotech industry’s inability to control genetically modified organisms is the Achilles’ heel of ag biotech. The Gene Giants have long insisted that GM technology is safe, precise and predictable, yet the unintended escape of engineered genes demonstrates the inability of regulatory bodies or industry to control and contain GMOs. There’s growing evidence of GM contamination in many areas of the world. For instance, DNA from GM corn has contaminated traditional corn grown by indigenous farmers in Mexico.

The very companies whose GM seeds are causing unwanted contamination are now insisting that society accept a dangerous technology to contain biotech pollution. One thing is certain.

If Terminator is accepted under the guise of biosafety, we’ll see it being used everywhere as a biological tool to enforce industry monopoly.

Fortunately, civil society, indigenous peoples and farmers’ organizations are fighting back. There’s a new, international campaign to ban Terminator. The Ban Terminator Campaign seeks to promote government bans on Terminator technology at the national and international levels, and supports the efforts of civil society, farmers, Indigenous peoples and social movements to campaign against it. The governments of Brazil and India have recently passed national laws to ban Terminator. The campaign is also coordinating efforts to strengthen the de facto moratorium on Terminator at the 8th Conference of the Parties (COP8) to the CBD in Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil March 20-31.

Check out banterminator.org to learn more about how to support the international campaign.