Environment, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, North America

ENVIRONMENT: Ban Endures on Terminator Seeds

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Feb 11 2005 (IPS) - An international moratorium on the use of controversial “terminator technology” in genetically engineered crops survived efforts to overturn it at a United Nations interim meeting on the Convention on Biological Diversity in Bangkok Friday.

The Canadian government initiated the move to lift the de-facto moratorium and allow testing and commercialisation of the genetically engineered technology that makes seeds sterile.

“It was a complete surprise to see this coming from Canada,” said Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, a Canadian-based NGO.

“Canada’s proposal could easily have been mistaken for one written by (agribusiness giant) Monsanto,” Thomas told IPS from Bangkok.

Leaked Canadian government documents obtained by ETC Group state that negotiators were instructed to “block consensus” on any other option.

However, African countries, Austria, Switzerland, Peru and the Philippines strongly objected to Canada’s proposal, and on the final day of meetings Friday were successful in keeping the moratorium in place, he says.

The precautionary moratorium was first instituted at a Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conference in 1998 over fears about the technology’s impact on agricultural biodiversity, farmers’ ability to save seeds, and the risk of “sterilisation genes” ending up in wild plants.

“Terminator”, a term coined by activists for a specific technology developed in the late 1990s and now owned by Monsanto and the U.S. government, is just one type of genetic trait control technology. The official CBD term is genetic use restriction technologies (GURTs). Several other seed sterilisation or trait controls are in development.

“There’s no scientific reason why GURTs should be banned before we’ve been able to evaluate them in field trials,” says Stephen Yarrow, national manager of the Plant Biosafety Office at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

“The Canadian government supports farmers and seed saving,” Yarrow told IPS. “However GURTs are a whole class of new technologies that offer a number of potential advantages.”

“We’re not pushing this technology. And we’re quite upset at being characterised (by activists) that way.”

Others believe that GURTs would be useful in non-food crops that are genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical products to prevent formation of seeds.

“Used correctly GURTs can be a benefit to society,” says Manjit Misra, director of the Seed Science Centre at Iowa State University in the United States.

The technology could have prevented the ProdiGene incident where an unwanted second generation of experimental maize plants containing a protein for a pig vaccine grew in a field of soy in the U.S. Midwest. The contamination was discovered post-harvest and resulted in about 14 million kilogrammes of soybeans being destroyed.

“This technology is also very important for the protection of intellectual property,” he said. In preventing the re-use of seeds, seed companies can get a better return on their research and development costs.

“Without intellectual property protection, private companies won’t make those investments. This is something developing countries don’t appreciate,” he said.

There are lots of uses for GURTs and intellectual property protection is one of them, agrees Dick Crowder of the American Seed Trade Association. Crowder couldn’t say what his association’s position is on the moratorium. However, the U.S. is not a signatory to the CBD.

“I’m aware it’s a controversial issue,” he said.

Canada’s National Farmer’s Union (NFU) was upset to learn that their country wanted to overturn the moratorium. In a letter to the country’s prime minister, they said the terminator technology is “the most controversial and immoral agricultural application of genetic engineering to date”. They asked Canada to support the moratorium.

“We’re very concerned. It’s just another way to keep farmers from saving seed,” said Terry Pugh, NFU executive secretary.

“It would give seed corporations tremendous amounts of power,” he told IPS.

Pugh rejects the notion that GURTs could prevent GE pollen and seeds from contaminating fields or breeding with wild plants. “First they unleash this contamination problem on us and then they say this (GURTs) is the solution?”

Compounding the problem is the consolidation within the seed industry. Monsanto is buying up all sorts of smaller seed companies, said Pugh, citing the 1.4-billion-dollar purchase of Seminis, Inc., a California-based seed company in January.

As for the future of the CBD moratorium, ETC Group’s Thomas says the consensus is very fragile. It will be debated at future meetings and there is continuing pressure to allow field trials of GURTs and then commercialisation.

Permanently terminating the terminator technology will be difficult, he said.

*Adds response from Canadian government.