Please help me NOT get sued
Matthew Townsend
This is for my local newspaper.
Principal among my concerns about it, is avoiding being sued. If you have
any factual or other corrections to make before it is published, please
write them IN CAPS.
Many thanks,
Matthew Townsend
PS You'll have read most of this before because it is largely an amalgam of
things that have come through this list in the last six months. Thank you to
all of you who have so assiduously forwarded the information on.
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Dead seeds: trust us, you want them
Monsanto—the company that gave the world Agent Orange, recombinant Bovine
Growth Hormones, and Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs)—is at it again.
This time Monsanto is on a spending spree. The world’s largest agro-chemical
producer has just invested about $6 billion in seed operations in Africa,
Asia, Central and Latin America and Europe.
This might not mean much were it not for Monsanto’s recent acquisition of
the rights to the “Terminator-gene”—a gene that ensures that its plants
produce only sterile seeds.
Monsanto refers to the Terminator patent euphemistically as its “TPS -
Technology Protection System”.
If Monsanto succeeds in inserting the Terminator gene into its expanding
array of seeds, farmers around the world could be presented with little
choice but to buy non-reproducing varieties.
As the New York Times put it, “The Terminator will allow companies like
Monsanto to privatise one of the last great commons in nature—the genetics
of the crop plants that civilisation has developed over the past 10,000 years.”
This is of particular concern to the developing world, where Monsanto has
been actively seeking new customers.
William Phelps, the Spokesman for the US Department of Agriculture, an
organisation that has been working on the Terminator’s development with
Monsanto, has reportedly acknowledged that the “second and third world
markets are the main targets for the Terminator seed.”
Monsanto is certainly expanding its third world links.
For example, in Bangladesh Monsanto recently developed an association with
the community based Grameen Bank. The Bank was to provide small loans for
farmers to buy technologies including Monsanto products. After protests from
environmental groups, however, the relationship was severed.
Monsanto is now believed to be conducting clandestine field trials of the
Terminator gene in India.
The Director of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) Mr Pat
Mooney says that Monsanto is targeting crops in India, China and Pakistan
because it will give companies with proprietary genetic traits confidence
about the risks of selling their seeds abroad.
“Since farmers can't save the seeds, they are forced back to the market
place to buy seed every season. Patented genes can't be bred into other
varieties by poor farmers.
Mr Mooney says this could have implications for established farming
practices: “Traditionally, women farmers not only save seed but they use
purchased seed to cross with other breeding stock to improve and adapt the
seed to their local needs. The Terminator makes all this impossible.”
Monsanto’s defence to these arguments is that people who don’t want the
Terminator seeds don’t have to buy them.
However, this ignores the reality that in many developing nations government
rules or commercial credit often force farmers to grow particular crop
varieties.
The Terminator gene not only poses an economic threat to farming
communities. If the technology goes wrong, it could sterilise surrounding
crops through cross-pollination.
It has already been shown that genes can jump from crops into weeds,
creating new species of superweeds resistant to herbicides.
Tests at the Ohio State University showed that crop genes altered by humans
can cross-pollinate surrounding plants. After a period of time they are
visually indistinguishable from their unmodified counterparts. The only way
to test whether some plants are resistant to a herbicide is to apply the
herbicide or to test their DNA.
More recently, an experimental crop of herbicide-resistant oilseed rape in
Britain had to be destroyed after it cross-pollinated nearby plants.
The British Government considered prosecuting Monsanto for allegedly
contaminating the environment and the company was ordered to destroy the crops.
This has raised the concern that if the Terminator technology jumps from
genetically modified crops into surrounding plants, it could create the
equivalent of a soil-born cancer.
Unsurprisingly, the public response to the Terminator gene has not been
positive.
Since the Terminator patent was granted in the United States last March,
opposition from environmentalists, farmers and scientists has been overwhelming.
In a serious blow to its patent-holder, the world's largest agricultural
research network, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR), has now announced it will boycott the use of Terminator
technology.
CGIAR expressed concerns about inadvertent pollination; the sale of flawed
seeds; the importance of farm-saved seed to resource-poor farmers; and the
potential impacts on genetic diversity.
The debacle surrounding the Terminator-gene has done nothing to dispel the
view that the biotechnology industry is on the wild west frontiers of
development, and that Monsanto Corporation is one of the principal cowboys.
Matthew Townsend is a barrister and lecturer in environmental law at
Victoria University of Technology. m...@ozemail.com.au
THIS ARTICLE IS DISTRIBUTED ONLY FOR ASCERTAINING THE FACTUAL CORRECTNESS OF
THE INFORMATION CONTAINED WITHIN IT.
Matthew Townsend
Barrister & Accredited Mediator
Lecturer in Environmental Law, Victoria University of Technology
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