Briefings

Monsanto announces that it will merge with Pharmacia-Upjohn and 'spin-off' its agricultural activities. The move heralds pharmaceutical industry strategy to distance itself from GM food flop. Monsanto also announced that it would drop its ill-fated bid to acquire Delta & Pine Land, the largest cotton seed company and co-owner of the prototype Terminator patent.

Corporate "Gene Giants" are expanding market share over agribusiness, food and pharmacy. Market dominance combined with monopoly patents gives the Gene Giants unprecedented control over the products and processes of life - the biological basis for commercial food, farming and health.

The Novartis patents comprise a wide-ranging and inter-related group directed toward controlled expression of desired traits in plants, these resulting from introduction of DNA constructs. While a principal focus of the work is to regulate gene expression by exposure of the plant to chemicals that can activate the promoter regions of introduced genes, the work also includes constructs that confer the constitutive expression (i.e. maintained in the absence of external stimulus) of introduced traits. In addition, considerable effort has been devoted to isolating the gene products which are produced as a stress response by the plants. Isolation of the genes that code for these proteins, and of the promoter sequences which regulate their expression, provide the basis for much of the work. Several of the claims are methodological, defining ways of isolating desired genes and the promoters that control them, but essentially they are variants of themes already well-developed in biotechnology. Similarly, while there is considerable space given in the discussion to the methods of transforming the plants through introduction of DNA sequences, the approaches used are standard for the industry and not relevant to understanding the result.

RAFI's first publication alerting the world to Terminator technology - published just weeks after RAFI discovered the patent. On March 3, 1998 the US Department of Agriculture and an American cotton seed company, Delta & Pine Land Co., received a US patent on a technique that genetically alters seed so that it will not germinate if re-planted a second time. It is a global threat the farmers, biodiversity and food security.