During the United Nations High-Level Conference on World Food Security, Climate Change and Bioenergy, Rome-based U.N. agencies announced yesterday that a new partnership was struck between the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the World Food Programme (WFP).

Review by Hope Shand, research director of ETC Group.
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In October 1996, a spokesman for Monsanto told Farm Journal why his company was buying up seed companies left and right: "What you're seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it's really a consolidation of the entire food chain."

Can you spot the missing vowel in this Washington Post headline?!

Md. Scientists Build Bacterial Chromosome

Scientists in Maryland yesterday said they had built from scratch an entire microbial chromosome, a loop of synthetic DNA carrying all the instructions that a simple cell needs to live and reproduce...

Now that you can drive your ‘nano’ car, listening to your ipod ‘nano’ while wearing ‘nano’ sunscreen and ‘nano’ clothing, the UK’s largest organic certifier has just introduced the perfect nano-antidote - a ‘nano-free’ standard for consumer products. The Soil Association – one of the world's pioneers of organic agriculture announced today that it is has banned human-made nanomaterials from the organic cosmetics, foods and textiles that it certifies.

On January 15, 2008, these two headlines shared the same Google News page. What's wrong with this picture?

"F.D.A. Says Cloned Animals Safe to Eat"

and

"188000 Pounds Of Tainted Beef Recalled"

What do ocean-going yachts, space-traveling bacteria and synthetic life have in common? J. Craig Venter, of course. The self-styled genome tycoon has been busy pushing the boundaries on what may appear at first glance to be unrelated enterprises. Nothing could be further from the truth. A suite of recently uncovered patent applications lodged by Venter and his colleagues reveal not only an attempt to grab ownership over much of synthetic biology (see news release) but also a breathtakingly bold business plan for producing millions of new synthetic organisms per day. At the heart of this are plans for a new, automated process enabling rapid assembly of complete synthetic genomes - plans that, if realised, could render current genetic engineering techniques quaint and obsolete. Venter calls it "homologous in vitro recombination" or "combinatorial genomics." ETC suggests it might be properly dubbed "shotgun synthesis" and it has the potential to blast apart current biotech practice.

In the past, several multinational seed corporations have publicly pledged not to commercialize Terminator seeds - but, not surprisingly, there is intense industry pressure to overturn Brazil's national law prohibiting suicide seeds. Bill number 268 (2007) in the Brazilian Congress proposes to:

Below you will find a series of articles on biofuels, originally written in Spanish by one of ETC Group’s researchers. (Unfortunately, English translations are not always available). Biofuel production is currently a much-debated topic in Latin America. The prominent farmers’ organizations in the region believe that the production of biofuels will lead to further marginalization and erosion of the lands which are currently being used for food production.

ETC Group attended the 12th meeting of the scientific advisory body (SBSTTA) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which met in Paris 2-6 July 2006. Expectations were high that SBSTTA would tackle new and emerging issues on its agenda: agrofuels (a.k.a. biofuels) and climate change. Despite the urgency of these matters, some governments managed to block meaningful recommendations and put a chill on biodiversity’s hottest topics.