In this article the author makes a very enlightening summary of corporate concentration during 2006, and how this affects our lives as simple citizens even though we think its something happening far away by Silvia Ribeiro Corporate concentration through global mergers and acquisitions reached a record at the close of 2006.

On October 10, ETC Group attended the US Food and Drug Administrations first public meeting on nanotechnology. About 40 people had signed up to make presentations, and we were each given eight minutes to say our piece to the FDAs newly-formed Nanotechnology Task Force. (You can read the text of ETC Groups presentation here.)

Nano-Drug's Dirty Little Secret

On September 12 just days before Mexico celebrates its Independence Day ETC Group and several Mexican organizations held a press conference in Mexico City and declared the traditional Cry of Independence, but this time for the genetic independence of Mexican maize. It has been over five years since DNA from genetically modified maize contaminated native maize varieties in Mexico.

The Economist this week has a Special Report on Synthetic Biology , the new field of building artificial life forms from scratch. As is to be expected from the Economist, this is a fairly upbeat assesment of the technology that fails to mention the growing opposition to Synthetic Biology, signalled a few months ago when almost forty civil society groups, trade unions and scientific associations signed an open letter calling for caution.

Here at ETC we have been busy writing our own special report on Synthetic Biology (which we are calling 'Extreme Genetic Engineering' - watch this space!). You can expect it to be a bit more critical than the Economist.

Silvia Ribeiro*

The biotech company Ventria Biosciences sponsored tests, on babies and children hospitalized at two pediatric institutes in Peru, of two new experimental drugs derived from transgenic rice that was genetically engineered with synthetic human genes to produce artificial human milk proteins.

We've just read the article, "Lessons on Ethical Decision Making from the Bioscience Industry" - this is not a joke - which appeared in the May issue of PLoS Medicine and is available on the Internet. The authors are Jocelyn E. Mackie, Andrew D. Taylor, David L. Finegold, Abdallah S. Daar and Peter A. Singer. Four of the five authors are at the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics.

Lucy Sharratt

At 9:30 pm in Brazil, the 8th Conference of the Parties confirmed its decision on Terminator. It is now official.

We see a moratorium on Terminator that is now strengthened.

The protests of Via Campesina and Brazils Landless Workers Movement (Movimento Sem Terra - MST) have been critical to the outcomes of this meeting. The protests continue this morning as 6000 peasant farmers are outside greeting buses of delegates as they come in. The protests have been so important in maintaining momentum and reminding delegates what was said last week against Terminator, reminding them how interventions from peasant farmers and Indigenous peoples made them understand the real impacts Terminator would have.

by Lucy Sharratt

Today Terminator was discussed again at COP8 - and the moratorium still holds! No country dared to challenge the consensus of last week.

Some governments made slight changes to a specific part of the text but this did not relate to the moratorium it was just enough to make us nervous!