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Monsanto - Handled with CARE?

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... or, CARE - Handled by MONSANTO? Major US Relief Agency holds talks with troubled agbiotech multinational-- Who's helping Who?

CARE, the high-profile U.S. food aid non-profit, is holding talks today with Monsanto Corporation at the company's world headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri (US). According to information received by RAFI, Monsanto's CEO Robert Shapiro contacted CARE's President, Peter Bell, inviting CARE officials to discuss ways in which Monsanto may be able to use its technologies for the benefit of food security in the South. Whether this is an attempt to resurrect Monsanto's scheme to provide micro-credit (soft") loans to Third World farmers in order to market its proprietary pesticides and genetically-modified seeds remains to be seen.

Monsanto Behind Anti-Farmer Law

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Ohio Bill Descriminates Against Seed-Saving Farmers

A bill has been introduced in the Ohio state legislature (United States) that would require registration and state-level regulation of anyone who cleans or conditions self-pollinated seed. According to the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), the proposed legislation is part of Monsanto's aggressive corporate strategy to police rural communities and intimidate seed-saving farmers.

UPOV '91 Threatens Francophone Africa

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Right to Save Seed in Poor Countries May be Eliminated as 15 African States are Pressured to Accept UPOV '91

Fifteen Francophone African states, among them some of the poorest countries in the world, are under pressure to sign away the right of more than 20 million small-holder farmers to save and exchange crop seed. The decision to abandon Africa's 12,000-year tradition of seed saving will be finalized at a meeting February 22-25 in the Central African Republic. The 15 governments have been told to adopt draconian intellectual property legislation for plant varieties in order to conform to a provision in the World Trade Organization (WTO) that obliges signatories to protect" plant varieties. The legislation (a kind of legal "Terminator" because it prohibits farmers from replanting "protected" seed) is also known, euphemistically, as "Plant Breeders' Rights". If adopted, the legislation will throw some of Africa's poorest countries into an intellectual property cartel dominated by a handful of OECD states led by the USA, the UK, and Japan.

Traitor Technology

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The Terminator's Wider Implications

RAFI examines the broader implications of Terminator and Traitor technologies. Traitor Tech refers to a new array of patents describing the control of a plant's genetic traits by the application of an external chemical catalyst. Farmers are becoming trapped in a pattern of biological controls that inevitably lead to bioserfdom.

Seed Sterilization is Biotech Holy Grail

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New Patents for "Suicide Seeds" Threaten Farmers and Food Security Warns RAFI

The Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), a Canadian-based rural advocacy organization, announced today that it has uncovered over three dozen new patents describing a wide range of techniques that can be used for the genetic sterilization of plants and seeds. The patents reveal that engineered seed sterility is not an isolated research agenda - it's the Holy Grail of the ag biotech industry," says Pat Mooney of RAFI. The disclosure follows on the heels of a controversial patent unveiled last year, christened the "Terminator" by RAFI, that continues to generate worldwide protest and debate because it renders farm-saved seed sterile - forcing farmers to return to the commercial seed market every year. The Terminator patent is jointly owned by the US Department of Agriculture and a Monsanto subsidiary, Delta & Pine Land Co.

Monsanto Terminates Terminator?

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... or is the "Monster" just taking its own sterility strategy underground? Get Ready for Terminator II - the "TNT" of agriculture

Rural advocacy organizations learned that Monsanto, arguably the world's least popular biotech multinational, held a high-level meeting yesterday to consider whether or not to abandon its quest for an exclusive license on the Terminator technology , US patent no. 5,723,765 , which its subsidiary, Delta & Pine Land Co., co-owns with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).* The patent covers a system for genetically engineering suicide seeds" that cannot be replanted, thus forcing farmers to return to the commercial seed market every year. Philip Angell, Director of Monsanto's Corporate Communications, confirmed that Monsanto held a meeting to discuss Terminator yesterday and that Monsanto's President, Bob Shapiro, attended. Angell declined to offer details, but he told RAFI that "it's an issue we have to wrestle with."

A Description of the Novartis Patent Group

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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.

Exploiting Apoptosis - the University of Texas GRIM Patent

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GRIM Patent (US #5,846,768 - December 8, 1998)

Problems resulting from the continued widespread use of pesticides has prompted some biologists to pursue other means of controlling insects. While there have been some success stories in biological control, these have not been numerous, and spraying with toxic chemicals continues to be the norm. The Texas patent attempts to address this problem by incorporating a toxic component in the genome of fertile insects.

Monsanto's 'Spectre' Dims

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Has CEO Bob Shapiro, the 'Goldfinger' of biotechnology, suddenly become the 'Man with the Minus Touch' ... or has Monsanto run afoul 007?

The plot thickens as Monsanto's biotech PR blitz has led to increasing problems for the corporation, including the scrapped merger between Monsanto and American Home Products.

Related Issues: 
Corporate Concentration
Patents & Biopiracy
Terminator & New Enclosures

Plant Breeders' Wrongs Righted in Australia?

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Under attack for blatant abuses to its Plant Breeders' Rights (intellectual property) legislation and accused of abetting the biopiracy of Farmers' Varieties around the world - including Australian Aboriginal varieties - Canberra's beleaguered PBR Office has issued new regulations intended to prevent piratical plant patents. But will they? What about past abuses? What does it mean for the renegotiation of the WTO's TRIPS" (patent) chapter this December 1-2 (1998)?

CGIAR Adopts "No Terminator" Policy

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The Terminator - and related genetic seed sterilization technology - has been banned from the crop breeding programs of the world's largest international agricultural research network. The strong and unambiguous policy was adopted by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) at a meeting at the World Bank in Washington on Friday, October 30th.

It's a courageous decision. The CGIAR has done the right thing, for the right reasons," says Pat Mooney, Executive Director of RAFI, "a ban on Terminator is a pro-farmer policy in defence of world food security."

The CGIAR is a global network of 16 international agricultural research centres, which collectively form the world's largest public plant breeding effort for resource-poor farmers. The Terminator genetic engineering technique renders farm-saved seed sterile, forcing farmers to return to the commercial seed market every year. The technology is aimed primarily at seed markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where over 1.4 billion people depend on farm-saved seed and on-farm plant breeding. If widely adopted, the Terminator would make it impossible for farmers to save seed and breed their own crops.

Out of Control

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Northern Patent Systems Threaten Food Security, Human Dignity, and are Predatory on the South's Resources and Knowledge

This chart illustrates where twenty of the world's worst patents have been granted and scores individual countries on the number of predatory patents they have allowed to issue on their soil. A full size picture can be downloaded in Adobe Acrobat format.

 

Related Issues: 
Patents & Biopiracy

CGIAR to Avoid Terminator Technology

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With more than 70% of the Third World's rice and wheat crops based upon its crop breeding programmes, the world's largest network of agricultural research institutes is vowing not to useTerminator Technology (a biotech-based strategy that prevents seed from regerminating in a secondgrowing season). The decision is a slap-in-the-face to one of its major funders - the US Government, and to Monsanto Corporation - who claim their technology will help feed the hungry.

Frustrated Harvest

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Frost has come early for the CGIAR's much-awaited Systemwide Review

After 17 years - a 17 day wonder? Now the question is, what next?

In search of vindication and vision, the CGIAR's first Systemwide Review in 17 years is indeed a vociferous defence of the past but its recommendations for the future vacuous and doomed to be discounted. After 18 months and $1.5 million is the System back where it started? How will it recover from its post-harvest losses?

Terminator

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So Bad, Even Monsanto Can't put a Spin on It

Monsanto appears apoplectic in the face of global criticism over the seed-killing Terminator technology. In recent weeks the company has taken a drubbing across the globe, from India to New Zealand, Zimbabwe, the UK, and even in cyberspace. But so far Monsanto's legendary spinmasters have been unable to counter the criticism and articulate any good reason why the world needs the Terminator. Who, after all, wants a dead seed?

Related Issues: 
Corporate Concentration
Patents & Biopiracy
Terminator & New Enclosures
Militarism & Dissent
Genomics & Biotechnology
Farmers' Rights & Food Sovereignty
Biodiversity & Cultural Diversity

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