CREATING A DEVIL TO PROTECT US FROM THE MONSTER

Genetically modified organisms are nothing new. The controversy over the unproven long-term safety of these money-making, trademarked plants has never wavered, nor has the support for GMOs by the Government of Canada.

But genetically modified canola that can withstand the onslaught of Monsanto’s killer Roundup is just the beginning. The future plants in research and development by the biotech industry make the “Frankenfood” euphemism seem downright benign. And just when you thought inserting pig DNA into rice was surreal enough, it gets worse.

What’s next out of the genetically manipulative minds of the biotech corporations are three things: genetically modifed trees, pharmaceutical plants, and, of most concern for farmers and consumers across the planet, suicide seeds, otherwise known as “Terminator technology.”

THEY'LL BE BACK

Terminator technology — known in the industry as Genetic Use Restriction Technology, or GURTs — is actually not new. Terminator has been around since the late 90s, but there has been a de facto moratorium on commercialization since 2000 at the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

GURTs is a term used to define the use of an external chemical inducer to control the expression of a plant’s genetic trait. More specifically, GURTs are referred to as Terminator technology, or sometimes suicide seeds, because they are genetically modified to be sterile at harvest.

Terminator technology was developed by the multinational seed and agrochemical industry to prevent farmers from saving seed from year to year as has been done for millenia. Terminator seeds were the agrochemical industry’s way of maximizing profits in the face of farmers — in both the developing and developed world — who have traditionally replanted harvested seeds.

“Canadian farmers have nothing to gain from Terminator technology,” Lucy Sharratt tells Vitality. Sharratt is the coordinator of the Ottawa-based Ban Terminator Campaign who have teamed up with groups from the U.S., Malaysia, India, and elsewhere to oppose Terminator technology. “Only multi-national corporations will gain. Even Canadian biotech has nothing to gain from Terminator.”

Despite widespread grassroots opposition to the commercialization of Terminator the Canadian government is toeing the industry line. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency states prominently on their website that: “Canada’s view is that there should be recognition of the potential benefits of GURTs as a biosafety tool which could mitigate the dissemination of novel traits in the environment.”

Canada has actually been less responsive to consumer backlash than some biotech companies creating these products.

When faced with public and grower outcry in 1999, Monsanto pledged to not commercialize Terminator. In an open letter in October of 1999 from Monsanto CEO Robert B. Shapiro to Rockefeller Foundation President Gordon Conway, Shapiro wrote: “I am writing to let you know that we are making a public commitment not to commercialize sterile seed technologies, such as the one dubbed ‘Terminator.’”

But that commitment was a flexible one. In Monsanto’s 2005 Pledge Report they say that “Monsanto does not rule out the potential development and use of one of these technologies in the future.”

WHAT'S WRONG WITH TERMINATOR?

In the first place, farming is about life. Seeds hold within their tiny shells all the material needed to create fields of wheat, alfalfa, canola, broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes, and all the wonderful foods farmers grow. The word “seed” itself has developed into a metaphor for beginning, for newness, for life. Terminator technology is a fight against nature in the strongest possible way.

“While seeds with the ability to reproduce contain the essence of life, Terminator represents only ‘exploitation and death,’” according to Terry Boehm, vice-president of the National Farmer's Union in Saskatchewan. Boehm further uses nuclear weapons as a parallel to Terminator technology: “Extensive testing of nuclear weapons did not change the fact that this was such a dangerous technology that it should not be used.”

The main problem is that over 1.4 billion people around the world depend on saved seeds from season to season to grow crops. Terminator seeds force dependence on the Monsantos of the world, destroying local and indigenous seed exchange practices, as well as the breeding and selection done by farmers.

And if Terminator seeds are ever commercialized the likelihood that companies would incorporate them into all GM plants is high, because seed sterility secures an absolute monopoly. A patent provides a legal measure, but seeds can still be saved and stolen and patents can be violated. Seed sterility requires no lawyers to fight farmers in court. If the seeds won’t grow, they have to buy more.

The other problem is that Terminator seeds would create the danger of cross-contamination as do all GM plants. In fact, once the backlash to Terminator manifested itself, the PR experts in the seed industry actually began touting GURTs as an environmental response. Terminator seeds would stop genetic contamination, the story went, because the resultant plant of any Terminator crops getting cross-pollinating with neighbouring fields would be sterile, so there would be no spread.

The irony is that in response to consumer and farmer backlash about GM contamination, multinational corporations are touting a further untested GM technology to fix the mess they created. It’s a little like letting Frankenstein loose and then sending out King Kong to fix the problem.

“Yes, your technology doesn’t work, or rather, nature keeps getting in the way of it working,” says Sharratt, “so this time you’re really going to keep nature down. Of all the things they want to overcome it is fertility. The food supply is based on the reproductive fertility of life.”

Delta & Pine Land, the U.S. seed company with the initial patent on Terminator technology, who are conducting greenhouse trials, claims that “even the remote posssibility of transgene movement” is prevented with the “biosafety” of Terminator. But this means that Terminator seeds would have to be 100% effective, 100% of the time. Scientists who have studied this believe this would never be possible.

THE NON-ADMISSION ADMISSION

“In essence, GM contamination is a new type of industrial pollution that involves living, replicating organisms,” according to the Ban Terminator campaign.

Large biotech companies certainly don’t like to admit that their products are pollution or contaminants of any kind. They don’t even like to admit that GM plants could be contaminating farmer’s fields, and when they do, they sue for patent infringement, as they did with Percy Schmeiser in Saskatchewan.

But the reality of GM contamination is well-documented and so now the industry is touting Terminator as a way of containing unwanted gene flow. This is clearly an admission of earlier guilt.

“Ironically, the very companies that are responsible for GM contamination are now insisting that society accept a new, unreliable technology to try to fix this pollution problem,” according to the Ban Terminator campaign.

VACCINE PHARMING

The serious concern of opponents to Terminator technology is well beyond the concerns over the long-term safety of other GMOs and their damage to certified organic farming, indigenous practices, and small agriculture.

That negative public image of GMOs because of contamination of adjacent fields and conventional seed stocks has been the roadblock preventing the commercialization of some truly lucrative – and to some, scary – GM crops.

“In states in the U.S. they are experimenting with rice crops with pharmaceutical components,” says Sharratt. “There are also field trials with tobacco in Canada. And then there are GM trees. The pollen from trees goes miles.”

In fact since 1991 the USDA has approved as many as 200 or more applications to grow pharma crops in the U.S. There are around 30 protein-based pharmaceutical drugs on the market, and currently the method to develop these proteins is with Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells, which is expensive and time-consuming. But if companies could grow drugs in corn and soybeans, maybe the whole process would be cheaper and simpler. These pharma crops look just like regular commodity corn and soybean destined for food products and grocery store shelves.

“Yet, unlike commodity crops, pharma crops produce hormones, enzymes, diagnostic compounds, plastics, and other substances that might harm consumers and animals if inadvertently ingested,” wrote Jane Rissler, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in a June 2005 article in Catalyst, the magazine of the UCS.

The biotech industry is keen to argue that Terminator will fix the problems of GM contamination (which they caused) and allow for pharma crop approval. But the UCS warn that this should not be done with food crops such as corn and soy as it currently is being done. Contamination of the food supply is virtually inevitable, according to a UCS report.
There have already been some “near-contamination incidents.” In 2002 there were two such incidents — one involving pharma corn plants mixed with soybeans, and the other involving pharma corn cross-pollination with commodity corn.

If Terminator seeds are developed and commercialized to allow for the dissemination of pharma crops, the level of GM contamination will likely only grow. Contamination is inevitable and the resulting consequences could be disastrous for farmers.

CULTURAL CONSEQUENCES

When policy makers say they are using a “science-based” approach, it always means just that. Products or techniques are analyzed using the accepted guidelines, and products or techniques are approved based on some quantitative assessment. This is how the concept of “substantive equivalence” came to be used by GM promoters in Canada and the U.S. as a way of avoiding risk assessments.

Substantive equivalence basically states that if it looks like a real apple, tastes like a real apple, and has similar nutritional value to a real apple, then it’s close enough to an apple for consumers. Even if it is a genetically modified version.

The problem is that this overlooks, among other things, the cultural consequences of GMO propagation.

“The cultural ramifications of selling and trading seeds is not taken into account,” Sharratt says. Farmers around the world will be threatened by Terminator technology, and that means the food supply is threatened.

“The use of Terminator is such a fundamental offense to the foundations of life and of agriculture that the very concept engenders rage from farmers and citizens around the world,” says Terry Boehm of the National Farmer’s Union. “Farmers east, west, north and south are absolutely dependent on using and reusing the seeds that they grow.”

CANADA: A WORLD GMO PUSHER

In the face of European and developing world opposition to GMOs, Canada has always stood firmly on the side of the profit-making for multi-national biotech corporations. If the fact that the federal government of a country so reliant on agriculture would support a technology that is opposed by consumers, farmers, indigenous groups, and environmental organizations, and is only supported by large ag biotech corporations, seems strange, well, it is.

The governments of Canada, the U.S. and Argentina even took the European Union to the WTO court of arbitration because of the EU’s precautionary ban on GMOs. And a 1,000-page preliminary report sides with Canada, stating that the EU’s ban has been an unfair barrier to biotech producers of GM food. 

Canada will now work further to push for an overturning on the moratorium on Terminator technology at the eighth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to be held in Brazil, March 20-31.

According to Sharratt of the Ban Terminator campaign, the Canadian government has heard the massive protests to Terminator technology, but they are still moving ahead. In February 2005 they were prepared to remove the moratorium but because people found out, they backtracked. So Canada has stepped back from its leadership role in this regard and will likely now sit back and allow Australia to take the lead, while they follow.

In fact Canada doesn’t even see the de facto moratorium as a moratorium at all. At the meeting in Brazil it is likely that countries like Canada and Australia will aim to change the wording on the 2000 moratorium ever so slightly to get their way. On the Canadian Food Inspection Agency website it says that “Canada supported wholeheartedly” the recommendation from the 2000 CBD meeting where the de factor moratorium was put in place. But then it reads, “However, this is a recommendation and not an outright ban or moratirium. This approach is consistent with the way Canada approaches all applications of biotechnology in the environment – a cautious and responsible approach based on case-by-case evaluations of each new technology.”

“The CFIA are not able to differentiate between GMOs and Terminator technnology,” Sharrat says. “Canada is holding an irresponsible position internationally, which supports multi-national corporations only. If we are eating food we need to be supportive of the people that grow food.”

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