[E-rundbrief] Info 941 - Terminator technology against Food/ Biodiversity

Matthias Reichl info at begegnungszentrum.at
Mi Jul 28 11:41:07 CEST 2010


E-Rundbrief - Info 941 - La Via Campesina Call to Action – Help Stop
Terminator’s Return! Terminator from Transnational Corporations like
Monsanto is a threat to food sovereignty and agrobiodiversity. 4 years
UN-moratorium will be ending?

Bad Ischl, 28.7.2010

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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La Via Campesina Call to Action – Help Stop Terminator’s Return!

(July 2010) Four years after the moratorium on Terminator technology was
reaffirmed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD), proposals to develop and commercialize ‘genetic-use restriction
technologies’ (GURTs) are back on the agenda for policymakers and the
biotechnology industry. Terminator is a threat to food sovereignty and
agrobiodiversity: ending the moratorium on Terminator will increase
control of seed by transnational corporations (TNCs) and restrictions on
farmers’ rights to save and plant harvested seed. Additionally, pollen
from genetically-modified (GM) crops with Terminator will contaminate
non-GM and organic crops, and native plant species.

GURTs (herein referred to as ‘Terminator’) are genetic engineering
technologies that seek to control plant fertility. First-generation
Terminator (also called ‘suicide seed’) was developed jointly by the US
Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land Company +) in the
1990s to protect the intellectual property of US agricultural
biotechnology TNCs. GM crops produce sterile seeds to prevent farmers
from replanting harvested seed with patented DNA. Due to international
public outcry from farmers and civil society worldwide, Terminator has
never been commercialized anywhere, and Brazil and India have national
moratoriums prohibiting it. In 2000, the CBD recommended a de facto
moratorium on field-testing and commercial sale of Terminator seeds. In
2006, pressure from La Via Campesina and its allies helped to strengthen
this moratorium in Curitiba, Brazil.

That year, US-based TNC Monsanto Company, the largest seed company in
the world, acquired Delta and Pine Land, along with the intellectual
property rights to Terminator. Since then industry, the US and European
governments and ultra-rich philanthro-capitalists have ramped up
rhetoric on the need for Terminator and other biotechnologies to adapt
to the climate, energy and food crises. Various false solutions are
being proposed to sell the lie that techno-fixes allow rich countries to
continue consuming resources and emitting carbon dioxide, unabated: GM
crops for cellulosic and second-generation agrofuels; geoengineering ‘
climate ready’ GM crops and trees with increased albedo (reflectivity)
and resistance to drought, heat and salt; monoculture plantation forests
of GM trees to industrially produce biochar for carbon sequestration;
and GM algae and marine microbes for carbon dioxide sequestration.
Monsanto is proposing that monoculture plantations of its Roundup Ready
soybeans qualify for carbon credits under so-called “no-till”
agriculture. All of these false solutions create new markets for
agricultural biotechnology and ‘extreme genetic engineering’.

With financing by the US government and British Petroleum (BP), i n May,
Synthetic Genomics, the company founded J . Craig Venter (which helped
to sequence the human genome) announced that it had created the
first-ever synthetic, self-reproducing microbe with synthetic biology.
Venter’s team claims that the microbe can be used to produce clean,
green algal biofuels; however, what will happen if this microbe escapes
into the wild and contaminates non-synthetic algae with its DNA?
Similarly, what will happen when a GM maize variety engineered to have a
high amount of stover (the stalks, husks, etc. of maize) for cellulosic
agrofuels contaminates food maize varieties? The implications are
frightening. Industry is now claiming that Terminator is needed to
contain genetic contamination (transgene flow) of food crops and other
natural life forms from genetically-engineered DNA in non-food crops; in
essence, as a precautionary, environmental necessity. Venter recently
told the New York Times that Terminator should be employed to contain
transgenic contamination.

Genetic contamination of non-GM and organic food crops from GM crops,
which occurs through the spread of GM pollen by wind and bees, is
gaining recognition as a growing ecological and economic problem. On
June 21 st the US Supreme Court ruled on Monsanto Co vs. Geertson Seed
Farms , and recognized that transgenic contamination is “harmful and
onerous to organic and conventional farmers,” and grounds for litigation
against biotechnology TNCs. Thus a new generation of Terminator research
is focused on biological containment to prevent engineered genetic
traits (transgenes) from spreading to non-GM food plants and wild
relatives. It is highly unlikely that the industry that created the
problem of genetic pollution will solve it with more biotechnology.
Given BP’s difficulty to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico,
why would the US government entrust it to contain trangene flow from the
world’s first synthetic life form? Yet that is what is taking place.
Europe has funded the Transcontainer Project with billions of euros, and
there are proposals from right-wing Brazilian politicians to overturn
the country’s national ban on Terminator.

While application and commercialization of Terminator technologies can’t
promise fail-safe containment of transgenes, they can function to
control farmers’ access to seeds and germplasm. Under the guise of
environmental security for GM crops, industry will use the new
generation of Terminator technologies to tighten its grasp on
proprietary germplasm, and restrict the rights of farmers to re-plant
harvested seeds. Further, the likely prospect of contamination of food
crops by GM crops engineered with Terminator places the entire global
food supply at imminent risk, and it therefore poses unacceptable
threats to food and seed sovereignty and agro-biodiversity. TNCs are
expanding and consolidating control over the world’s croplands,
rangelands, peat bogs and last remaining forests, while simultaneously
consolidating control of the genetic commons at cellular and molecular
levels. Terminator technologies for synthetic biology, GM crops for
agrofuels, geoengineering and all of the other false solutions to the
energy, climate and food crises enclose vast genetic resources and
agrobiodiversity, taking them out of the public realm and into the
control of TNCs, especially the US Big Biotech giants Monsanto, Dupont
and Arborgen.

Organizing against Terminator in 2010 - what you can do

It is critical that La Via Campesina, small farmers, NGOs and consumers
throughout the world organize to stop Terminator’s return. Pressure by
civil society at the CBD meeting in May resulted in two draft
moratoriums against synthetic biology and geoengineering, giving a boost
to mobilization against Terminator at the next CBD meeting in Nagoya,
Japan, October 18-29 2010, where industry will likely try and overturn
the moratorium . Because industry’s rhetoric for Terminator is based on
false solutions to climate change, organizing against it will also be
critical at the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, November 29 to
December 10, 2010. The international coordination of La Via Campesina is
asking its members, allies and all consumers to:

    1. Write letters, request meetings, launch cyber-campaigns, etc. to
pressure with your government representatives who will be representing
your country in the CBD and UNFCCC negotiations to uphold the moratorium
on Terminator in Japan and Cancun. It is vital that organizations and
individuals in India and Brazil pressure their governments to maintain
national their moratoriums. For your convenience, use and adapt the
attached standard letter.

2.  Send as many people as possible to the CBD and UNFCCC meetings in
Japan and Cancun;


Resources

     *

       “ The race to make fuel out of algae poses risks as well as
benefits.” Dina Fine Maron, Environment and Energy Publishing . July 22,
2010, 
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/07/22/22climatewire-the-race-to-make-
fuel-out-of-algae-poses-ris-80037.html;
     *

       “ Exploring Algae as Fuel.” Andrew Pollack, The New York Times .
July 26 2010.
     *

       ETC Group Hands off Mother Earth campaign:
http://www.handsoffmotherearth.org/
     *

       “ Retooling the Planet: Climate Chaos in the Geoengineering Age
.” ETC Group , December 2009, http://www.etcgroup.org/en/node/4966.
     *

       Terminator: the Sequel. ETC Group, May/June 2007, 
http://www.etcgroup.org/en/node/4966
     *

       “ Peasants victory in defending seeds from Terminator
Technology,” La Via Campesina, March 2006.
http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=124:peasants-
victory-in-defending-seeds-from-terminator-technology&catid=22:biodiversity-and-genetic-
resources&Itemid=37

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+)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_and_Pine_Land


Contact

Tejo Pramono (Indonesia) tejopramono at viacampesina.org

Isabella Kenfield (US) isabella.kenfield at gmail.com

La Via Campesina
Via Campesina is an international movement of peasants, small- and
medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural
youth and agricultural workers. We are an autonomous, pluralist and
multicultural movement, independent of any political, economic, or other
type of affiliation. Born in 1993, La Via Campesina now gathers about
150 organisations in 70 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

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Phone : +62-21-7991890, Fax : +62-21-7993426

E-mail: viacampesina at viacampesina.org ; Website: http://www.viacampesina.org


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-- 

Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
Center for Encounter and active Non-Violence
Wolfgangerstr. 26, A-4820 Bad Ischl, Austria,
fon: +43 6132 24590, Informationen/ informations,
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