CORPORATE CLAIMS TO END TERMINATOR SEEDS BELIED

by Someshwar Singh

Geneva, 16 May 2000 -- Despite promises by the world's leading biotech companies - in the face of mounting public protest - to back away from commercialization of Terminator and Traitor (genetic trait control) seeds, work on this technology continues unabated, warns a Canada-based NGO.

"After Monsanto and AstraZeneca publicly vowed not to commercialize suicide seeds in 1999, governments and civil society organizations were lulled into thinking that the crisis had passed," says the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) in its March/April Communique. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

Without government action to firmly reject Terminator and Traitor, these technologies will soon be available commercially, warns RAFI, with potentially disastrous consequences for farmers, food security and biodiversity.

RAFI has also identified a number of upcoming opportunities where governments can challenge Traitor technology and call for a ban of Terminator.

Traitor technology or "genetic use restriction technology" (GURTs) refers to the use of an external chemical "inducer" to turn on or off a plant's genetic traits - the same mechanism used to control seed sterility in Terminator plants.

In 1999, RAFI identified over 30 patent claims related to Terminator and Traitor technology involving virtually all the Gene Giants. Many more patent claims on Traitor technology have been issued in recent months.

"Chemically dependent seeds - the goal of Traitor technology - will hold farmers and food security hostage to a handful of multinational enterprises. National agricultural production could become wholly dependent upon foreign exports of critical chemical inducers.

"Entire countries could be forced to surrender national seed sovereignty and be held in biological bondage if governments decided to use the technology to enforce trade sanctions or resolve trade disputes."

Quoting Econexus, a UK-based NGO, RAFI says Zeneca received approval from the UK government in 1999 to conduct a field release of genetic trait control in tobacco and potato plants. The field test is designed to test the efficacy of inducible promoters. In the presence of the chemical inducer, ethanol, the tobacco plants are expected to demonstrate an easily identifiable phenotype, such as leaf curling.

According to RAFI, the Director General of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Jacques Diouf has declared his opposition to Terminator in a recent interview. Diouf pointed out that the technology would affect farmers both in the North and the South.

Diouf's public rejection of Terminator reverses earlier statements by one high-ranking FAO official, RAFI notes. The positive change could be attributed, in part, to the letter-writing campaign of Global Response (a US-based non-profit organization) whose 4,000 members in forty countries wrote to the FAO chief last year asking him to oppose the Terminator as a matter of global food security.

In publicly rejecting Terminator, RAFI says FAO's Diouf has come to the defense of the 1.4 billion people who depend on farm-saved seed for their survival. "As the United Nation's voice for global food security, and in the context of its Food for All campaign, FAO member states should now consider a formal resolution to reject Terminator."

In 1999, two major Gene Giants, each of whom hold their own Terminator patents, publicly vowed not to commercialize genetic seed sterilization technology. The R&D Director of Zeneca said in February 1999, "Zeneca is not developing any system that would stop farmers growing second-generation seed, nor do we have any intention of doing so."

Similarly, in October 1999, Monsanto's CEO Robert Shapiro pledged, "not to commercialize gene protection system that render seed sterile." In making that announcement, Shapiro also added that Monsanto did not own its own seed sterilization technology.

"This is false, " says RAFI. In fact, Monsanto's in-house Terminator technology is described in the company's patent, WO 9744465, "Method for Controlling Seed Germination Using Soybean ACYL COA Oxidase Sequences" published 27 November 1997 under the Patent Cooperation Treaty In Europe.

Moreover, Zeneca's R&D director wrote in 1999 that terminator was "one piece of technology we did not want to take forward, and the project was stopped in 1992." But ExSeeds Genetics, an AstraZeneca joint venture with Iowa State University won a new seed sterilization patent as recently as August 11, 1997, based on a claim made in 1995 - three years after AstraZeneca reportedly abandoned its research on genetic seed sterilization!

Not only are corporate commitments to disavow Terminator short-lived, they are also meaningless, says RAFI, in the light of rapid corporate take-overs. Monsanto and AstraZeneca, for example, have each merged with other companies since they pledged not to commercialize suicide seeds.

On December 2, 1999 Novartis and AstraZeneca announced they would spin-off and merge their agro-chemical and seed divisions to create the world's biggest agribusiness corporation - to be named "Syngenta."

On December 19, 1999 Monsanto announced that it would merge with drug industry giant Pharmacia & Upjohn to create a new company, named Pharmacia, with combined annual sales of $17 billion. The merged company will spin-off its agricultural chemical and besieged biotech business, which will keep the name Monsanto and headquarters in St. Louis (USA).

The world's largest cotton seed company - Delta & Pine Land - which controls an estimated 71% of the North American cotton seed market and is rapidly expanding in Asia, is reportedly "moving ahead to commercialize Terminator." According to its Vice-president to technology transfer, Harry Collins, "We never really slowed down. We're on target, moving ahead to commercialize it. We never really backed off."

According to RAFI, the lessons learned over the past two years show that:

* We can't depend on the goodwill of corporations to prevent Terminator seeds from becoming a commercial reality. Without government action to ban Terminator and Traitor, these technologies will be commercialized.

* Terminator and Traitor technologies are not limited to a single patent, nor is the research confined to one or two companies. Although Delta& Pine Land is currently the high-profile crusader for Terminator, the goal of genetic trait control is industry wide.

* It is important to keep pressure on the US government and USDA's (Department of Agriculture) disgraceful support of Terminator. Many prominent agricultural bodies, such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and Wageningen University, have already concluded that genetic seed sterilization is an unacceptable goal for public agricultural research. Public opposition must force USDA to reach the same conclusion. But even if the USDA ultimately surrenders its Terminator patent, it will not prevent commercialization of the technology.

Though Terminator has captured the spotlight, RAFI says the Traitor technology may prove far more insidious because the Gene Giants will argue convincingly that genetic trait control brings positive benefits for farmers (the option of picking from a menu of value-added traits.)

If companies can successfully engineer seeds to perform only with the application of a proprietary pesticide or fertilizer, it means that the giant corporations will dramatically increase sales of their proprietary inputs. This could reinforce chemical dependencies in agriculture that are hazardous to farmers and the environment.

An especially disturbing scenario described in some patents, says RAFI, is the potential for external chemicals to disable a plant's natural function's - the plants ability to fight disease, for instance. The long-term implications, both for farmers and for national seed sovereignty, are sobering.

Outlining its own strategy, RAFI suggests the pressure points for political action, are, first and foremost, with national governments around the world. Second, pressure should be applied at key international fora such as through the Biosafety protocol at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), CBW (Chemicals and Biological Weapons) Treaty negotiations in Geneva, and at the World Trade Organization in TRIPS.

"If political initiatives can be taken in these fora- as well as at FAO and the GFAR (Global Forum on Agricultural Research) in Dresden (Germany, May 21-23, 2000), both the corporations and the US government will have to retreat," RAFI says. (SUNS4669)