Corporate Biopiracy and the Terminator Seed

“The problem with farmers exchanging seeds, and saving seeds and planting seeds,” says Michael Dorsey, a professor of International Environmental Policy at Dartmouth University, “is that corporations don’t make any money off it.”

The latest move in the decades-long campaign by the corporate “life-science industry” to horn in on this ancient and unprofitable practice is the patenting and introduction of the so-called “terminator seed.” Arguably the most fiendish product yet devised by corporate genetic engineers, and in the United States, the least known, terminator gene technology prevents this year’s crop from producing next year’s seed, thus obliging otherwise ungrateful farmers to return to distributors for each year’s seed.  As patent holder, the US Department of Agriculture intends to license and implement this obscene technology worldwide, applying it to food crops including maize, wheat and rice, which are the staples of much of the developing world.  The aim of US corporate biopirates is eventually to make impossible the saving and preserving of next year’s seed from this year’s crop anyplace on earth, while guaranteeing themselves a no-risk profit any time a farmer plants anywhere in the world.

“They are putting the entire planet’s food supply at risk for what could potentially be a vast profit.”

“With genetic use restriction technology, the corporate name for the ‘terminator seed’ Monsanto and the other life science companies,” according to Dorsey, “are engaged in a set of ethically and scientifically questionable maneuvers that aim to capture and control agriculture on a global scale.  They are putting the entire planet’s food supply at risk for what could be a potentially vast profit.”

How has such a thing become possible?

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