Corporate Biopiracy and the Terminator Seed

“At a February meeting of scientific advisors to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Canada did the dirty work for the US government and the biotech industry by drafting a recommendation to allow for the field testing and commercial use of Terminator seeds – essentially undoing the precautionary language now in place at the United Nations.  Fortunately, the Canadian position was not accepted at the February meeting, but we expect to see strong pressure by industry in the coming months to win acceptance of Terminator seeds.”

“Famines happen when we play games with the food supply”

attempted to contact the offices of Senate Agriculture chairman Saxby Chamblis (R. GA), and Rep. David Scott, (D. GA) who serves on the House Agriculture Committee, but could find nobody at either office who would talk, or even admit they knew anything about “terminator seed” technology.  This is not a bad time to make your own representative in Congress aware of the danger of US support for deploying terminator seed technology.

“Famines don’t occur in today’s world…because of natural disasters” concludes brother Michael Dorsey at Dartmouth.  “They don’t happen because there are too many people.  They happen because of political and economic decisions [when] people with power decide that those without it don’t eat.  They happen when we play games with the food supply….  It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with a scenario where corporate transgenic crops and terminator technology lead to disastrous food shortages for tens or hundreds of millions of people… This is very dangerous stuff.”

In his last week at the Department of Homeland Security, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge talked about how easy it would be for “terrorists” to tamper with the nation’s food supply.  We at think he was kidding.  It seems safe to assume that like the rest of the Minister of Fear’s terror alerts, this was intended to direct our attention away from something a lot more substantial, like the very real risks and consequences of corporate genetic tampering with the planet’s food security.  Should we hear the words “terrorism” and “food supply” in the same paragraph any time in the near future we will be reminded of the little man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.  He would tell us to pay no attention to the patent lawyers, genetic engineers and corporate biopirates behind the curtain, busy hijacking the planet’s food supply.

Additional resources on biopiracy and the commodification of nature:

Interview with Vandana Shiva The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization

There are about a dozen speeches by Vandana Shiva, freely downloadable online.

Article Appeared @http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/corporate-biopiracy-and-terminator-seed

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