21st Century Vision: Seeds of conflict

People power can win.

Last week the issue of Terminator crops (or “suicide seeds”) reached the negotiating floor of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting in Curitiba, Brazil. Pioneered by companies such as Monsanto, Terminator crops are genetically modified to create sterile seeds at harvest so that farmers must buy new seed every season. They may also be used to introduce specific traits only triggered by the application of proprietary chemicals patented by the same companies. If Terminator were commercialised, it has been calculated that the extra seed costs for farmers in just seven countries could exceed $1.2bn per year, or about half the yearly Canadian aid budget.

Yet this is just a fraction of the full financial windfall the seed industry could hope to extract from farmers if they could apply Terminator technology to all their seed lines worldwide. This figure is thought likely to run to billions of extra dollars per year. In Brazil, host country to the CBD, soybean farmers could face US$407m in extra seed costs if they were unable to re-use harvested seed. Even Canadian wheat farmers, whose government is one of the leading proponents of Terminator at the CBD, could be stung with an annual bill of US$85m.

Four rich countries promoted "case by case risk assesment" for Terminator technology: Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK (supported on the sidelines by the US, which is not a party to the CBD). This "case by case" clause would open the door to field trialling and commercialisation of sterile seed technology.

Roberto Requião, Governor of Brazil's Paraná state, opened the CBD conference with a strong condemnation of Terminator: “Suicide seeds are the next step in the transnational industry's strategy to control the production and commercial use of seeds," he told the opening plenary of 3000 delegates. "It is one more step by transnational industry to obtain total control over the production of grain."

But in a development which ought to hearten those seeking to give full effect to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation or Kyoto Climate Change Treaties, the “terminators” failed. Following last Friday’s decision by the CBD to refuse to end the moratorium on Terminator technology, Francisca Rodriguez of Via Campesina, a worldwide movement of peasant farmers, said: "This is a momentous day for the 1.4 billion poor people worldwide, who depend on farmer saved seeds. Terminator seeds are a weapon of mass destruction and an assault on our food sovereignty.”

Benedikt Haerlin, Director of Save our Seeds and the Foundation on Future of Farming, Germany, said: “This victory today marks the beginning of the end of Terminator technologies, not so much because of the text adopted and rejected, but because it has been won by a uniquely broad and diverse coalition of peasants, farmers, social movements and environmental organisations who are supported by the vast majority of delegates.”