-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- Dave Hartley http://www.asheville-computer.com/dave Terminator and Traitor Technologies Target Global Seed and Food Supply Part II: Traitor Technology Copyright ©2000 by Geri Guidetti All Rights Reserved This Update may be reposted or reprinted intact and unedited only, including contacts. Nature can be cruel sometimes. With broad geographic brushstrokes, floods, severe droughts, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions can wipe out the food and drinkable water supplies for communities or whole regions in hours, even minutes. Within days and weeks following a disaster, competition for whatever resources remain can be fierce, even deadly. The formerly complex rules of community life are quickly simplified to one: Food is Power. Whoever has it, survives. Whoever controls it has virtually complete power over those who don't. Throughout human history, man has learned to manipulate that simple, natural truth to starve out pockets of ideological resistance, to gain control of strategic ports, or to turn whole populations into serfs for a handful of powerful masters. Last week I discussed efforts and patents by our own U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and an ever-smaller handful of global gene giants to create and commercialize genetic seed technologies designed to render food and fiber seeds sterile. The seed embryos are genetically programmed to commit suicide. These first generation Terminator technologies are designed to prevent farmers from raising and saving their own seed for future crops. Please note, from my original, June 1998 Terminator article (http://www.arkinstitute.com), that the USDA clearly expects to profit monetarily from this patent. Dependence for food seed on a handful of powerful global giants and a U.S. agency ensures profits, but strips farmers and, eventually the people they feed, of food security and freedom. Yet, the now 30-plus Terminator-type technology patents are apparently not enough profit insurance for these powerful multinational seed and agrochemical companies or, for that matter, for the USDA. It has now been learned that two more seed sterilization patents were issued to the USDA and development partner, Delta & Pine Land. Patent No. 5,925,808 was issued on July 20, 1999 and patent No. 5,977,441 on November 2, 1999. According to RAFI Executive Director, Pat Mooney (http://www.RAFI.org): "The U.S. government is advancing research and squandering taxpayer dollars on a technology that has been universally condemned because it is bad for farmers, food security, and biodiversity. It's an egregious misallocation of public resources for the sole purpose of maximizing seed industry profits." RAFI Programme Officer, Silvia Ribeiro, commented: "Despite mounting opposition from national governments, United Nations' agencies, farmers, scientists, and civil society organizations around the world, USDA continues to ignore the public outcry at home (Maryland just introduced a bill to ban the Terminator this month) and abroad." Meet the Traitors If you think it is difficult to imagine a more ruthless technology than the Terminator, meet the Traitors, a collection of (so far) 29 patents that introduce genetic traits to food plants that make those plants dependent on the external application of a corporation's proprietary chemicals to bring in a crop. What a perfect business plan! Sell them the seed, and then you get to sell them all of your own chemicals, too! If they don't buy and apply the chemicals, they don't eat! Here is a look at some of the Traitors: *AstraZeneca's Verminator II patent, WO 9735983 (The Verminator got its name because a rat gene was used to create specific genetic controls in the plant): Plants' genes are modified to create chemical junkies. Plants will need continuing exposure to specific chemicals to germinate and grow. Killer genes will direct the seed or plant to commit suicide unless the killer compound, barnase, is inactivated by another pair of genes turned on by the company's chemical(s). The junkies must have their chemical fix or they die. The fix is only temporary, and it is inherited. Seed saved from these plants are also junkies. No chemicals, no food. The company says the technology can be used in all plants, especially in wheat, barley, rice, maize (corn), apples, peaches, pears, carrots, cabbage, onions, lettuce, melons, bananas, strawberries, tomatoes, tobacco, sunflowers, canola and sugar beets. They said they will seek patent approval in 77 countries. *Seed and chemical giant, Novartis, has patents that also create chemically dependent plants, but with a different, perhaps more sinister twist. They target plants' innate, natural pest and disease resistance genes, eleven of them, and then genetically modify them so they can be turned on or off externally. "...Novartis explicitly claims the introduction of traitor traits by the deactivation of essential, natural resistance functions of plants. By linking this deactivation to inducible promoters, patented plants can be sold that will not exhibit natural positive traits like germination and pest resistance unless exposed to a chemical. Novartis blandly calls it 'inactivation of endogenous regulation.' According to the company, the technique results in plants in which 'genes which are natively regulated can be regulated exclusively by the application to the plant of a chemical regulator.' In other words, the plants are effectively drug addicted." (See reference #1 at end of article.) Traits that Novartis proposes for chemical control are germination, insect resistance, herbicide resistance, flowering, nutritional qualities and flavor. (Underlined for emphasis Will innate, natural flavor and nutrition be disabled unless the plants are continuously dressed with proprietary chemicals?) Novartis's patents are also designed for most vegetables, some grains, clover, alfalfa, tobacco and cotton. (Underlined for emphasis Note that pasture and hay crops are now also targets for the creation of chemical dependencies in plants.) So far, patents for this family of technologies have been issued in Australia, Poland, Portugal, the USA. Patents are pending in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Israel, Norway, New Zealand, South Africa and many others. A total of 76 countries are targeted. The Bigger Picture Raises Many Questions Terminator technologies were designed to ensure that farmers must come back, year in and year out to the company to buy seed, but growing seed is a huge task for these companies, a task fraught with all kinds of weather, transportation and handling challenges. Why bother? What if they could get you, the farmer, to grow your own seed for future crops but still have to pay them for it every year? What if they had a way to hook you permanently to their pipeline of chemicals? This is now possible with Traitor technologies. The combined technologies will unwittingly ensnare many farmers, especially those highly targeted but not as well informed, in Second and Third World countries, in a tangled web of chemical purchases, spray schedules and licensing fees. U.S. farmers are already reeling from the high cost of hybrid, genetically engineered seed and chemical inputs. In bad weather years when there is little or no harvest, they teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. Many are already bankrupt and have been forced to sell out to corporate, factory farms. These technologies will drive the nails in the coffin of the family farmer. There are many uglier, potentially more dangerous sides to this seed issue that few are talking about yet. Every gene creates a protein. Many of the genes inserted into plant genomes to create Traitor and Terminator technologies create proteins that have simply never been tested as food in humans! No one can say that they are safe for human consumption! Most human allergens are proteins. If a protein is recognized by a person's immune system as "foreign", the body launches an attack which many of us recognize as allergies. Some of the most severe attacks are life threatening anaphylaxis and asthma. How will we know which food or food component in our complex diets of fast and processed foods caused the illness or death of a child? What if severe reactions and deaths take months or years to occur as our bodies build up levels of novel metabolic byproducts of these chemicals that we are unable to excrete? Will we merely say that serious allergies and allergic asthma are sadly becoming more common? A sign of the times? What about the potential carcinogenicity of grains, fruits and vegetables that have now been bathed throughout their entire growth cycles with a vast array of herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics and even fertilizers, the gene/agrochemical giants' "saviors" that will remove the artificial locks they have placed on natural, God-given germination, disease resistance, nutrition and flavor? What about the effects of all of these novel proteins and chemicals on the farm animals who will eat the engineered clover and alfalfa that are bathed in proprietary chemicals? What about the run-off from these pastures and farms, run-off that ends up in our already highly contaminated creeks, rivers and drinking water. Given our own USDA is the co-originator and has been granted a profitable patent on at least three of these technologies, my guess is these will be commercialized without doing a single study on potential health and environmental effects. One last big unknown: many biologists have come forward worldwide to say that there is a clear danger of pollen from these plants infecting related species in neighboring fields. If you refuse to grow their seed, a percentage of the pollen will get your plants anyway. If it's a Terminator, your seed will be terminated for next year. If it's a Traitor, perhaps it will be disabled, made suddenly disease susceptible, and languish or die. We will not know how high the frequency of this genetic drift is until it happens. This has already happened using other technologies. Here's another thought - speculation - that we should consider. What if the pollens of natural, open-pollinated, non-hybrid seeds are portrayed to government bodies, in corporate PR and in legal complaints as "contaminants" of a corporation's "better", genetically engineered seed? What if they are able to convince governments that native crops grown by local farmers now threaten the patented, proprietary genes growing in Traitor and Terminator fields ? Who do you think will win such legal and legislative battles? The little guy with patches on his jeans or the multinational with the deep pockets in his? Will our natural heritage - our wealth, our only real food security, our non-hybrid seeds - be taken away from us? Will smaller seed companies be told they can no longer grow and sell it? The latter is probably moot. Most small seed companies have now been bought out by the big ones. Consolidation continues. It will be very easy to engineer the disappearance of the rest of our natural seed heritage from the catalogs and stores. This is madness! It deserves your questions, your study, your opinions. Here are some addresses and resources you might find useful: RAFI, the organization that is taking the international lead on this issue: http://www.RAFI.org is an outstanding resource. Emails and phone numbers here, too. Or , by mail: RAFI International Office, 110 Osborne Street, Suite 202, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3L 1Y5 Canada Secretary Dan Glickman, USDA, 200-A Whitten Bldg., 1400 Independence Ave.,SW, Washington, DC 20250 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: 202-720-3631 Fax: 202-720-2166 The Ark Institute, PO Box 142, Oxford, OH 45056. ***The Ark Institute will provide free non-hybrid, open pollinated vegetable and grain seed to individual and community growers as part of our preservation work. Please contact us by email at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or at the address, above. Put "Free Seed" on the subject line or at the top of the envelope and we will contact you with details. Thank you.......Geri Guidetti, The Ark Institute <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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