-Caveat Lector- Here is a rather bland Wash.Post article about "Terminator" crops. The part about spreading to wild plants is alarming. Of course the corporations are "confident" that is no threat. Makes me feel so secure, don't you? flw Sowing Dependency or Uprooting Hunger? By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, February 8, 1999; Page A09 After focusing for decades on getting crops to grow bigger and better, agricultural scientists are turning their talents to a more difficult task: making plants that kill their own offspring. Depending on who's talking, the quest is either a sincere effort to solve the world hunger crisis or a corporate plot to impose economic slavery on the world's farmers. So far, the so-called Terminator system of seed-killing genes exists in just a few experimental tobacco plants in U.S. greenhouses and is at least five years away from being commercialized anywhere. Yet the debate over the technology has already become so polarized and emotional that farmers in India recently went on a rampage and burned several fields of crops rumored to harbor the deadly genes. The "Technology Protection System" (TPS, dubbed "Terminator" by critics) was developed by scientists at the Agriculture Department and the Delta & Pine Land Co., a Mississippi seed company that is being purchased by St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. The goal was to help U.S. biotechnology companies retain control over their patented, genetically engineered crops by making it impossible for farmers to collect the seeds from those crops for replanting the following year. Seed saving is a tradition in much of the world, but the practice makes it difficult for seed companies to recoup their research and development costs. TPS is a clever, three-gene system that forces plants to produce a toxin that is fatal to their own seeds, compelling farmers to buy new seed each year. The poisoning--by a plant toxin that is harmless to people--occurs late enough in the season so the seed retains its value as a source of food or oil. The tricky part, said TPS co-inventor Mel Oliver of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Lubbock, Tex., was to make a plant that kills its own seeds when growing in farmers' fields, but makes healthy seeds when growing on company land. That is necessary if the company is to grow multiple generations of the plants as a source of seeds to sell. To do so, the researchers manipulated the plant's DNA so the seed-suicide gene was under the control of yet another genetic mechanism, which suppresses the death gene indefinitely. In the suppressed state the plants produce fertile seeds, and the company can replant those seeds to grow more plants to make more seeds for sale. Just before they are sold, however, the seeds are sprayed with a chemical "inducer" (in one version, it's the antibiotic tetracycline), which overcomes the suppressor, waking up the dormant seed-killing gene. The seeds grow into plants that make any of several seed toxins, such as the appropriately acronymed Ribosomal Inhibitory Protein (RIP). Several international agricultural and environmental organizations have been raising alarms about Terminator, saying it directly threatens the more than 1 billion families in the developing world who are subsistence farmers unable to afford new seed each year. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a foundation-supported global consortium that develops new seed varieties for the Third World, has declared that it will not incorporate the technology into any of its seeds. "Once you've got farmers hooked on it and they've lost their traditional [crop] varieties, it is very hard to go back again," said Geoffrey Hawtin, director general of CGIAR's International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Rome. "Then these companies will be sitting pretty on a captive market." Other groups have called for a ban on the technology. "It is a threat globally to food security, which is a basic human right," said Mark Ritchie, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. Critics also worry that pollen from Terminator plants could fertilize nearby native plants and make them sterile, triggering an epidemic of crop sterility. Recently, warnings to this effect have been popping up on Web sites and in seed catalogs and agricultural newsletters. "Plant diversity, world food supply at risk. Terminator seed technology threatens farmers worldwide," read a special alert inserted in the spring 1999 catalog of the Burlington, Vt.-based Gardener's Supply Co., recently mailed to about 1 million customers. But supporters see in Terminator a possible solution to Third World hunger and poverty, which could become more widespread in coming years as populations expand and farmlands are lost. "The rhetoric has been extremely alarmist without looking at the whole situation," Oliver said. Henry Shands, assistant administrator for gene resources at the USDA's ARS, said foreign farmers need to recognize that biotech companies are not going to export their best-engineered varieties to parts of the world where patent protection is weak unless they can be assured that farmers won't resell or replant harvested seeds. TPS, he and others said, will give poor farmers access to better seeds. "This is going to give the subsistence farmer a superior crop," said Harry Collins, Delta & Pine Land's vice president for technology transfer. "He will get a crop that allows him not only to subsist, but to become productive." The situation will resemble that with corn in this country, Collins said. Scientists 40 years ago developed hybrid corn that has better annual yields but produces lousy seeds, and farmers have found it worthwhile to buy fresh corn seed every year to get the better crop. As for getting "hooked," others said, it would not be economical to put TPS in every, or even most, seed varieties, so farmers will always have the option of switching back to nonengineered seeds. Supporters also note that the technology is intended for self-pollinating crops that rarely mate with neighboring plants. Even if pollen grains bearing the toxin genes were to fertilize some nearby plants, those plants would themselves become sterile and could not spread the death trait in their seeds. Indeed, Collins said, if TPS were incorporated into other genetically engineered crops already in use--such as those endowed with genes that make them tolerant to weed killers--it could eliminate one of the big fears that activists have expressed about those gene-altered crops: that they will spread their foreign genes to native plants, making "superweeds." "It's a plus as far as biosafety goes," Collins said. "The system would stop any outcrossing within one generation." Several companies are now rushing to create similar systems for controlling gene activity in plants, not only to trigger seed sterilization but to turn on growth-enhancing or disease-resistance genes just when they are needed. These too have stirred concerns among critics, who fear that crops will be designed to respond only to fertilizers and chemicals made by the company that sold the seed, as a means of gaining corporate market share. But farmers are very astute about the bottom line, Shands said, and won't buy products that don't serve them well. There's no need for a gene war of words, he said. "The marketplace will sort it out." © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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 credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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