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Terminator Gene Ban Suggested in Canada
innocent_white_lamb writes "A member of the Canadian Parliament has proposed legislation to outlaw the development and deployment of 'terminator genes' that would prevent seeds from germinating after a set span of time. This practice would require farmers to re-purchase seed every year instead of saving the seeds from last year's crop. The legislation is not expected to pass due to opposition from the Agriculture Minister. 'There is also an issue with the technology, which is based on a complicated five-gene construct. It is "inevitable" it will fail and could harm biodiversity, said Lucy Sharratt, co-ordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, which backs the ban. CFIA argues exactly the opposite, saying "the terminator approach provides an excellent method to protect against transference of novel traits to other crops and plant species."'"
is going to harm biodiversity? IT CAN'T PROPAGATE.
This for 1. sounds almost like a bad vendor lock-in and 2. Any time you alter something, you have the possibility of a long term result you couldn't plan for.
Hmmm. Genetically modifying plant DNA so that they stop producing seeds after a generation. Why does that sound like a really really bad idea.
Isn't making the plants that grow from the seeds produce seeds that are sterile good enough?
If I buy a seed I should be able to plant it as far away from when I bought it as I'd like.
If you explain to the farmer that the plant cannot be used for seed it is up to the farmer and the open market to decide if that is the right approach. If the farmer cannot afford the seed then they will have to use non engineered seed and the companies will have to decide if it is worth it.
The industry of growing crops has been around for thousands of years... of course farmers shouldn't have to re-buy seeds. Using last year's seeds/etc is how the small farmer can even bear to get a living against a corporate farm.
stuff |
.. DRM for seeds.
-- lol pwned
It seems like with the insanity the US government promotes with corporations gone wild and the destruction of human rights, it will be up to the rest of the world to preserve civilization. Maybe once the whole house of cards collapses the rest of the world can then help us fund our rebuilding, a reverse Marshall Plan.
And I avoided making any reference to man-eating venus flytraps looking for Sarah Connor! Yay--er, crap.
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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So *THAT*s why a girl can't get pregnant from giving a blowjob!
You mean Heroes lied to me?
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
It might cross breed with normal seed and terminate it. What you would be left with is nothing but what the friendly multinational has to offer each year. That might not be good for you.
The whole "rape seed" Monsanto insanity is a good primer on these matters. An normal farmer in Canada was forced to destroy his crops because they were contaminated by neighbors using Monsanto seed. The US has pushed these practices onto the Iraqi puppet government, so you can see where they would really like things to go.
There are fundamental problems with seed patents that need to be corrected. The contamination issue is one that makes the whole idea look foolish and economically harmful.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Monsanto is the world's largest seed company (after its January 2005 acquisition of Seminis for US$1.4 billion).
The company's 2004 pro forma seed revenues (including Seminis) were US$2.8 billion.
Monsanto's GM crops and traits accounted for almost 90% of the total GM crop area worldwide in 2004
Monsanto controls 41% of the global maize market and over one-fourth of the commercial soybean market (both conventional and GM seed).
Monsanto and Terminator
This is old news... Like 2000 old news...
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Actually, he won, partially, and is firing back with another case due in 2008.
Tm
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Doesn't this come down to a total cost of ownership decision that any business should make:
Option A: I buy the traditional option, I lose X% to various natural hardships, I replant the seed I keep back next year.
Option B: I buy the new version, I lose a smaller Y% to various natural hardships, I have to buy the seed again next year.
If my profit increases due to decreased loss by more than the cost of annual purchases, I buy the annual purchase option. If my profit increases less than the cost of annual purchases, I keep doing it the old way.
Cheesy as it feels to see science advance to the point where this happens with crops like it already does with other man made commodities, are the "poor farmers" really being forced in to anything worse [in terms of that business model]? They can still buy traditional seeds, right?
Now there's the bigger issue with whether we want something in our food chain that turns off the ability to reproduce (even if there's no science for it being passed on, that alone should make awesome advertising for those who don't go with it). There's also the bigger issue with this gene getting passed on to other farmers and their crops getting wiped out - unfortunately, thus far, legislation seems to be siding with the seed producers and not those who fall victim to cross polinization thanks to lobbying funds etc.
Still, in terms of the "poor farmers" - unless there's some kind of monopoly I'm missing, why can't they just not buy the product if they don't like the terms?
That makes me wonder where humans went wrong.
Seriously, passing a law that requires farmers to re-purchase natural seeds every year??? When did people get so obsessed with money that they stopped caring about the people that they live with on this planet?
This kind of shit is what sends me into a spiral of depression.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
People starve when you do. The free market is concerned with short term profit (the 10 to 30 years it takes to get filthy, stinkin' rich), not with the long term viability of our food supply. This doesn't mean socialism, but it sure has hell means regulation.
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It should not be banned only, it should be declared as crime against humanity.
Imagine a sudden, global catastrophe that would shut down global transportation, resources or access to harvest and distribute the "designer" seed...
Corporations want to send people for downloading music or copying a movie, but they are free to put in danger the food supply, that can potentially affect the survival of millions, so that the shareholders of one or a few companies can make more money?
I challenge any politician to explain the voters how is it more harmful to society to copy illegally a cultural product than putting in danger the food supply.
The bottom line here is that the only reason for the existance of the terminator gene in the first place is to squeeze more money out of farmers and control crops with their "intellectual property rights" bullshit. The only reason that the Agriculture Minister would be supporting this is because he is a Monsanto shill. This is really one case where what is good for the people and what is good for the corporations can be drawn in black and white. There is absolutely no other reason for the terminator gene to exist.
They've already declared music, writing, artwork, and source code to be "intellectual property." Next up will be genes and molecules, followed by plants and animals, air, water, you name it. Everything will have a monetary value and a corresponding license. Don't you just love commoditization?
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
encourage a lot more herbicide use, which kills off other species of plants by `accident'
This also breeds more resistant weeds, so eventually everyone is forced to use pesticide resistant seed ... owned by a single company!
There is also disturbing evidence of the resistance genes being passed directly into weeds from the crop. The mechanism is not understood.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
While I agree that the government should watch out for such abuses, this does not, by extension absolve corporations like Monsanto from responsibility for such an apparantly reckless action.
For example, if I make a decision to drive home drunk one night, that's a bad decision regardless of whether or not someone is there to enforce the law (i.e. I get caught), or even if there was an accident as a result.
no...it is not the corporate world's job to put greed above corporate responsibility
A goal is a dream with a deadline
The ultimate goal is to dominate and rule the whole world of seeds. While this may sound like a conspiracy theory, it is the only explanation that makes sense without thinking the Monsanto management has their head stuck up their arse.
The new Canadian law is exactly this - a lobby effort targeting at domination, against our environment.
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The creation and endorsement of terminator seeds is a crime against humanity. I cannot believe money and time were spent to develop this. These should be made illegal everywhere on this planet. We already have enough problems with dictators starving their populations for their political ends. Let's not give them anymore tools to do so.
Although plants who take on the gene will not produce offspring they can infect other plants through pollination. So if you're a farmer using unaltered seed and your neighbor is using the t-gene strain the chances are likely that some of his pollen will make some of your next year's crop seed worthless. You'll have a smaller crop because some of your last year plants produced seeds infected with the t-gene and those seeds won't germinate. More farmer's will be forced to buy seed and if they choose the t-gene type the problem grows. Personally I think farmers need a class action suit for damages. If their product infects my product in a negitve way why would I not be able to recover my losses?
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For an interesting look at the Monsanto history, GM foods, risks and impact across North America, I recommend you watch the documentary "The Future of Food" (torrent).
Description:
THE FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.
From the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada to the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, this film gives a voice to farmers whose lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by this new technology. The health implications, government policies and push towards globalization are all part of the reason why many people are alarmed by the introduction of genetically altered crops into our food supply.
Shot on location in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, THE FUTURE OF FOOD examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world's food system. The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture, placing organic and sustainable agriculture as real solutions to the farm crisis today.
IMDB link.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/harvest/
The PBS special HARVEST OF FEAR is also a good resource. I believe I watched a bit of THE FUTURE OF FOOD, and found it primarily biased against biotech, as you may surmise from the description. I don't think it's good for people new to the subject to watch because of this, though it is certainly worth watching.
I felt HARVEST OF FEAR is a better introductory documentary. It provided a better balanced documentary; every interview was countered with an opposing view. When I watched it, I felt that because of the balanced viewpoints, it helped lead viewers to pros and cons, rather than inundate the viewer with negativity.
In any case, I'm offering an alternative, and I hope anyone who watches one will watch the other.
...glad you saw it or I would have chimed in. The reason for terminator gene seeds is to establish food monopolies/cartels eventually, seeds are the first step and they really want to get this going in the developing world, lock in millions or billions *forever*. They are well on the way there already, this is obvious, along with trying to patent every possible conceivable living thing (and people think software patents are a bad idea), along with the ongoing scam and ripoff of privatization of drinking water supplies for the masses. Control the food and water and that's a *lot* of economic and political power. Add in control of energy, and you got most of the bases covered and can dictate directly or sub rosa from a few steps away from the public facing political puppets how you want society to act.
Remember, this is the same company that tried to corner old traditional Indian wheat with a "patent", never mind THOUSANDS of years of "prior art", and almost got away with it-this is how they think and act, these are their "corporate values". They are the MS, Enron and Haliburton of "food". If they are "for" something, you can bet the farm it isn't good for you, and only goes to insure vendor lockin and maximum profits. I farm and won't give them turkeys a single penny for anything.
Now, I think there's a place for some extremely regulated genetic engineering and I think it can be of some good benefit long term-but not that company, not what they do and with their track record, nope, as far as I am concerned they are just *creepy* weird. I mean bad news weird. Can't put it any better than that.
It seems entirely sensible to me to insert fail-safe control mechanisms into genetically engineered products: we want a way to limit the damage they can cause in the event that something bad happens. We do NOT want the uncontrolled spread of something that turns out to have been an environmental disaster. For for trains, the equivalent is the dead-man's-switch.
If this means that farmers can't grow plants from seeds then I for one am happy with this. And actually, I'd like multiple off switches so that we can be as certain as we can that we will be able to contain the inevitable failures.
Farmers do not have to use the genetic engineered varietals, they do so in the belief that they'll be getting a better return on investment than with a normal plant.
I say all this as a GM believer. I don't see any way through to feeding the world, except through the use of GM, so I'm pro GM.
Sidenote: Ooh, I feel a software patent coming on! I started with an analogy to using Break/Ctrl+Alt+Delete/Ctrl+C to stop run-away programs, but these take a positive action to stop the program, whereas failsafe mechanisms require an action to continue. In multithreaded or multiprocess software designed for multi-core processors, if some program goes awry, you want the parts of the program to stop: they should be designed so that without positive input from the controlling process they cease funtioning. For instance one embodiment of the present invention is a computing device programmed such that if the child computation of a parent computation fails to receive a heartbeat signal from the parent computation, or any computation acting in its stead, then said computation should end. Remember you read it here first, and prepare yourself to pay me billionz!!! Oops, forgot to file it, and now it's in the public domain.
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Monsanto has a long history of using a combination of tactics, bribery, force and unethical means to get their products sold world wide.
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This has apparently become a huge problem in developing countries like India where farmers are committing suicide in the thousands, because they are too poor to keep re-purchasing monsanto seeds every year - thanks to the terminator gene infested crops they do not germinate.
Contrary to what monsanto claims, the plants ability to resist pests and the use of pesticides has not declined.
In China, there have been huge uproars about how genetically modified Bt cotton, designed to control bollworm, is encouraging the spread of other types of insect pests. There has been a huge impact on the insect ecology, which is resulting in new problems for farmers.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/patent/chinacotto
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2011/stories/20
Don't forget, Monsanto was one of the companies who produced and supplied agent orange ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange ) during the vietnam war, and they wouldn't blink before screwing half the world if it profited them.