The war over 'suicide seeds'
Monday, March 13, 2006
The Calgary Herald
By Kelly Patterson

Some see them as the seeds of salvation, bringing bumper crops to millions of struggling farmers.
Others call them "suicide seeds" that could decimate the world's food supply, sentencing billions to starvation.
They're the so-called terminators -- a new breed of seed designed to produce plants incapable of reproducing.
The seeds were invented to ensure farmers of genetically modified crops buy seed every year rather than growing from their own seed stock.
Industry giants such as Syngenta and DuPont, which together account for almost 20 per cent of the world seed trade, have already taken out patents on the technology, which is still in development.
Terminator seeds are also meant to stop genetically modified crops from contaminating neighbouring fields -- an increasingly common problem in North America.
But critics fear terminator's sterility trait will, like other traits from genetically modified crops, escape into nature, threatening the world's food supply. They also fear the cost of buying seed every year will break the backs of farmers, especially in the developing world.
India and Brazil have banned the seeds, and a host of other developing countries vehemently oppose the technology, facing off against countries such as Canada and the United States, which have embraced genetically modified crops.
Genetically enhanced crops offer farmers "higher yields, more efficient production and less disease," argues Harry Collins, a geneticist who heads the sterile-seed effort at the U.S.-based Delta and Pine Land Company, which pioneered the process in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1998.
Such crops can help small-scale farmers make the leap to large-scale production, he says.
Collins also says genetically modified crops can open up previously barren land to cultivation.
But seed companies must ensure they'll be paid for their work or future innovation will be doomed, the industry argues.
Collins says fears the sterility trait will spread are far-fetched, and points out such scenarios are purely "theoretical" since the seeds have yet to be field-tested.
The fate of terminator seeds hangs in the balance as the 188 members of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity decide whether to give the green light to further development of the technology at a meeting March 20 to 31 in Brazil.
Six years ago, a report for the convention effectively banned the seeds, calling on governments to block the field-testing and sale of any form of the technology, pending research into its implications.
Canada has played a prominent part in opposing the ban: A memo leaked to the media last year showed Canada planned to overturn the blanket ban and would veto "any other outcome" at a key 2005 meeting. (Canada backed down in the face of an international outcry.)
Critics say the blanket ban was finally overturned this January after Australia, backed by Canada and New Zealand, successfully pushed for evaluations to be allowed on a case-by-case basis (the U.S. is not a convention member).
Infiltration of genetically modified crops is a headache not only for organic farmers but also for any producer who exports to markets such as the European Union, where regulators have for years blocked genetically modified imports.
But terminator seeds would put an end to such problems, Collins argues. It's a "bio-safety tool. Some people have said transgenics can spread to wild species. If (terminators) were effective, it should prevent that from happening."
Critics scoff at that reasoning.
"The companies that caused the contamination -- who told us there would be no contamination because they had good scientific practices -- are now saying, 'Trust us, we've got the solution to the problem we caused,'" retorts Pat Mooney, of the Ottawa-based ETC Group, a conservation watchdog organization.
Critics are even more worried about the risk of genetic mutation or a failure of the intricate process by which sterility is induced.
Citing scientific studies that have noted problems such as the "temporary silencing of a gene" in other genetically modified plants, Lucy Sharratt of the Ottawa-based Ban Terminator campaign argues that "terminator wouldn't work 100 per cent."
Plants in which the technology fails could introduce impaired reproductive systems into nature, she says. Collins concedes safety is a concern.
"I'm not willing to concede that it's the only important thing, but it is important that we have a high rate of sterility."
That's all the more reason for the UN body meeting later this month to allow further testing, Collins argues.
"We don't know whether (the seeds) would be 100 per cent sterile . . . Until we've had an opportunity to test it, we can't know that. We simply ask for it to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. That can't be done if there's a ban on it."
Giuliano Tolusso, senior policy analyst for Agriculture and Agri-food Canada, which has pushed hard for the UN to allow further terminator testing, echoes that argument.
"There's always a risk with any technology. You have to (assess) that before you make a decision whether or not to use it," he says.
But the terminator debate is not just about the science. It's also about control of the food supply.
"This is not about helping farmers make a living," says Colleen Ross, an Ottawa Valley farmer and women's president of the National Farmers Union, which strongly opposes the technology. "It's about corporate control over seeds and ultimately over food."
The world's largest peasant farmer organization, La Via Campesina, which represents about 80 million farmers worldwide, vehemently opposes terminator seeds.
One spokesman recently predicted that if the UN allowed "case-by-case assessment of terminator, it means farmers will be carried off the land coffin by coffin."
Indigenous groups have also condemned the technology as an affront to their cultures, in which fertility in nature is revered.
As for farmers in the developed world, no one knows how they feel.
Agriculture Canada's Tolusso admits the government has not asked farmers what they think.
Defenders of the technology say the market will show whether farmers take to terminator. If the popularity of genetically modified crops so far is any measure, the sterile seeds would dominate farmland across the country: Already last year, about 40 per cent of all soybeans and corn grown in Ontario were genetically modified; the same was true in Quebec, according to Statistics Canada.
Ann Clark, a plant-agriculture specialist at the University of Guelph, says it is "disturbing in the extreme that the Canadian government . . . would be taking the lead on this" without consulting farmers.
"In the future," she warns, "a handful of companies could be controlling the entire seed supply of all crops via vehicles such as terminator.
"The implications are absolutely staggering."

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