IT’S SPRING on the Prairies and that means billions of seeds are going into fields and gardens with the hope that they will germinate, grow into healthy plants and reproduce viable seeds in their turn.
This regeneration is at the heart of agriculture. It’s the cycle of life on which all of us depend for our food.
But this cycle could be broken if the harvest yielded seeds that did not germinate when resown the next spring. Imagine a technology deliberately designed to thwart natural regeneration in seeds. A Grinch with such a tool in hand could actually steal spring.
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Delegates at the recent meetings of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Curitiba, Brazil, were wrestling with such a Grinch. A range of technologies, dubbed terminator technologies but officially labelled Genetic Use Restriction Technologies or GURTs, have been developed and patented by the major seed corporations: Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont and others.
Governments agreed to a de facto moratorium on field testing and commercializing terminator seeds in 1998. But due to pressure from Canada, New Zealand and Australia, the issue was back on the table at this session.
It’s easy to see the potential benefits of sterile seed varieties for the companies developing them. Terminator seeds have a built-in patent protection with no expiry date. Since they cannot be reused, the seller will be spared the legal costs of prosecuting farmers who might be tempted to reseed their harvested grain without paying royalties.
This would be especially important in developing countries where weaker legal systems make it harder to protect patents.
More importantly, such seeds would put an end to the age-old farmer practice of saving some seed at harvest to plant the next spring.
It would also curtail any neighbour to neighbour seed sales and exchanges, because the protocols and chemicals needed to turn off the germination inhibitor genes are the property of the corporation holding the seed patent. Farmers would be captive customers, forced to purchase new seed each spring.
Terminator technology is a sophisticated, powerful technology, but it is fundamentally anti-farmer. It undermines our right to save seeds. It threatens the lives and livelihoods of the 1.4 billion peasants who depend on farm-saved seed. And it unleashes the potential for devastating genetic pollution.
As Vandana Shiva, a well-known scientist and writer from India put it, “termination of germination is a means for capital accumulation and market expansion. However, abundance in nature and for farmers shrinks as markets grow for Monsanto. When we sow seed, we pray, ‘may this seed be exhaustless.’ Monsanto and the USDA, on the other hand, are stating, ‘let this seed be terminated so that our profits and monopoly is exhaustless’.”
Thanks to thousands of peasants, environmentalists and social activists who demonstrated and lobbied in Curitiba, and citizens elsewhere in the world who pressured and persuaded decision-makers, the release of terminator technology was averted for now.
Putting seed into fields and gardens, we might pause to consider the regenerative power of germination with wonder, gratitude and a new awareness. Spring can no longer be taken for granted.
Nettie Wiebe is a farmer in the Delisle, Sask., region and a professor of Church and Society at St. Andrews College in Saskatoon.
