| The second element, though, which scares us at RAFI even more, is something that happened on March 3 of this year, just a few days after I suggested
to Kent the topic of good news/bad news. On March 3, a company called Delta & Pine Land (based here in the U.S., a major cotton seed company) together with the United States Department of Agriculture announced
that they had obtained a patent. The patent has since been described by the company as being a "technology protection system -
TPS." The company and the USDA claim that with this new technology, they can
take any plant species and can render the second generation of the seed infertile. So they can sell seed to you, anything from tobacco to cotton to corn to beans to
alli-ums, and you can plant that seed. It will
grow and you will have a harvest, but you can't save the seed and plant it a second year. They do that by applying a chemical spray to the seed, actually an antibiotic that they spray on the seed prior to it being
delivered to the farmers or the retail stores. And it kicks in automatically at a certain stage of the growth cycle of the plant and kills the embryo of the seed. And this will work for many species. When the USDA and Delta & Pine Land announced their patent, they said that the focus for the technology would be developing countries of the Third World, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. They
said that this would protect American technology being exported to the Third World so that farmers couldn't steal the genes that were patented by the companies who breed the seeds. And the president of Delta &
Pine Land went on to say that in fact they estimate that by the year 2001 or 2002, more than one billion acres of land in the Third World would be sown to this new technology. That's a land mass the size of South
Asia, sown to this technology. He estimates that the value of this technology will be somewhere between $1-$1.50 per acre, in terms of profit to the company. And that's every year, of course, because you can't
save the seed. The crops that are being targeted in countries such as India, Pakistan and China, which he mentioned specifically, would be crops like rice (the world's most important food crop) and wheat
(the world's second most important food crop). He went on to say that farmers in Third World countries have been fooled for years into believing that they should save seed. They shouldn't save seed because they're
denying themselves these new technologies, the patented technologies that they won't get otherwise, unless they agree to buy hybrids or this new technology protection system. Around the world this
technology has come to be known as "Terminator Technology." In the United Nations it is now being debated as Terminator Technology. Even the Green Revolution institutes, which have never been very
friendly to these issues, are calling the Terminator Technology anti-farmer and anti-agriculture. This is technology which offers absolutely no agronomic benefit to farmers. All it does is stop them from being
seed savers. That's all it does. And it guarantees that the company will control the farmers. There's another part of the story that I haven't told you. As I said, the patent was granted on March
3. On May 7, Monsanto bought the company, Delta & Pine Land, for $1.76 billion. Frankly, the company isn't worth it - except for the Terminator Technology, for the access to that patent. When we asked the USDA
why the hell a government department that's supposed to be there to help farmers would create Terminator Technology, the response from the USDA was that they didn't even know they were doing it. They were shocked.
The first they knew about Terminator Technology was when they saw RAFI's press release, and they called me about it. The technology was created in a USDA Agricultural Research Station near Lubbock, Texas, together
with Delta & Pine Land. The company really controlled the strategy, but it was the USDA that provided the money. That's the usual arrangement. Now the technology is out there, and now the
company, with Monsanto's support, is trying to get patents for Terminator Technology in 78 countries. RAFI has always monitored patents in agriculture. We've never seen a patent before that's been applied for in
so many countries at the same time at the outset of the patent application. Twenty or thirty, yes, forty sometimes, but 78 - that's a record. So this is a technology being specifically targeted at the poor farmers
in the Third World and on an unprecedented scale. There are 1.4 billion human beings on this planet who depend for their food on the ability of farmers to save seed. Those farmers save their seed,
not just to replant it, but to breed from it, to develop new varieties from it. Because they know that no one is breeding seeds for them. They're on the hillsides, they're on the poorest pieces of land, trying to
grow food and make a living for their families, trying to have something to sell in the marketplace. But if they can't save their seed, then they're off the hillsides and will be forced to
move into the cities. And 1.4 billion people will lose their chance to provide food for their families. And if that technology goes wrong, if the farmers in the valleys buy it and it spreads and leaks out into the
crops of the farmers on the hillsides, suddenly they find when they plant their crop the following year that nothing comes up, and they can't do anything about that. Their traditional way of life is gone, they
fail and 1.4 billion people move into the squalor of the cities and have to straggle even harder to survive. Of course the company says that no one has
to buy their technology; no one is going to force them to. But American Home Monster will
force them to. Last week and the week before, Monsanto made deals with voluntary organizations, civil society organizations like Grameen Bank (the originators in Bangladesh of the idea of micro-credit that provides very small loans to very poor people who then pay it back at remarkably high rates of interest). So Monsanto made a deal with Grameen Bank. Grameen Bank would take Monsanto's money, provide loans to farmers in order other words, they're using voluntary organizations, people organizations - which are the only ones who lend to the poor, especially to the poor farmers - to make them the controllers of debt, and that will allow their technology to be sold to the very poorest people. So the farmers of Bangladesh with their rice crops, that they depend upon, will have no choice if they want to get credit. They'll go to the Grameen Bank, which is all that's out there in about 37,000 villages in Bangladesh. They'll go to the Grameen Bank and they'll have to buy Monsanto's products. That's immoral and indecent, and it's being done.
It comes down to control of technology. It comes down to who owns life - the origin of life. The reason why these mergers are happening so frantically in the life industry is because of the
enormous possibility now that through patent systems - not just in the United States but around the world- patent systems now make it possible to own not just the plants, but all the parts of the plants, and to
own every single gene in the plant. Pioneer Hi-Bred has maize varieties growing now which they sell which have more patents in them than a 747. Well, I'm exaggerating, but still, 37-38 patents are not uncommon in
a single variety, but that's a remarkable, remarkable control over living things. Since I was here in 1990, what's changed and become part of the bad news is that in 1990
we were talking about owning a plant variety, the whole plant, and also the threat of the United States system of allowing the patenting of individual genes which we were afraid would spread into other countries.
In 1998, all the member countries of the Word Trade Organization are being forced down that same path. They are being forced to accept the United States model of morality when it comes to the ownership of life.
The trade pressures that are being exerted are pushing us all to accept that kind of a system. In fact, we're in a world now where it's not just the products of life that are being patented, or the
processes of life, but it's literally the formula of life that can be patented. The formulae of how life is created - even the parts of the human body, including the reproductive parts of the human body -
are now under patents. It sounds absurd to say that, I know, but two years ago the estimate by the companies themselves was that in fact 1/5 of the genes relevant to the functioning of the human brain were under
patent application. That's intellectual property - don't think that thought! That's under patent. That part of your brain can't be used. Kent said, in his introduction, that in 1992 RAFI began to
expand its research into other areas. Let me explain just a little bit about how that changed and why it is relevant to Seed Savers as well. It wasn't intentional. In the summer of 1993, I was in Winnipeg on a
weekend, trying to do some research on the patents related to soil, because a friend of mine in India had asked for some information about claims they heard pharmaceutical companies were making on soil samples. I
had a CD-ROM that was attached to the American Type Culture Collection, the largest "dirty gene bank" in the world, more soil samples and bacteria and fungus than any other collection, all kinds of
creepy-crawlies are in the American Type Culture Collection. At that time it wasn't on the Internet, it was only on CD-ROM. I typed in "India or Indian" and "patent." And what came up on my
screen was a "Patent on a 26-year-old Guaymi Indian woman from Panama." I read that description in the American Type Culture Collection, and then I went to another CD-ROM that showed the patents. What I
found was that a 26-year-old Guaymi woman, the mother of two living in western Panama, that her entire human cell line, all her DNA, had been put under patent by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. In
fact, the patent application we found was signed by The Honorable Ron Brown, Secretary of Treasury at the time, on behalf of the United States government. This was the first time that the entire DNA of a human
being of one country was being put under patent claim by a foreign country. I had one of the most absurd experiences of my life, flying from Colombia a few days later to Panama. The only Spanish I
know is how to order cerveza in a bar, and there I was, trying to explain to the Guaymi General Congress - who had been called by telephone for me by friends - trying to explain what a patent was, what DNA
was all about, what the Word Trade Organization was, who Ron Brown was, and why it was that a woman in Panama was under a patent claim from the United States. We spent the entire night going over it - because I
couldn't make myself understood, mostly - and in the morning we had made an agreement on strategy. Two days later, the president and vice-president of the Guaymi General Congress flew to Geneva and confronted Ron
Brown on the steps of the Word Trade Organization's furore offices (it was the office for another organization at that time, GATT) and forced Ron Brown to back off. It was a rather embarrassing photo opportunity
to be seen to be patenting other people who are standing in front of you, and the patent was dropped. A few months later, we found two other patent claims by the United States Government. One was on a
20-year-old Hagghai man from Papua New Guinea, and the other was on a 57-year-old man and 58-year-old woman (two claims together) from the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. All of these patents were by the
United States Department of Commerce, all of the entire DNA of those people. Well, RAFI found itself unavoidably thrown into the debate over who owns humans, not just crop genetic diversity where we felt a bit
more comfortable, but human genetic diversity. Because, in fact, the debates about the ownership of life extended from the Seed Wars that Kent mentioned back in the 1970s and early 1980s, to the
agricultural wars of the late 1980s, but in the 1990s the wars really are over who owns life, all of our genes - plants, human, livestock, soil organisms, whatever. The strange thing is that in
global commerce and in the World Trade Organization, there isn't a definition for all of these things. So there is a requirement for every country that's part of the World Trade agreements, which is now virtually
all the countries, to agree to allow the patenting of microorganisms. Under the Budapest Convention on Microorganisms, a "microorganism" isn't defined. But as long as it's small enough, you can patent
it. If you can squeeze the DNA of a human being, or any part of it, into a test tube, you can patent it. And you can force that patent to apply around the world. That's the world we're living
in. And that's the world that Monsanto and Novartis and DuPont and Dow and a handful of other remaining companies are fighting over- fighting over the ownership of life. Twenty years ago I
used to go around giving speeches saying that the prayer "Give us this day our daily bread" shouldn't be a prayer to a Monsanto. It's no longer that. It's "Give us this day our life." That's
what we have to fight against. The good news is the Seed Savers Exchange, because what Kent and Diane started a couple of decades ago has spread around the world in a much more solid profound way than anything
that RAFI can do. Much more so, in a much more solid, grassroots participatory kind of way. We fight at the political level, but actually saving our traditional seeds means something. This lasts. Governments come
and go, but when you're saving the seeds that are safe from the floods and E1 Nifio, that really counts. And it's that kind of fight. But that fight has changed, because in 1990, when I was talking
here in this barn, I was saying that the movement to save seeds had spread around the world. Then I could identify more than 40 countries around the world where seed saving groups have sprung up -there must be
over 70 countries by now - that I could identify back then. What's interesting is that we've been fighting against the patents on life, we've been fighting for indigenous people's rights, we've been fighting for
farmers' rights, and their rights as human beings to not be patented by somebody else! And all of those fights have been by the same groups. It's been Camila Montecinos whom I mentioned in 1990 in Chile, who has
been the hero of seed conservation programs in Latin America. And Camila has taken up the fight on humans and on livestock as well. And in 1990 1 mentioned Rene Salazar from the Philippines, who's been here as
well. (Heritage Farm is sort of like a Mecca.) Rene Salazar, who has been conserving seeds, has found himself, because of the realities of the nature of politics in the Philippines where so few people can work
together on these things, he's had to take on the protection of human genetic diversity in the Philippines, and the rights of indigenous people in the Philippines as well. And that battle goes on, and it's had
some successes. Monsanto is in trouble now. They might not believe it, but Monsanto is in trouble. Monsanto may not get its Terminator Technology patented outside of the United States. That doesn't
mean it's not a big problem in this country. But there are movements saying that this should be treated like nuclear develop- ment issues. That it should be banned, it should not be allowed, there
should be treaties against this. In fact, this is biological warfare against farmers and the poor. It should not be allowed to get out. International Labor Organization, U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization,
World Health Organization are all discussing how they can control this kind of technology. It's amazing. Often in the work I do (and this is not true) I'm often called (as are RAFI and I'm sure
Kent is also called) a Luddite. You've heard the expression "Luddites"? No one knows much about their history, but the Luddites were the movement of workers in 1811 in England, who fought against the
textile trade, fought against the imposition of the new machinery that threw them all out of their jobs and forced all of them to congregate in the cities. And the Luddite movement was seen to be anti-technology
and anti-Industrial Revolution, and they had to be stopped. And of course they were stopped, most of them were hung, and by 1811 or 1812 they were all dead. And the Industrial Revolution marched on over the bodies
of all of the poor who were driven into the cities. Why is there a word for the Luddites, those who appear to be opposing technology, but there's no word for those who are imposing technology?
There needs to be a word for those who are forcing it upon us, untried and untested. We don't know whether it's going to work or not. We don't know what it's going to do to humanity, good or bad, but it's new, so
you've got to have it. Why isn't there a word for those people? Well, I have a suggestion for a word. It comes from about the same time as the Luddites. It didn't happen in England, but was part of the
repercussions of what happened in India, because the textile trade originally came from India. And when the new technologies came in, when Eli Whitney's cotton gin and so on all came in, then the movement was to
get rid of the production in India and bring it to the southern United States instead, to the slave trade in the southern United States. At the same time, artificial import barriers were created that made it very
hard for India to export finished or raw cotton into England. So there was a political move by the controllers of the technology to prevent competition from the traditional producers of the cotton.
The problem was that even the political moves didn't work. Thousands - by some reports millions -of cotton spinners and weavers in India died between 1811 and 1815, but that was never recorded. During that time,
the British still found that the Indian growers and the Indian weavers could produce finer cotton, higher quality at cheaper prices, than the new technology. This is not good for the new
technology. So what did they do? The British Army in India went around and used rifle butts to smash the fingers of the weavers. They systematically went from village to village, smashing and breaking fingers, to
allow the new technology to operate. To round off the story in a nice little package, in 1793 Eli Whitney got the patent on the cotton gin. But 200 years ago this year, in 1798, Eli Whitney also got another patent
that's never been talked about very much. That was a patent on a musket with interchangeable parts, including rifle butts. And it was bought by the British Army that smashed the fingers of the textile workers in
India. I'm not blaming Eli Whitney for this. It is not a question of there being a plot. It is a question of tragedy. To me this story points out that where there are Luddites, there is also
someone else on the other side forcing this technology upon us untried and untested. So I suggest we might call them, in honor of Eli Whitney, the "Elites." That's the other side of the coin. It is not
really a case of Luddites always being opposed to new technology. It is that we should demand that new technology be tested carefully, that the technology should be proven to be safe, that the social implications
of the technology should be understood and taken care of before it is introduced. And when technology comes along that is like the neutron bomb of agriculture, such as Terminator Technology, it should be stopped.
And the Elites should not have their way. And American Home Monster should be put back in its cage. Check back next month for our newest feature article. Go to top of page
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