In 1998 the ETC group (then called RAFI) denounced the existence of patents on a technology called Terminator. This is GM technology to produce suicide seeds: they are sown, produce a crop, but the second generation becomes sterile, in order to oblige agricultural producers to purchase new seeds for every season of growth. This was developed by the Delta and Pine Company (now the property of Monsanto) together with the United States Department of Agriculture. Monsanto is not alone in this: five of the six transnational corporations that control GM seeds sown at a world level have patents for Terminator technology. Syngenta has the greatest number of these.

The companies that developed this aberrant technology called it a System for the Protection of Technology, since it exists to promote dependence and to prevent the use of seeds without paying royalties to the patent-holders. In their first propaganda pamphlets, they said that this technology was developed to ensure that agricultural producers in the third world would cease the practice of using obsolete seeds. This was a clear indication of their intentions: put an end to traditional seeds and the irritating practice of a majority of agricultural producers in the world (campesinos, indigenous producers, family farms) of using their own seeds instead of buying seeds from transnational companies.

The technology provoked an enormous and immediate reaction from campesino movements, social organizations, resulting in declarations of opposition from public research organizations. The then director of FAO, the Senegalese Jacques Diouf, declared that this is an undesirable technology. In the year 2000, the Convention on Biological Diversity of the United Nations (CDB) adopted a global moratorium against the experimentation and use of Terminator technology, which is still in force. Later, a number of countries began to discuss national legislation to ensure the enforcement of the moratorium. Brazil and India enacted national legislation prohibiting the use of Terminator technology.

But the Terminator is one of the most prized dreams of the transnational seed companies and they have not renounced it. It would give them a great advantage in order to increase their monopoly power and to increase the dependence of agricultural producers. Shortly after the Brazilian legislation was enacted, the big landowners of this country, clients and associates of Monsanto, Syngenta and the other transnational corporations producing genetically modified seeds, presented a proposal for legislation to eliminate the prohibition, which was rejected at various levels, but is still under consideration.

In addition, the transnational companies that produced genetically modified seeds moved aggressively to end the United Nations moratorium on Terminator seeds, through friendly governments such as that of Canada, promoting a paragraph which would allow for evaluating Terminator technology for individual cases, and would have ended the moratorium in the eighth Conference of the CBD in Curitiba, Brazil, in 2006.

In the CDB session in 2006, Mexico supported the terminating of the moratorium, ironically through a representative of the National Commission on Biodiversity. By chance, this is the same person who now, from the National Commission on Forestry, is promoting REDD projects which also have a devastating impact on communities. He was isolated by the rest of the countries of the entire global South.

In 2006 in the CDB in Curitiba, Via Campesina and organizations from the whole world rose up in a massive protest to defend the international moratorium. In particular, the actions of the women of Via Campesina, who interrupted the sessions of the United Nations in a moving and peaceful action in defense of seeds, made it possible for the CDB to maintain and to reinforce the moratorium against Terminator technology.

Nevertheless, the transnational corporations continue their attack, even while hiding their motives, means and representatives. Now they claim that Terminator is for biosecurity. This is completely false.

In the tenth Conference of the CDB in October, 2010 in Nagoya, Japan, the government of Mexico again attempted to eliminate the global moratorium on Terminator technology, this time as if it were a merely administrative theme, concerning decisions that were no longer relevant. They did not succeed since many other countries were opposed, but they showed their intentions and to whom they are loyal.

In Brazil, the proposal of the great landowners was joined by the congressperson Cándido Vaccarezza of the ruling party (PT) to eliminate the prohibition of Terminator technology. Vaccarezza’s proposal was drawn up by a lawyer employed by Monsanto, as was demonstrated with irrefutable proofs by the Campaign for a Brazil without Transgenic seeds, and made public by the Movement of the Sin Tierra of Brazil, in December of 2010. The lawyer herself was obliged to recognize this fact. The proposal is presently under consideration by a Commission of the Legislature, especially created to promote discussion of the question.

A number of movements and organizations are on the alert. In June of 2011, in the tenth congress on Agroecology of Via Campesina in Paraná, Brazil, more than 4000 participants from the whole country expressed their rejection of these proposals. A week later they appeared and rejected these attempts to legalize Terminator technology, in international meetings in preparation on the part of social and civil society movements for the world conference Rio + 20, in Rio de Janeiro, with hundreds of delegates participating.

Brazil will preside over the Rio + 20 meeting next year, a world conference of the United Nations which will revise their environmental commitments, twenty years after the Earth Summit of 1992. In addition Graziano de Silva, who was in the Brazilian government, has assumed the direction of the Organization for Food and Agriculture of the United Nations (FAO). The least that Brazil can do to assume responsibility for both responsibilities, is to maintain the prohibition against Terminator technology at national and international levels, since it is one of the greatest threats to food sovereignty and biodiversity. Anything else would be a suicide.

- Silvia Ribeiro is a researcher with the ETC group.

(Translation: Jordan Bishop).