The Terminator Seed

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5 APRIL 2005

ELE - The Terminator Seed

 

 

Imagine if last December someone had started cautioning you about the

dangers of earthquake and tidal waves as you prepared for your

vacation abroad. You are packing your bags for a lovely trip to a

Pacific island, happily contemplating sun, sand, and sea, for a

carefree holiday. Your friend starts reminding you to take care if the

sea suddenly starts receding. " Run for high ground, " she cautions you,

" That's the classic sign of a tidal wave. " You would have thought her

paranoid and laughed it off. Only after the fact are most humans

willing to start taking the kind of safety precautions that are then

always and tragically too late. The human race, except for a very

select few of us, is always in a " closing the barn door after the

horses have fled " mode. Too little, too late, we continue to fight the

last war and prepare for the last disaster.

 

Hopefully we have another factor on the side of caution this time –

human independence of spirit. Hopefully enough farmers and gardeners

will stand up and say no to the latest trend in food crops – the

" terminator seed. " The terminator seeds produce plants with either no

seeds at all or seeds that will not germinate. Each planting, the

farmer must buy new seeds from Monsanto or one of the other

multinational food/chemistry conglomerates. These multinational

agribusiness corporations are pushing hard across the world to make it

illegal to retain seeds. They are applying for patents on the food

that we eat so that we must buy everything from them or starve.

 

If you listen to Monsanto and the others, they have our best interests

at heart. The use of the terminator seeds prevents the spread of GMO

crops into the non-GMO world. The seeds of this year's crop cannot be

saved to grow next year's food or fiber. These one season seeds cannot

get out of hand and contaminate the wild lands and overgrow the world,

pushing out the diversity of species. This is the explanation for

engineering a type of seed/crop that cannot be used to grow more of

its kind. It is simply to protect the world, you see. The fact that

each year the farmers must buy new seeds from the agribusinesses is a

side issue and of no importance. After all, these wonderful crops are

resistant to defoliants, diseases, and to pests. They yield larger,

more plentiful crops. They stand up to heat, cold, and drought and are

in every way more robust than the natural seeds. They have a higher

germination rate than wild type plants, which may produce seeds that

only have a 10% germination when you calculate how many seeds will

result in mature fruitful plants. It is, after all, better living

through chemistry.

 

The danger is not just an economic one. We maintain old disease

cultures in storage, refusing to wipe out a species even as abhorrent

to us as small pox, because it is a dangerous thing to do.

Deliberately causing the extinction of species is criminally dangerous

and may lead to a human crafted disaster of enormous proportions that

will endanger the entire ecosphere if we allow it to happen. So we

made the choice to save the last of the small pox cultures; but that

was a decision of science and medicine, not big business. Big business

has a different agenda and appears to have fewer brains to go with

their monetary resources.

 

They figure it like this: if they control the seed that the farmers

use to grow crops, the farmer will spend money every year coming to

them to buy the seed. If they own patents on the progenitor seeds from

which these terminator crops are generated, they control the food

sources of the world – if we let them carry it that far. It cannot be

allowed to go any further along that line. If the human race is to

survive, we must stop destroying our world.

 

Biology is an unpredictable thing. The diseases that the current crops

from the agri-giants are resistant to are subject to mutation, like

all living things. Like the influenza virus that mutates every time it

infects a living body, so too do plant viruses mutate. Microorganisms

mutate and combine to produce new diseases every week throughout the

world. The seeds that are resistant to this year's diseases will not

be resistant to the diseases produced by a few years of mutation. Like

they did with our antibiotics, the microorganisms will find a way to

" go around " the barriers erected and infect the new types of plants.

We will be faced with a disaster if the wild type plants from which

all of these plants are originally grown are no longer available to

farmers in sufficient quantities to re-seed the fields of the world.

 

In biology, there are other limits that we are not aware of and the

terminator crops are too new for us to know where and how these limits

will be exhibited. Cells in tissue culture can survive only about 50

divisions before they " transform " into cancerous, abnormal cells or

die out completely. That may take a few months, a few years, or a few

decades, depending on how many times the cells are used. Then they no

longer produce normal healthy cells. It may well be that these

" terminator " crops have such a limited life time and we have no way of

knowing what it will be and when we will suddenly be faced with seeds

that will no longer germinate. If the agribusinesses such as Monsanto

are allowed to fully dominate the world's food production system, we

will then be faced with unprecedented famine and death.

 

Sounds like Doomsday, right? Sort of the way it would have sounded

last December 20th if I had cautioned you to be careful about tidal

waves on your Pacific island vacation? Perhaps the way it would have

sounded if on September 10, 2001, I had cautioned you to stay out of

tall buildings because a plane might crash into one? Or told you to

watch for untended rucksacks or suitcases at the Olympic games? Tidal

waves, bombs and earthquakes happen. Tissue culture lines die out.

Species become extinct. These are not events that are rare at all in

the longer term. They only seem rare when a single human life time is

taken as the time frame – a very limited viewpoint. If you look at the

span of 3 generations, they are quite common events and a sensible

sapient species plans for them.

 

It is time to start planning for the inevitable disasters that

bio-business is going to bring down upon the world. Seeds, viable,

productive, healthy, wild type seeds, must be saved and used to grow

new crops every year in fields and gardens across the world. The

terminator crops must not be allowed to become the major force in

worldwide agriculture. The diversity of species must be maintained.

The diversity of the gene pool in each of the species that still

survives must be maintained. The agribusinesses and bio-corporations

must not be allowed to patent the world's food sources to the extent

that we are predominantly dependent upon them for our food supplies.

It is a dangerous trend, an Extinction Level Event potentially in the

making, and this time humanity is the endangered species.

 

This gives Victory Gardens a whole new meaning. It may be that the

family farmers and household gardeners of the world hold the salvation

of humanity in their hands. Save your seeds!