Word: monsanto
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...science take hold, opponents warn darkly, and farmers could find themselves coming to Monsanto, seed cup in hand, paying whatever the company demands before they can plant that season's crop. Worse still, some doomsday scenarios suggest, pollen from Terminator plants could drift with the wind like a toxic cloud, cross with ordinary crops or wild plants, and spread from species to species until flora all around the world had been suddenly and irreversibly sterilized...
...serious scientist thinks anything so dire will come to pass. For Monsanto, however, with a technology in its pocket and a fight on its hands, the situation is about as grim as it can get--at least in terms of public relations. "From a marketing perspective, the technology is brilliant," says biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin. "From a social perspective, it's pathological. This is a question of who controls the seeds of life...
...feel for the p.r. beating Monsanto is taking, check out the Web. Activist groups like Rural Advancement Foundation International are using the Net to rally Terminator opponents, urging them to flood the U.S. Department of Agriculture with letters of protest. At least 4,000 people from 62 countries have responded--an anti-Monsanto army raised by the electronic vox pop alone. "The group R.A.F.I. masterfully called this Terminator," says Gary Toenniessen, deputy director for agricultural science at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City. "It's not what Monsanto would call...
...heat Monsanto is taking, the company did not create Terminator. The technology was developed by the USDA and a Mississippi seed company known as Delta and Pine Land, and the patent was awarded to both of them. Monsanto later made a $1 billion-plus offer to buy Delta--an offer that was quickly accepted...
...Pine Land have filed Terminator patent applications in dozens of countries. In many of those countries farmers can't afford to buy top-of-the-line seeds every year and must rely on saving a portion of each crop in order to plant their fields the following year. Monsanto insists that weak patent protection in many of these countries makes a technology like Terminator especially important. But that argument carries little weight in parts of the world where food bowls are going empty. "This technology brings no benefit to farmers," says Hope Shand, research director of RAFI...