The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Harvest basket full of Monsanto shares?

Hardly a new issue, but a timely one and one requiring broader public awareness: Terminator seeds.

This is one of those topics I've meant to touch on for a long time, but kept forgetting to. (The issue has been on the table since 1998, when it was used in connection with cotton.) In short, the people behind bioengineered crops have taken a step in a direction that, well, strikes me as so blatantly base and immoral that if there is a God then the folks behind this scheme are damned.

Bioengineering of crops, while an area that must be approached with caution as it involves making changes in living, growing things and then introducing them to the environment, is a potentially wonderful thing. Whether it's to produce new strains that either produce more or better grain or to allow plants to grow under a wider range of environmental conditions, bioegineering offers an avenue of improving not only this planet but potentially of helping to terraform other worlds. People have to be concerned about untrammelled development and dispersal for various reasons, from cross-contaminating species with potentially deadly allergens (eg including a protein from, say, a peanut plant into a strain of wheat, creating a strain of wheat that someone with a peanut allergy could find deadly) to the way nature refuses to be tidy and almost always spreads, but the potential benefits from such manipulations are huge and should be carefully explored.

However, concerned with the possibility that farmers might do what farmers through history have - save seeds from one harvest so they can be replanted for the following year's crop - some soulless, bottom-line being decided it would be a good idea to isolate and splice in a terminator gene to these seeds. One crop to a customer. "If you want to have something to grow next year, Mr. Farmer, just place an order with our salesman."

This has to be some sort of sin.

Taking deliberate steps to prevent crops from producing plantable seeds in order to lock in repeat customers... should unsettle anyone. If a company is making refinements in their lines of seeds and are selling them at a reasonable price, customers will be returning for new seeds anyway. It's easier than having to collect and plant seeds from last year's crop, and this becomes more the case the larger the operation is. Creating crops that won't effectively go to seed mostly ensures that the smallest farmers - the poorest ones - will be locked in as customers.

Even sweeping the moral implications aside, keep in mind that plants pollinate. Through various means they share their DNA with other plants, often far away. What happens if the terminator gene is one of the things that spreads?

Why, well... I guess Monsanto will have some really good years ahead... if people want to eat.

So, what aside from it being a ticking time-bomb makes this timely? The Convention on Biological Diversity is currently under way in Brazil (running March 20-31). To find out more, from information to possible action, head to Ban Terminator.