Terminator fall victory for anti-GM lobbyists

By Roger Franklin

Herald correspondent

NEW YORK - It is no small irony that a charity founded by John D. Rockefeller, the robber baron who made his fortune by seizing control of the United States oil industry from wellhead to petrol pump, has just dismantled another vast monopoly in the making.

But that is what happened when a letter from Monsanto chief executive Robert Shapiro arrived at the Rockefeller Foundation's headquarters in Manhattan. Shapiro wrote that Monsanto had decided not to procede with plans to sell commercial crop seeds equipped with the so-called Terminator gene. It was a capitulation that scuttled what critics painted as the foundation of a global agricultural monopoly so large and all-powerful that farmers from Calcutta to Kansas would have had no choice but to do its bidding.

"Chalk one up for the little guys," crowed agriscientist Gary Toenniessen, one of the leaders in the battle to keep this particular variety of genetically altered seeds off the market. "The announcement was the ultimate indication that Monsanto had come to realise that it could not win - at least with this approach."

"This approach" was an attempt to stop farmers doing as they have always done: setting aside a certain small percentage of their harvest as seed for next year's crop. The Terminator process made that impossible since a series of intricate genetic manipulations and antibiotic "baths" rendered second-generation seeds sterile. What the men in the white coats created was a seed merchant's dream: plants genetically programmed to commit suicide after one generation.

Any backyard potterer who has cultivated a plot of tomatoes knows that if you re-plant the seeds from fruit grown on commercial vines, next year's crop is very likely to be a total dud. That is because modern tomatoes are unstable hybrid strains that tend to devolve to their individual parents' genetic characteristics rather than remaining true to an artificially bountiful combination of the two. It is a nuisance for gardeners but a godsend to the seed companies, which get to sell billions of dollars worth of seeds and seedlings every year.

Up until the Terminator technology was developed some five years ago in a United States Department of Agriculture laboratory, that hybrid rule of diminishing returns did not apply to crops like rice, whose seeds remained just as fertile and productive from one generation to the next. Farmers, particularly the Third World's subsistence farmers, had no reason to line up every year at the seed store when they could quite easily produce their own stock for replanting.

What makes the victory over Terminator so unusual is that it represents one of those rare occasions when the First World actually paid attention to complaints from the Third. In a well organised lobbying effort spearheaded by groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and propagated over the Internet, Terminator's enemies built a network of support that stretched from Asia's paddies to the executive council of the World Bank, which voted last year to ban Terminator crops from any development projects for which it loaned money.

In India, the point was made rather more emphatically when aggrieved farmers' groups launched boycotts and even destroyed Monsanto's research farms. Faced with an increasingly vocal opposition, Monsanto evidently decided to cut its losses and suspend all research into the Terminator gene. With opponents of genetically altered foods gaining strength in Europe, the last thing it wanted was one more front on which to fight a doomed and costly battle against public opinion.

Yet while Toenniessen and his boss, Rockefeller Foundation President Gordon Conway, are delighted to have achieved their goal, neither man is fooling himself that Monsanto has renounced its original goal of controlling which crop varieties are cultivated.

"My instinct tells me that Monsanto made a rational decision that the returns from Terminator were not worth the trouble of developing it any further," Toenniessen said, adding that the foundation had nothing against genetic engineering as such. "We have put something like $US100 million in genetic research to improve crop yields - but this Terminator technology improved nothing, except the corporate bottom line."

Now, the world's self-appointed genetic watchdogs say they will be watching Monsanto to make sure the company does not try to achieve the same ends by different means.

Author and genetic modification foe Jeremy Rifkin says a "lock-and-key" system of genetic manipulation could well be on sale in less than two years.

"This will be a crop that has a genetically altered element which will increase yields. But the seeds won't provide that improved yield unless they are first treated with a chemical compound available only from the supplier that is needed to 'unlock' the gene's potential."