Despite the pouring rain, three hundred people turned up outside Plymouth Crown Court this morning where two women who admitted uprooting genetically modified (GM) crops heard that the prosecution could offer no evidence to disprove the women's defence of having lawful excuse. This was due to a high-level political U-turn charges against them have been dropped.

Jacklyn Sheedy and Liz Snook faced up to ten years in prison for 'conspiracy to cause criminal damage' worth L605,000 after removing GM maize on 3 August 1998 from a test site near Totnes, Devon, which threatened to contaminate sweetcorn on a neighbouring organic farm.

After seven months of severe bail conditions, which included a 10pm - 6am curfew, the defendant's lawyers last week received a highly unusual one-line letter saying that "for complex reasons the Crown intend to offer no evidence in the above case."

The women's defence solicitor, Mike Schwarz, commented on the last minute decision: "We served the prosecution by midday last Monday with ten expert reports detailing the risks posed by genetic engineering and the failures of the regulatory system. Within 24 hours I was told that the prosecution were going to drop all charges. It was made clear to me in a telephone call from the Crown Prosecution Service that this was a decision made at the highest level: by the Director of Public Prosecutions, David Calvert-Smith QC."

Mr. Schwarz continued: "This was a political, and in my experience, unprecedented decision. By withdrawing the case from the jury the Crown have accepted that there was compelling evidence that the defendants had a lawful excuse to remove the GM maize. The last thing the Crown wanted was to see a jury - a microcosm of society - acquit people who admitted taking direct action against GM crops."

Jacklyn Sheedy, from the Genetic Engineering Network, said that the decision vindicated their action: "We have always admitted damaging the genetically engineered maize, and this decision shows that we were right to stand up to the bullying of the biotech companies. I hope this encourages other communities to take action to protect our environment. Today proves that direct action is not only justified but is also extremely effective."

Liz Snook added, "The government knows that ordinary people faced with the truth about genetic engineering would acquit us and they just can’t handle that kind of publicity. Questioning this technology really does make a difference. The Totnes Community have fought hard against the GM invasion this week NIAB announced that they will not be going ahead with planting GM crops at Hood Barton Farm, as had been planned. However, there are still hundreds of these test sites around the country. Even now irrevocable damage may have been done to the ecosystems on which we all ultimately depend. Everyone has the right to a GM-free environment."

Trade: From ‘Terminator’ to ‘Traitor’ (technologies)

Geneva, 28 Apr (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- As trade, agriculture and other policy-makers in developing countries are still trying to grapple with the implications of the ‘Terminator’ technology to prevent farmers saving their own seeds but buy seeds from transnational seed suppliers, a new range of technologies are now being patented to strengthen the monopolistic grip of a handful of Northern-based TNCs that produce and market fertilizers, pesticides and transgenic seeds.

More than two dozen patent claims have been filed for these "discoveries", dubbed as ‘Traitor’ technology (for negative traits bred into a seed) by the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), a Canada-based International NGO active in tracking and exposing such activities. RAFI says that if left unchecked, Traitor technology could by year 2010 easily dominate and control nearly 80% of the world’s seed market, through "transgenic" seeds, and increasing the dependence of farmers on these seed supplies, fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides (produced and marketed by the same firms).

Calling for concerted actions across a wide-front, RAFI has advocated that governments should invoke the order public exception available to them under Art. 27.2 of the WTO TRIPS agreement, to reject patent claims for Terminator and Traitor technologies.

Also, using the mandated TRIPS review, Third World governments should also call for expanding the language of Art. 27 of the TRIPS to allow bans against patent claims, not merely on individual plant varieties, but whole technologies applied to plants such as the Terminator.

Such a broad spectrum approach to order public would create the necessary political space for some governments to insist that intellectual property over "life" is against national public morality.

The Terminator technology, first identified and so named in March 1998 by RAFI, has as its most obvious feature, the creation of a suicide sequence of exotic genes, triggered by an anti-biotic, that renders the seed infertile in the next generation.

There is no agronomic advantage whatsoever in this technology, and its benefit is exclusively for the Gene Giants, who are now involved in agro-chemical (fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides), pharmaceutical, and seed production, as also in the international commodity trades.

A glimpse of the "new globalization" process, and garnering of the value added from production to final sale in the hands of a few TNCs based in the North, have been provided in the WTO arbitration award to the US in the banana dispute.

In that dispute, the US claimed a $520 million damage to the Chiquita banana company as a result of EC banana regime affecting banana imports from Latin American countries, and the banana wholesale marketing business in the EC. The report of the arbitrators, in awarding the US only a $191 million damage, brought out that the US claim included the value of fertilizers, machinery, pesticides, capital and management services (supplied by Chiquita) to banana producers and marketing the bananas.

The latest batch of patent claims, says RAFI, connect the Terminator’s "suicide sequence" to enhanced herbicide or fertilizer applications - thereby transferred the costs of sterilization of seeds (to prevent their being saved and used from the harvested crops) from the company to the farmer. Some of these Terminator-type patent claims seem to reach beyond plants to insects and mammals, while others seem to be aimed at expressly weakening a plant’s pest and disease resistance capacity as part of the genetic sterilization process.

"The ultimate goal appears to be, not to force farmers to buy corporate seeds every year, but to force them to pay for their seeds every year." This would capture to the companies enormous cost savings and render the commercial merit of aggressive new plant breeding moot.

"Farmers will be trapped in a pattern of biological controls that lead inevitably to bioserfdom," RAFI adds.

The new technologies, RAFI says, will be dominated by no more than half a dozen TN agro-industrial firms that already control virtually 100% of the biotech transgenic seed market.

"Their ability to insert and externally-manipulate vital DNS sequences within crops (and possibly insects and livestock) threatens national sovereignty over agriculture and other biological resources."

The Traitor technology could expand rapidly to occupy the entire transgenic seed market by 2010, if not sooner, and this "Traitor seed market" could match 80% or more of the entire global commercial  seed market or a sales value of about $20 billion a year.

The real control over the food supply exercised through the control of the seed supply is vastly greater.

The two Terminator technology patents (that issued to the USDA and Monsanto in March 1998, and the one to AstrZeneca in September 1998) prove that it is possible to switch on, or off, specific genes or possibly multi-gene traits by applying whatever external catalyst the company prefers.

Although using the technology to create sterility is the most lucrative possibility, in RAFI’s view the same strategy could trigger other traits with other negative implications, a "market logic backed by recent experience". Twenty years ago, in an analysis based on a realistic appraisal of the scientific opportunity and commercial tendencies towards reducing costs and maximising profits, RAFI warned that pesticide manufacturers were buying into the seed industry in order to develop plant varieties that could tolerate their patented herbicides. But the analysis was dismissed by both scientific and political institutions. Within two years of the prediction, however, pesticide manufacturers were openly developing herbicide-tolerant plants. And, by 1998, 71% of the croplands sown to transgenic seeds contained herbicide tolerant traits.

Applying the same analytical logic, RAFI concludes that the Terminator (suicide gene sequence) is one part of what can be most correctly described as Traitor technology. Industry’s biotech breeders are focusing on the linkage between the Terminator’s ability to sterilize second-generation seed with the technology’s ability to promote other "Traitor" sequences in the first-generation seed.

At one level, Traitor offers the opportunity to load a number of commercial characteristics onto a plant variety (or animal breed) which the company can choose to either activate or de-activate at or after the point of sale. This turns Traitor into a launching pad or platform technology upon which proprietary traits are placed. Farmers can buy seed like an industrialized farmer might buy a tractor - with or without so-called "value-added" accessories. Depending on what traits the farmer can afford - or what traits the company wants to disclose - external chemical sprays or soakings could activate the purchased qualities in the "platform" seed. The Gene Giants want to tie Traitor seed to their proprietary chemicals so that one is useless without the other. Economic and commercial realities point the way clearly to how the technology will evolve.

For the Gene Giants, one of the hurdles in developing "sterile" seed is the high cost of seed multiplication. One route for dramatically lowering the cost of producing hybrid seed is to create apomictic varieties. "Apomixis" is a natural, asexual type of reproduction in which plant embryos grow from egg cells without being fertilized by pollen. Apomixis offers a means of cloning plants through seed because the offspring are genetically identical to the mother plant. Apomictic seed is genetically uniform from generation to generation (unlike normal sexual hybrids or open-pollinated varieties). Plant breeders and molecular biologists have successfully transferred the genes that confer apomixis from a wild grass species, Tripsacum dactyloides, to maize.

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Agriculture obtained the first patent on an apomictic maize plant (U.S. Patent No. 5,710,367). CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico) and France’s ORSTOM (a public agricultural research institute) have also worked jointly over the past decade to develop apomictic maize. The UK’s John Innes Centre is also working on apomictic seed production and joining it with externally controllable traits including sterility. In early 1998, the Innes Centre received a patent on its technique (WO 9828431 - 7 Feb 98)

In theory, apomictic seed could offer tremendous benefits to resource-poor farmers because farmers would gain the benefits of so-called "hybrid vigor" and still be able to save their seed for re-planting. It could theoretically offer fast and flexible plant breeding strategies that would be responsive to locally targeted breeding needs. But industry breeders have different priorities.

Commercial breeders are eager to patent (or license) apomixis genes and use the technology as a means of lowering the cost of hybrid seed production. If they can successfully combine the benefits of apomixis (the ability to mass-produce low-cost clones) with the Terminator’s suicide sequence - it will mean that farmers cannot save seed from apomictic varieties. Will the potential benefits of apomixis be monopolized by the Gene Giants, and ultimately used for precisely the opposite goal (preventing farmers from saving seed) for which it is best suited? RAFI considers this scenario highly likely.

If successfully commercialized, the development of sterile, apomictic hybrids threatens to further reduce genetic diversity in agriculture and increase crop vulnerability for farm communities. The impact on the corporate bottom line, however, will be to reduce production costs in multiplying Traitor "seed."

All 29 Traitor Tech patents studied by RAFI trigger "inducible promoters" to an external chemical catalyst. In the "index" Terminator, the patent granted to USDA/Delta & Pine Land, the external catalyst is the antibiotic tetracycline. There are biosafety and cost concerns in using massive quantities of antibiotic-soaked seeds in the soil and the food chain, however. It is also a whopping cost that must be initially borne by the company and then passed onto the farmer directly in the price of the seed.

In its second generation, Terminator claims are identifying more subtle ways to transfer catalyst costs from the ‘expense’ column to the ‘profit’ column by activating suicide (and other) traits via the sale of proprietary chemicals - preferably the company’s own herbicides or insecticides. This only works, however, if the farmer is convinced that it is necessary to trigger the seed’s suicide sequence in order to secure other qualities in the harvest.

AstraZeneca’s new Verminator II patent can create plants that need continuing exposure to a particular chemical not only for germination; but for continued healthy growth. The precise chemical necessary to avoid plant death depends upon the particular genes involved (AstraZeneca has at least three different promoter systems under patent claim); but the chemically dependent plant must have it in order to survive. From the company perspective, what could be more "logical" than mixing the chemical the plant requires with its own pesticides or herbicides? Eventually, as the company’s technological ability to manipulate and design inducible promoter systems matures, the plant’s chemical dependency might even be on the pesticide or herbicide itself.

This is no anomaly, RAFI suggests.

Between March of 1997 and December of 1998, Novartis applied for no fewer than 12 closely related Terminator-type patents, which explicitly propose that the suicide sequence within the seed could be triggered by herbicides or even fertilizers. The patents also note that the inducible promoter strategy proposed would have the effect of weakening the plant’s natural resistance to pests and diseases. Novartis, of course, is in the business of manufacturing the chemicals necessary to compensate for the weaknesses it also manufactures. Farmers are sold addict seeds with junkie genes that will not perform well without chemical (or, for that matter, biological) supplements - including the purchase of augmented herbicides that trigger the seed’s sterility.

"This is truly Traitor Technology," RAFI says.

RAFI has found that many of the new Terminator-type patents look far beyond control of seed germination to the control of a wide range of secondary traits. Secondary traits can be of two kinds: first, activating the traits through spraying can either improve the productivity of the crop or the processability of the commodity (the end product). Equally, however, spraying could protect the crop or the commodity from the activation of negative traits - traits that unless halted, could render the crop unproductive for the farmer or unwelcome to the food processor.

So far, the latter has been the Gene Giant’s major objective. Since spraying to de-activate negative or "traitor" traits can be a great incentive for the farmer, it will be particularly attractive for the company.

Among the traits proposed for control in Novartis patent claims are:

• Input Traits: Germination; Flowering; Herbicide resistance;

Insect resistance

• Output Traits: Nutritional qualities; Flavour qualities.

Although all the Traitor patents uncovered by RAFI involve external chemical inducers, they do not all confine their targets to plants. One patent, issued to the University of Texas (U.S. Patent #5,846,768 granted December 8^th 1998) suggests that the inventors could activate a dormant suicide trait in insect pests by later spraying the crop with almost any chemical they can link to an inducible promoter. Indeed, the sequence could even trigger suicide through "natural causes" - changed climatic conditions, for example. The Texas researchers refer to their invention - actually a gene from a fly, as the "GRIM protein". (Not to be out-morbidized, AstraZeneca, which received its Verminator II patent (U.S. Patent #5,808,034) on September 15^th 1998 talks proudly of its "killer genes". The company concedes that its technique is "not desirable per se...").

At one level, Traitor offers the opportunity to load a number of commercial characteristics onto a plant variety (or animal breed) which the company can choose to either activate or de-activate at or after the point of sale. This turns Traitor into a launching pad or platform technology upon which proprietary traits are placed. Farmers can buy seed like an industrialized farmer might buy a tractor - with or without so-called "value-added" accessories. Depending on what traits the farmer can afford - or what traits the company wants to disclose - external chemical sprays or soakings could activate the purchased qualities in the "platform" seed. The Gene Giants want to tie Traitor seed to their proprietary chemicals so that one is useless without the other. Economic and commercial realities point the way clearly to how the technology will evolve.

I have been mulling over the "soy allergy" issue that we talked about briefly last month. After I did the bit of research about the GE tryptophan disaster of 1989, I went back and looked at the article about soy allergy discovered in the UK. It is much more of an immediate health concern than I had thought. The symptoms look like auto-immune disease, the same kind (albeit milder) that hit the people who took the contaminated tryptophan. We may have a public health disaster in the making.
This is what we know:

In the tryptophan case, the novel amino acid was metabolised and integrated into people’s muscle tissue and THEN recognised by their immune systems as foreign, triggering a deadly, self-destructive auto-immune reaction called EMS.

Based on this, I believe it is not out of the question to call for a moratorium on GE foods and destruction of the current RRS crop. The potential threat to animal and human health is horrendous. If it is used for animal feed, those animals will potentially metabolise it into "novel" animal protein...

In addition, we need to find out whether the BT-toxin foods express novel proteins/amino acids/enzymes, and whether there are any reports of "allergic" symptoms to BT crop products.