Monsanto drops the terminator.

• Author: Halweil, Brian
• Position: Brief Article

Responding to nearly two years of protest from farmers, environmental groups, and development agencies, the Monsanto Corporation announced in October 1999 that it will not commercialize the so-called "terminator" technology--which would prevent harvested seed from germinating and, thus, prevent farmers from saving seed for future planting. The decision was officially announced in a letter from Monsanto's CEO, Robert Shapiro, to Gordon Conway, the President of the Rockefeller Foundation. In a speech to Monsanto's Board of Directors in June, Conway had expressed concern about the technology, including the potential adverse effects on the estimated 80 percent of farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America who depend on saving seed, and had urged the company to abandon work on the technology.

Farmers have always saved some of their harvest for planting the next year, a practice that is critical for food security as well as for the husbandry of crop diversity, since the saved seed is generally selected from those plants that have done best under local conditions. The terminator--still in the developmental stage and at least five years from any possible commercialization--would prevent this practice by rendering harvested seed sterile, assuring that farmers need to purchase seed each year. In wealthier nations, the sellers of proprietary seed currently rely on seed contacts signed by the farmer, which forbid the re-planting of patented seed. The terminator would make such legal agreements a biological reality. Melvin J. Oliver, a U.S. Agriculture Department molecular biologist and the primary inventor of the terminator, explains that his...