Some Food Security Issues Relating to the Introduction of GURTs (Terminator Technology) in Agriculture
by Thom van Dooren
(This article is a reproduction of a paper that I gave at a Public Forum on Terminator Technology at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia in March 2006. At this forum I spoke exclusively about the potential impacts of these technologies on farmers and food security – other speakers covered environmental concerns, etc. I hope that my comments here might spark curiosity and concern in readers and add to the growing voice of people opposing these technologies.1)
Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURTs) are really a set of genetic modifications that can be made to plants or animals to control either their reproduction or the expression of particular genetic traits in their offspring. My comments in this short paper are focussed on the use of these technologies to render crop plants infertile in the second generation.2 The basic motivation of biotechnology companies in this area is to produce seed that can be sold to farmers and used by them, but that requires the farmer to return to the seed producer each season to buy more seed.3 As yet, there are no commercially available crops with GURT modifications, but recent debates at the United Nations indicate that it is highly likely that this will happen in the near future.4
Although there are numerous socio-economic and ecological issues relevant to the introduction of Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURTs – also popularly called ‘terminator’ technology) into agricultural food systems, in the short amount of time available in this forum I would like to focus my comments on some of the many issues related to ‘food security’. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization defines food security as: “Physical and economic access, at all times, to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”.5 My basic position is that GURTs will not improve global food security, but will on the contrary lead to new and deeper problems in this area.
Perhaps the most basic potential food security problems associated with GURTs lie in the steady supply of access to, and adequate information and awareness about, this new type of seed. When farmers adopt the use of externally supplied seed which they cannot re-use but must purchase each year, whole agricultural and food systems become highly dependent on trade and economic systems that are vulnerable - particularly in developing countries - to a variety of different disturbances, such as war, civil disorder and natural disasters.6 It is also important to note here that with growing levels of concentration in the global seed sector whole countries or regions would likely become more dependent on seed companies based on the other side of the world. An example of this concentration can be seen in the fact that ten companies (all based in the US, EU or Japan) now control roughly 50% of all commercial seed sales.7 Additionally, the successful introduction of this type of seed would require that farmers understand the technology, so as not to mistakenly plant unviable seed, a potential problem that would also require adequate labelling and systems for grain classification and separation. In short, the introduction of this type of seed into developing countries would cause numerous food security issues at levels ranging from the local, right up to and beyond nation-states.
Perhaps the most serious potential food security problem raised by GURTs, however, is the fact that valuable seed resources that might have been used to improve local plant varieties would be “locked up”, unavailable to farmers and plant breeders. As has been well established now, crop breeding in developing countries is very often highly dependent on international flows of germplasm and new crop varieties for use as inputs into local breeding. Brush cites numerous studies to this effect from around the world.8 The presence of GURT genes in commercial crops would, therefore, limit the available inputs for local crop development.
While in some instances this technology may be used to further enforce an already existing intellectual property right, there is no guarantee that this is how it would be used (setting aside for the moment the huge problems associated with the way in which IP is distributed and allocated in relation to agriculture). GURTs could, for example, be introduced into plant varieties which, according to some international conventions (such as UPOV ‘78), farmers and breeders are entitled to save seed from, either for re-planting or to draw upon in plant breeding.9 In other words, this technology would allow those companies with the resources to do so (who are in large part the same companies that now own the global seed market) to lock up any plant varieties they desired without necessarily having any legitimate legal claim to this level of exclusivity.
The final point that I think must be addressed in a forum such as this one is the idea that GURTs are ultimately justified by the fact that they ensure a healthy return on investments in plant breeding by making sure that customers return to repurchase seed each season. This situation, it is argued, will encourage further investment, and thus innovation, in the plant breeding sector which will in turn have benefits for all people. Ample research has now shown, however, that each of the string of assumptions that holds this position together is either overly simplistic or simply wrong.
The main reason for this is that GURTs, and the companies that will implement them, encourage a particular type of research and innovation that is not at all helpful to most developing-world farmers, and certainly not to food security issues. This type of innovation is characterised by large scale, monoculture, high-input agricultural strategies that draw on external resources for everything from seeds to fertilisers, pesticides, machinery and irrigation. It is this brand of farming that GURTs have been designed for, and it is this brand of farming that currently attracts almost all of the private research dollars. As decades of scholarship on the effects of the Green Revolution have shown, however, this type of farming can only exacerbate food security problems as it leads to the consolidation of land and agricultural resources in the hands of the few, while the majority are left dispossessed in urban slums, dependent on the market for their food needs.10
In order to address food security issues, we need research into relevant, low-input farming, that works with local peoples (and environments) in ways that are actually appropriate to their needs. Increasing yields on first-world farms, or even the large farms of the wealthy in developing countries, will not feed the poor. As the FAO’s World Agriculture report of 2002 has shown, global food production has actually slowed in recent years, despite the fact that millions of people go hungry every day. According to the FAO: “the slowdown has occurred not because of shortages of land or water but rather because demand for agricultural products has … slowed”. The report goes on to say that this slowing in ‘demand’ is a result of the fact that a “stubbornly high share of the world’s population remains in absolute poverty and so lacks the necessary income to translate its needs into effective demand.”11 In other words, food security for the world’s poorest people will be dependent on systems of land ownership and innovation that encourage local food production for local consumption. GURTs will not only not foster, but will actively undermine, such systems, for example, through its prevention or disruption of current systems of seed-saving and plant breeding.
It is for all of these reasons, combined with the other socio-economic, legal and ecological factors that will be discussed here today – along with all of those that we wont get to – that I think a global ban on this technology is not only appropriate, but essential, at the current time. Instead, however, we have a government that seems insistent on weakening the current UN position while refusing to make its policy position public to the Australian people so that we might engage in the discussion and debate essential to the functioning of any meaningful democracy. This technology amounts to another “land grab”, the handing over of resources to those in a technological and economic position to exclude others from their use. This is an enclosure by the market of the very possibility of life, and not just for the plants and animals whose DNA is directly altered, but also for we humans who depend on these plants and animals for nourishment - for our lives. Must we, can we, should we, really hand life over to a small group of corporations?
Thank you.
***
Thom is a PhD student at the Australian National University (ANU) working on philosophical and political issues in people’s relationships with agricultural seed and property regimes in plant genetic resources.
Notes
1. I have greatly expanded and developed the points that I make here in a recent article: van Dooren, T. (2007) "Terminated Seed: Death, Proprietary Kinship and the Production of (Bio)Wealth" Science as Culture 16 (1). If you would like more information on GURTs please see this article (and its bibliography), check out http://www.banterminator.org, or send me an email.
2. For more details on different types of GURTs and their applications see: Jefferson, R.A., D. Byth, C.M. Correa, G. Otero, and C. Qualset. 1999. "Genetic Use Restriction Technologies: Technical Assessment of the Set of New Technologies which Sterilize or Reduce the Agronomic Value of Second Generation Seed, as Exemplified by U.S. Patent No. 5,723,765, and WO 94/03619" (UNEP/CBD/SBSTTA/4/9/Rev.1).
3. New, ‘greener’ motivations for these technologies have now been offered in the face of a lot of public criticism. See: van Dooren, Op. Cit.
4. An up to date source of information on these developments can be found online at www.banterminator.org.
5. http://www.fao.org/ag/wfe2005/glossary_en.htm
6. Jefferson, R.A. Op Cit.
7. ETC Group. 2005. "Global Seed Industry Concentration." Communiqué 90, Musselli Moretti, I. 2006. "Tracking the Trend Towards Market Concentration: The Case of the Agricultural Input Industry." United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
8. Brush, S.B. 2005. "Farmers' Rights and the Protection of Traditional Agricultural Knowledge." CGIAR Systemwide Program on Collective Action and Property Rights (Working Paper No. 36).
9. UPOV. 1991. International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (1961) as Revised 1972, 1978 & 1991. Geneva.
10. Glaeser, B. 1987. "Agriculture between the green revolution and ecodevelopment - which way to go?" in The Green Revolution Revisited: Critique and Alternatives, edited by B. Glaeser. London: Allen & Unwin, Kloppenburg Jr, J.R. 2004. First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000 (Second Edition). Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, Oasa, E.K. 1987. "The political economy of international agricultural research: a review of the CGIAR's response to criticisms of the 'Green Revolution'." in The Green Revolution Revisited: Critique and Alternatives, edited by B. Glaeser. London: Allen & Unwin, Yapa, L. 1993. "What are Improved Seeds? An Epistemology of the Green Revolution." Economic Geography 69(3):254-273.
11. FAO. 2002. "World Agriculture: Towards 2015/2030 (Executive Summary)." Rome: Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.(my italics)
