Unless the Grain of Wheat Dies
Roland Lesseps SJ 1/5/08 - foreword, excerpt
In this booklet, Sean McDonagh and Donal Dorr raise important, questions about Terminator technology. They argue that a technology which stops farmers from sharing seeds and forces them to buy new seeds for every growing season is grossly immoral. Since poor farmers cannot afford to buy seed every year, they will go hungry. This moral evil is compounded by the fact that, since this Terminator technology attacks the very principle of life itself, it could jeopardise the whole evolutionary process if Terminator genes spread to other plants.
Furthermore, destroying the life principle in an organism is not a right relationship with creation which should be received as a gift from God to be shared by all. The immorality of Terminator technology becomes even more evident from the following arguments put forward by Donal Dorr.
- First, it widens the gap between the wealthy and the poor.
- Secondly, it increases the extent to which the global market or the local market for food is controlled by one company or a small group of companies, with the result that producers and consumers of the food are at the mercy of the company or companies.
- Thirdly, it lessens the extent to which the environment is shared by all.
- Fourthly, it lessens biodiversity of crops, which threatens millions of people with famine if the remaining varieties are destroyed by some disease or pest.
- And fifthly, the technology has not yet been adequately and objectively tested for its long-term consequences for the environment and future generations of people.
The Moral And Theological case against Terminator seeds
Booklet available from: Progressio, http://www.progressio.org.uk/
‘Patenting genes the same way you patent software robs Third World farmers. While they and their ancestors developed almost all important food crops, transnational corporations can now blithely patent those crops and make mega profits without in any way compensating traditional farming communities for the original research.
Genetic resources taken freely from southern countries will be returned to them later as pricey patented commodities. “Terminator” technology is a way of locking this “bio-piracy” into the very genes themselves.’
Anuradha Mittal and Peter Rosset of Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy/’Seeds Sow Controversy’, San Francisco Chronicle, 1 March: A21, 1999; http://www.pacificsites.com/~lakenews/Food.html
‘Termination of germination is a means for capital accumulation and market expansion. However, abundance in nature and for farmers shrinks as markets grow for Monsanto.
When we sow seed we pray “May this seed be exhaustless!” Monsanto and the USDA on the other hand arestating “Let this seed be terminated so that our profit and monopoly is exhaustless.”
‘There can be no partnership between the terminator logic which destroys nature’s renewabili and regeneration and the commitment to continuity life held by women farmers of the Third World. The two worldviews do not merely clash - they are mutually exclusive. There can be no partnership between a logic of death on which Monsanto bases its expanding empire and the logic of life on which women farmers in the Third World base their partnership with the earth to provide food security to their families and communities.’
Monocultures, Monopolies, Myths and the Masculinisation of Agriculture by Dr. Vandana Shiva, Workshop on ‘Women’s Knowledge, Biotechnologyand International Trade - Fostering a New Dialogue into the Millenium’, The International Conference - ‘Women in Agriculture’, Washington, June 28 - July 2 1998 From: http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/terminator.html