An end to terminators

Murray Dobbin reports that while Canada's farmers may have been unable to push the Harper government toward a reasonable position on terminator seeds, the Canadian delegation's pro-suicide-seed position has once again been soundly rejected internationally:

The Brazilian government, chairing the meeting, announced that the 188 member governments of the CBD agreed to reject language that would have undermined the six year old moratorium on terminator. Promoters, including Canada, have called for a "case by case risk assessment" of terminator seeds, with the intention of allowing the technology to be approved through existing legislation for genetically modified crops...

That Canada would continue to pursue the commercialization of terminator technology is inexplicable from any practical standpoint. Not a single company in Canada has a stated interest in using this technology and virtually every farm organization in the country opposes it. The impact of the terminator, also called "suicide seeds", has been calculated to be in the hundreds of millions in lost annual income for Third World farmers.

According to the ETC Group, which monitors the issue "Brazilian soybean farmers would see their seed costs increase by approximately $515 million each year. Argentina's soybean farmers would pay an extra US$276 million. Wheat farmers in Pakistan would face a price rise of US$191 million. Rice farmers in the Philippines will pay another US$172 million."

And it is not just farmers of the Global South who would suffer. Terminator wheat, if it were ever commercialized, would cost Canadian farmers an additional US$85 million dollars per year, according to ETC.

It's a relief to see that other states have continued to take a more reasonable stance on the issue. But the lack of any harm done so far is no excuse for the willingness of both Lib and Con governments to ignore both the explicit wishes and the obvious interests of Canada's farmers. And it may not take long before those farmers start recognizing the degree to which Harper's government is now complicit in an effort to make their livelihood even more precarious.