PANNA: Corporate Greed + Destructive Technology = Increased Risk
of World Hunger See PANUPS updates service, for complete
information. When the Mississippi-based corporation Delta & Pine
Land and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
patented a genetic process in 1998 to make harvested seeds
sterile, farmers around the world reacted in horror. For
thousands of years, farmers have harvested and saved their seeds
in a collective process of agricultural development that
continues to feed the world's populations to this day. The
public outcry around Terminator seeds resulted in a United
Nations Convention on Biological Diversity de facto global
moratorium on the technology due to its potential to disrupt
global agriculture and rural subsistence. An advisory working
group of the Convention is meeting in Granada, Spain, on January
23-27 2006 to make a recommendation on the fate of the UN
moratorium. Terminator technology genetically modifies plants to
produce seeds that are sterile and that will not gr