SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
cooperation of the US Department of Agriculture in Delta & Pine Land's Terminator research. s EU Patent Office Approves Terminator In the intervening seven years since the first attempt by Monsanto to acquire Delta & Pine Land and its global Terminator patent rights, D&PL had not been idle. It had aggressively and successfully extended its patent rights on GURTs. In October 2005 Delta & Pine Land together with the US Department of Agriculture won a major new patent on its Terminator technology from the European Union's European Patent Office, Patent no. EP775212B. The patent would cover all 25 nations in the European Union from Germany to Poland and Italy to France, some of the world's most abundant food-producing regions. Several days later D&PL and the US Government also secured patent protection for its Terminator technology in Canada under CA 2196410. The advance of Terminator technology to global commercialization had hardly ceased despite the de facto worldwide UN ban imposed years before. 6 The advent of GMO patented seeds on a commercial scale in the early 1990's had allowed companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Dow AgroSciences to go from supplying agriculture chemical herbicides like Roundup, to patenting genetically altered seeds for basic farm crops like corn, rice, soybeans or wheat. For almost a quarter century, since 1983, the US Government had quietly been working to perfect a genetically engineered technique whereby farmers would be forced to turn to their seed supplier each harvest to get new seeds. At the Fourth Meeting of the Working Group of the international Convention on Biological Diversity of the United Nations Environment Program in Granada in January 2006, a group of indigenous farmers from Peru filed a submission on their concerns over possible introduction of Terminator seed technology: As traditional indigenous farmers we are united to defend our livelihoods which are dependant on seeds obtained from the harvest as
