by Lucy Sharratt –
Discussions on Terminator at the UN COP started this afternoon - actually they started this morning as governments kept intervening to make statements on Terminator, even though the discussions were on another agenda item.
With a Chair who demonstrated great understanding and facilitation skills yesterday when he recognized and thanked the Via [...]
A group of approximately 40 women from the Via Campesina movement - mostly from across the Americas - staged a dignified protest against Terminator on the floor of the negotiations at COP 8 today. They received applause from delegates and the Chair of the meeting recognized their protest and remarked that it was “a heartfelt [...]
So today is the day that Terminator is expected to come up in the Working Group and expectation and rumour is running high. Over 150 people are wandering around the conference room wearing distinctive white T-shirts which declare that suicide seeds are homicide seeds , there are posters and stickers, flags and placards - the [...]
As buses of delegates arrived this morning for day 2 of COP8 they were met by hundreds of protesting (and dancing) farmers, peasants, Indigenous People’s and NGO’s twirling flags, giving speeches, chanting and rallying against Terminator Technology - many of them organised through Via Campesina - the global movement of peasants. Banners with images of [...]
The Eighth Conference Of the Parties (COP8) to the Convention on Biological Diversity opened today, here in Curitiba Brazil, with an indigenous ceremony to Mother Earth, tupthumping speeches and around 3000 delegates frenetically pacing the corridors jostling and negotiating. Last night, on the eve of the COP, those same 3000 delegates were treated to a [...]
Yesterday the Ban Terminator Campaign announced that over 300 organisations have so far signed up calling for a ban on the sterile seed technology known as Terminator and that Monsanto seemed to be wriggling out of its 1999 pledge to abandon the technology.
Not content with heading for the stars, the corporate sponsored X-Foundation that awards the X-prize has now set a bounty for commericalising the neXt frontier - the human genome. According to this article in the Wall Street Journal the X-foundation will award a new X-prize of between $5-$20 million to the first inventor of a gene sequencer that can decode the DNA of 100 people in a matter of weeks. behind it is craig venter, the genomics mogul.
(et cet er a) and other things; such as human rights, biodiversity, biopiracy, converging technologies, global governance and corporate concentration. An experimental growing plot for news, views and new ideas.
