Review by Hope Shand, research director of ETC Group.
In October 1996, a spokesman for Monsanto told Farm Journal why his company was buying up seed companies left and right: “What you’re seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it’s really a consolidation of the entire food chain.”
Today, Monsanto is the world’s largest seed […]
In the midst of our new fight over geoengineering near the Galapagos, we’ve got good news over a very old fight with Monsanto… Hope Shand just phoned from Munich to say that the European Patent Office has agreed with ETC’s arguments and overturned Monsanto’s soybean “species” patent. There is no further appeal!!
In a couple of days Hope Shand from ETC Group will be in court in the European patent Office to challenge Monsanto’s Patent on Soy beans - a patent that we have been contesting for 13 years and that originally Monsanto themselves opposed!! You can read more about that here. In the meantime, ETC […]
The biotech industry claims that the global area devoted to GM crops in 2005 was 90 million hectares - or 222 million acres. ETC Group does not endorse or agree with the validity of annual statistics on GM crops compiled by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).
We agree with civil society critics who charge that ISAAA’s statistics are inflated and unreliable. However, even using industry-generated statistics, the biotech countdown is revealing. Here are the “vital statistics”:
Two of us from ETC are in Granada, Spain following the Working Group on 8j – the CBD body that has the mandate to recognize and protect the traditional knowledge, innovation and practices of indigenous peoples. By the end of the week, the Working Group on 8(j) will make recommendations to COP8 (Curitiba, Brazil, March) on the social and economic impacts of Terminator. Here’s a brief round-up of government interventions (just the highlights) in yesterday’s working group.
(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.
