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 […]
The BP-Berkeley deal, the new joint Bio Energy institute, and also the recent job hop by John Menlo of BP fuels to Amyris Biotech - are all extra strings tying the interests of the Syn Bio community as a wholeever closer to the interests of big business. It should be noted that in each of thse cases CEO Keasling plays a central role. The same man who claims to be developing Synthetic Biology to serve the worlds poor (via synthetic artemisinin) seems to be rather busy these days serving the fabulously rich.
When patents on Terminator seeds first came to light nine years ago, even the most jaded among us were stunned by the audacious corporate greed manifested by this novel (and complex) gene engineering technique. Terminator refers to crops that are genetically modified to render sterile seeds at harvest – the equivalent of a “biological patent” […]
Is Craig Venter, the so called “bad boy of biology”, about to announce the world’s first synthetic lifeform? (or ‘Syn’ for short)… we don’t know. According to New Scientist “rumours are circulating that his institute will soon unveil the first synthetic bacterium”. What we do know is that he has applied for a patent with broad claims that include a synthetic organism itself…
Last week the US Justice Department (DOJ) gave the green light for Monsanto’s $1.5 billion takeover of the world’s largest cotton seed company, Delta & Pine Land (D&PL) — the company that has long vowed to commercialize Terminator seeds (more on that below). The so-called “anti-trust” regulators approved the deal with […]
Further reflections on EPO’s May 3 decision to revoke Monsanto’s species-wide soybean patent ETC Group has been receiving lots of emails and phone calls in the past few days about the defeat of Monsanto’s soybean patent one week ago. While most have been congratulatory a few have asked whether this wasn’t in fact a hollow victory […]
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”:
In this article the author makes a very enlightening summary of corporate concentration during 2006, and how this affects our lives as simple citizens even though we think it’s something happening far away…
by Silvia Ribeiro
Corporate concentration through global mergers and acquisitions reached a record at the close of 2006. In our daily life this […]
Nano-Drug’s Dirty Little Secret
ETC Group’s September 2006 report on nanomedicine, Nanotech Rx, requires some updating. After all, it’s nearly 30 days old. Our report mentions the nano-drug Abraxane, and it acknowledges that approval of the cancer drug was a watershed event for the nanotech industry. But important details are emerging. On October 1 the […]
(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.
